Blues and Bourbon: Old Spirits, Loud Guitars and the Fine Art of Growing Older

There are worse ways to spend an American evening than with a good guitar player in front of you and a good bourbon beside you. Both require patience. Both reward attention. Both have survived periods when fashionable people declared them finished. And both have the useful habit of getting more interesting once the lights go down. This week offered plenty of evidence.

Buddy Guy is 90 years old and preparing for a birthday celebration at Radio City Music Hall that reads less like a concert bill than a family tree of modern blues guitar. Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr., Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, Joe Bonamassa, Billy Gibbons, Samantha Fish and others are expected to gather around a man who knew Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf when those names belonged to working musicians rather than chapters in music history. The concert will also be livestreamed around the world.

There is something wonderfully strange about this. The blues was once music you had to find. You went looking for a club. You drove to the wrong part of town. You followed a handbill or a rumor. You bought a drink and waited. Now Buddy Guy can walk onto a stage in Manhattan and a kid with headphones in Helsinki can watch from the kitchen. The room got bigger. The music remained stubbornly itself.

Eric Clapton is making a similar move with his Crossroads Guitar Festival in Austin. The festival will be streamed globally, with cameras devoted to the machinery of guitar playing itself. Fretboards. Pedalboards. Picking hands. The small things guitar players stare at while everyone else is watching the show.

It is a fitting development because the blues has always been passed from hand to hand. Someone watches B.B. King bend a note. Someone else watches Buddy Guy attack a Stratocaster. Clapton carries part of that vocabulary to England. Stevie Ray Vaughan brings it roaring back through Texas. John Mayer hears Vaughan. Gary Clark Jr. grows up in Austin. Nobody owns the sentence. Everybody changes the accent.

That chain lost another link this week with the death of Carvin Jones, the Texas born guitarist who made Phoenix his musical home. Jones learned from B.B. King records and became famous for refusing to remain politely onstage. He played among the crowd because blues has never been particularly interested in personal space.

Warren Haynes, meanwhile, has taken the opposite approach and made everything bigger. His new Dreams and Songs: A Symphonic Journey places his guitar beside the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. This sounds dangerous on paper. Blues can die quickly when somebody dresses it for dinner. Haynes avoids the funeral.

The orchestra gives the songs scale while the guitar keeps dirt beneath their fingernails. It is another reminder that blues is surprisingly difficult to kill. Put it in a juke joint and it works. Put it in an arena and it works. Apparently you can give it sixty four orchestral musicians and it still refuses to behave. Which brings us to bourbon.

Bourbon has been having its own argument about tradition.

Willett has taken its familiar Pot Still Reserve and released a cask strength version. The idea is beautifully simple. The whiskey is not being sent through a barrel that once contained something harvested by monks on a volcanic island. Nobody has added an exotic botanical. Willett simply gives you more of what was already there.

The recipe is 65 percent corn, 20 percent wheat and 15 percent barley. It enters the barrel at 115 proof and emerges without being politely diluted into submission. This is bourbon innovation for people suspicious of innovation. Jeffersons has gone in another direction by making its Reserve older and stronger. The whiskey now carries an eight year age statement and rises to 96 proof.

Age statements matter because bourbon spent years quietly losing them.

Demand rose. Old stocks tightened. Numbers disappeared from labels. Consumers were encouraged to discuss flavor rather than birthdays, which was convenient because many distillers no longer had enough birthdays to discuss.

Now some numbers are returning.

Eight years is not Methuselah territory. It is simply old enough for the barrel to have had a serious conversation with the whiskey without necessarily winning the argument. Then there is Blue Note Bourbon in Memphis.

This is where our two subjects finally sit down at the same bar.

Blue Note has built its identity around Memphis blues culture, with names such as Juke Joint and Crossroads making the connection obvious. Its latest honey cask releases take bourbon and rye and finish them in barrels previously used to age wildflower honey. The distinction matters.

This is not bourbon with honey poured into it. Honey lives in the barrel first. The honey leaves. Whiskey enters. The wood remembers.

The Bourbon expression uses 70 percent corn, 21 percent wheat and 9 percent malted barley and arrives at a muscular 117.8 proof. There is something appropriately Memphis about the whole arrangement. Sweetness. Heat. Wood. A little excess.

And tonight in Louisville, Bourbon and Beyond offers the industrial scale version of the same idea. More than 100 musical performances share a festival with whiskey bars, rare bottles, distillers, chefs and enough brown liquor to make tomorrow morning a matter requiring careful negotiation. Gary Clark Jr. is on the opening day bill. Chris Stapleton, Marcus King and Jason Isbell are among the names appearing across the weekend.

The festival understands something important about bourbon. People rarely fall in love with whiskey because they studied a tasting wheel. They remember where they drank it. A porch. A wedding. A fishing trip. A terrible bar with a magnificent jukebox. The night somebody put on B.B. King and nobody changed the record. Blues works the same way. You can measure proof. You can document mash bills. You can identify guitar tunings and amplifier circuits. All of this is useful.

Then the glass arrives. The guitar starts. The rest is between you and the night.