Remembering Peter J Lowry today
Remembering Peter J Lowry today.
Pete passed a few years back, he remains with me in the car, on the cd of original mid-east local blues players he recorded. Listening back today I was struck how good some of the harp playing is and how grateful I am to have made Pete’s acquaintance.
Pete was the patron of the Sydney Blues Society and a name that still rang out with the OG’s in Blues land when we toured.
Pete earned his stripes in the thousands of hours of field recordings of original unknown local Blues players he made in the 1960’s and 70’s, a collection he eventually gifted to an Ivy League school somewhere upstate in New York.
It comes as a bit of a surprise when someone you only know by rep gives you a tip of the hat and from Pete that was some tip, writing about us in Living Blues, in the same sentence as the Mighty Reapers.
Later on, when I got to know him, Pete would send me CDs of stuff he had recorded and each time I got another note and disc or tape, I felt some degree of impostor syndrome. Why on earth would he rate us, especially after all he’d seen and heard?
I think I know why now. He was passing it on to the next person who might carry the memory, the melody, a little further into the future.
Listening to Pete’s recordings I hear the unvarnished honest folk blues of harp players who grew up rough, poor, black, and learned to make a buck on the corner singing, stomping and playing, holding down the space with every noise that they could make to put another coin in the hat; the exuberance of it, the braggadocio.
And like all successful thieves, I hear each gem of an idea and start working out how to practice it, to make that sound.
And so, it carries on into the future, as I can hope it will each time someone else hears those ideas and follows them to their roots.
Pete was one smart mother…individual and I am remembering him today 😊
