Big Road Blues

 I first stumbled upon the music of Tommy McClennan by accident. In my early record buying days one of my favorite haunts was Tower Records at Broadway and West 4th Street in NYC which had a terrific blues section. I think I was looking for a Tommy Johnson record and somehow got him and Tommy McClennan confused. I wound up taking home the LP Cotton Patch Blues 1939 – 1942 on the British Travelin’ Man label which sported an evocative sepia toned cover of cottonfields complete with cotton pickers and and overseer riding a horse. I soon realized my mistake but my disappointment was dispelled when the raw, direct sounds of the first track, “You Can Mistreat Me Here”, hit me and was truly floored when I heard the third number, “Bottle It Up and Go.” I’ve been a fan ever since.

 McClennan is a contradiction; at once wholly individualistic with his powerhouse gravel-throated voice, sprinkled with frequent entertaining spoken asides propelled by an exciting, rudimentary guitar style while on the other hand derivative, with a repertoire mostly drawn from other artists. Despite his limited bag of songs, his limited guitar prowess (despite the boastfully titled “I’m a Guitar King”), McClennan made it work through the sheer force of his outsized personality and his intense commitment to his material. His record label, Bluebird, and the record buying public obviously saw something in McClennan as he cut forty sides (at five eight-song sessions), everyone issued at the time, between 1939 and 1942.

At the time Cotton Patch Blues was released in 1984 writer Alan Balfour noted that “what little is known of Tommy McClennan’s life is based, as is so often the case, on the recollections of others.” McClennan is remembered by bluesmen like Big Joe Williams, Big Bill Broonzy, Jimmy Rogers and most importantly Honeyboy Edwards. Our knowledge of McClennan has been expanded since then with the release of Honeyboy Edwards’ 1997 autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, where he put pen to ink,  recollecting at length about his old friend and partner.

The following is taken from Honeyboy’s memoir which paints a vivid portrait of his old pal: “It was out in Wildwood plantation when I first met Tommy McClennan. Tommy would come out there and play the guitar a while and bump on the piano. He could play the guitar pretty good, but he sure wasn’t no piano player. He threw the people; he had them dancing and hollering. …He could play that guitar, and he could holler; Tommy had a big mouth.  …Tommy played the guitar and gambled, shot dice, played cards. …Tommy was dark and had big eyes like a frog. He was real little, about four and ten, just touched me right along there about the shoulder. Tommy didn’t weigh a bit over 115 pounds. …I and Tommy, we be together all the time. And when he wasn’t with me he was with Robert Petway. …Tommy and Robert was about the same size. They’d come down the street with two guitars, looking like midgets. Now Robert could beat Tommy playing but Tommy could holler more than Robert. …I learned a few licks from Tommy, a few numbers he made. He mad the ‘Bullfrog Blues’ and Petway made ‘The Catfish Blues.’ …Robert and Tommy McClennan and me, we’d be together all the time. On days we wasn’t out playing at the whiskey houses or on the streets; we’d be at Tommy’s house drinking and playing cards, and one of us sitting in the corner practicing some song. …Tommy, he wasn’t really a guitar picker; he was mostly a frailer, and played a few chords in the key of C, running chords with that big loud voice. …Tommy McClennan and me played both sides of town [Greenwood, MS]. We used to serenade in the white neighborhoods. We’d walk down the street amongst all those old houses, strumming our guitars, and we’d see them curtains fly back and they’d chuck nickels and dimes out in the street for us. We’d play ‘Tight Like That’, little jump-up songs for them. Then we’d go back across the river where we come from, raise hell and drink, holler our asses off all night long, singing the ‘Cotton Patch Blues’ in them shotgun houses in our part of town.”

 McClennan arrived in Chicago in 1939 supposedly through the intervention of Big Bill Broonzy who told Bluebird talent scout Lester Melrose he ought to look him up. Again, Honeyboy picks up the tale: “I missed Lester Melrose when he came through Greenwood looking for musicians to record. …He picked up Tommy McClennan then and Tommy recorded ‘Bottle It Up And Go’ for him. He recorded Tommy, Robert Petway, a gang of musicians through the South.” “Bottle It Up And Go” is one of the songs most associated with McClennan although according to Honeyboy he learned the song from Memphis Jug Band member Dewey Corley and in turn taught it to McClennan.  McClennan insisted on playing the song as he learned it in the South, ignoring Northern sensibilities when he sang the controversial lines:

Now the nigger and the white man playin’ seven-up
Nigger beat the white man was scared to pick it up 

Broonzy tells a story of McClennan singing these lines at a house party and being forcibly ejected, forced to leave via the window with parts of his guitar around his neck. McClennan is obviously pleased with this act of defiance, barley able to contain himself as he chuckles throughout the rest of the song. It’s a bravo performance with McClennan hollering out the blues with gusto, using his guitar to finish his verses, offering a running commentary with his spoken asides and finishing up with an energetic bit of trademark scatting. Jimmy Rogers, who met McClennan in Vance, MS commented on his scatting perhaps half-seriously: “Little Richard sneaked around there and stole ‘be-bop-a-lu-bop’ and ‘be-bam-boom’. That was Tommy.”

Bottle It Up And Go (MP3)