The Hammond Draw

The air inside the Dusty Boot, a low-slung concrete block lounge on the edge of Jacksonville, smells of fried catfish and stale draft beer. At nine o’clock, Corinna Finch takes her seat behind a Hammond B-3 organ that has been her constant companion since 1969. The organ, a massive piece of walnut-veneered furniture, is connected to a Leslie speaker cabinet that occupies almost half the stage. Finch, seventy-four, is a tiny woman with a towering white beehive hairstyle and a pair of rhinestone-encrusted spectacles. When she steps on the bass pedals with her soft-soled shoes, the floorboards of the lounge vibrate with a deep, muscular resonance that demands immediate attention.

Finch’s paradox is that while her music is deeply rooted in the sacred traditions of the black Baptist church, she has spent her entire adult life playing in some of the most secular, rough-edged joints in the Southeast. She sees no contradiction in this, viewing the blues as simply another form of sermon, delivered to a congregation that prefers modern whiskey to ancient holy water. She plays with a fierce, percussive physical intensity, her hands flying over the dual keyboards with a speed that defies her arthritic knuckles. "The church and the lounge are just two different rooms in the same house," Finch said, adjusting the drawbars to produce a dirty, growling vibrato.

The crowd at the Dusty Boot is small tonight, consisting mostly of older men in baseball caps and a few younger patrons who arrived by accident. Yet Finch plays as if she were headlining the Newport Jazz Festival, her face contorted in a mask of intense concentration. She knows that the Hammond B-3 is an endangered species, too heavy for modern touring and too expensive for struggling clubs to maintain. When her set ends, she sits quietly on her bench, her hands resting on the cool wood of the cabinet, listening to the slow hum of the vacuum tubes as they begin to cool down.