Day 147: Adam Gussow

February 24, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“… there’s certain spiritual principles that I really explored deeply during that period in the early 2000s and that has stuck with me ever since … one of them is “brave people aren’t people who were never afraid,” you know?  There are people who are afraid who acknowledge that fear and then take a deep breath and step out beyond it, and I find that …  a very moving principle.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Adam, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Adam Gussow: Yes.  My name is Adam Gussow, and I’m an Associate Professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi; and I’m a harmonica player.

Toni: Well thank you, Adam.  Now, we’re going to be talking about the word inspiration, so when you think about that, who do you inspire and how you do that?

Adam: Well, I can tell you who inspire, I think, because I get emails from them, and it’s a sort of strange thing.  I seem to have stumbled into a way of inspiring blues harmonica players or blues harmonica students or people who’ve always wanted to learn how to play the harmonica and play blues on it.  Around the world, I get emails every day from people who’ve seen by now what amounts to more than 200 instructional videos, free videos that are on YouTube.

When this all started … almost exactly three years ago it started because I was just surfing the web one day, and I went to YouTube, and I found that somebody had posted something of me.  And I thought “That’s interesting, this person is controlling my image.  Let me check out and see what else is out there on YouTube” and discovered that there were an awful lot of really bad harmonica playing and one guy who was pretty good who was offering some instruction and nothing else.  And I had been a pro harmonica player for a number of years, recorded with a duo called Satan and Adam, and had also been a teacher for a long time and thought “You know, people deserve better.”

So I got a camera — I didn’t really know how to do the whole thing_- and I set it up on a little tripod, and I uploaded it as Gussow Lesson 000.  I thought “I’ll do something different.  I will pretend as though I’m going to actually upload at least 100 of these,” that’s why I’ll give it three zeros, “and I’ll just talk on camera and say this is what I’m going to do.”

I have to be honest; it was out of entirely mixed motives.  It was to want to teach, it was to want to show off, it was to want to share, it was to want to inspire, it was to … I called it “Blues Harmonica Secrets Revealed!”  I wanted to almost get back at some of my fellow professionals who weren’t sharing this stuff.

And you know, it’s okay.  It’s possible to actually begin with mixed motives and then put something out in the world and realize that what you’ve done is give people something that they receive as a gift.  And that’s what started to happen is that people started to email me from day one and say “Hey, this is great!  Are you going to do more of these?”

And I thought “Wow!  Well, yeah, okay,” and I did 40 videos in 40 days and developed, you know, got 100 people to subscribe, and then it just kept on snowballing.  People said “You know, Adam, we’d really like to send you money,” and I said “Okay, well, I’ll get a P.O. box.”  And they said “Oh no, that’s very old fashioned, you need to update yourself and get PayPal.”  One thing led to another.  I got a Paypal account, and they sent money in!  I thought “Wait a minute, from around the world people are sending me money for me doing videos?”  So again, mixed motives; the profit motive enters.

But here’s what I get these days, three years down the line – I get emails from people in Iraq and Pakistan and California and Alaska, and I get some letters from people who say “I’ve just stumbled across your videos, and I’ve always wanted to learn how to play, thank you so much.”  I get videos from people … emails from people who say “25 years ago, I really took this instrument seriously, and then I just lost interest.  I stumbled across one of your videos, and I’m playing again.  I don’t know how to thank you.”

Occasionally they say “Where can we send money?”  But I mean the point is, those kind of letters … and I realized that something that I had that wasn’t even of great interest to me three years ago, my own ability to play the harmonica, was sleeping.  My own hunger to get back and really learn.  And the moment I began to give it away was the moment it began to reawaken in me.

And so all of these spiritual truths, you know … to give is to receive.  We can talk about the Interfaith Church where I learned some of this stuff, but all of these truths turned out to be true and, I mean, I guess that’s a long answer to a great question, but that’s one of the ways that I inspire.

Let me tell you one thing that people invoke when they talk about what they like about my teaching style, and this surprised me, is I resolved that … the player who inspired me was a guy who always was willing to make mistakes because he was always trying to improve.  And so in my videos, one thing I did from the beginning was I was a little awkward in moments or, if I made a mistake, I didn’t try to edit that out.  I’d say “I guess that was a clam …”  “Okay, let me try that again.” … and again and again, people who email me say that’s the most refreshing thing.  “You make me feel like it’s okay to make mistakes.  You make me feel like it’s okay not to be perfect.”

So again, you know, sort of shedding the shell of perfection and just allowing myself to be authentic and to be more or less who I really am as a teacher; somebody with considerable skill — obviously that comes through — but also somebody willing to say “This is how the process really works.  You want to learn how to play?  You’re going to make a lot of these mistakes.  I make them, you’ll make them, but it’s okay, and you’ve got to keep on going.”  And so that’s how I inspire people.

Toni: It sounds as though there’s a lot more going on there than … and I don’t mean to demean this at all — but than just teaching the harmonica.  It sounds like there is a whole lot more going on in those videos in addition to that.

Adam: Yeah.

Toni: I would wonder then, how do you think putting those videos out, and I understand being a teacher as well, how do you help other people to explore their own potential?

Adam: Well, one thing I’ve ended up doing is creating a website, and I do many things on the website including sell some harmonica lessons through videos, but I’ve also used my training as somebody with a PhD in English and somebody who knows how literary criticism works, I’ve used my training to kind of … the way that they used to rank books, top 10 books, I’ve ranked harmonica players, or I’ve given people a top 10 list and a second 10 list.

So one of the way I inspire people is to say “You know what?  If you want to learn how to play the instrument, here are some steps.  And one of the things you need to do is you need to really have good stuff coming into your ears.  You need to really be listening to the good stuff, so I’m going to center you.  Here are 20 players that you ought to be listening to who are the heart and soul of blues harmonica.”  That’s one of the ways is to say “Listen to the good stuff.”

I also … some of my lessons are about spiritual principles.  That was one that people actually liked a lot.  There was one in particular that was very unlike what other people were doing when they taught harmonica.  I said “To be a good blues harmonica player or improviser, you have to be a warrior, a lover, and a painter” and then I went through those three things.

“You’re a warrior to the extent that you should do what warriors do before they go into battle and take your instruments seriously.  Don’t play old flatted-out harps.  Take yourself seriously.  It’s a discipline to go into the woodshed and to practice.”  I said “You’re a lover because you have to learn how to listen as well as how to play, and good music making is about leaving space, right, not just playing.  That’s the way being a lover is about communication.  It’s about listening to your audience.  And then you’re a painter because good soloing is about” … this is sort of a parallel with the lover, but it’s about “knowing how to create mass and volume.  Also by leaving space, create meaning by leaving space.”

And so that’s one of the ways I inspire people was to say it’s not just about this hole and that reed and this custom harmonica, but it’s really about larger principles that can go into any discipline that you might have and that these can undergird what you’re doing.

Toni: So what inspires you, Adam?

Adam: What inspires me?  My son.  I’ve got a four-year-old, and the challenge of watching him grow and realizing that he has some of the same crazed intensity that I must have had that drove my mother nuts, and trying to let all that be there and heal and try not to tell him … try not to overly shape him while at the same time providing boundaries.  I would say that’s one thing is just the life process of my own son.

I was inspired at a particular period in my life.  As a former marathoner, I was in a period where I was actually smoking occasionally and had a kind of mild heart attack which shook me to my core, would be fair to say, back in the year 2000.  It happened shortly after I began to go to the first and only church service that I’ve ever attended which was a very unusual place in Manhattan, actually, across the street from Carnegie Hall.  It was called the Interfaith Fellowship.  It was a bunch of … it was just all kinds of people, and we read a book called A Course In Miracles which I’m sure some of your listeners would be familiar with.

Toni: Yes.

Adam: And I did a lot of reading after that heart thing.  I read … well, here are some people I read.  I read every book that I could find in the new age spirituality section of the book store.  I read Pema Chodron When Things Fall Apart:  Heart Advice For Difficult Times. I find Pema Chodron, the Tibetan Buddhist way — although I’ve never taken it in a formal way — I found her incredibly inspiring for her ability to say “Sometimes you just need to sit with yourself in those moments when everything has messed up.”  That was good for me.

Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart; and then the two ministers at the Interfaith Fellowship, Diane Burke and John Mundy, were incredibly helpful in that really difficult time when I fell apart and picked myself back up and began to kind of pay a lot more attention to my heart and found myself a part of a community.

I can also tell you that I was terrifically inspired by the handful of workshops that I took at a place called The Omega Institute which, again, I suspect some of your listeners may have heard of, kind of a place in the Hudson River Valley.  A workshop, for example, with Marianne Williamson who foremost, I guess, exemplar of … or proponent of The Course In Miracles.

And that was terrific to watch powerful, spiritually enlightened people lay some of their own stuff out there and say they had to work with it, too, and are still working with it.  That was all … in terms of forgiveness for myself, that was a good thing.  And one more thing that also inspired me …

Toni: Sure.

Adam: Musicians, as somebody who was a musician trying to learn his craft.  In fact, I really would be negligent if I didn’t name the one single musician who has inspired me the most which is the man who I have played with for 23 years, a man named Sterling Magee who is an African American rhythm and blues guitar player who was playing on the streets of Harlem back in 1986 when I first came across him.  He was calling himself Mr. Satan at that point, as was everybody in Harlem, and I played with him.

He let me play, and we began a … he plays guitar and percussion; I play harmonica.  And we became an act after three or four years of playing on the street and ended up playing festivals and club gigs all over the country.  He was an incredibly – he still is – but I mean then he was an incredibly powerful musician and also a good man who was always telling me to clean up my mouth.  He didn’t like certain words that, you know, young musicians might use.  So he taught me all about respect but also about the art of really reaching down into myself as a musician and always doing the thing that frightened me a little bit; always being willing to find my edge and then just kind of leap past it – that inspired me.

Toni: Finding that edge and leaping past it – is that part of what you do as far as exploring your own potential?

Adam: Yeah, it’s something I’m doing right now, actually.  I’m making a foray into production and producing an event in North Mississippi in May, which means I’m dealing with musicians from the standpoint of the guy who’s going to be paying them which is all very new to me, because I’m used to sort of making the deal from the other side.

Toni: Right, right.

Adam: It’s hard to lowball somebody when you’ve been there, so I’m trying to put my ideals into action.  Yeah, you know, there’s certain spiritual principles that I really explored deeply during that period in the early 2000s and that has stuck with me ever since, and I would say one of them … you know, it came up in so many different texts, but one of them is “brave people aren’t people who were never afraid,” you know?  There are people who are afraid who acknowledge that fear and then take a deep breath and step out beyond it, and I find that – in fact, I’m feeling it right now.  I find that a very moving principle.

Toni: I had someone say to me just today on another interview that fear is just unfinished business.

Adam: Okay, that works for me.

Toni: And I thought “Yeah, all right; that’s a nice way to put that as well.”  You had mentioned in a comment that you said you do in your teaching with the harmonica and also, but I’m hearing it as kind of a theme in your interview, but I want you to clarify this for the people who are listening – you said “leaving a space.”  Define what that means for the people who will be listening and reading your interview.  What does it mean from your perspective to “leave a space?”

Adam: Oh, to leave a space.  Well, it means – and this is especially important I think for people who are possessed by visions, you know, transformative visions and they want to share those visions with the world.  It’s really important in order to bring people along.  I think good ministers … I live in Mississippi and good Bible belt ministers know this but, you know, even if you rise to a thunderous pitch, I think it’s really important also to give people a space in which they can step forward towards you.

So that’s what it means to leave a space.  It means … well, it means to listen, and it means to really listen if you can.  It’s hard to remain that present so that you’re always able to listen even as you’re putting a vision out there, but it means being … I think, wasn’t it Daniel Goleman’s book about emotional intelligence?  It means also having a little emotional intelligence.

I had a student … I teach at Ole Miss, and I had a student who was my age who is an educational professional in Mississippi who had actually not done very well on an exam, and I had to speak with her about it.  And I had gone back and looked at her transcript, her sort of record, and realized that she had been taking courses for 20 years towards her PhD.  She was respected in her field; she just hadn’t done well on this exam because she had misunderstood something.

But as I began to talk … I wanted to tell her that I really admired that it had taken her 20 years but, as I began, as I sort of paged through the couple of pages of her transcript, I realized that there was a pain that was kind of clouding her eyes, and that she … For her, that was a burden that when she had taken off five years to have a kid or three years because she’d had a divorce and things were going bad for her, and I realized I may have intended to praise her but that what she was getting was her own unfinished business.

And I had to be present enough to see that pain and then to reframe what I was presenting by accentuating “I can’t tell you how impressed I am that you’ve persisted in this; that you’ve persisted in this and we’re going to get you through.”  So that’s what I mean about space is you have to know how to pause.

Toni: It’s almost … what I’m hearing in this interview is that it’s leaving the space but also respecting that space and being able to readjust that space when necessary.

Adam: Yes.

Toni: And that’s what I’ve heard from you in this interview; not only what you do for others, but also what you’ve learned.  Because you spoke very eloquently about your own challenges and how you must have been in a space for a couple of years, and you not only were helped through that space but it sounds like you were listening very intently to others and learning while you were in that space that allows you to do what you’re doing today.

What an awesome gift that you’re giving today to the Get Inspired! Project by giving us this interview.  And for that, Adam, we cannot thank you enough.  We will post a link or two or however you want people to be able to find you, listen to your music, or maybe learn how to play the harmonica.

Adam: Yeah, why not?

Toni: You know, sure!  So we thank you so very much, Adam, for coming to the table today.

Adam: It’s been my pleasure, Toni.

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For more information about Adam Gussow:  www.youtube.com/user/KudzuRunner, www.modernbluesharmonica.com, www.hillcountryharmonica.com

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