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Oozing the blues

Toby Bonar may have only recently discovered the blues, but he sings and plays them like they've been in his bones forever.

By LOUIS HAU
Published December 29, 2005

It's an unusually chilly December evening as Toby Bonar leans on a counter at the rear of Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, taking in a performance by the famed acoustic bluesman John Hammond.

Bonar marvels as Hammond bends the strings of an old steel guitar, his face contorted in sorrow as he sings of love gone bad.

"This music has more emotion than any other music," Bonar enthuses. "This rawness, this realness. Listen to this guy. He's more than singing a song and playing a guitar. He's putting himself out there."

Getting to the heart of that "realness" is something the 31-year-old Bonar, a blues guitarist himself, has been working at too, with impressive results.

The Tampa resident only began playing the guitar in college. He only started singing last year. And he's only been playing in public since March.

Despite a startingly brief apprenticeship, Bonar exhibits a remarkable musical gift. During a benefit concert at Skipper's in late October for Friends of Florida Folk Inc., he performed a bracing set of Mississippi Delta blues, including numbers by Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson and Charley Patton.

By the time he finished a scorching rendition of If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day on a 1931 National Duolian Resonator guitar, a few stunned members of the audience were left asking each other, "Who the heck is this guy?"

Barry Brogan, the president of Central Florida Folk Inc., first heard Bonar play last year during a weekly jam session he hosts at the Spiral Circle bookstore in downtown Orlando. He later got Bonar his first gig, a Sunday-morning appearance at the Orlando Folk Festival in March.

"I said, "I don't have anything to teach you,"' Brogan recalls. "He already had all the moves. He plays those old blues guys better than I do."

Bonar grew up a hip-hop aficionado in Moundsville, W.Va., graduating from John Marshall High School in nearby Glen Dale a year after a certain country-music enthusiast named Brad Paisley, a friend who's now a big star in Nashville.

Bonar first became obsessed with the blues as a student at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, prompting him to start learning guitar chords during the summer before his senior year. He made halting progress on his own until he met blues guitarist Roy Book Binder a couple of years later while attending Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport.

The two soon struck up a friendship. Bonar began hanging out at Book Binder's home in St. Petersburg, listening to old records and absorbing the road-tested wisdom of the blues veteran.

"When I met Roy, he opened up Pandora's box because he was able to show me what was going on," Bonar says. "All this stuff I loved to hear, I saw him play and I was just in awe. He showed me how to practice, what I needed to do to get that thumb down. Once you've got the rhythm down, everything sort of falls in line."

Bonar now plays occasional gigs at Perk Fiction in Pass-A-Grille, the Gulfport Fresh Market and other local venues. He even got up the courage to appear at an open-mike event in November at the legendary Club Passim in Cambridge, Mass.

Bonar says he's been gratified by the audience response so far.

"It's been a lot of self-discovery, for sure," he says. "I'm really just enjoying every minute of it."

[Last modified December 29, 2005, 10:18:59]