CeDell Davis played at Stickyz Saturday with Peter Buck and others.

  • Jim Harris
  • CeDell Davis played at Stickyz Saturday with Peter Buck and others.

The telling moment from Saturday night’s show at Stickyz featuring CeDell Davis came when several members of his backing band — some of rock’s royalty, to be sure — took turns taking camera phone shots of the native Arkansas bluesman.

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Former Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin, when he pulled himself away from the drum kit behind Davis, said. “I didn’t want to miss getting a shot of this.”

On the stage, R.E.M. multi-instrumentalist Peter Buck, now based in and recording limited vinyl releases out of Seattle, played bass and led a contingent of three guitarists, a pedal steel player, and former Brave Combo member and Little Rock native Joe Cripps on percussion. There was also a late appearance by blues guitarist David Kimbrough.

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Martin and fellow Seattle musician Jeff Angell also opened the night with a set of advanced grunge and rock as part of the Walking Papers (other members Duff McKagan, former GNR bassist, and Ben Anderson didn’t show). The Thomas Houston Jones Band, with some of the same players who had backed Davis, wrapped up the night.

With such notables as Buck in the room, not to mention a living legend in Davis, one would have expected a larger crowd. In essence, this might have been one of those shows only a musician or ardent blues lover could truly appreciate.

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Davis, whose childhood bout with polio left him unable to use his left hand, suffered a stroke in recent years that took the use of his right arm as well. He no longer plays the guitar. At age 85, he sits in a wheel chair and sings verses to various blues riffs and pacing.

“I’m going to sing y’all one or two more verse and then we’ve gotta go,” he told the energetic crowd as the show grew more intense with each song. Davis encouraged Buck, Cripps and the band to “pick up the tempo on this one” after a dirge-like start, and by the end of the set he had the audience captivated with such CeDell classics as “Rub Me Baby” and “I Don’t Know Why.”

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Later, when the Jones Band was playing, Davis sat alone in his wheelchair at a table near the Stickyz bar. “I’ve been all over. I’ve seen a lot of things, yeah. I’ve been blessed,” he told a fan, a fellow Pine Bluffian who spent the evening marveling at the talent assembled, when Seattle converged with the Arkansas Delta.

Meanwhile, Buck, Martin, Angell and others made a full weekend of it in Little Rock, hanging with Scott Diffee’s band Go Fast and also around Diffee’s tattoo parlor, and showing up at an area church on Sunday evening, where (according to Martin on the Walking Papers Facebook) they played songs by The Band, The Who, James Brown and more, bringing the house down with “Mississippi Queen.”

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After the jump, check out Martin’s incredible account of their trip to Little Rock.