Bluesman Davis reaches down deep to put truth into words

For Guy Davis, the appeal of the blues to many different people is simple.

“There’s truth in it,” said the veteran bluesman. “A successful song contains words that evoke images. The mind can’t help but see pictures when you hear the words.”

Davis, who will be playing at 8 p.m. today at the Ramada Inn in Lewiston and at 7 p.m. Friday at The Grand Auditorium in Ellsworth, remembers when he first connected with the blues. He was a teen-ager, watching Buddy Guy and Junior Wells onstage at a Cambridge, Mass., nightclub.

“I was on the edge of my seat watching Buddy Guy bend the strings, and Junior sucking all the air out of the harmonica,” he recalled from a tour stop in Iowa. “I kept coming back to the blues. I knew it was an adult form of music, and it was deep.”

Although raised in New York City, Davis, the son of actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, heard accounts of life in the rural South from his parents and especially his grandparents, and those made their way into his own stories and songs.

During his career, Davis has been a musician, composer, actor, director and writer.

As an actor, he made his Broadway musical debut in 1991 in the Zora Neale Hurston-Langston Hughes collaboration “Mulebone,” which featured the music of Taj Mahal. In 1993, he performed off-Broadway as legendary blues player Robert Johnson in “Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil,” for which he earned the Blues Foundation’s W.C Handy Keeping the Blues Alive Award.

He began creating his own material, including the one-man show “In Bed With the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters” in 1994 and “Two Hah Hahs and a Homeboy,” performed with his parents in 1995. In 1992, his anti-drug abuse play, “The Trial: Judgment of the People,” was produced off-Broadway. He also arranged, performed and co-wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning film “To Be a Man.”

In recent years, Davis has been concentrating on writing and performing music. He’s released four albums on Red House Records: 1995’s “Stomp Down Rider,” 1996’s “Call Down the Thunder,” 1998’s

“You Don’t Know My Mind” and 2000’s “Butt Naked Free.”

How does Davis know what an idea will become?

“Sometimes I don’t know until it’s done,” said Davis. “One idea went from being part of a letter to a poem to a speech by a drug-addicted character in a play. I give it free rein. I barf everything out, then figure out what it should be part of.”

Davis hopes to have an album out by late summer or early fall, and he’s got at least one play kicking around in his head. But all that’s on the back burner while he’s out on the road. On this recent day, he’s in the midst of a series of shows for Iowa schoolchildren.

“This will help me have an audience in 20 years,” he joked.

Davis returns to Maine for the first time since playing the 1999 North Atlantic Folk Festival in Rockland, and he encourages blues fans to come out and see him.

“I’ve got plenty of stories and other stuff that will have them planting their feet and smiling deep-inside smiles,” he said.

For tickets, call 1-800-639-2919 for the Lewiston show and 667-9500 for the Ellsworth show.