Dave Brainard took this photo of Floyd Council Jr. at Floyd's home in Sanford, NC.

So I called up Floyd Council Jr.

He answered on the fourth ring...

"Um...this is kind of an odd phone call to come, you know, out of the blue and all, but I'm looking for a dead blues guitar player named Floyd Council and I was wondering if you were any relation to him at all..."

"He was my Deddy'" he said.  I could hear a deep and patient amusement in his voice.

"Do, uh, do you reckon I could come by and talk to you about your Deddy?"

"Come on," he said.  And we did...

     Floyd Council Jr. has a fine high sense of humour about the historical accident that caused Syd Barrett to name one of the most successful rock groups in history after his Dad and Pink Anderson - a man his Dad most likely never met.  He's a big man who laughs readily and eases through his sphere with smooth and precise movements that make his size seem less imposing but rather...comforting.

He's got a walking stick his Deddy used to carry.  Everything else is gone.  There are no family photos.  A female relative tracked down the Kip Lornell and the Pete Lowry photos of his Dad on the internet and printed them out for him (those are the only two photos I know of).  Another relative made him a cassette tape of the six commercial recordings Floyd made.  Everything was lost after his Dad died.  Floyd Jr. thinks a cousin of his Dad's who was bad to drink probably carted all of his possessions off to a pawnshop on the afternoon his Dad died and pawned it all.  It makes me like him, you know...and feel a kind of orphan kinship.  After Katrina, the thing I missed most terribly and regretted most having lost to the storm were the postcards my own Dad sent home to my Grandparents from the army.  I missed his spidery handwriting and his homesickness and his sense of duty and his affection for his Mom and Dad.  I missed the faded and dog-eared pictures of Germany and his certainty that the alpine foothills in Bavaria were nice enough but couldn't hold a candle to Seneca Rock or East River Mountain or Spruce Knob...

Floyd and his Dad were both over the road truck drivers.  Both men play(ed) the guitar.  Floyd Jr. plays the guitar in his church.  In fact, he got his guitar and his amp out and insisted we play for him.  Standing in his driveway, he best remembered his Dad's lyric about:

I'm gonna get me a razor, a knife and a blue steel gun
I'm gonna get me a razor a knife, and a blue steel gun
Gonna cut you if you stand...shoot you if you run.

So, sitting in his living room I played his Dad's song Runaway Man.  That's where that verse comes from...it was kind of quiet after I got done and then Floyd Council Jr. laughed and shook his head and said, "Man, times sure was different back then, wasn't they?"