The highlight of my night, though, came when the band took a break and Gip was persuaded to climb carefully onto the stage, where he sat at the side in a chair. He picked up his white Fender Stratocaster, and started to pluck some chords. He played simple old-time blues, sounding like the ancient 1930s recordings of Robert Johnson, one of Gip's blues heroes, along with Muddy Waters, Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker.
Gip's accent was so thick that whole verses went by where I couldn’t understand a word he sang; and his fingers, almost a century old, understandably hit a few bum notes. But it didn’t matter one bit. For a while, I was transported back 100 years to the front porch of someone's rickety cabin in the Mississippi Delta, an old man seeking refuge in a blues song after a hard day's work in the fields. Or digging graves.