Big Road Blues

Show Notes:

I recently finished Michael Gray’s excellent “Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes – In Search of Blind Willie McTell” which is the inspiration for today’s show. In addition to focusing on Blind Willie we play the music of his fellow Atlanta bluesmen, just about all who were inspired by McTell and several who played with him. Like Memphis, Atlanta was a staging post for musicians on their way to all points. It’s not surprising then that the first country blues musician, Ed Andrews, was recorded there in 1924. The company that recorded him, Okeh, was one of many to send their engineers to Southern cities to record local talent. Companies like Victor, Columbia, Vocalion and Brunswick made at least yearly visits until the depression.

McTell was born in Thomson, Georgia, near Augusta, and raised near Statesboro. He played a standard six-string acoustic until the mid-’20s, and never entirely abandoned the instrument, but from the beginning of his recording career, he used a 12-string acoustic in the studio almost exclusively. He was A major figure with a local following in Atlanta from the 1920s onward, he recorded dozens of sides throughout the 1930s under a multitude of names — all the better to juggle “exclusive” relationships with many different record labels at once — including Blind Willie, Blind Sammie, Hot Shot Willie, and Georgia Bill, as a backup musician to Ruth Mary Willis. Willie’s recording career began in late 1927 with two sessions for Victor records, eight sides including “Statesboro Blues.”

He recorded prolifically through the 1930′s a did a session for the Library of Congress in 1940 under the supervision of John Lomax. The newly founded Atlantic Records — which was more noted for its recordings of jazz and R&B — took an interest in Willie and cut 15 songs with him in Atlanta during 1949. The one single released from these sessions, however, didn’t sell, and most of those recordings remained unheard for more than 20 years after they were made. McTell cut his final sides for record store owner Ed Rhodes in 1956, who had begun taping local bluesmen at his shop in Atlanta in the hope of releasing some of it. These turned out to be the only tapes he saved, out of all he’d recorded.

A younger contemporary of Blind Willie McTell and Curley Weaver, Eugene “Buddy” Moss was part of a near-legendary coterie of Atlanta bluesmen, and one of the few of his era lucky enough to work into the blues revival of the 1960s and ’70s. By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he was good enough to be noticed by Curley Weaver and Robert “Barbecue Bob” Hicks, who began working with the younger Moss. It was Weaver and Bob that got him his first recording date, at the age of 16, as a member of their group the Georgia Cotton Pickers, on December 7, 1930. In January of 1933, however, he made his debut as a recording artist in his own right for the American Record Company. He frequently played with Barbecue Bob, and after Bob died of pneumonia on October 21, 1931, he found a new partner and associate in Blind Willie McTell, performing with the Atlanta blues legend as local parties in the Atlanta area. A jail term curtailed his career from 1935-1941. Moss made some further recordings before WW II interfered. Moss continued performing in the area around Richmond, Virginia and Durham, North Carolina during the mid-’40s, and with Curley Weaver in Atlanta during the early 1950s, but music was no longer his profession or his living.

One of the first recorded products of the Atlanta blues community of the pre-war era, Peg Leg Howell bridged the gap between the early country-blues sound and the 12-bar stylings to follow. He signed to Columbia in 1926. Howell recorded prolifically up until 1929; he recorded solo and with his street group, the Gang (guitarist Henry Williams and fiddler Eddie Anthony). Williams was imprisoned not long after, and following Anthony’s 1934 death, Howell gradually disappeared from the area blues circuit. He spent the next several decades clouded in obscurity, with diabetes claiming his other leg in 1952. Howell was 75 when the Testament label sought him out in 1963 to record his first new material in over 40 years; he died in Atlanta on August 11, 1966.

Eddie Anthony and Henry Williams cut one 78 in 1930. In addition Anthony recorded as Macon Ed with the mysterious Tampa Joe. They cut eight sides in 1930.

Little is known about Fred McMullen. He cut 8 issued sides in 1933 for ARC label. Was part of the group called the Georgia Browns with Buddy Moss and Curley Weaver who cut 10 sides in 1933.

Barbecue Bob was the name given by Columbia Records talent scout Don Hornsby to Atlanta blues singer Robert Hicks. Hicks is widely credited as being the singer who more than any helped to popularize Atlanta blues in its formative period. Born to a family of sharecroppers in Walnut Grove, GA, Robert Hicks and his brother, Charley “Lincoln” Hicks relocated with them to Newton County. There the Hicks brothers came in contact with Savannah “Dip” Weaver and her son, Curley Weaver. With the Weavers, the Hicks boys learned to play guitar and sing. Robert Hicks was the first of this group to “break out”; Hicks’ first Columbia record, “Barbecue Blues,” recorded in Atlanta on March 25, 1927 and was a big hit. Over the next three years he made 62 sides for Columbia. Hicks died in 1931 of pneumonia. He was only 29.