Jackson C. Frank

Before venturing to the North Park Theatre in Buffalo to catch a one-night-only showing of Blues Run the Game: The Strange Tale of Jackson C. Frank, the new documentary about the Queen City’s doomed native-son folksinger, I shared Frank’s most famous number, “Blues Run the Game,” with our friend Pat. “That could be the saddest song I’ve ever heard,” she said. Yet Frank wrote it during his very brief wine, women and musical heyday. One shudders to imagine what he composed as an obese, one-eyed, homeless paranoid-schizophrenic. Frank’s western New York contemporary, the novelist John Gardner, said that “art begins in a wound, an imperfection, and is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.