I have found the next musical genius to come from Wesleyan. I heard him one night by chance, walking into Middletown. The night was dark and the only light came from the burn of streetlamps. Suddenly, a beautiful melody, lyrical yet haunting, floated in on the breeze. Someone was riffing on a harmonica and singing the blues. Now, I’ve heard great harmonica players and blues singers before but this, this was different. Every wheeze was even more beautiful and mysterious than the last, and I found myself being drawn to it like the song of the sirens. I rounded a corner some three blocks east of High Street and saw him. He was sitting in the shadows of a stoop surrounded by a small crowd. But when he saw me approach the group, he vanished. I asked the people remaining what this man’s story was. Had they heard him play before? Was he a Wesleyan student? But everyone remained silent.
I was about to leave when a man softly whispered, “The boy’s name is Chris Foley ’10.” With that I learned his legend. Chris Foley, also known as the Delta Devil, grew up seven miles west of Portland, Maine, or so people think. But most can’t tell you who his parents are or what county he was born in, and that’s because he just appeared one morning at the crossroads of highways 61 and 49. The Cumberland county school bus driver saw him standing there in a pair of busted overalls with no shoes on his feet. He didn’t have a book satchel either, just a gold plated harmonica in his back pocket. Chris hopped on the bus and went to school. That night he went home with Jack DeLoache, a friend he made at school that day, and lived with the DeLoaches until he graduated high school. How he ended up at Wesleyan no one knows. The important thing is Chris Foley’s here and you might get the opportunity to listen to him play. Not many days you get to hear the musical styling of a man that’s sold his soul.
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