Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened,
the podcast that teaches folks from all walks
of life telling us one formative story from their
childhood. I'm your host, Jay Rehack, and like
you, I've had my share of childhood experiences.
Some of them great and some of them not so great.
But I'd like to think that everything that happened
to me as a child has helped make me who I am
today. Tell Me What Happened is sponsored by
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That's laughsaver .com. All right. I have as
my guest today a good friend of mine, a former
colleague actually. Ed Zedzik. Ed Zedzik taught
history in the Chicago public schools and worked
on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of
Trade. He is a great believer in the power of
music and serendipity to change lives. Welcome
to the show, Ed. Hi, Jay. Ed, are you ready to
tell your story? I am. All right. I'm going to
meet myself and listen to it. Great. Well, I'd
like to talk about how strange little things
can end up affecting a whole life, in this case,
my life, and how a little event can end up impacting
all of my adult perspectives on life and changing
several things. In this case, the finding of
a couple of little things that most people would
pass over or even maybe throw out. I come from
a musical family that always found great joy
and even spirituality and connection with music,
but also different musical instruments that others
might not find particularly enchanting, but I
did. And one of those instruments was our harmonica.
And my older brother, when he got married and
moved out of our house, and that left a whole
lot of more room for me. but also he left behind
a bunch of his old stuff because he was moving
into a kind of a small place and needed to find
a way to move into that without carrying everything
else that he owned and so that left behind for
me one thing was a bunch of his old record albums
and another thing was a couple of old beat -up
harmonicas that I found again those wouldn't
be Much too many people, they're interesting
looking. If you ever have seen one, they're kind
of small and have some etchings into the metal
of them. And so they've got an interesting look,
but the ones he left behind were kind of beat
up. But I found them and for some reason they're
very interesting to me. And especially the fact
that I could listen to some of these old albums
that he had, not real old, but kind of old. They
played... I played the music of people like the
Rolling Stones, John Mayall and the Yardbirds,
Paul Butterfield, all these old British blues
bands, British rock bands that found their roots
in American blues music. And interestingly, they
seemed to discover it and reintroduce it to a
large segment of the young American population.
And so I was able to listen to some of these
albums and hear some of that blues music. And
it just grabbed me. And I also noticed that a
lot of it had the blues harmonica in it that
nobody really plays very much in current day
music. But at the time, there were a number of
groups like the Rolling Stones and others that
I mentioned that had this blues harmonica sound
in it and I thought I'm gonna I've got a couple
here I think I'm gonna try to learn how to play
these things and so I started messing around
with them started playing these blues harps as
they're called just to see what the sound was
and I also walked down to our local record emporium
in the neighborhood where there are just That's
something that modern day young people don't
have the joy of. And that's looking through the
old bargain bin of a record store and finding
all sorts of interesting old albums and things
that will introduce you to music you might not
have otherwise found. And they also had a little
section of books related to music. And one of
the books was How to Play the Blues Harp. And
so I started reading this book about how to play
it. I noticed that my brother didn't really have
the ability to play it very well. So I thought,
well, I can maybe do better than him. And I started
to learn how to play the instrument as it is
supposed to be played by some of the guys I was
listening to who played the blues harmonica.
And after listening to that and reading a little
bit, I started to discover my 13, 14 -year -old
self. that the music was not originally made
by British blues artists. I mean, I kind of knew
this, but then I found out who the original artists
were, and it started to really open my eyes to
this music and this incredibly soulful, meaningful,
moving to me music. And so I started to hear
the originals of this stuff and hear people like
Muddy Waters and Little Walter. and Elmore James
and all these guys that just had this great blues
sound. And I wanted to find out more about that
and really immerse myself in it as much as I
possibly could being the 14 year old kid here
in Chicago. But Chicago is kind of a great place
for that. And I and some of my friends would
go down on Sunday mornings to a place called
Maxwell Street. Just down around uh, no longer
exists now, really down around Halsted and Roosevelt
Roads. And you could go down there on a Sunday
and it was just this amazing open -air bazaar
that was almost like a Moroccan open -air meeting
place for people to buy and sell stuff. And the
food was amazing. It was these Polish sausage
and pork chop sandwiches that they would sell
at a... world famous now that you can see the
Maxwell Street, Polish and go down there and
walk around and see people buying and selling
stuff. It was a place for relatively poor people
to interact with each other and sell things where
and make a buck more or less honestly and have
an interesting interaction with people. I never
all the times I went down there, never saw a
fight, never even really saw a serious argument.
and it was just an amazing, amazing place, but
probably the most amazing thing about it was
the music. You would go down there and on several
of the street corners, there would be somebody
who would just set up shop, had talked one of
the businesses into letting them plug in their
amp, and they would just start playing this most
amazing, often blues music. through their little
amps and play some electric guitar and some amplified
blues harmonica and have a drum set set up and
they would play this and people would gather
around, throw a few bucks into the hat and listen
to this and get along with each other in a way
that I thought was just amazing really. We saw
people of all sorts of different races, ethnicities,
religions I suppose and would meet together and
talk with each other and laugh and have a great
time. And so this experience of Maxwell Street
for me was really eye -opening. And it introduced
me to an even greater understanding of this blues
music. And I was able to then go into their blues
emporium there, one of which was a great big
blue bus that was parked on the corner of Maxwell
and Halstead. and that I could go into and it
was what it was called was the blues bus and
it was a record store in an old school bus and
you would walk in and there were cassette tapes,
old albums, all sorts of things of these great
blues artists that you could walk in there and
just be introduced to this thing for the first
time in my life and there was also another at
the end of the block around Peoria Street there
was a an old record store that would sell all
these and had a great big speaker out front playing
all this wonderful blues music that I was able
to be introduced to. And so this allowed me to
develop a real love for this music that has such
a, like I said, a soulful spiritual quality to
it and that I could play and that my friends
and I could get together and play. I had a couple
of friends who played guitars and drums and we
were not. great. But we had a lot of fun with
it. And as my dad said of us, you guys don't
have much talent, but you sure got a lot of nerve.
And so that's you're having some fun with that
music. And that's really what it's all about.
And so we found our little niche of playing this
sort of blues music and being more and more interested,
learning more about it, learning how to play
it and how to appreciate it and who all the great
artists were. many, many who had Chicago connections.
And so much so that when Chicago started having
something called the Blues Festival in the summers,
I would go religiously every year, often with
my older brother, and we would go there and appreciate
the music. And one year I was waiting in line
to get in to see this, this wonderful blues player
called Solomon Burke. And I was waiting there
and saw this attractive woman standing a couple
steps in front of me and I made a joke with a
t -shirt vendor and she laughed at it and I thought
well now I really have to get to know this woman
she laughs at my jokes and we started talking
with each other both realized we appreciated
this music and how much we both loved it and
understood it and that woman is now my wife and
you know that enabled me to make this strange
connection maybe that these two little harmonicas
that I discovered and just sort of following
my interests, following my bliss, as it's called,
were able to follow that up and eventually meet
the love of my life and the woman that I eventually
married. And so that's my story, how my two little
harmonicas enabled me to meet my wife and make
that all a part of my life. I love it, Ed. I
love it. Listen, I know you for a million years
and I know that you've actually played that harmonica
or used to play it occasionally at Whitney Young
when we used to teach there. So have you got
a harmonica nearby? I'd love to hear it. I'd
love to take us out of it. I do, in fact, have
a harmonica that I could play a little something.
I could improvise a little something called Blowin'
the Blues here. I would love it. Before I do
that, I'm going to say goodbye to everybody.
But we're going to end a little differently this
week. We're going to end with you giving us a
little bit of the blues. But I do want to thank
you because I know the impact and it's happened
because I know your wife and I know how long
you've been married, by the way. We've been married
26 years. All right. So those harmonicas definitely
paid off. All right. I'm going to end this show
with my good friend Ed Zedzik taking us out.
Thanks again for being on the show Ed.