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"Oh, no, no," he says. "Zakiya said to forget the birds and crickets and shit. She said her daddy wasn't into no damn birds and chickens."
Right now, Crockett is trying to lay down a bass line (using a one-of-its-kind acoustic bass that Ollan bought in Amsterdam, maxing out his credit card). He's playing into a microphone out in the hallway, fumbling for the changes, speeding up or slowing down with the music. The problem, it quickly becomes clear, is the foot stomp, which gets jittery during Thorogood's solo, then starts to lag during a later verse.
"There's gonna be a time," Ollan says, "when we have to take the foot out."
Or, Crockett suggests, they could let the computer fix it. "Chop it up, and put it in correct time," he says. For now, though, they crank up the drum a bit, muffling the sound of the foot. And within an hour, they have a workable version of the song, sitting on a brand-new bass line. Ollan punches a few keys and plays it back.
"That's the shit," he says.
"That's sweet," he says a moment later.
"That," he finally declares of "Wednesday Evening Blues," a song featuring the guy who did "Bad to the Bone," a $2,000 bass from Amsterdam, and perhaps a digitally corrected foot stomp, "is the Delta blues."
Zakiya sang as a kid, and as a mother she would peck out children's songs on the piano; she never bothered to learn the guitar, though. Almost 30 years ago, her father returned from a trip to Spain with a gorgeous acoustic, a gift to his daughter. He tried to teach her how to play, but it never took. "I thought, "This is for men -- women don't play guitars,'" she says. "And I just didn't have time. I was too busy. I had the children, I was busy trying to get on with my life, and I didn't realize what he was trying to give me.
"That's so sad that as young people we don't realize what our elders are trying to give us, and it's just sheer ignorance that makes us not accept it."
During a recent rehearsal, though, she started kidding around with her guitarists. There must be a million of you fucking guitar players in the world, she sneered at them. Everybody's a guitar player. The acoustic from her father was lying nearby. "I just picked it up, and I just started strumming on it," Zakiya recalls. One of the guys said she looked good. "So I started piddling around with it," she says, "and I found that I really liked it."
Zakiya has three guitars -- a baby Taylor, her father's acoustic, and one electric -- and she's thinking about buying a small, cheap one she can play at work. What she really wants, though, is a Gibson or an Epiphone, the guitars her father always used. "If I'm gonna play onstage," she says, "that's what I wanna play. I wanna play what he played." And she's getting better. Zakiya practices daily, tries to attend a weekly lesson, and pops in a how-to DVD when she has a chance. She strums in bed at night, and she's proud of the calluses on her fingers. She's learning new chords all the time -- new styles, too.
"Matter of fact," she says, "I'm playing a boogie-woogie now."
The first time she played onstage, at the February Biscuits & Blues show, Zakiya learned three chords for a song called "Dirty Things." Her guitar was tuned to a "D," an easy arrangement for a beginner. "They said, 'OK, pretty much all you have to do is strum, but you've got to make these changes,'" Zakiya says. The crowd had thinned out a little by that point. A band member passed her a red electric guitar, and she lassoed the strap over her Afro and around her neck, then launched into the song. She didn't look comfortable; the guitar seemed heavy, and she sort of chopped at the strings with her thumb.
"But I memorized those changes," she says, "and I made 'em."
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