A week ago I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you who Carey Bell was. It wasn't until I listened to the new DVD from Delmark Records, Gettin' Up Live, that I'd heard of him, let alone heard him play. In spite of that here I am a week later writing an obituary about him.
I'm sure there are many people out there who are far more qualified to be doing this than me, and I'm sure they already have, going into details about his career, where he was born, the great stuff he did with the harmonica, and how wonderful his voice sounded. Maybe they'll even talk of the fifteen kids he had and his two marriages.
He was seventy years old when he died on May 6 in Chicago's Kindred Hospital of heart troubles brought on by complications from diabetes. From what I gather he'd been in the hospital a while because of his diabetes and had been very sick. His health hadn't been the greatest for a while before that either; when he performed the gig in July of 2006 that makes up part of the Gettin' Up Live DVD, he had suffered a stroke four weeks earlier, which had also caused him to fall and break his hip.
But there he was up on stage at Theresa's in Chicago, blowing harmonica and singing while his son Lurrie was blowing out the lights with his guitar. It would have been an amazing performance even if you didn't know about the stroke a month earlier, but when you factored that in, it was hard not to feel awed by the man's indomitable spirit.
What does it say about somebody that only four weeks after not only having a stroke but also suffering from as debilitating an injury as breaking a hip, that he's sitting on stage blowing his harp and singing and acting like there ain't a thing wrong in the world? The only allusion he made at all to his recent illness was to apologise for not being able to stand because "I been ill recently".
Three months later the two men were back again at Buddy Guy's Legends club in Chicago, and some tracks from that October 2006 gig are included on their DVD as well. Carey isn't sitting down in a chair now, he's sort of side-saddle on a stool, one foot on the floor while he perches on the bar stool swinging his other leg in time to the music. It's a perfectly natural pose that you see plenty of performers assuming, so aside from the fact he didn't shift from the stool at all during the five songs filmed, there's no indication that he was ever "ill" at all.
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