Maybe, as the saying goes, ¡°you can¡¯t go home again,¡± but you can take a little bit of home with you wherever you roam. ¡°Rambling¡± Steve Gardner does; a Mississippi roots and bluesman based in Tokyo, Gardner travels the world making music and giving seminars about musical history.
The irony of the contrast between his small-town Southern background and global perspective doesn¡¯t escape him, but with a good-natured grin, he savors the contradiction.
¡°Coming to Japan in the 1980s as a foreigner, I felt, early on, that sudden awareness of my own country as an outsider, and I felt a little shameful, growing up in Mississippi and looking at the hard and dark record of race relations my state has,¡± he says. ¡°You carry with you a genuine stigma, if you are at all aware of things. But my trump card as a musician in Japan was the very fact that I was from Mississippi.¡±
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