Willie Murphy
2008 Induction of Willie Murphy
"Blues Performer"
Introduction by Lolly Obeda
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
-Allen Ginsburg
Lolly Obeda
high in the nondenominational steeple on a Friday afternoon
letting fly from the belfry all manner of rhythm and blues and bebop,
down on block E , before erasure that is,
in the first desperate days of the dead of winter
steaming the insides of the belly of the whale
where the bees buzzed and the hip cats sipped
gallons of nectar direct from the hive
where the wrecking ball hung like a giant Christmas bulb
poised to break the dead alive,
was one Little Richard lovin mother fucker all grown up,
the piano playing coat pulling king of the west bank
smoking a cigar the size and shape of an el dorado Cadillac
and turning out pockets full of beat into the night.
- Lolly Obeda
Thank you for inviting me here tonight to deliver this honor to a man who has enriched so many of our lives with the gift of his music. When I was a little girl I listened to the popular music of the 30's and 40's on the radio with my dad. There was a radio station in the Twin Cities that tagged this genre "the music of your life". I didn't realize at the time that my life would eventually also have it's own soundtrack and that Willie Murphy would be a part of it.
We are all here tonight because we share a commonality in the music of our lives. Not supplied in one lump sum package or limited to a single genre that we can contemplate and easily describe, but delivered to us over the course of our lifetimes one shining piece at a time.
Music, and particularly for those of us in this room, blues at its best, speaks to us in a language that we inertly understand and embrace. We take it with us wherever we go. We dance to it, fight to it, cry and cook and make love to it. We drive and relax and raise kids to it. We take it up north with us and bring it with us to school and work. We live with it and it plays a part in making us who we are.
On that note, I would not in my wildest dreams expect to stand here and tell you tonight who Willie Murphy is. Bandleader, musician, composer, writer, traveler, philosopher, artist, liver of life; he just isn't a sum-uppable kind of guy. But I will tell you that he has played an incredible part in the music of our lives. That he has created and produced and performed and lived that music for all of his life. That he has inspired and lifted us and made us think as a result of his craft. That we have danced our asses off to the music he has made. That we have listened in the dark to the messages his music sends and have heard him with our hearts; and that within those hearts, bees will always buzz, angel headed hipsters will always burn and we will never grow tired of fairy tales and secrets.
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you this year's Blues Hall of Fame Inductee for Blues Performer, Mr. Willie Murphy.
This Page Last Updated: Tuesday, July 10, 2012
