Big Road Blues

Everybody’s Blues (MP3)

Rock Island Blues (MP3)

Hey baby, tell me what’s the matter now (2x)
Lord you tryin’ to quit me, baby and you don’t know how

I ain’t got no good girl, ain’t got no lady friend (2x)
I ain’t go nobody to say, “Furry, where you been?”

If you don’t want me, won’t you tell me so (2x)
Then you won’t be bothered with me round your house no more

Hey-ey baby, you don’t treat me right (2x)
Ah the way you treat me, take my appetite

I’d rather see my coffin come rollin’ from my door (2x)
Lord than to hear my good girl says “I don’t want you no more”

Ba-aby, what you goin’ do with me? (2x)
Way you doin’ me baby, I declare I sure can’t be

(Everybody’s Blues, 1927)

After a brief hiatus we resume our continuing exploration of the blues advertisements that appeared in the Chicago Defender and turn our attention to the legendary Furry Lewis. Lewis was promoted in the Chicago Defender on five occasions; in July and August 1927 and April and June of 1928. Lewis’ first advertisement was for “Everybody’s Blues”, a rather small ad dwarfed by a large Paramount ad for Papa Charlie Jackson’s “Skoodle Um Skoo.” Perhaps because of the sales of that record he was granted larger ad space for “Sweet Papa Moan” and “Jellyroll” also cut at this first session. The year Lewis made his debut was the beginning of a blues boom that would last until 1930; there were just 500 blues and gospel records issued in 1927 and increase of fifty percent from 1926 a trend that would continue until the depression. To feed the demand record companies conducted exhaustive searches for new talent which included making southern excursions with field recording units. Memphis was a prime destination with record companies visiting the city eleven times during this period.

Lewis was actually born in Greenwood, MS and moved with his mother and two sisters to Brinley Avenue in Memphis when he was a youngster. Before he was ten he had fashioned a guitar from a cigar box and screen wire. His first guitar was supposedly given to him by W.C. Handy, a Martin that he used for decades, “until I just absolutely wore it out completely” as he recalled.” Lewis played around Beale Street in speakeasies, taverns, dance halls and house parties and worked the countryside at suppers, frolics and fish fries. In 1925 he got together with Will Shade, Dewey Thomas and Hambone Lewis to form an early version of the Memphis Jug Band and like Jim Jackson took to traveling with medicine shows. Vocalion talent scouts saw both men in 1927 but it was Lewis who went to Chicago first in April where he cut six sides with “The Panic’s On” remaining unissued. He and Jackson went up together in October the same year where Jackson cut his famous “Kansas City Blues” with Lewis cutting seven numbers including the unissued “Casey Jones.” Asked in later years if Jim Jackson was still alive in 1959, the year Lewis was rediscovered, Lewis quipped “he been dead so long he near about ready to come back.” Just under a year later Victor recorded eight more titles by Lewis in Memphis and Vocalion brought him in the studio one last time in 1929, cutting four songs at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.

Jellyroll (MP3)

Mr Furry’s Blues (MP3)

While playing the blues at nights and occasional recordings, Lewis kept a day job at the city’s Sanitation Department which he secured in 1923 and kept until he retired in 1968. “When I first started there, the city didn’t have trucks, I drove a mule and a car for the city. I was a street cleaner, I hauled garbage, I worked on the city dump and I worked washing streets.”

Thirty year would pass before Sam Charters came knocking in 1959 subsequently recordings him for Folkways that same year with two more albums following for Prestige in 1961. There was nothing rusty about his playing as he had never stopped performing for neighbors and friends. Lewis was recorded often through the 1960′s, with a slew of informal recordings issued posthumously. Bob Groom wrote in his book The Blues Revival that his “return has been one of the most satisfying of the [blues] revival.” He played regularly at festivals around Memphis, appeared with Burt Reynolds in the movie W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, sang “Furry’s Blues” on Johnny Carson and was the subject of a Joni Mitchell song (he didn’t like it). During this period Lewis’ apartment became a pilgrimage for many visitors to Memphis, from blues fans, musicians to celebrities.  Lewis died in 1981 at the City of Memphis Hospital. In the liner notes to Shake ‘Em On Down, Pete Welding wrote that Lewis’ music, “engagingly direct and sincere, typifies the best that the Memphis blues has to offer. If any single performer can be said to stand as the living embodiment of the Memphis blues, a perfomer in whose music can be found the full span of that urban-rural polarity, that man is surley Furry Lewis.”