A Brush with Blues & Bird Dogs

A song cycle with a camera. Each month: one original blues composition set against photographs and motion of the dogs at work, shot on my grandfather’s Minolta and the other bodies that came down with it. The music carries the story. The pictures sit beside it.

I have been drawn to the guitar my whole life, the same way I have been drawn to having dogs my whole life. We made the blues. I have never fully been able to explain why it pulls at me, only that it does, and that it pulls from the same place the dog work does. So rather than keep the two apart, this chapter puts them together and lets them answer each other.

Nothing here is staged that did not happen. Running a bird dog is a real thing — no animal but a dog does it, and no one but a person teaches it. Making music is a real thing too, and what we care about in both is the same: that a person did it. That is the whole argument of this chapter, and it is why the rules below are rules and not preferences.

• Original songs only — written and played by me.
• Shot on the cameras that came down to me — my grandfather's Minolta and the bodies beside it. Real film, real grain, real mistakes.
• Real dogs, real coveys, real ground.
• No generative AI — not in the pictures, not in the music, not anywhere.

The songs are written and performed as LamarCy; the paintings are signed D.LAMAR. Both live at dashcreatives.art. One release a month. Twelve of them is a record and an exhibition — which is the point. This is not a series of episodes. It is a body of work being accumulated in public, a month at a time.