Buddy Guy Asked “Can Anyone Play Harmonica?” When His Player Collapsed — Ozzy Osbourne Stood Up

Buddy Guy Asked “Can Anyone Play Harmonica?” When His Player Collapsed — Ozzy Osbourne Stood Up

January 23rd, 2016, 11:40 p.m. In Chicago at 700 South Wabash, the windows of Buddy Guy’s Legends were fogged over from the inside. It was 10° outside. Inside, there were 400 people, and not one of them had sat down in half an hour. Then the music stopped, and 79-year-old Buddy Guy leaned into the microphone and asked a question he had never once had to ask in 50 years on stage.

 Is there anybody in this room who can play harmonica? The room went quiet. 400 people looked at each other. Nobody moved. Then at the far end of the back bar, in a corner the lights barely reached, an old man stood up. He wore a black cap and a pair of round dark glasses he hadn’t taken off even though it was nearly midnight.

 He was unsteady on his feet, and until that night, not one person in that room had looked at him twice. They had no idea who he was. But this story didn’t start with that question. There were two men in that club who had no business being there. One of them was up on stage doing the exact thing his doctor had told him in plain words to stop doing 3 weeks earlier.

 The other had sung in front of 14,500 people the night before and was now sitting at the far end of a bar with a cup of tea going cold in front of him. Their paths had crossed once 46 years earlier in this same city. Amos Prior was 71 years old, and he had been playing harmonica on Buddy Guy’s stage for 30 years. He grew up on the West Side in the late ’60s hanging around the back doors of the clubs where Junior Wells played.

 One night, when he was 17, Wells handed him his own harmonica and said, “Cup your hands, son. The sound hides in your palms.” Amos never forgot that sentence, not once in 54 years. In the dressing room at Legends, there was a hook nailed to the wall with his name on it, and that hook was the most valuable thing he owned because he had lost everything else in the last 14 months.

 His wife Della passed away one morning during breakfast in November of 2014. Amos was on the road in Milwaukee that morning, and his phone was on silent. After Della died, the house went, too. In November 2015, he sold it to clear a second mortgage he hadn’t been able to pay for years, and he moved into a one-room apartment in Bronzeville.

 A man who had walked onto a stage every night for 30 years, and everything he owned fit into four boxes. He never showed those boxes to anyone, but neither the house nor the money was what weighed on him. His granddaughter Simone was 17. She had no mother, and she had passed the entrance exam for a music high school in Chicago.

 Enrollment required $1,850 by February 1st, and that money was supposed to come out of January’s shows. That night, like every night, Simone was sitting at the table at the very back of the club trying to finish her math homework. Amos always looked over at her before he went on. She would lift her head, touch two fingers to her temple, and give him a small salute.

 It was the only superstition he had in 30 years on stage. There were two things Amos hadn’t told anyone. The first was that 3 weeks earlier his doctor had told him to stay off the stage for at least 2 months. The pain in his chest had started in December, and he hadn’t mentioned it to Buddy or to Simone.

 The second was the envelope folded in the inside pocket of his jacket. Inside were four lines in his own handwriting, and those four lines meant the end of a 30-year job. For 3 weeks he had put that envelope in his pocket every night, walked as far as the door of Buddy’s dressing room, and turned back every night without knocking.

 That Saturday night, he did the same thing. The night before, on Friday, January 22nd, 14,517 people had watched Black Sabbath at the United Center, 2 miles north of there. The tour was called The End, and that wasn’t a marketing line. After 46 years, the band really was going on stage for the last time. Ozzy Osbourne was 67 years old that night.

 When the show was over, he went back to his hotel room, sat down on the edge of the bed without even taking off his coat, and stayed like that for hours. Sharon had flown back to Los Angeles. The next show was 2 days away in Minneapolis, and in front of him was a huge, silent Chicago night he had to fill somehow.

 On stage, with the noise of the crowd around him, he felt 30 years old. The moment he walked off, he carried every one of his years. He lasted about an hour sitting in that hotel room. Then he pulled his cap on, put on his dark glasses, got into his heavy black coat, and walked out without telling anyone.

 At the corner of Balbo, he stopped. A harmonica was leaking out through a door left ajar, and the sound stopped him where he stood. Someone was holding one long, low note. It didn’t waver, and it didn’t thin out. It just held, as if the man playing it were holding time instead of his breath. Ozzy looked up at the sign above the door, stood there a few seconds, and went inside.

 He took the stool at the very end of the bar, the one farthest from the stage. 24-year-old Vera Hollis was working that night, 8 months into her job at the club, and she knew drunk tourists from the Hilton across the street wandered in all the time. She figured he was one of them. The man didn’t look up. In a heavy English accent that ran all his words together, he said, “Any chance of a cup of tea, mate?” Then he stopped and corrected himself. “Sorry, miss.

” It was the first time Vera had ever heard anyone order tea in a blues club. For a second she didn’t know what to say. Then she found some in the kitchen, brought it out, and didn’t charge him for it. In the second set of the night, Buddy Guy went into five long years, and 11 minutes in he handed the microphone over to Amos.

 Amos cupped his hands around the harmonica, exactly the way he had learned to 54 years earlier, and started holding a single note. The note stretched and stretched. 400 people went quiet without quite understanding why. The man at the end of the bar had lifted his cup halfway to his mouth. He held it there for a second, then set it back down without drinking.

 He moved his hand slowly to his coat pocket and left it there. His lips moved, but no sound came out. He muttered a single word to himself, “Impossible.” The solo lasted 2 minutes and 10 seconds, and Amos never finished the last note. He put a hand to his chest, took a step back, and sat down on the edge of the amp. The harmonica slipped out of his palm, hit the boards, and slid to the edge of the stage, where it stayed.

 He was conscious. He even waved off the two people who ran over to him and tried to tell them he was fine, but the color of his face said otherwise. Buddy Guy crouched down beside him without letting go of his guitar, and the stage lights went out. 15 minutes later, when they put Amos into the ambulance outside the club, there was an oxygen mask on his face, and his eyes were open, and his granddaughter climbed in with him from that back table without even picking up her homework.

 11 minutes later, Buddy Guy came back out on stage. The 79-year-old’s shirt was stuck to his back, and the hand holding the microphone was shaking. “Amos is stable,” he told the crowd. “He’s on his way to the hospital, and he’s going to be all right.” The room applauded, then went quiet again. For a while Buddy didn’t look at anyone.

 He looked down at the boards, at the spot where the fallen harmonica was lying. Then he raised his head. “I’ve been on this stage with that man for 30 years.” he said, “and I’m not ending this night with his harmonica on the floor.” And then he asked the question. “Is there anybody in this room who can play harmonica?” The silence lasted 11 seconds.

 Then the stool at the far end of the bar scraped back across the stone floor, and the man in the cap stood up. He took something small and metal out of his coat pocket and started walking towards the stage. Not one of the 400 people in that room knew who he was. 400 people watched in silence as the old man in the cap and the dark glasses, shoulders bent slightly forward, came through them.

 When he stepped up onto the stage, Buddy pulled the microphone away from his mouth and asked, “What’s your name, son?” The man thought for a second, then said only, “John.” It wasn’t a lie. It was the name his mother gave him when he was born, and it was the only name he wanted to use on that stage that night. Buddy nodded toward the spot where the harmonica had fallen.

“Can you really play?” he asked, “or are you just brave?” For the first time, the man gave a small smile. “I could 46 years ago.” he said. A few people in the front rows laughed. Then he did something nobody expected. He walked to the edge of the stage, leaned down with one hand on the boards, and picked the fallen harmonica up off the floor.

 He wiped it clean on the sleeve of his coat and set it on top of the guitar amp, right in the middle of the light. Then he leaned toward the microphone. “This isn’t staying on the floor.” he said, “but nobody’s taking his place, either.” Then he took something out of his own pocket. It was a small, narrow harmonica. The brass plating had worn through to copper in places from years of sitting in a palm, and the lettering on it was gone completely.

 It looked like something that had spent 46 years in a coat pocket, a drawer, a suitcase, because it had. Buddy called out the key of the song. The man looked at the one in his hand and said, “Same.” Then he cupped his hands around it. What he played wasn’t mastery. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t fancy. It was a single long note, and it held without wavering, without thinning out, without breaking, exactly the way Amos had held one half an hour earlier.

 Buddy Guy played two chords and settled in underneath him. There was no contest between them. There was one man’s breath and one man’s guitar. 400 people didn’t know what they were listening to, but they knew they were holding their breath. Vera Hollis was standing behind the bar with her eyes on his hands. When he raised the harmonica, the backs of his fingers caught the stage light for the first time, and Vera finally read the faded blue letters.

There were four of them. O Z Z Y She set the glass in her hand down on the counter so hard that two customers turned to look at her. In that same second, a young man in his 20s, standing right in front of the stage, said one word out loud before he could stop himself. He had been at that concert at the United Center the night before, and he was still wearing the same shirt.

That word moved through the room like a wave. The front rows first, then the tables, then the back wall. Phones came up one by one, and hundreds of small lights came on in the dark. Buddy Guy turned his head, narrowed his eyes, and understood. The microphone was in his hand, and he was 1 second away from saying the name, but the man looked at him and shook his head very slightly.

Buddy said nothing. He just kept playing, and they finished the song together. When the song ended, the room came to its feet, but the man didn’t take a bow. He looked at the harmonica on top of the amp and didn’t touch it. Then he leaned toward Buddy and asked him one thing. Which hospital? Buddy told him, and the man stepped down off the stage, went through the crowd, and was out in the cold faster than anyone could stop him.

 He left behind 400 people and hundreds of phone videos shot that night. A few days later, one of those videos would show Amos Prior the most important thing he had ever seen. At 2:40 in the morning, the seventh-floor hallway at Northwestern Memorial Hospital was empty. Amos’s granddaughter, Simone Prior, was sitting in a plastic chair.

 The math notebook she had picked up off the floor was still in her lap, and the last page of it was damp and wrinkled. An old man sat down next to her, took off his cap, and set it on his knee. Simone looked at him, didn’t know who he was, and didn’t care. That night there was one person in the world she cared about, and he was on the other side of the glass.

 The man didn’t ask her anything, and didn’t try to comfort her. Neither of them spoke for 15 minutes. Then Simone said, “My grandfather shouldn’t have gone on stage.” Her voice cracking. “The doctor told him he went up there because of me.” The man looked at the light at the end of the hallway for a while. Then he spoke in that heavy accent, running his words together.

 “I’m 67 years old, love.” he said. “And last night I sang in front of 14,000 people. Doctors tell me a lot of things, too.” Simone sniffed. The man went on. “Your granddad didn’t go up there because of you. He went up there to be himself. One day you’ll understand the difference.” When Amos opened his eyes toward morning, there was an oxygen mask on his face, and two people were standing on the other side of the glass.

 He saw his granddaughter first. Then he looked at the man beside her, and his eyes stayed there. When the nurse let them in, Amos pulled the mask down to his chin, and the first thing he said was not what anyone expected. He didn’t say a name. He didn’t say, “You’re Ozzy Osbourne.” He looked at the man’s hand and said, “I remember that hand.

” Then he said, “There was a boy who had written something on his own fingers. He had very long hair and he was terrified.” November 1970, Black Sabbath were in America for the first time and 21-year-old Ozzy Osbourne had never been that far from Birmingham in his life. He had no money in his pocket, nobody could understand his accent and a few months earlier he had played the harmonica part at the opening of a song called The Wizard himself in the studio.

 That part was on records now and every time Ozzy heard it he thought the same thing, “I don’t know how to play this thing. Sooner or later somebody is going to work that out.” After the Chicago show, he didn’t go back to the hotel. He walked, he got lost and he ended up standing outside a club on 43rd Street on the South Side.

 Inside, a 25-year-old man was playing harmonica holding a single note without letting it move. Ozzy spent the night in there up against the wall. When the club was closing he went over to the young harmonica player and asked him how he did it. Amos Prior showed him how to cup his hands then took a small harmonica out of his case and held it out to him.

 Ozzy didn’t take it. He said the man didn’t even know him and that he had nothing to give him in return. Amos shrugged. “Eight years ago somebody handed me his own harmonica one night. I promised I’d hand one to somebody else someday. You’re just the next one in line.” Ozzy asked him one more thing that night.

 He said he didn’t really know how to play and that people were going to figure that out sooner or later. Amos laughed and said the sentence he would repeat 46 years later in that hospital room. “This isn’t about who plays better, son. It’s about who stands up.” Ozzy kept that harmonica from 1970 on. It sat in a drawer for years and then it was forgotten.

 And in 2015, when Black Sabbath’s final tour was announced, he took it out of the drawer and put it in his coat pocket. It was the one thing he wanted with him on that last tour. In the hospital room, Aussie took that harmonica out and laid it on Amos’s blanket. Amos looked at it for a long time, then shook his head.

 “I don’t know how many I gave away,” he said. “50 years and I don’t remember how many boys I handed one to. Not one of them.” Then he stopped. His eyes filled and he added, “But I guess one of them kept it.” There were three people in that room and none of them spoke for a while. Then, for the first time in her life, Simone saw her grandfather cry.

 The story could have ended there, but the next morning the same man stopped by Legends, left some change on the counter and said, “That’s for the tea last night. It was terrible, but a debt’s a debt.” On his way out, he handed Vera a thick envelope to pass on to Buddy. Inside that envelope was all four years of Simone Prior’s music school tuition and three lines written by hand on the front.

 “46 years ago a man gave me a harmonica and asked for nothing in return. It’s my turn. Let his granddaughter go to her school.” Underneath were two letters. J.O. That same week, Amos finally handed Buddy Guy the envelope he had been carrying in his pocket for 3 weeks. Buddy read the four lines, folded the paper, put it in his own pocket, and said, “I’ll accept you leaving the stage.

 I won’t accept the resignation.” Amos never played on that stage again, but the hook in the dressing room was never empty. Buddy never let anyone pull out the nail with his name on it. And for years, Amos came into that club 3 days a week to teach kids harmonica. And there was one more thing. Someone showed Amos one of the phone videos from that night while he was still in the hospital.

 He watched the man set his own harmonica on top of the amp and say that nobody was taking his place. And then he made them start the video over exactly seven times. On the day he was discharged, he put the 1970 harmonica Aussie had left behind into Simone’s palm, and said the sentence that had been said to him 54 years earlier, “Cup your hands.

 The sound hides in your palms.”