Big Road Blues

Show Notes:

“In the best-known photograph of Charley Patton a youngish man faces posterity with a straight but somewhat apprehensive gaze. Some of what lay ahead he might have predicted: a hard life, early death, obscurity. What was not on the cards was that some 30 years later he would begin to be described as one of the most singular musicians of the 20th century, a voice of the blues like no other, a teller of stories from a time and place that for his new listeners were as unimaginable  as the dark side of the moon. His sometimes strangled utterances, already half choked by the surface noise of old discs, gradually revealed themselves to be passages from an oral history of black Mississippi in the 1910s and ’20s: its dirt roads and rivers, drinking places and jails, the pest ravaged cottonfields of “Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues”, the drought of “Dry Well Blues”, the flooded bottomlands of “High Water Everywhere” and, turning from natural disasters to man-made ones, the layoff of railroad workers in “Mean Black Moan.” These reports, and the many other types of songs he recorded, from blue-ballads like “Frankie And Albert” and rags like “Shake It And Break It” to hymns and transformed popular songs, are delivered in a voice as tough as steel, to guitar melodies as densely springy as ryegrass. It is extraordinary music, not always easy to understand, but so full of incident that it quickly becomes totally absorbing.”

That above portrait of Patton was written by Tony Russell and I think serves as a superb  capsule of what makes Patton’s music so compelling. Today’s program spotlights Patton and those artists he worked with and influenced. The rest of the show notes are primarily drawn from David Evans’ essay in the 7-CD box set Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues: The Worlds of Charlie Patton which is also where the bulk of the music comes from.

Born in 1891, Patton was older than the other Delta musicians who recorded during the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, and he seems to have developed many of the themes that are now considered basic to the Delta blues repertoire. His trademark guitar arrangements were adopted by Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown, as well as younger players like Howlin’ Wolf, Roebuck “Pop” Staples, all of whom hung around him in order to master the pieces he had turned into local hits. He apparently gave formal lessons to some of them, using teaching as a secondary source of income in the weekdays between juke joint performances.

Paramount promoted Charley Patton’s second release (12805) with a contest. The initial pressing run of 10,000 copies was issued under the pseudonym “The Masked Marvel,” and customers were encouraged to guess the actual artist’s identity on cards like the one above. Winners could pick a free record of their choice. The contest was formally announced in the Chicago Defender on September 7th.

Around the age of fourteen Patton obtained his first instrument given to him by his father. He first played with members of the Chatmon family and probably other local musicians around Bolton and Edwards, MS. The Chatmons were an important musical family, and a younger set of Chatmon brothers would later become the famous band and recording unit, the Mississippi Sheiks. Patton’s sister stated that he didn’t really learn to pick a guitar until he moved to Dockery’s Plantation. There he came under the influence of older,most importantly a man named Henry Sloan. Sloan was born in January 1870, in Mississippi, and  moved to Dockery’s about the same time as the Pattons, between 1901 and 1904. Charley received some direct instruction, observed and imitated the playing of the older men, and played behind Sloan’s field hollers. Evidently at some point he surpassed them in ability and reputation, probably by 1910, as he was influencing other musicians like Willie Brown at that time.

Paramount recorded some of the greatest blues performances of the era and full credit should go to talent scouts like Henry C. Spier, a music store owner from Jackson, Mississippi. Speir scoured the south for talent and was responsible for getting Son House, Skip James and Charlie Patton on record. Paramount asked Gennett to record 14 tunes by Patton at their Richmond, Indiana studio in June 1929. “Pony Blues” b/w “Banty Rooster Blues” was the first issued. The coupling was a hit and Paramount labeled his second release, “Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues”, as by The Masked Marvel. The advert bore a drawing of a blindfolded singer and the clue that this was an exclusive paramount artists. Anyone guessing his identity would get a free Paramount record of their choice.  In all, Patton recorded 38 numbers for Paramount in 1929, some issued the following year, with two gospel songs issued under the pseudonym Elder J.J. Hadley.

Patton’s basic blues themes–the “Spanish tuning” arrangement he recorded first as “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues,” and that Willie Brown recorded as “Future Blues,” Son House recorded as “Jinx Blues,” and Tommy Johnson recorded “Maggie Campbell” when recorded by Willie Brown, Son House, and Tommy Johnson respectively, or the basic blues in E he called “Pony Blues,” which was reshaped by Brown into “M&O Blues” and Johnson into “Bye and Bye Blues.”

One of Patton’s many admirers was Howlin’ Wolf who said:  “I didn’t start to fooling with guitar until about 1928, however, and I started on account of on the plantation—Young and Mara’s plantation, where our family was living—there was a guy at that time playing the guitar. He was called Charlie Patton. It was he who got me interested. … It was he who started me off to playing. He showed me things on the guitar, because after we got through picking cotton at night, we’d go and hang around him, listen to him play. He took a liking to me, and I asked him would he teach me, and at night, after I’d get off work, I’d go and hang around.”

Another Patton admirer was Bukka White who recorded the spoken “Remembrance of Charlie Patton” in 1963 in which he had this to say: “Always wanted to be like old Charlie Patton. Long ago when I was a kid, I hear him an play those numbers about:  ‘I’ll hitch up my buggy and saddle my black mare’ an I used to pick cotton an come around in Clarksdale after them cafes, eatin’ cheese an cracker. None of the other boys they didn’t have an idea what I was thinkin’.  I say, I wants to come to be a great man like Charlie Patton, but I didn’t want to get killed he did, the way he got killed, the way he had to go. …And so goes on down and got me old piece a-guitar. And I always wanted to play about ‘Hitch up my buggy, saddle up my black mare I wanna find my baby in this great big world, somewhere.’ …And so Charlie Patton used to sing that song about ‘Hitch up my buggy and saddle up my black mare and I hear, would just knock me off my feet. I was bare-feeted, little bare-feeted boy, too. And I like it so well after I growed up, the first record I put out when I was comin’ up about ‘Downtown women sickin’ them dogs on me’. ["Sic 'Em Dogs On", 1939] I was one that kind-a compare with it. Ah, I think I made a pretty good hit on that!”

In 1930, Arthur Laibley who had produced Charley Patton’s last session for Paramount, stopped in Lula to arrange another session with Patton. Patton told Laibley about Son House and about two other musicians Willie Brown and Louise Johnson, setting the stage for one of the blues most legendary recording sessions. The group headed to the Paramount studios in Grafton, WI, where House recorded six songs at the session: three of which were long enough to fill both sides of a 78: “Dry Spell Blues,” “Preachin’ The Blues,” and “My Black Mama.” On today’s program we spotlight several sides from this remarkable session.

Louise Johnson was barrelhouse pianist and girlfriend of Patton’s who went to Grafton to make records with Patton Brown and House. She cut four sides at that session, her sole recorded legacy. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Willie Brown played with Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, mostly playing second guitar. Little is known for certain of the man whom Robert Johnson called “my friend-boy, Willie Brown” (“Cross Road Blues”). Brown is heard with Patton on the Paramount sessions of 1930 and cut”M & O Blues and” and “Future Blues” at that date.  In 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Brown with Son House, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Leroy Williams. Brown played second guitar on three performances by the whole band, and recorded one solo, “Make Me A Pallet On The Floor.” Brown died in Tunica, Mississippi in 1952 at the age of 52. Despite the disappointing sales of his Paramount records, for Son House the Grafton experience marked the beginning of a long musical friendship with Willie Brown. For much of the 30’s House reverted to his former pattern of preaching and then going back to the blues, usually at the prompting of Brown. In 1934 Charley Patton died and with his death, House became the biggest star in the Delta. He and Brown played all over the Delta as well as Arkansas and Tennessee for the rest of the 1930’s.

Remembered by history as a blues musician, Patton had grown up in the pre-blues era, and he played the full range of music required of a popular rural entertainer. Even though his recording career was sparked by the blues craze, only about half of his roughly fifty records can reasonably be considered part of that then-modern genre. The others are a mix of gospel and religious music like “Runnin’ Wild Blues” and “Prayer Of Death.” Charley not only performed and recorded religious songs but for most of his life wrestled with what he thought was a calling to be a preacher.

Patton had a gift for personal narrative, and seems to have enjoyed documenting events that touched his own experience, and which would have been particularly interesting to his local audience. For example, he wrung wry humor from two of his own run-ins with local lawmen, in “Tom Rushen Blues” and “High Sheriff Blues.” Recorded five years apart, these were essentially two variations on a single musical theme. “Tom Rushen Blues was actually a reworking of Ma Rainey’s “Booze and Blues” cut in 1924.

Patton’s death certificate indicates that the onset of his fatal heart trouble occurred on January 27, 1934. In early April he gave his last performance. It was a dance for whites, probably not too far from Holly Ridge. He had been suffering from bronchitis, perhaps from a winter or spring cold. Bertha Lee stated that he returned home hoarse and unable to talk or get his breath properly. He was visited by a doctor on Tuesday, April 17, and again on Friday, April 20. Many relatives and fellow blues singers and friends visited him during this final illness. His sister said that an attempt was made to take him to a hospital, but his car was bogged in mud from the spring rains. The end came on the morning of Saturday, April 28, 1934, and he was buried the following day at Longswitch Cemetery, less than a mile from his last home at Holly Ridge. He was 43.

Related Documents:

“Blues In The Round” (PDF)
Ed Komara’s account and analysis of the famous 1930 Grafton recording session of Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown and Louise Johnson.

“Howlin’ Wolf: “I Sing For The People” (PDF)
1967 interview with Pete Welding where Wolf talks about the influence of Charlie Patton.

Show Notes:

As protégé David “Honeyboy” Edwards described him, Big Joe Williams in his early Delta days was a walking musician who played work camps, jukes, store porches, streets, and alleys from New Orleans to Chicago. He recorded through five decades for Vocalion, Okeh, Paramount, Bluebird, Prestige, Delmark, and many others. Big Joe was born in Crawford, MS and settled in St. Louis by 1925 where he married blues singer Bessie Mae Smith and worked with Walter Davis, Robert Lee McCoy and Henry Townsend. Little is known of his early years although by he apparently began traveling young, supposedly running away from home to join the Rabbit Foot Minstrels.  Along the way he worked the lumber mills, levee camps, plantations, gambling dens and brothels. By the late 20’s he earned a considerable reputation in Mississippi. Honeyboy recalls his first sight of Big Joe: “…Big Joe Williams was playing at Black Rosie’s dance. Joe wasn’t wasn’t nothing but a hobo then, running down the streets. I went over to Rosie’s and there he was playing. He was in his thirties, had a red handkerchief around his neck, and he was playing a little pearl-necked Stella guitar; he was playing the blues. He played “Highway 49″, and I just stood and looked at him. I hadn’t heard a man play the blues like that! …Nine strings, he always had those nine strings on his guitar. That’s something he invented himself. He bored holes at the top of the neck of the guitar and made himself a nine-string guitar. That’s what he played all the time.” …He was playing “Brother James”, all of them old numbers like that. “Brother James”, “Highway 49″, Stack O’ Dollars.”  …’Baby Please Don’t Go”, Milkcow Blues.”

In St. Louis it was Walter Davis who got Big Joe signed to Bluebird as well as Robert Lee McCoy. Bg Joe’s first session for Bluebird, on February 25, 1935, yielded 6 tunes. This initial session finds Joe playing solo except for  “Somebody’s Been Borrowing That Stuff” with Henry Townsend on second guitar. Joe wouldn’t be heard solo on record again for some time. As John Miller noted: “Big Joe’s playing on these two sessions is quite amazing.  Everything is in Open G tuning, so a certain sameness of tonality and very pared back harmonic content results, but Joe’s rhythmic imagination and ability to execute his ideas in the moment has never been equaled in this genre.  His right hand approach combines powerful thumb popping of bass notes and lines with vigorous runs in the treble and an array of strumming and brushing techniques that has to be heard to be believed.” The second session, on October 31, 1935, resulted in four more tunes, and was done with a line-up of Joe joined by Dad Tracy on one-string fiddle and Chasey Collins on washboard. That second session included the first recorded version of “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Big Joe backed Chasey Collins on two numbers at the same date; “Atlanta Town” and “Walking Blues” are superbly sung blues with excellent playing by Joe and makes one wish Collins had recorded more.

Sonny Boy I and Big Joe first recorded together May 5, 1937. This was a marathon recording session. Robert Lee McCoy cut six sides at this session with backing by Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams. The May 5th sessions were also Sonny Boy Williamson’s first and Nighthawk and Joe Williams backed him on this legendary session that produced such enduring classics as “Good Morning Little School Girl”, “Blue Bird Blues” and “Sugar Mama”. In addition Big Joe Williams recorded eight sides under his own name with Nighthawk and Sonny Boy backing him and Nighthawk also backed Walter Davis on an eight-song session. Big Joe backed Sonny Boy again for two sessions in March and June 1939 which yielded 18 sides.

In the 1940’s Sonny Boy backed Big Joe on sessions on March and June 1941. Big Joe and Sonny Boy reunited for a four-song session together on July 12, 1945 with Jump Jackson on drums and a twelve-song session on July 22 1947 with Ransom Knowling on bass and Judge Riley on drums. As Tony Russell noted about these sessions: “The half-dozen tracks they cut at a session in 12/41, including definitive interpretations of ‘[Baby] Please Don’t Go’, ”Highway 49′ and ‘Someday Baby’,  confirm them as one of the great blues partnerships. They continued recording together until 1947, the delicate architecture of their duets solidly buttressed by bass and drums. It isn’t off said, but it seems likely that driving trio and quartet sides like ‘Drop Down Blues’ (1945) or ‘King Biscuit Stomp’ (1947) were listened to attentively by some of the younger musicians then finding their voice in Chicago’s clubs or on Maxwell Street.”

As Big Joe sailed into the 50′s, recording opportunities weren’t as plentiful probably due to the fact he did nothing to update his sound to the changing musical times. Among the most notable recordings was an eight-song session in 1951 cut for the Jackson, MS based Trumpet label. Joe is in terrific form on numbers like “Delta Blues”, the evocative “Whistling Pines” and “Over Hauling Blues.” In the 50’s he also recorded for Specialty and Vee-Jay. Just prior to the folk-blues boom, Big Joe recorded extensively for Delmark at sessions in 1958 and 1961. Piney Woods Blues and Stavin’ Chain are among his best from this period, both recorded at the beginning of 1958 and feature the excellent J.D. Short who was a cousin of Big Joe.

By the 1960′s Joe was became much in demand as the blues revival picked up steam. He performed at festivals, clubs and coffeehouses through the country as well as playing overseas as part of the American Folk Blues Festival. He recorded prolifically during this period for labels such as Bluesville, Spivey, Storyville, Folkways, Testament, Takoma, Arhoolie, Adelphi among others.  Among his best albums from the 1960′s  are Tough Times on Arhoolie which has been reissued on CD as Shake Your Boogie which adds some tracks from a 1969 session. He recorded songs like “Mean Stepfather” and “Brother James” before but rarely as powerful as these versions. We play several interesting sides from the 1960′s including a pair from Blues Roots: The Mississippi Blues Vol. 1 on Storyville recorded circa 1964/65. These sides were recorded in St. Louis and Chicago by Pete Welding. Most of these men like Coot Venson and Arthur Weston were musical associates of Big Joe while Bert and Russ Logan were uncles of his.

Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Joe Williams were involved in a jam session for World Pacific cut in Los Angles in 1960. This material has been reissued under many titles including Down South Summit Meetin’, First Meetin’, Southern Meetin’ among others. They also recorded together live at the Ash Grove in Hollywood in 1961 which was issued as Blues Hoot. From these sessions we spin “Ain’t Nothin’ Like Whiskey” and “Blues For Gamblers.”

Also from this period we spotlight Big Joe’s pal Shortstuff Macon. The liner notes to his Folkways album had this to say: “Short Stuff has now begun traveling the sparse and fickle concert circuit with Big Joe Wiilliams, who, in a trip back to Mississippi, ‘discovered’ him, liked his ‘deep down’ music, remembered his father and mother, and decided to take him with him. Since then, the two bluesmen have been making do with whatever work they could get—living from day to day, hour to hour, on the whims and generosity (sometimes curiosity) of friends interested in blues, college student aficionados, and the small, folk record companies.” That comes from  the notes to Hell Bound And Heaven Sent in 1964 with backing from Big Joe. From that album we spin the excellent “Short Stuff’s Corrina.” The same year they cut sides for the Spivey label which were issued on a album called Mr. Shortstuff. He appears again on the album Goin’ Back to Crawford from 1971. Goin’ Back to Crawford was produced by Big Joe in his hometown of Crawford, MS in 1971 by gathering talented relatives, neighbors, and acquaintances to hopefully present their songs to the wider world. Big Joe performs on seven of his own tracks and backs several of the artists including Shortstuff Macon who died two years after these recordings.

In the 1970′s Big Joe continued to record for labels like Storyville, Sonet, Bluesway, L+R and others. By 1982 he was back in Mississippi where he passed in December of that year. Joe was buried in a private cemetery outside Crawford near the Lowndes County line. His headstone was primarily paid for by friends and partially funded by a collection taken up among musicians at Clifford Antone’s nightclub in Austin, Texas, organized by California music writer Dan Forte, and erected through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund on October 9, 1994. Joe’s old pal Charlie Musselwhite, delivered the eulogy at the unveiling. Williams’ headstone epitaph proclaims him “King of the 9 String Guitar.”

Show Notes:

Newspaper photo of Son House, and a July 14 Rochester Times-Union article about his comeback.

“I’m talking about the blues now, I ain’t talkin’ about no monkey junk”

Today’s title come from a term Son House used often as his biographer Dan Beaumont explains: “House had an amusing phrase he would use when asked about the blues being played in the 1960′s. It was a phrase he used to dismiss much of the blues music of that period. ‘It’s not the blues,’ he would say. ‘It’s just a lot of monkey junk.’ The blues so dominated House’s life-we have now established the price that he had paid for it-that a period in which he all but ceased playing it may well have seemed to him simply so much ‘monkey junk.’” As anyone who’s listened to Son House knows, there was nothing frivolous or gimmicky about Son’s blues. In his hands the blues were a gripping, all consuming feeling:

You know, the blues ain’t nothin’ but a low-down shakin’, low-down shakin’, achin’ chill
I say the blues is a low-down, old, achin’ chill
Well, if you ain’t had ‘em, honey, I hope you never will

Well, the blues, the blues is a worried heart, is a worried heart, heart disease
Oh, the blues is a worried old heart disease

(The Jinx Blues Part 1, 1942)

Today’s show is our annual tribute to Son House who created some of the most visceral and gripping blues of the 1930′s and 40′s and who emerged after two decades to find himself bewilderingly hailed as a blues hero to young white audiences around the world. It’s with a matter of pride that Son’s comeback came in my adopted hometown of Rochester, NY. Over the years I met numerous people who fondly recalled Son House here in Rochester and when I started doing my yearly radio birthday tributes it brought even more people out of the woodwork who gladly shared their memories with me. So it’s puzzling that the city has never honored Son in anyway. For years myself and others thought someone should rectify this sorry state of affairs; a plaque, a statue or something to honor one of the pivotal figures in blues history. The sad fact is there is nothing tangible in this city that shows Son ever made this city his home for a good part of his life (1943-1976). It’s worth noting that Son does have a plaque in Tunica, MS as part of the Mississippi Commission’s Blues Trail.

2009 Hot Blues For The Homeless …A Tribute To Son House Poster

Next week marks the third Hot Blues For The Homeless concert I put on with several other dedicated folks.  Now billed as Hot Blues For The Homeless …A Tribute To Son House,  we had a fantastic turn out last year, raised a good deal of money for the Rochester homeless and hopefully raised some awareness about Son House. If you live in Rochester, live close by are just visiting on June 7th make sure to help us celebrate the memory of Son House.

On today’s program we start out by playing the bulk of Son’s legendary Paramount recordings. In 1930, Arthur Laibley who had produced Charlie Patton’s last session for Paramount, stopped in Lula to arrange another session with Patton. Patton was famous throughout the Delta and had already recorded close to forty sides for the label. Patton told Laibley about House and about two other musicians Willie Brown and Louise Johnson, setting the stage for one of the blues most legendary recording sessions. The group headed to the Paramount studios in Grafton, WI, where House recorded six songs at the session, three of which were long enough to fill both sides of a 78: “Dry Spell Blues,” “Preachin’ The Blues,” and “My Black Mama.” Two songs, “Clarksdale Moan” and “Mississippi County Farm Blues” were issued as a 78, with a lone copy surfacing just recently. In September 2005, a collector announced he had obtained the lost “Clarksdale Moan” 78 in reasonably decent condition. The details of this discovery are not known to the public as the collector has chosen to remain anonymous. On April 4, 2006, both “Clarksdale Moan” and “Mississippi County Farm Blues” were released on the collection The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of from Yazoo Records. While “Clarksdale Moan” is a previously unknown song, “Mississippi County Farm Blues” is an earlier (and faster) version of a song Son House later recorded at his Library of Congress recording session in 1941. The unissued test of “Walking Blues” we spin was not found until 1985.

Rochester Times-Union article about Son House from July 6, 1964. This is the first article written about Son’s rediscovery.

Despite the disappointing sales of his records, for House the Grafton experience marked the beginning of a long musical friendship with Willie Brown. For much of the 30’s House reverted to his former pattern of preaching and then going back to the blues, usually at the prompting of Brown. He and Brown played all over the Delta as well as Arkansas and Tennessee for the rest of the 1930’s. In August of 1941 the folklorist Alan Lomax found House working as a tractor driver on a plantation near Robinsonville. House took Lomax a few miles north to Lake Cormorant where Willie Brown lived. They rounded up two other musicians, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Leroy Williams. Behind Clack’s general store, House recorded five songs for Lomax. The next summer in July, House recorded, unaccompanied, ten more songs for Lomax.

A year after the Library of Congress sides House vanished, or did the next best thing which was to move to Rochester, NY. More than two decades would pass before he would resurface. On June 23rd of 1964, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls found House living on 61 Grieg Street in Rochester, NY. Waterman became Son’s manager and the following year he was signed to Columbia and played the Newport Folk Festival. Son had several good years on the comeback trail; he toured the US playing folk festivals and the coffeehouse circuit and he did tours of Europe as well. He also performed locally in Rochester. From these later years we spin several tracks for his superb comeback album Father Of The Delta Blues plus several live cuts.

Also on today’s program is my good friend Dan Beaumont. University of Rochester professor Dan Beaumont discusses  his forthcoming book, Preachin’ the Blues: The Life And Music Of Son House. This is the first full-length biography of Son House and will be published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Dan will also be reading excerpts from the book at the workshop component of the Hot Blues event. in addition we also play a couple of clips of Dick Waterman talking about Son from an interview I conducted with Dick several years ago and who was a guest at last year’s event.

OK, with the recent high profile articles in Vanity Fair I can honestly say that I’ve reached my limit regarding Robert Johnson. If you missed this I’m referring to Frank DiGiacomo’s Searching For Robert Johnson and his follow-up A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment which deal with a possible newly found Johnson photo. At this point more ink has been spilled on Robert Johnson than any other blues artist and while there has been plenty of quality research on the elusive bluesman it’s been largely buried in layers of hyperbole, mythology, speculation, romanticism and sheer nonsense.  I have no idea if the new photo is Johnson, nor do I care all that much, and to be fair DiGiacomo’s articles are well written and don’t wallow in the kind of nonsense that usually makes the rounds. That’s no really the point. The point is the relentless scrutiny on Johnson at the expense of so many other worthy blues artists that never get a mention – AKA the Eric Clapton mentality – “he is the most important blues musician who ever lived.” Who appointed Clapton the authority on such matters anyway? By the time the Complete Recordings were issued in 1990 (going gold and selling over a million copies by 1994) “mythology had consumed reality” as Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch wrote in Robert Johnson: Lost And Found.

Unfortunately this obsession on every minutiae of Johnson’s life has taken away the focus on his very real talents and perhaps more importantly this lopsided focus on Johnson has obscured the fact that he was very much part of a tradition; his music firmly built on the artists who came before like Lonnie Johnson and Tampa Red who don’t get a shred of the acclaim that Johnson does. Johnson remains one of the blues great artists, his brilliance was in how he borrowed, reshaped, synthesized and added his own brilliance to the music of those who came before to create a powerfully individual style. It would be nice if this intense spotlight on Johnson spilled over to raise the awareness of other equally worthy early blues artists but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead this endless focus on unverifiable photos, the exact crossroads he sold his soul to the devil, etc. only trivializes his accomplishments while further obscuring those of his contemporaries and predecessors.

Show Notes

Over the years I met numerous people who fondly recalled Son House here in Rochester and when I started doing my yearly radio birthday tributes to Son it brought even more people out of the woodwork who gladly shared their memories with me. So it’s puzzling that the city has never honored Son in anyway. For years myself and others thought someone should rectify this sorry state of affairs; a plaque, a statue or something to honor one of the pivotal figures in blues history, a major influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and who’s recordings are among the most powerful in blues history. The sad fact is there is nothing tangible in this city that shows Son ever made this city his home for a good part of his life. Next week marks a sequel to last year’s successful Hot Blues For The Homeless concert I was involved in, this year billed as Hot Blues For The Homeless …A Tribute To Son House. I’m hoping this year’s modest concert will be the start of something big. I’ve also heard an unconfirmed rumor that the city plans to honor Son with a plaque which would be welcome news. If you live in Rochester, live close by are just visiting on June 8th make sure to help us celebrate the memory of Son House.

Any history of the blues has to place Son House at the very pinnacle. Along with Charlie Patton, House was one of the prime exponents of the Delta blues and few recordings match the sheer emotional impact of his first sides cut for Paramount in 1930. Despite his lofty stature House’s recorded output is scanty with sides cut by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1941-1942 and, after a long gap, a full-length album for Columbia in 1965. Dick Waterman, House’s manager, put his place in blues history in perspective: “He was the mentor for both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, who are clearly acknowledged as two of the most influential bluesmen on not only urban blues but ultimately the modern music scene. If in his prime he had been recorded as much as Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson, he would be considered the pre-eminent artist of his time. He would have his proper appreciation.”

Despite the disappointing sales of his records, for House the Grafton experience marked the beginning of a long musical friendship with Willie Brown. For much of the 30′s House reverted to his former pattern of preaching and then going back to the blues, usually at the prompting of Brown. In 1934 Charley Patton died and with his death, House became the biggest star in the Delta. He and Brown played all over the Delta as well as Arkansas and Tennessee for the rest of the 930′s.In August of 1941 the folklorist Alan Lomax found House working as a tractor driver on a plantation near Robinsonville. House took Lomax a few miles north to Lake Cormorant where Willie Brown lived. They rounded up two other musicians, Fiddlin’ Joe Martin and Leroy Williams. Behind Clack’s general store, House recorded five songs for Lomax. The next summer in July, House recorded, unaccompanied, ten more songs for Lomax.A year after the Library of Congress sides House vanished, or did the next best thing which was to move to Rochester, NY. More than two decades would pass before he would resurface. On June 23rd of 1964, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls found House living on 61 Grieg Street in Rochester, NY . Waterman became Son’s manager and the following year he was signed to Columbia and played the Newport Folk Festival. Son had several good years on the comeback trail; he toured the US playing folk festivals and the coffeehouse circuit and he did tours of Europe as well. He also performed locally in Rochester.

“Blues In The Round”
An account and analysis of the famous 1930 Grafton recording session of Charley Patton, Son House, Willie Brown and Louise Johnson. (Ed Komara)

Front cover of Father of the Folk Blues Photographer: Dick Waterman

When I was a teenager discovering the blues one of the first albums that really captivated me was Son House’s Death Letter -I still have it – (the UK equivalent of Father of the Folk Blues), his stunning return to the studio after dropping out of sight for nearly twenty-five years. As author Dan Beaumont writes in his yet-to-be published Son House manuscript: “In 1943 Son House left Mississippi, and, for all that is known of his life over the course of the next twenty one years, he may well have fallen off the face of the earth. But this he did not do-instead he did the next best thing. He moved to Rochester, New York.” As a teenager living in the Bronx I too knew nothing of Rochester outside the fact it was in some nether region of New York State – the farthest I had been was the Catskills, one hundred miles upstate. But as I read Dick Waterman’s liner notes, Rochester and the address 61 Greig Street was burned in my memory. That was where Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro and Nick Perls finally tracked Son down on June 23rd, 1964. Waterman became Son’s manager and the following year he was signed to Columbia and played the Newport Folk Festival. Son had several good years on the comeback trail; he toured the US playing folk festivals and the coffeehouse circuit and he did tours of Europe as well. He also performed locally in Rochester playing concerts at the UR, the Black Candle (later called Studio 9) and the Regular Restaurant in the Genesee Co-Op on Monroe Ave.. The Black Candle was run by Armand Schaubroeck who now operates the world famous House of Guitars. Memories of Son’s local performances are vividly burned into the memories of all who had had a chance to witness him in action.

Son’s rediscovery in Rochester was newsworthy, making it into Newsweek, Downbeat and the May 29, 1965 edition of the Rochester afternoon newspaper, The Times-Union, with a story titled “Son House Records Blues Again.” It must have been a bit bewildering to Son who was living a very low-key life in Rochester as Dan Beaumont notes: “There for twenty one years he lived amidst almost total obscurity. Indeed, what is known of his life in that city from 1943 to 1964 is so slight, so slender, that his biographer’s task becomes well nigh impossible. …The reasons for this sorry state of affairs are, I suspect, at least two. The first is the sorts of interviews that were done with House after his rediscovery. The interviews were done mostly by young, white blues fans-not by journalists or academics-and for these interviewers a period in which House all but ceased performing and even playing was of little interest. …The second reason is, in fact, simply surmise. House had an amusing phrase he would use when asked about the blues being played in the 1960s. It was a phrase he used to dismiss much of the blues music of that period. ‘It’s not the blues,’ he would say. ‘It’s just a lot of monkey junk.’ The blues so dominated House’s life-we have now established the price that he had paid for it-that a period in which he all but ceased playing it may well have seemed to him simply so much ‘monkey junk.’”

I came to Rochester in the late 1980′s for college and have been up here ever since. Over the years I met numerous people who fondly recalled Son House and when I started doing my yearly radio birthday tributes to Son, it brought more people out of the woodwork who gladly shared their memories with me. So it’s puzzling that the City has never honored Son in anyway. At least Cab Calloway (born in Rochester in 1907) has a plaque honoring him, albeit tucked away on a nondescript side street in an equally nondescript park. For years myself and others thought someone should rectify this sorry state of affairs; a plaque, a statue or something to honor one of the pivotal figures in blues history, a major influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and who’s recordings are among the most powerful in blues history. It would be a shame to let Son’s memory slip back to the years before he was rediscovered in Rochester, but the sad fact is there is nothing tangible in this city that shows he ever made this city his home for a good part of his life.

Hopefully this will be the year when he finally receives some recognition from his adopted city. This year marks a sequel to last year’s successful Hot Blues For The Homeless concert I was involved in, this year billed as Hot Blues For The Homeless …A Tribute To Son House. I’m hoping this year’s modest concert will be the start of something big. I’ve also heard an unconfirmed rumor that the city plans to honor Son with a plaque which would be welcome news. If you live in Rochester, live close by are just visiting on June 8th make sure to help us celebrate the memory of Son House. As Dick Waterman reflected: “If in his prime he had been recorded as much as Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson, he would be considered the pre-eminent artist of his time. …If the blues were an ocean distilled…into a pond…and, ultimately into a drop..this drop on the end of your finger is Son House. It’s the essence, the concentrated elixir.”

“Looking for the Blues”
The cover of Newsweek, July 13, 1964 and the article about the ‘rediscovery of Son House. The lead story in the magazine was about disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi and the violence there.

“Finding ‘Son’ House”
The article that Dick Waterman wrote in The National Observer in July 1964 about how he and Nick Perls and Phil Spiro found Son House in Rochester, NY.

“I Can Make My Own Songs”
An interview with Son House, in his own words, by Julius Lester from Sing Out!, July 1965.

Son House Ontario Place 1964 (Link)
An early rediscovery concert at Washington’s Ontario Place by John Meid

Son House Discography (Link)

Mississippi John Hurt’s “Avalon” Blues” provided a road map some thirty plus years later to the singer just as Bukka White’s “Aberdeen Mississippi Blues” led to the rediscovery of White (John Fahey and Ed Denson addressed a letter to “Bukka White (Old Blues Singer), c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi”). Similar, but more roundabout was a clue the mysterious King Solomon Hill left back in 1932. In 1966 Stephen Calt contacted blues detective Gayle Dean Wardlow writing that he heard “goin’ Minden” in King Solomon Hill’s “The Gone Dead Train.” That correspondence led to the unraveling of one of the blues greatest mysteries. “… I went to Minden and began asking people on the streets in the black section if they heard of a King Solomon Hill who made records in 1932. One of them said, after listening to the King Solomon Hill cuts from the Sam Collins LP ( Origin Jazz Library OJL-10), ‘That sho’ ’nuff sounds like Joe Holmes. You go down there to Sibley. That where he come from.’” Sibley was the hometown of Holmes which resulted in Wardlow’s King Solomon Hill (78 Quarterly no. 1 (1967): 5-9) and One Last Walk Up King Solomon Hill (Blues Unlimited no. 148 (Winter 1987): 8-12) both reprinted in the book Chasin’ That Devil Music.

Roberta Allums, who was once married to Joe Holmes, is pictured here with (unidentified) neighbor holding a 1932 King Solomon Hill record. Photo Gayle Wardlow

Both Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White were duly rediscovered and went on to successful comebacks during the blues revival. No such luck for King Solomon Hill who according to his ex-wife died in 1949. Hill’s legacy is the six sides he cut for Paramount in 1932: “Whoopee Blues”, “Down On My Bended Knee”, “The Gone Dead Train”, “Tell Me Baby”, “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” and “Times Has Done Got Hard.” The last two numbers were not found until 2002 by record collector John Tefteller. It seems particularly true in blues that quantity has no bearing on artistic achievement and obscure artists have issued music on par with their more established peers. King Solomon Hill is a case in point, all six sides small three minute masterpieces in there own way. King was closely connected to Crying Sam Collins and Blind Lemon Jefferson and their influence is evident, to some degree, in Hill’s style. Hill’s records are utterly captivating featuring his eerie falsetto and a raw, slide style featuring irregular rhythms and notes said to be stretched out by the use of a cow bone. The integration between his free form slide guitar and vocals perfectly compliment one another. “Whoopee Blues” is a version of Lonnie Johnson’s 1930 number “She’s Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight” although with a totally different guitar part and with a bleak, haunting quality missing in Johnson’s version. The flip side is the equally compelling “Down On My Bended Knee.” The Gone Dead Train” may be his finest number, a magnificent train blues apparently about a railroad disaster. The flip side, “Tell Me Baby”, is variation of Memphis Minnie’s 1930 number “What Fault You Find of Me, again with a different guitar part and given a wholly original treatment. If anything, the newly discovered Hill sides confirm his genius; “My Buddy, Blind Papa Lemon”is a heartfelt tribute to someone Hill clearly admired: “Hmmm then the mailman brought a misery to my head/When I received a letter that my friend Lemon was dead.” Hill ran with Lemon for about two months after he passed through Minden. Hill’s widow recalled that “he sung that song a whole lot ’bout Blind Lemon. Said he loved his buddy ‘some way better than anyone I know.’” “Times Has Done Got Hard” is a superb hard time blues opening with knocking notes on the guitar as he sings “That’s the rent man/You know it must got tough he coming here before rent’s due/Ahh baby, sorry we got to move.”

Those who’ve been enthralled with haunting, otherworldly sounds of Robert Johnson and Skip James would do well to listen to King Solomon Hill, one of the more intriguing footnotes in pre-war blues history. With the newly discovered sides there is no one collection that contains all of Hill’s recordings. Six sides can be found on Document’s Backwood Blues 1926-1935, the newly found sides can be found oh the JSP set When The Levee Breaks plus several Hill tracks appear on various Yazoo compilations with superior remastering. Also make sure to make read Wardlow’s Chasin’ That Devil Music which details the known facts of Hill’s life and is an all around essential read for fans of early blues.

Whoopee Blues (MP3)

Down On My Bended Knee (MP3)

The Gone Dead Train (MP3)

Tell Me Baby (MP3)

My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon (MP3)

Times Has Done Got Hard (MP3)

Show Notes:

JSP Records is a record label founded in 1978 by John Stedman (John Stedman Productions). These days they mostly issue box sets of public domain jazz and blues records. Among the box sets issued include single artist sets on Blind Willie McTell, Blind Blake, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Boy Williamson and regional compilations like Atlanta Blues, Memphis Masters, East Coast Blues, Texas Blues and many others. These 4 and 5 CD sets are very cheap and you do get lots of great music for your buck pus they’re nicely packaged with usually good, if sometimes brief, notes. The remastering, particularly on the pre-war collections, vary greatly from set to set but are often a sonic upgrade to Document but usually can’t compare to labels like Yazoo and Revenant. Also one thing that bothers me is that are consistent errors such as mislabled tracks or artists which probably means JSP is throwing these on the market too quickly.

I’ve been thinking about remastering quite a bit lately. Overall Yazoo does an excellent job bringing the music to the surface but you still get a fair amount of hiss and crackle. To be honest I have no problem with this as some of the technologies major labels have used like No-Noise, while removing all surface noise, leave the records sounding sterile, lifeless and artificial. Also Yazoo used the original 78′s as the source where JSP does not. I wish JSP would be more transparent regarding remastering and told us a bit about their remastering actually entails.

Anyway on to today’s show which spotlights the following recent JSP box sets: The Road To Robert Johnson & Beyond, Lightnin’ Special Vol. 2, Ma Rainey: Mother of the Blues, Crescent City Bounce: From Blues to R&B In New Orleans, When The Levee Breaks: Mississippi Blues – Rare Cuts 1926-1941.

I’ve reviewed some of the sets so just follow the links for more about each one. You’ll notice that this part one and I’ll be certainly doing a follow-up. The JSP sets keep rolling in and a couple of interesting new ones include A Richer Tradition – Country Blues and String Band Music 1923-1942 and That’s What They Want: Juke Joint Blues – Good Time Rhythm & Blues 1943 – 1956.

In my ongoing attempt to to clear some space in my house I’ve been systematically working my way through several piles of unlistened to records including several JSP box sets. For the uninitiated JSP specializes in issuing budget priced roots box sets of public domain material. On the blues front they’ve issued single artists sets such as the complete recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charlie Patton, Ma Rainey as well as several themed sets like Atlanta Blues, Memphis Masters, East Coast Blues among many others. This time out we look at two four CD sets; The Road To Robert Johnson & Beyond and When The Levee Breaks collectively encompassing just over two hundred tracks of prime country blues with the Johnson set spending half of it’s time in the post-war era.

Like many country blues fans it was Robert Johnson who was the first pre-war blues artist I seriously listened to (King of the Delta Blues Singers LP) and of course I was enthralled with the music. It was the music but also of course the mythology surrounding this mysterious figure that grabbed my imagination. Unfortunately by the time the “Complete Recordings” was issued in 1990 (going gold and selling over a million copies by 1994) the “mythology had consumed reality,” as Barry Lee Pearson wrote, and Johnson’s musical accomplishments were clouded in a haze of mythology and romanticism. Unfortunately this obsession on every minutiae of Johnson’s life has taken away the focus on his very real talents and perhaps more importantly this lopsided focus on Johnson has obscured the fact that he was very much part of a tradition; his music firmly built on the artists who came before like Lonnie Johnson and Tampa Red who don’t get a shred of the acclaim that Johnson does. The Road To Robert Johnson & Beyond attempts to place Johnson in historical context; disc one traces the roots of Robert Johnson, those artists who came before Johnson and who directly or indirectly shaped his style, disc two contains Johnson’s own records while the remaining discs contain music from those influenced by Johnson. If this sounds like deja vu, well it’s been done before in more streamlined fashion by Yazoo Records who in 2004 released Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson which was an expanded and revised version of their The Roots of Robert Johnson which came out in 1990.

It’s strange then that the blurb on the box set indulges in the usual hyperbole that surrounds Johnson, first equating him to Shakespeare and someone “who took the raw, deep blues of an older generation and created a new style and a body of recorded work of the deepest genius which would be the template for blues (and much of rock music) for the next 60 years or so. He forged one of the four pillars upon which twentieth century music stands (Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Elvis Presley and the Beatles being the other three).” Geez!

Johnson’s brilliance was in how he borrowed, adapted, synthesized and added his own flourish to the music of those who came before and this is well illustrated in the first disc, the so called “raw materials.” Much of the same songs are compiled as in the Yazoo, in quite good sound, but if you haven’t heard them it’s certainly interesting to see where Johnson may have gotten his inspiration. The 25 tracks are a who’s who of country blues greats including extraordinary slide guitarist Kokomo Arnold an inspiration for Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” and “I’ll Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”, Leroy Carr whose urbane “When The Sun Goes Down” was the source of “Love In Vain”, the popular Peetie Wheatstraw whose “Police Station Blues” was reworked by Johnson into “Terraplane Blues” and “Hellhound On My Trail” and Lonnie Johnson, one of the era’s most influential guitarists, whose “Life Saver Blues” guitar arrangement was lifted nearly note for note in Johnson’s “Malted Milk” and “Drunken Hearted Man.” Other artists include Son House who Johnson learned directly from, Skip James, Charlie Patton, the Mississippi sheiks and others.

The second disc contains all of Johnson’s records sans the alternate takes and really there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said – several forests have been felled producing the paper that’s been written about these sides. The final two discs contain those artists who have been influenced by Johnson either directly like Johnny Shines, Robert Lockwood, Calvin Frazier, Honeyboy Edwards or indirectly like Muddy Waters and Elmore James. Thematically this is where the box strains at the seams; Muddy for instance was more influenced by Son House and may have seen Johnson once or not at all, Robert Lee McCoy (Robert Nighthawk) probably met Johnson but bears no stylistic influence, the same can be said for Big Joe Williams (although a couple of Johnson’s Terraplane Blues lines showed up in I’m A Highway Man) and Baby Boy Warren does a faithful cover of Stop Breaking Down although it’s unknown where he learned the song and artists like Homesick James, Little Walter and Baby Face Leroy have only a tenuous connection to Johnson at best. Then there’s eleven tracks from 1975 by the mysterious Blind Will Dukes who claimed to learn from Johnson himself but sound suspiciously like he learned from the records. Still, the material itself is hard to fault, sound generally very good and typically informative notes by JSP’s chief writer Neil Slaven who surely must have writer’s cramp at the rate these box sets are issued. Buying this set I suppose depends on how much of the music you already have and certainly the budget price is attractive. For those newer to the music who’s main introduction to country blues is through Johnson, this box is worthwhile for putting Johnson’s music in historical context.

Thematically When the Levee Breaks Mississippi Blues Rare Cuts 1926-41, there’s a mouthful of a title, is a bit loose as well gathering recordings made by Mississippi artists in a fruitful fifteen year span. The one hundred recordings contain many outright masterpieces with the slant on lesser know artists such as Freddie Spruell, Arthur Petties, William Harris, Mississippi Bracey, Otto Virgial, Walter Rhodes, Willie ’61′ Blackwell. Most of these names are well known among collectors and certainly artists like Geeshie Wiley, King Solomon Hill, Blind Joe Reynolds and Garfield Akers have long ago entered the blues cannon despite exceedingly slim discographies. Mississippi blues is usually associated with Delta, usually with the prevalence on slide or bottleneck playing but this collection goes some ways to dispel that notion providing a wide range of styles from men and woman all over the state.

Sound quality is generally good, considering the extreme rarity of the records, generally on par with Document but not the equivalent of Yazoo, which have an exceptional feel for remastering pre-war blues that’s virtually unmatched outside other specialist outfits like Revenant and Old Hat. Indeed for several of these records there’s only one known copy; newly discovered sides by Son House, Blind Joe Reynolds and King Solomon Hill are included, all of which have been released previously by Yazoo so it’s easy to deduce where JSP sourced their copies. “Clarksdale Moan” b/w “Mississippi County Farm Blues” is from House’s legendary 1930 Paramount session with Willie Brown and Charlie Patton. “Clarksdale Moan” is a strange tune but “Mississippi County Farm Blues” is a surging, slide driven powerhouse version of a number he would cut a dozen years later for the Library of Congress. Another long lost Paramount from the same year is Blind Joe Reynolds’ “Ninety Nine Blues” b/w “Cold Woman Blues” found at a flea market a few years back and purchased for one dollar! A quick comparison between JSP’s transfer and that found on Revenant’s Screamin’ & Hollerin’ The Blues finds Revenant’s transfer much more lively, with JSP damping down some of the noise to negative effect. I’ll simply agree with Yazoo’s Richard Nevins who called “Cold Woman Blues” a masterpiece although I prefer “Ninety Nine Blues” with it’s explosive drive and unrelenting swing. Lyrically it shares a number of verses with the magnificent “Third Street Woman Blues” (“My woman’s got something called a stingaree/Four o’clock in the morning she turns it loose on me”), also included, which unlike his other slide numbers, features some very effective strumming. King Solomon Hill is another shadowy figure who signed to the Paramount label in 1932, soon traveling to Grafton, Wisconsin to record six tracks – two of them alternate takes – which comprise his known discography; songs like the eerie “Gone Dead Train” and “Down on Bended Knee” are masterly performances featuring Hill’s eerie falsetto and raw, unorthodox guitar work. In 2002 record collector John Tefteller went to Grafton and discovered the long lost Hill 78 “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” b/w “Times Has Done Got Hard” in mint condition, both included here. “My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon” is a stunner and one of the rare tributes from one bluesman to another (Leroy Carr garnered a few and Lemon was also mention in a sermon by Rev. Emmett Dickinson).

One of the benefits of having all these tracks in one place is that it lets you reassess some of the lesser known names such as Freddie Spruell, ‘Bogus’ Ben Covington, Arthur Petties, J.D. Short, Mississippi Bracey, William Harris, Joe Calicott, Sam Butler (Bo Weavil Jackson), Willie ’61′ Blackwell among others. Spruell was one of the first self-accompanied guitarists to record and lived in Chicago when he made his debut for OKeh Records in 1926. He seems to have some connection to the Delta but his background is hazy. Eight of his ten records are on board showcasing a fine singer/guitarist particularly on “Muddy Water Blues” from his first session and “Mr. Freddie’s Kokomo Blues” and “Let’s Go Riding” from his last with Carl Martin on guitar. Arthur Petties was another appealing singer who we know little about. He possessed a fine rich voice with “Revenue Man Blues” and “That Won’t Do” being standouts with Jed Davenport on harmonica on the former. It should be noted that his song “Good Boy Blues” is actually Webster Taylor’s “Sunny Southern Blues.” Unfortunately these kind of mistakes appear on many of the JSP sets. The excellent Jaydee Short or J.D. Short who recorded as ‘Jelly Jaw’ Short and Joe Stone was born in Mississippi but is really associated with St. Louis where he spent his entire life. “Let’s get stomped out and get drunk and run” he announces at the beginning of “Barefoot Blues” propelled by his quick chorded runs and powerful vocal. Equally strong is the wonderful “Snake Doctor Blues” and the tough depression era blues of “It’s Hard Time.” ‘Bogus’ Ben Covington sounds like a throwback from an older era as he plays banjo and harmonica energetically on “Boodle-de-Bum Blues” and the hilarious “Adam & Eve in the Garden” which is just the type of song church folk probably labeled the devil’s music: “When Adam and Eve was in the Garden of Eden, they must have shook that thing/Well the leaves started falling, the snakes started crawling/He must have give her a diamond ring.” Joe Calicott has been a long time favorite of mine and is marvelous whether backing Garfield Akers on the throbbing two part “Cottonfield Blues” (Aker’s other two numbers are also included) or his lone 78 “Fare Thee Well Blues” b/w “Traveling Mama Blues.” When he was rediscovered some forty years down the line his talents remained virtually unchanged and those late period records come highly recommended. Then there’s the marvelous Bo Weavil Jackson who actually hailed from Birmingham, Alabama but is called in the notes an “honorary Mississipian” for some reason. The sides included come from his 1926 Vocalion session (some of the Paramounts were issued on JSP’s Paramount Masters – in fact quite a number of artists on this set also have cuts on the Paramount box); Jackson possessed a high piercing voice and played remarkable, complex slide heard to fine effect on “You Can’t Keep No Brown” although I prefer the earlier version he cut for Paramount, “Devil and My Brown Blues” and the fine “Jefferson County Blues.”

When the Levee Breaks is a treasure trove of terrific country blues and I suppose collectors will have to sort out how much of this material they have where as newer fans may be a bit overwhelmed by it all. Neal Slaven offers up a particularly fine set of notes for this collection. JSP’s remastering is very uneven; on certain sets like the recently reviewed Ma Rainey they’ve generally done a fine job but on a set like this many tracks sound quite good while several others fall well short of similar tracks reissued by Yazoo and Revenant. I’ve also read a comment on a pre-war blues forum where the writer suggested that JSP’s remastering isn’t done for the sake of the music but to hide the fact that they are re-releasing tracks from other labels. I suppose you’ll have to make up your own mind but certainly the music can’t be faulted and the price is right.

Son House – Walkin’ Blues [The Road To Robert Johnson](MP3)

Blind Blake – Georgia Bound [The Road To Robert Johnson] (MP3)

Blind Joe Reynolds – Ninety Nine Blues [When The Levee Breaks] (MP3)

Show Notes:

For someone who recorded so little Tommy Johnson’s influence was unusually vast and long lasting; after all his recorded output only consists of six issued sides for Victor in 1928 and six issued sides for Paramount in 1929. A welcome surprise in recent years has been the discovery of several recordings of unissued material. It was Johnson’s Victor sides that were the most influential and oft covered: “Cool Drink of Water Blues”, “Big Road Blues”, “Bye-Bye Blues”, “Maggie Campbell Blues”, “Canned Heat Blues” and “Big Fat Mama.” Unlike the Paramount records these sold fairly well and were apparently the songs Johnson sang most often in person. As David Evans wrote: “For about thirty years Tommy Johnson was perhaps the most important and influential blues singer in the state of Mississippi.”

Johnson was born in 1896 in Hinds County, MS, on the George Miller plantation. Once the family moved to Crystal Springs in 1910, Tommy picked up the guitar, learning from his older brother, LeDell. By age 16, Johnson had run away from home to become a “professional” musician, largely supporting himself by playing on the street for tips. By the late teens-early ’20s, Tommy was frequently playing the company of rising local stars Charley Patton, Dick Bankston and Willie Brown. Johnson spent most of the ’20s playing in the company of Rubin Lacy, Charley McCoy, Son Spand, Walter Vincent, and Ishmon Bracey. He cut his first records for the Victor label at sessions held in Memphis, TN, in 1928.

He cut one session for the Paramount label in 1930, largely through the maneuvering of fellow buddy Charley Patton. Then the slow descent into alcoholism started taking its toll. He worked on a medicine show with Ishmon Bracey in the ’30s, but mostly seemed to be a mainstay of the juke and small party dance circuit the rest of his days. He was playing just such a local house party in November of 1956 when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Babe Stovall

I was aware of Johnson’s influence but hadn’t really thought about it until recently. I was listening to some records in preparation for one of my shows, records by K.C. Douglas and Shirley Griffith, both of who were influenced by Johnson first hand. I began to dig out some other records, mainly LP’s of field recordings David Evans made in the 1960′s and 70′s. It was David Evans investigation into Johnson in the late 1960’s that we owe a good deal of what we know about Johnson and it was through Evans’ field recordings that Johnson’s influence comes into sharper focus. Evans had this to say regarding Johnson’s influence: “Johnson exerted almost no musical influence, either in person or through his records, on blues singers outside the state of Mississippi. …Furthermore, none of his songs, was a big enough hit to enter the folk tradition significantly in its recorded from. Instead, his records tended to act as a reinforcement of the playing of men who had already learned the songs from him in person, and as a stabilizing force within the tradition. …Versions of Johnson’s songs derive exclusively from personal contact, though many of the artists undoubtedly heard Johnson’s records at one time or other.” Evans recorded many men who learned directly from Johnson including Roosevelt Holts, Boogie Bill Webb, Arzo Youngblood, Isaac Youngblood, Bubba Brown, Babe Stovall, Houston Stackhouse and Tommy’s brother Mager Johnson.

Among the records played on today’s show are the following, all recorded by Evans: The Legacy of Tommy Johnson (the companion LP to Evans’ book Tommy Johnson – I want to thank Evans for making me a copy of this hard to find record), two albums by Roosevelt Holts (Presenting The Country Blues, Roosevelt Holts and Friends) , South Mississippi Blues, Goin’ Up The Country and Catfish Blues: Mississippi Blues From Jackson & Crystal Springs. Outside of Catfish Blues all the other records have never been issued on CD. Evans has done quite a bit of field recording much of it unavailable. Here’s a link to a list of some of the recordings he’s made.

In addition Johnson’s influence can be heard on many earlier recordings. Those played on todays show include: Willie Lofton’s “Dark Road Blues” (1935), Mississippi Sheiks “Stop and Listen Blues” (1930) were covers of “Big Road Blues”, The McCoy Brothers recorded “Going Back Home” (1934) which was a version of “Cool Drink of Water Blues”, Robert Nighthawk recorded versions of “Maggie Campbell Blues” in 1953 (he also cut a version in 1964) and K.C. Douglas who recorded “Canned Heat Blues” 1961 (he cut another version in 1956).

As for Johnson’s own recording they are available in their entirety (outside a a newly found title) on Document’s Tommy Johnson 1928 – 1929 and JSP’s Legends of Country Blues. Sound quality is good on both but even better on Yazoo’s Masters Of The Delta Blues ~ Friends Of Charlie Patton and Revenant’s Screamin’ And Hollerin’ The Blues: The Worlds Of Charlie Patton, although these feature only a few tracks.

I again want to thank David Evans for taking the time to talk with me about Tommy Johnson. If you can track down a copy, I highly recommend his book Tommy Johnson.