Darryl Steele & Friends

Darryl Steele, mesmerizing Tallahassee musician and son of the late Rev. C.K. Steele, civil rights activist of the ’50s is poised to reinvent himself.

Watch out children, here he comes.

It only takes a second. Only a chord or two, and the deep down boogie of R&B, the throb of juke joints at 2 a.m., or perhaps moments later, a spirit-lifting catharsis to a gospel beat spills from the guitar of Darryl Steele.

Gray hair pulled into waist-length dreads, his wire-thin frame moving like a corporeal heartbeat, he sings with his whole body, finessing each note, swaying, swaggering, sweeping this way and that, calling out words that could have risen from the pine forests a hundred years ago or from the Jim Crowe times when only those in church or in the fields could have heard him sing.

To watch Tallahassee-born and Tallahassee-staying Darryl Steele perform is to feel yourself at the very nexus of that time before, the time after, and a future in the process of emerging. His musical and real life’s arc spans them all.