Guy Davis learned fingerpicking on a train from Boston to New York by watching the hands of a stranger with nine fingers. This episode explores how the only son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, born in 1952 in the New York City area, absorbed the rural South through his grandmother’s speech and family stories, learned five-string banjo at a Vermont camp run by John Seeger, and refused formal lessons in favor of the oral, hand-to-hand tradition that originally carried the blues. We look at his 1980s acting career, including the film Beat Street and the role of Dr. Josh Hall on One Life to Live, and argue that soap opera discipline sharpened the stage presence he later brought to the blues.

The turning point came with a 1991 Broadway debut in Mulebone, with music by Taj Mahal, and a 1993 off-Broadway portrayal of Robert Johnson that earned him the Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award, presented by Robert Cray. We cover his one-man show In Bed with the Blues: The Adventures of Fishy Waters, the anti-drug play The Trial toured through New York shelters, his Red House Records run from Stomp Down Rider through Call Down the Thunder and Legacy, fans from Ian Anderson to Maya Angelou, children’s work on Nickelodeon with Dr. John, Teaching Tolerance projects, and Grammy nominations for Sonny and Brownie’s Last Train with Fabrizio Poggi and Be Ready When I Call You.

• How a New York kid built an authentic Southern blues vocabulary without living in the South
• Why acting on a daytime soap turned out to be training for the blues stage
• Playing Robert Johnson and earning the blues community’s acceptance as one of its own
• Treating the blues as defiant dance music rather than a vehicle for sorrow
• The three Guy Davises behind the 2004 album Legacy: musician, illustrator and winemaker