Big Road Blues

Show Notes:

An eclectic variety of blues on today’s mix show spanning from 1926 through the 1960’s. We have several spotlights on tap including sets of music featuring Will Ezell, Papa Charlie Jackson, Lonnie Johnson plus recordings from the Bluesville label and the vaults of famed producer Jay Miller. Born in Texas, pianist Ezell played in the jukes around Shreveport before moving to Detroit and Chicago. He was a frequent accompanist for Paramount Records and even took Paramount’s star, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s body back to Texas for burial.  Ezell cut sixteen sides for the label between 1927 and 1929 and backed artists such as Lucille Bogan, Elzadie Robinson, Bertha Henderson, Blind Roosevelt Graves and others. Henderson was powerful singer who delivers a moving performance on the evocative  “Black Bordered Letter” sporting some pungent cornet from Dave Nelson. The record was advertised in the Chicago Defender on September 3, 1927. Ezell and Graves team up on Ezell’s bouncy “Just Can’t Stay Here” and Graves’  exuberant “Crazy ‘Bout My Baby” both from a September 30, 1929 session and both featuring a lively cornet player. Graves was from Mississippi and according to bluesman Ishmon Bracy, was a street and juke-joint musician. His brother played tambourine with him and sang harmony. The duo cut some 20 sides, a mix of gospel and blues, for Paramount and ARC at sessions in 1929 and 1936.

From Paramount’s Book of the Blues 1927

We spin a trio of sides from the neglected Papa Charlie Jackson. Supposedly born in New Orleans in 1885, Jackson moved to Chicago in 1924, when Paramount’s J. Mayo Williams saw him singing in the street and recruited him for the label. Jackson, who played guitar and banjo, went on to be the first self-accompanied male blues singer, a best-seller on record and was the first to cut several blues standards . Between 1924 and 1934 he cut around 70 sides. Jackson cut some superb material but seems to get overlooked perhaps because he doesn’t fit the preconceived idea of what a blues artist should be; for one he usually played the banjo and secondly much of his material is vaudeville slanted, aimed at amusement and dancing. Throughout his body of work, however, there’s plenty of fine playing and some fascinating songs. “I’m Looking For A Woman Who Knows How To Treat Me Right” is a bluesy number with a vaudeville feel and some driving banjo playing,  “Lexington Kentucky Blues” is a terrific straight blues with a reference to the famous racehorse Man o‘ War while “Up The Way Bound” shows off his ample guitar skills.

We did a whole show devoted to Lonnie Johnson a couple of weeks back and hear two more by Johnson including a duet with Clara Smith and in a supporting role behind Mooch Richardson. Much is made of the duets Johnson did with Victoria Spivey, rightly so, yet less has been said about the fine duets he did wit Smith in 1930. “What Makes You Act Like That” is a wonderful, playful number with both artists voices contrasting beautifully and as usual Johnson lays down some stunning guitar work. Johnson backed  singer Mooch Richardson on seven numbers in 1928 (four were never released) including our selection “Helena Blues.”

Bluesville Records, a subsidiary of Prestige, was launched in 1960 to document the growing interest in blues that would lead to the rediscoveries of many artists who recorded in the 20’s and 30’s as well as many who never previously had the opportunity to record.  Two of the best albums cut for the label were Scrapper Blackwell’s Mr. Scrapper’s Blues cut in 1961 and Robert Curtis Smith’s Clarksdale Blues cut the following year. Mr. Scrapper’s Blues has thankfully been issued on CD which is not the case with Clarksdale Blues which has become highly collectible. A chance meeting with Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, at the Big 6 Barber Shop in Clarksdale led to this album. In the liner notes Mack McCormick wrote: “Robert Curtis Smith is a hard working farm laborer in upper Mississippi. He supports a wife and eight children by driving a tractor ($3 a day top) during the farming season, by hunting rabbits in the winter. He has a borrowed guitar with which he sings of women he has loved, lost, discarded, or found worthy of erotic praise. …The status quo in his world is to sap the strength and exploit the weakness of Negroes. It is a far more vicious crime than the occasional lynching since the end result is the massive weakening of a strong people. Ideas of inferiority are fed to him hand-in-hand with conditions that patently are inferior. Badly deprived of constitutional privilege and the minimum wage, and lacking the know-how to correct his situation, Smith’s way of life is astonishingly out of step with modern times.” Our selection, “Council Spur Blues”, is Smith’s bitter indictment against that way of life:

You ask for money, he’ll give you all up to the store (2x)
Then if you eat that up before the week is out, man, you don’t get no more

You think that’s bad, working for 30 cents an hour (2x)
You just stick around awhile and let me tell you about Mr. Roy Flowers

Mr. Roy Flowers don’t pay but two dollars a day (2x)
Yes, and once you are there, he dare you to leave away

Mr. Roy Flowers – in the winter time he’s got a habit (2x)
When you go to him for food, he’ll tell you to catch some rabbit

A few other tracks by Curtis appear on various anthologies. Smith disappeared from the blues world not long after these recordings but 30 years later he was rediscovered living in Chicago. He had given up blues in the passing years, but he continued to play in church and was recorded performing gospel numbers in 1990.

Also featured today are recordings by Lightnin’ Slim, Leroy Washington, Mr. Calhoun and Joe Johnson from the vaults of J.D. Miller. Miller operated a small studio and record label (Feature) out in Crowley, Louisiana. He had been recording some regional Cajun and Country music in the early fifties when he first heard Lightnin’ Slim at WXOK in Baton Rouge. Miller has said that Lightnin’s music “did something to me”, and, with the help of disc jockey Diggy-Doo, he recorded Lightnin’s “Bad Luck” in the Spring of 1954. There was no way J.D. could keep up with the demand for the record, and he decided to travel to Nashville for a record convention in 1955. Miller met with Ernie Young and worked out a deal that would lease the material he was recording back in Crowley to Excello Records for release and distribution. Soon Miller’s studio became ground zero for ‘the sound known as “swamp-blues” issuing records by Slim Harpo, Lazy Lester, Silas Hogan, Lonesome Sundown and others. Many recordings were never released and in the 70’s the Flyright label, with the assistance of Miller, began a series called the The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions that ran to over fifty volumes. These recordings come from those LP’s. In February I’ll be doing whole show devoted to these recordings.

Also in February I’m doing a show on Brownsville Blues spotlighting recordings by Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Charlie Pickett and Son Bonds. Today we give you a little taste of that show with tracks by Bonds and Pickett. An associate of Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, Bonds played very much in the same rural Brownsville style that the Estes-Nixon team popularized in the ’20s and ’30s. The music to one of Bonds’ songs, “Back and Side Blues” (1934), became a standard blues melody when John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson from nearby Jackson, TN, used it in his classic “Good Morning, (Little) School Girl” (1937). According to Nixon, Bonds was shot to death, while sitting on his front porch, by a nearsighted neighbor who mistook him for another man. Bonds backed Sleepy John Estes at two sessions in 1941 while guitarist Charlie Pickett backed Estes at two sessions in 1937 and one in 1938. At that same 1937 session Pickett waxed four sides of his own including our track, the salacious “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon.”