- JACK’S KIND OF BLUES by Paul Oppenheimer -

In retrospect, which is the only way at this point, I can see that my good friend for over fifty years, Jack Barschi, was somehow aiming for the brighter side of the blues, or at writing the stream of utterly moving lyrics that he would produce near the end of his life. Probably I should have sensed that he would arrive at how to manage it, how to come up with these uniquely beautiful lyrics, if only because his funky sardonic smile, perfected over many years of university teaching, exhilarating round-the-world travels, and, later, his delicious settling in with his wife Ilona in Austria and upstate New York, merged with what I came to recognize as his naturally lyrical way of perceiving things. As I got to understand it, his smile was as much a part of him as the blues themselves may be said to form the deepest part of the American singing soul.
     I’m grateful that I was let in on how Jack had gone hunting for precisely these songs of himself in the Walt Whitman sense, or the right musical equivalent of his smile and way of seeing. And what a pleasure it turns out to be to find it here in his book, overflowing with its visions of dramatic prairies, desolate city streets, suave metropolitan triumphs, his refusal to give up and above all his plucky confidence in meaning. I count myself lucky in being allowed to see how lines such as “Looking out the window/only shadows in the street” lean toward anyone’s blues bon chance as much as everyone’s risk of loss, and even then toward good music, and especially good blues music, along with his rueful sense of fun, of good times lost and remembered, and refreshingly so, as in “The Good Old Days”

When we stuffed ourselves into Barry’s Olds
Six packs on the floor and a bottle of Seagram’s best
Exchanging stories of imaginary conquests
Roaring drunken remarks out the windows
We were pirates, Buccaneers, men of the movies
Six shooters ready to be drawn
Smooth faces and minds filled with porn.

I know I’m happiest, finally, with rejoicing, as he did, among these pirates and Buccaneers, and in their free-spirited songs setting sail and bound for the wild places where dreams for-ever sustain the finest human adventures.

Paul Oppenheimer is the author of four volumes of poetry; a novel, Blood Memoir; a study of evil, Evil and the Demonic; and biographies of Peter Paul Rubens and Machiavelli.