Bluesman, Pie Champ Reveal Secret Ingredients

He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and clutched the neck of his guitar. His faded leather shoes pounded the ground. His voice broke. His guitar moaned.

“It just happens,” Rocky Lawrence said of his rendition of the Robert Johnson classic ​“Love in Vain,” after he finished performing that and other blues standards Monday evening at the Hi-Fi Pie Fest at Beecher Park behind Mitchell Library.

It was the final of five installments of the annual live music fest and pie-making contest organized by the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.

Lawrence, the evening’s featured performer, and Kate Bradley, the evening’s pie-baking champ, each shared their secrets about how they mixed the right ingredients in serving up their specialties.

“You’re trying to convey what you’re feeling and what you’re saying, and it just happens,” Lawrence said. ​“All those little things that you learn and you practice when you were a 15-year-old kid, now you’re not thinking about it anymore.” 

Lawrence, a longtime Westville resident, has carved out an international career as a touring blues musician. He’s best known for reviving the sound and look of Johnson and for his association with the late David ​“Honeyboy” Edwards, a Delta blues guitarist, as well as sharing the stage with the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards and the Allman Brothers.

“I tell kids, ​‘You listen to whatever you want to now. When you get older you’re gonna want to listen to real music, that’s blues and jazz, because it makes you feel something,’” he said, as some of the roughly 150 concert-goers and pie-eaters passed, lawn chairs on shoulders, thanking their neighbor for his tunes.

For celebrity culinary judge Arturo Franco-Camacho, Kate Bradley’s apple galette with salted caramel sauce struck a chord.

The weekly pie category was apple, pear, and quince. ​“Maybe one person has used quince in festival history,” said Lizzie Donius, executive director of the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.

“You can tell when someone bakes with their soul,” said Camacho, the executive chef of Shell and Bones and now Westville’s hopping Camacho Garage restaurant, as he settled at a conference table at Mitchell Library before the entries of the 11 contestants.

“The crust is evenly baked, no juices running,” he said. ​“And the caramel sauce on top made a great balance, more like gourmet. Plus it holds its shape. If a pie doesn’t hold its shape, it’s points off.” 

Having learned that Bradley’s apple galette was Camacho’s winner, head organizer and ​“Pie Boss” Naomi Senzer clapped her hands. Donius whooped.

“That’s awesome,” Senzer said. ​“It was time for her to win.”

“Kate Bradley is one of the biggest volunteers in Westville,” Dontius said. ​“She plants and waters all of the plants with her husband. She’s invested a lot of love in this place.”

To hear Bradley tell it, there’s nothing complicated about the ingredients that constitute a winning pie.

“It’s just apples, cinnamon, lemon juice, lemon zest, and sugar, and the crust, and the caramel sauce,” the veteran Hi-Fi Pie contestant said as she stood among admirers in the gathering dusk.

As for what distinguished her pie, ​“it’s sweet, but it’s got the crumbly salt in it, and it’s not all mixed in, so you can taste it,” she said. ​“There’s also a little bit of rum flavor in it which I think makes it a little deeper.”

Above all, she maintained, it wasn’t only the pie. ​“It’s this whole thing,” she said, sweeping her arms to embrace everyone at Beecher Park. ​“It’s having Rocky Lawrence; he contributes so much to Westville. It’s having Camacho; he doesn’t have to come out here and judge a contest, he’s like a famous chef. It’s everyone who makes this thing happen. I just think the whole neighborhood is the winner.”

Lawrence had a similar take. ​“When I’m playing, I get what I try to give,” he said. ​“If I’m halfway successful, folks can go away happy.

“When you sing the blues, you chase the blues away.”