He's probably best-known to northwest blues audiences for his four years co-fronting the Paul deLay band. But David Vest has been at it for half a century, bringing audiences to their feet with a unique blend of blues, boogie, gospel, jazz and old-time country -- the real stuff.

His music, like his life, defies labels.

In the Fifties he went back and forth between juke joints and gospel music, appearing on programs with the Blackwood Brothers and Statesmen when he wasn't honky-tonking.

In the early Sixties he played with Big Joe Turner, sat in with Bill Black's Combo and the Jimmy Dorsey Band, wrote the first songs ever recorded by the late Tammy Wynette and played theaters as a duo with author/comedienne Fannie Flagg.

Then he moved to Nashville and, after playing on some Zeke Clements sessions engineered by Scotty Moore, disappeared completely from the scene.

More than ten years would go by before he would perform in public again.

Turns out he was off teaching and writing poetry -- lots of it. By the late 70s his work had appeared in many of the leading literary magazines and a few anthologies. But he split that scene as suddenly as he had left Nashville. A letter from a university press asking to publish his book went unanswered.

Finally, in 1980 he took the stage again at a jazz festival -- not in the U.S. but in Transylvania, of all places, while in Europe as a Fulbright scholar. The live telecast of the show was seen in several countries, leading to an offer to record an album ("Heart Full of Rock and Roll") in Bucharest, backed by Romanian musicians led by the legendary Johnny Raducanu,

Returning to the U.S., he concentrated at first on songwriting, producing 14 songs one memorable October day. "Every time I would sit down to rest, here came another one," he recalls. "It was like a swarm. I was writing them on a roll of paper towels with a felt tip pen." (Some of those songs remain staples of his repertoire. One of them "Vestitution," wound up on Serve Me Right to Shuffle.)

In 1981 he relocated to Texas, where he toured with blues legends Lavelle White, Floyd Dixon and Jimmy T99 Nelson and played with bands like the Generators and the Sheetrockers, as well as the jazz combo Straight No Chaser and his own band featuring Susan Alcorn, queen of the steel guitar.

1999 brought another move -- to Portland, where he was a founding member of The Cannonballs before joining forces with Paul deLay.

Other performance credits include gigs with Johnny Reno, Curtis Salgado, Lloyd Jones, Jerry Woodard, Sam the Sham, Grady Gaines, Jerry Lightfoot, Tommy Dardar, Little Junior One Hand, Trudy Lynn and Milton Hopkins.

He has appeared at many festivals, including Portland's Waterfront Blues Festival, Seattle's Bumbershoot, the Baltimore Blues Festival, Houston's Juneteenth Festival and the New Orleans Jazz Heritage Festival.

The set turned in by David Vest at the 2007 Waterfront Blues Festival was called Portland's Best Live Performance of the year.

In 2008 he began performing a series of concerts with Northwest Pianorama.

A graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, David holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt. He has also served time in the corporate world as a speech writer and as a member of a top web development team.

His articles on music and other subjects, for web sites such as CounterPunch, are widely read.

Photo by Jim Dorothy

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