She's quite contiguous enough for my tastes, Giok -- your mother must have been scared by a Picasso print before you were born.

Anyway KT, you ARE a budding blues artist. Just get those words to "Juneau Woman Blues" down and we'll start working on the whole delivery shtick. Thing about blues delivery is, it is simple. It HAS ta be simple. That's where it comes from -- simple places, simple people, nothin' gussied up. So even though the good blues like Bobert's stuff SEEMS complex and subtile, it is just cuz he knows how to weave together a few simple things.

One of them is the guttural. To make a guttural, make believe you are a talking dog with laryngitis and sing a line or two that way.

Another is the Blues Grunt. This is not the "wake me up out of a deep sleep to ask for water" grunt, or the "ask me if this dress makes me look fat while I am doing my tax returns" grunt. This is the sort of grunt that comes from an EXCESS of sentiment trying to get out through a mouth too long forced shut by public censure. It's a deep, in-your-soul, every sad moment all remembered at once kinda grunt. Like all the times you wanted to just haul off and throw a rolling pin at yer man, jump off a bridge into deep ice, or bash some catty rival between the eyes with a spiked heel, or weeping for all the lost chillun you have ever seen, all summed up in a deep, rapid exhalation -- WHUH!!!!!!. Not that you have any rivals, but you know what I mean.

There is also the Angry Blues Grunt, which is like the above but mixed in with a really big sow deciding her piglets are under threat and lurching to the attack. That's a kinda grunt you do NOT wanna mess wit!! But anyone can master it, with a little practice.

Then there's the Near-Tears-Whine. This is a dual-vector pressure release which delivers bottomless grief through the belief that grownups never cry. Ya gotta clamp it down while making it irrepressible, that's the trick, like a Pushme-Pullyou in four-wheel drive fighting against itself to get nowhere. When you get that feeling nice and stirred up, ya just throw back your head and let out a blues line, any line will do, but ya fracture it with those two opposing forces and ya got yerself a world-class Near-Tears Whine.

There's a few other minor techniques for delivering blues, but you start working on these, using the words to Juneau Woman Blues, and you will be on your way to a rising stardom the like of which ole Bobert has merely DREAMED about, I tell ya!

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