Decoration Day Blues, 2026

 As usual, I have some blues on this Decoration Day, commonly known these days as Memorial Day.  The bank and post office were closed today, but I planned ahead and these didn't bother me too much.  The Studio was probably closed today (or at least it always was for the big national holidays when Herb ran the place), but I didn't need to be there anyway.  I don't like the fact that my town was filled up with tourists for the past week or so, which means I was pretty much trapped in my house the past week.   On the other hand, we had a rainy weekend, so all the people who came to the beach for the occasion couldn't really enjoy it. 

No need to write about the history of Decoration Day in Carbondale or its renaming- those are covered in previous blog posts.  (go to May of recent years and you'll find them)  However, I will talk about the blues.  As mentioned previously, on this day I always think about the Howling' Wolf song called "Decoration Day Blues", which I had on one of the first blues albums I bought.  That vinyl right now is in storage, so I don't get to listen to it at the moment.  And not burned to CD either, as I had a four disc boxed set of Howling' Wolf on my shelf, and never had the immediate need to make more discs of his work.  Luckily, everything can be found on the internet if you know where to look, and I do, so I was at least able to hear his version today.  

The image above isn't of the Wolf, who was more a force of nature than a singer and guitarist, though he could do those things as well.   I've never done any images of the man or art about his songs, though he was very much like a later version of Robert Johnson, except for much bigger and even a little meaner.  What you see above is a print I made of John Cephas, performing as part of a duo at Philadelphia's River Blues festival in 1990, based on a photo I took myself.  I did the print as a two color  linoleum demonstration piece I did for a workshop a long time ago, but it is a good bluesy piece of art to put up today.