Big Road Blues

Show Notes:

As blues historian Paul Oliver wrote: “For some reason St. Louis has never had its due as a centre for the blues. …With its ragtime background St. Louis was a Mecca for blues pianists like Speckled Red and Henry Brown, Sylvester Palmer and Roosevelt Sykes, Peetie Wheatstraw, Barrelhouse Buck McFarland and Wesley Wallace. But it was discovered early by the guitarists too, Sylvester Weaver and Lonnie Johnson, Clifford Gibson and Charley Jordan, J.D. Short and Big Joe Williams among them. There were plenty of women singers too, like Mary Johnson and Edith Johnson, Alice Moore or St. Louis Bessie Mae Smith. And while there were big name recording stars like Walter Davis there were many very good but lesser know ones: St.Louis Jimmy, Blind Teddy Darby, Aaron “Pine Top” Sparks, Lawrence Casey, Oscar Carter and many others.” And as write Don Kent noted: “The blues men who took St. Louis to be their home are responsible for some of the most magnificent country music to be recorded during the twenties. Inexplicably, the plethora of musical wealth has been left unpublicized and, blueswise, St. Louis has scarcely been tapped for all the information it could yield.”

Today’s program features many of these artists and in addition, in the second hour, we interview author Kevin Belford who’s Devil At The Confluence is deeply researched and illustrated history of the pre-war St. Louis blues scene. Devil At The Confluence is a gorgeous coffee table sized book, beautifully illustrated by Belford who stuffs the book with drawings of the artists, vintage blues advertisements, label shots and other blues ephemera. The book also features much new information and corrects errors that have persisted for decades. As Belford states on his blog: “Nearly all of the information in Devil At The Confluence on the hundreds of names that I found who had recorded from St Louis in the pre-war blues period is new and unpublished information.”

As he explained to me: The St Louis blues are a wider and deeper catalog of blues music. The reason that St Louis has been historically overlooked is because as interest in the blues developed, the general knowledge of blues became narrowly defined and mostly-arbitrarily categorized. Southern, Delta, primitive music. The original blues that the audience bought and craved was not just that, but the later research into the blues was limited to that. St Louis had more artists selling the most records for the longest period than any other Pre-war area. St Louis’ blues cannot be contained in a simplified catch-all category. St Louis had it’s roots music, uninfluenced by other areas, and the artists were known for mixing it and creating innovative new styles. Creative progress, hybrid and merging is what makes the arts evolve. This is the central concept that I realized when researching and why I decided to do the book. St Louis’ artists are often misunderstood and disregarded when the definition of the blues of the 20s and 30s is limited to transient Southern musicians playing a simple, backward style. My profiled artists are not transients through the city. They started their careers in the city, spent significant time in the city, worked amongst the other St Louis artists and in most cases lived in St Louis for the greatest part of their lives.”

The second half of the show features a varied set of recordings selected by Belford while the first part is tracks I’ve selected. Below is some background on today’s featured artists. Since it’s impossible to cover the St. Louis blues scene in one show I’ll be doing a sequel sometime down the road.

Lonnie Johnson moved to St. Louis from his native New Orleans in 1925, making his debut the same year. As writer Don Kent noted: “In a city with many musical influences, few wielded as strong an influence as Lonnie Johnson. If St. Louis could be said to have a dominant figure, it was undoubtedly Lonnie. His impeccable guitar style impressed Clifford Gibson and Henry Townsend, as well as exerting a tremendous stylistic influence on the field as a whole…”

Clifford Gibson was born in Louisville, KY and moved to St. Louis in the 1920’s where he was discovered, as was nearly all the city’s talent, by Jesse Johnson of the DeLuxe Music Shop on Market Street. He recorded 8 sides for QRS and another 12 for Victor in 1929, all in New York. He was recorded as an accompanist in Louisville in 1931 on two sides with R.T. Hansen (probably J.D. Short) and one, (Let Me Be Your Sidetrack) with country artist Jimmie Rodgers. He was a familiar figure on the streets of St. Louis, playing for tips with his performing dog as a crowd puller, almost up to his death on December 21, 1963. He recorded two 45’s for St. Louis’ Bobbin label in 1960.

Charlie Jordan came from Helena, Arkansas, and was said to have been a bootlegger in the twenties. He acted as a talent scout for Decca in the thirties and ran a rehearsal studio for local talents” He is reputed to have been shot to death on Ninth St. in 1954. He recorded around 40 sides between 1930 and 1936 for Vocalion, Victor, Decca And ARC.

Henry Townsend arrived in St. Louis just before the ’20s began. By the end of the ’20s, he had landed a record contract with Columbia and two years later made some recordings for Paramount. During this time, Townsend began playing the piano, learning the instrument by playing along with Roosevelt Sykes records. During the ’30s, Townsend was a popular session musician, performing with many of the era’s most popular artists. By the late ’30s, he had cut several tracks for Bluebird. During the ’40s and ’50s, Townsend continued to perform and record as a session musician, but he never made any solo records. In 1960, he led a few sessions, but they didn’t receive much attention. Toward the end of the ’60s, Townsend became a staple on the blues and folk festivals in America, which led to a comeback. He cut a number of albums for Adelphi and he played shows throughout America.Townsend had become an elder statesmen of St. Louis blues by the early ’80s, recording albums for Wolf and Swingmaster and playing a handful of shows every year. During the late ’80s, Townsend was nearly retired, but he continued to play the occasional concert until his death in 2006.

St. Louis had a number of very talented woman blues singers although they rarely seem to get their due. Woman like Mary Johnson, Alice Moore, Bessie Mae Smith, Edith North Johnson, Irene Scruggs, among others, cut some superb records during the 1920’s and 30’s.

Alice Moore ranks with Mary Johnson as one of the two best female blues singers in St. Louis during the pre-war period. Alice Moore’s recording career can be divided into two time periods (1927-29 and 1934-37). The first set of recordings was made for Paramount and the latter ones were made for Decca. The Paramount recordings feature accompaniments by Henry Brown on piano and Ike Rodgers’ gut-bucket trombone. The first Decca recordings feature Brown and Rodgers, but most of the Decca recordings feature her boyfriend, Peetie Wheatstraw, and some of the best have Wheatstraw with Kokomo Arnold.

Mary Johnson (sometimes billed as “Signifying Mary”)made her debut in 1929, cut just shy of two dozen songs, achieved modest success and never recorded again after 1936 despite living until 1983.

Edith Johnson recorded eighteen sides in 1928/29 as “Edith North Johnson”, “Hattie North” and “Maybelle Allen.” In 1961 she recorded with Henry Brown for Sam Charters, released on Folkways.

Little is known about Lane Hardin whose one coupling for Bluebird “ Hard Time Blues/California Desert Blues” was recorded in Chicago July 28, 193. According to Henry Townsend, Lane Hardin was a “metalworker” probably inferring he worked in a steel mill. Townsend further states that Hardin was “from down South.” Hardin was recorded after the war as “Leroy Simpson, cutting some sides for the Modern label.

St. Louis had an abundance of talented blues pianists including Henry Brown, Peetie Wheatstraw, Roosevelt Sykes, Lee Green, Aaron “Pinetop” Sparks, Walter Davis among many others.  Henry Brown worked clubs such as the Blue Flame Club, the 9-0-5 Club, Jim’s Place and Katy Red’s, from the twenties into the 30’s. Recorded for Brunswisck with Ike Rogers and Mary Jonhson in 1929, for Paramount in Richmond and Grafton in ‘29 and ‘30. He served in the army in the early ’40s, then formed his own quartet to work occasional local gigs in St. Louis area from the ’50s, and worked the Becky Thatcher riverboat, St. Louis in 1965. In addition to his pre-war recordings, he was recorded by Paul Oliver in 1960, by Sam Charters with Edith Johnson in 1961 and by Adelphi in 1969.

Pianist Speckled Red (born Rufus Perryman) was born in Monroe, LA, but he made his reputation as part of the St. Louis and Memphis blues scenes of the ’20s and ’30s. In 1929, he cut his first recording sessions. One song from these sessions, “The Dirty Dozens,” was released on Brunswick and became a hit in late 1929. In 1938, he cut a few sides for Bluebird. In the early ’40s, Red moved to St. Louis, where he played local clubs and bars for the next decade and a half. Charlie O’Brien, a St. Louis policeman and something of a blues aficionado “rediscovered” Speckled Red on December 14, 1954, who subsequently was signed to Delmark Records as their first blues artist. Several recordings were made in 1956 and 1957 for Tone, Delmark, Folkways, and Storyville record labels.

Show Notes:

Producer Jay Miller in his Crowley, Louisiana studio

Jay Miller operated a small studio and record label (Feature) out in Crowley, Louisiana. In addition to Feature, he had other small labels such as Fais Do-Do and Feature, Rocko (originally Rocket) and Zynn. 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 Miller 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 many others. Of his unique sound, Miller said: “It wasn’t technical as far as audio but I had a sense of something. Maybe that was the best thing that could have happened. I didn’t know too much about it, I didn’t go by the book, because I went by these two things – my ears!!! I’ve had so many compliments about the sound I got.” He further explained: “I ran all my sessions myself. I gave them as much leeway from a ‘feel’ standpoint (as I could) but from a professional standpoint I took over there. In other words, I didn’t want my artists to sing a song like I wanted it sung, as long as they had the feel, but if they didn’t have the feel I was either gonna change songs or try to explain to them what we needed.”

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It was Miller who gave most of his artists their nicknames as he recalled in a 1981 radio interview: “I always tried to pick one that suited the artist’s personality, like Lazy Lester (laughs). And Lightnin’ Slim; he was just so slow in anything he did …Lonesome Sundown, well Lonesome Sundown …didn’t come in too early most of the time he was around. He’d come in late, or rather, he’s come in early and take off and come back late, and there was something that struck me that Sundown was just the right pseudonym for him.”

Miller recorded way more material then he could issue hence many recordings were never released. In the 70’s the Flyright label, with the assistance of Miller, began a series called the The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions to issue these unissued sides. The series ran to over fifty volumes. All the tracks from today’s show come from those LP’s. Much of this music has not been reissued on CD. Below is some background on today’s featured artists, most of the information gleaned from the liner notes. Additional information comes from John Broven’s classic book South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous which goes into great detail about Miller and the artists he recorded.

It’s worth quoting Bruce Bastin from his introduction to the series: “Close to South Louisiana bayou country, Crowley is the home of J.D. Miller’s studio, responsible as much as any other factor for the sound we now know as the moody, loping blues of the Louisiana swamps. Many completely unknown artists found fleeting fame through Miller’s recordings  and through the Excello issues of his recordings, he helped support one of the most consistent blues labels of the 1950’s. Some of the finest of Miller’s recordings were issued, often on his own labels – but not all! His present studio contains an awe-inspiring and perplexing array of masterpieces, many containing superb and unissued recordings. These are just a few of those…”

Miller scored his first big R&B hit on Excello with Guitar Gable’s infectious instrumental “Congo Mombo” in 1956, followed closely by the swamp-pop standard “Irene”, sung by Gable’s vocalist King Karl. For the next three years Guitar Gable and King Karl had regular singles on the Excello label, culminating in “This Should Go On Forever” which provided a top 20 hit for swamp-popper Rod Bernard. Not only this but Gable’s band was used as Miller’s session group, recording everything from swamp-blues to rock’n’roll. Gable’s and Karl’s sides are collected on Cool Calm Collected – The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions Vol. 36. As Bastin notes: “Miller reckoned Gable’s band to be the most reliable R & B band at that time and he used it for a number of sessions, most notably Slim Harpo’s first . Half dozen releases emerged on Excello over two years but Gable recorded many more tracks and as is typical with unreleased titles found in Miller’s vaults, they were the equal of – and often
superior as blues – to many which were released.”

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In the large stable of blues talent that Jay Miller recorded for Excello, no one enjoyed more mainstream success than Slim Harpo. Bastin writes: “Slim Harpo was one of the finest bluesmen to achieve recognition from Jay Miller’s  recordings  in  Crowley, Louisiana and although he gained greater success after he had left Miller, he never made records of the same quality. James Moore first came to Miller’s studio in 1955. He had been playing full-time as a musician since the late 1940’s, calling himself Harmonica Slim and frequently playing around Baton Rouge with Otis Hicks – Lightning Slim. Miller had used a number of harmonica players to back Lightning and late in 1955 Lightning brought with him his own man, Harmonica Slim, for a session ” Harpo’s first record, “I’m A King Bee”, became a double-sided R&B hit. Even bigger was “Rainin’ in My Heart,” which made the Billboard Top 40 pop charts in the summer of 1961. In the wake of the Rolling Stones covering “I’m a King Bee” on their first album, Slim had the biggest hit of his career in 1966 with “Baby, Scratch My Back” which made Billboard’s Top 20 pop charts. Follow-ups “Tip on In” and “Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu,” were both R&B charters. By the end of the 60’s  Harpo contacted Lightnin’ Slim, who was now residing outside of Detroit, MI. The two reunited and formed a band, touring together as a sort of blues mini-package to appreciative white rock audiences until the end of the decade. The New Year beckoned with a tour of Europe (his first ever) all firmed up, and a recording session scheduled when he arrived in London. Sadly he died suddenly of a heart attack on January 31, 1970. Volumes 4, 20 and 31 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  are all devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Harpo’s recordings.

Clifton Chenier hired Lonesome Sundown, whose’ real name was Cornelius Green, as one of his two guitarists (Phillip Walker being the other) in 1955. As Sundown recalled “After hearing about Jay Miller I brought a demo tape to his studio; you shoulda seen that studio. It was like a repair shop and studio combined. So closely combined you couldn’t hardly tell which was which. Jay Miller asked me to bring the band by. We recorded a couple songs for him, but we soon split up.” By 1956 he was back in Miller’s studio and began recording fairly regularly.” Over the next eight years, Sundown’s lowdown Excello output included a host of memorable swamp classics. In 1965 he retired from the blues business to devote his life to the church. It was 1977 before Sundown could be coaxed back into a studio to cut the excellent blues LP Been Gone Too Long. Sundown passed in 1994. Volumes 8, 29 and 52 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  are all devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Sundown’s recordings.

Regarding Lightnin’ Slim, Bruce Bastin wrote: “One of the few bluesmen whose nicknames were acquired before coming to Miller, Lightning had only been playing 6 years when he came to Miller’s notice and became the second black artist that he recorded (Richard King of Crowley was the first). Lightning changed the whole focus of Miller’s recordings. Following the success of the first blues releases on Miller’s own Feature label, the emphasis of his recordings became directed towards blues and r’n b, and the pattern of Black Louisiana music on record emerged for the first time.” Slim recorded for 12 years as an Excello artist, from 1954 to 1965, starting out originally on Miller’s Feature label. Between Feature and Excello Slim released some sixty tracks. As the late ’60s found Lightnin’ Slim working and living in Detroit, a second career blossomed as European blues audiences brought him over to tour, and he also started working the American festival and hippie ballroom circuit with Slim Harpo as a double act. When Harpo died unexpectedly in 1970, Lightnin’ went on alone, recording sporadically, while performing as part of the American Blues Legends tour until his death in 1974. Volumes 5, 12, 27 and 47 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  are all devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Slim’s recordings.

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While riding on a bus sometime in the mid-’50s, Lazy Lester met guitarist Lightnin’ Slim, who was searching for his AWOL harpist. The two’s styles meshed seamlessly, and Lester became Slim’s harpist of choice. As Miller recalled, “One day Lightnin’ Slim walked into my studio to cut a record session, accompanied by a tall, slender young stranger, introduced to me as Leslie Johnson …I learned that Lightnin’ had met Leslie on a bus to Crowley, but had not heard him sing or play. Having a few minutes before the session, I put Leslie in the studio and the rest of us went into the control room to listen. When I turned on the equipment and signaled him to begin, I was surprised by what I heard. It was so much more than what I expected. I was immediately convinced that this was an artist of great potential.” Lester recorded first in 1957 and 15 Excello releases ensued over the next 9 years until Jay found Lester too unreliable to use. Miller found that Lester was equally talented on guitar and drums, and he became a stalwart of Miller’s session bands. Lester appeared on Miller-produced songs by Lightnin’ Slim, Slim Harpo, Katie Webster, Lonesome Sundown and artists as varied as Nathan Abshire and Johnny Lano. Volumes 7 and 16 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  are all devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Lester’s recordings.

In 1962, at the ripe old age of 51, Silas Hogan was introduced by Slim Harpo to producer Jay Miller and his recording career finally began in earnest. Hogan recorded for Excello from 1962 to early 1965, seeing the last of his single releases issued late that year. As Ray Templeton wrote: “Outside of the big four – Lightning Slim, Lazy Lester, Lonesome Sundown and Slim Harpo – Silas Hogan is the most important of the downhome blues artists Jay Miller recorded, whether you measure importance in numbers of singles issued (Hogan had eight releases on Excello) or in terms of quality and consistency.” Volume  32 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions is devoted to Hogan’s recordings and one of the tracks gives today’s show its title.

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Jimmy Dotson was a small part of an active Baton Rogue blues scene of the 1950’s. Miller documented many of these artists including Lazy Lester, Slim Harpo and Jimmy Anderson Dotson cut sessions for Miller circa 1957 through 1960. Dotson said: “The Baton  Rouge blues scene in the ’50s was nice,  we  had a following, we played from club to club. I played drums for Lightnin’ Slim for a while and with Slim it fluctuated, I was a kind of utility musician. If they needed a drummer I’d go play drums, if they needed a bass player, a guitar … I couldn’t play any too good on any of them but I could fit in. But they had a tremendous following,  Lightnin’ Slim and Slim Harpo. They would go from club to club, sometimes we would play Sunday afternoon somewhere back over North Baton Rouge in the park area from two o’clock to six and the place would  be full of people.  OK then we would go across the river (to Port Allen) and they’d just line up in cars and follow us across the river! It was fantastic, it really was.”

Local guitarist Ashton Savoy took Katie Webster under his wing, sharing her 1958 debut 45 for the Kry logo with her. Webster rapidly became an invaluable studio musician for Miller in Crowley and Eddie Shuler in Lake Charles. She played on sides by Guitar Junior (Lonnie Brooks), Clarence Garlow, Jimmy Wilson, Lazy Lester, and many others. She also waxed some terrific sides of her own for Miller from 1959 to 1961 for his Rocko, Action, and Spot labels. As Bruce Bastin writes: “Katie Webster is best known as Jay Miller’s most frequently used session pianist, backing a diversity of artists from blues to rockabilly and pop. …As an accompanying pianist, she has few peers in postwar blues but the musical legacy that she left with Miller is broader than might at first be expected.” Volumes 48, and 49 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  are devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Webster’s  recordings.

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Tabby Thomas probably spans a longer recording history with Miller than anyone else. He cut in  1954 for Miller’s Feature label and cut a final session for Miller in 1980. His Feature disc didn’t sell too well but he returned to make a number of discs there in the 1960’s including his best-known number, “Hoodoo Party.” As Ray Templeton writes: “Tabby Thomas holds a unique record in relation to the Jay Miller operation at Crowley, Louisiana.  He is the only artist to have had his work issued on Miller’s own labels Feature, Rocko and Zynn, as well as on Excello…” Volume 56 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  is devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Tabby’s  recordings.

Little is known about Leroy Washington, who recorded several sessions between 1957 and 1961 for Miller. He was recalled by Miller as perhaps his favorite blues guitarist.  He only released a handful of sides, however, he had recorded a considerable legacy of material for Miller, which had lain unissued until this series. As Bruce Bastin writes: “Like another fine Miller guitarist, Guitar Gable,  Leroy Washington was from Opelousas.  …Washington’s polite, easy-going nature and keenness to record made him a highly suitable artist for Miller, who carefully built up his artist’s sessions, in order to create a satisfactory potential ”hit’ record. Three couplings submitted by Miller to Ernie Young of the Nashboro Record Co. saw release on his Excello label in 1958-59 but Miller clearly submitted material which did not find favor.” Volume 25 of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions  is devoted to unissued or alternate takes of Washington’s  recordings.

Clarence Garlow waxed his first sides for the Macy’s label in 1949, scoring a minor hit with “Bon Ton Roula.” Garlow next session was for Miller’s Feature label in 1951, cutting further sessions for Miller in 1954 and 1958. Garlow’s sides for Miller are collected on The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions Vol. 28.

Harmonica player Jimmy Anderson modeled his sound on Jimmy Reed and cut all his sessions for Miller circa 1962 and 1964. As John Broven wrote: “Jimmy Anderson, a younger artist fro Baton Rogue, was too much in jimmy Ree’s shadow to succeed.” Anderson quit recording In 1964, feeling that he was being gypped out of royalties. He continued to play for a few years , taking up the guitar, but when  he  appeared  at the  1991 Utrecht Blues Estafette,   Jimmy had been out of music for 20 years. Ten tracks by Anderson appear across several volumes of The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions.

Henry Gray was born in Kenner, Louisiana, in January, 1925, but raised near Baton Rouge at Alsen. He headed to Chicago where he appeared on many definitive Chicago blues sessions of the 1950’s backing artists like Jimmy Rogers, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy and others. In 1956, he joined Howlin’ Wolf’’s band and was Wolf’s main piano player for twelve years in performance and on recordings. He returned to Louisiana in 1968 and within a few years cut some sides for Miller in 1970.

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Miller was involved in recording several Zydeco sessions which are collected on Zydeco Blues – The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions Vol. 14 and Zydeco Blues Vol. 2 – The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions Vol. 37 and Rockin’ With Dupsee – The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions Vol. 30. In addition to  Rockin’ Dupsee, who recorded sessions for Miller between 1970 and 1974, Miller also recorded Clifton Chenier (1958-1959), Fernest Arceneaux, Marcel Dugas and Joseph Bo. Miller was one of the earliest producer to record Chenier and issued three couplings on his own Zynn label having found no interest shown by Nashville’s Excello label.

Miller recorded several fine bluesman who remain little known but cut some superb music. Featured today are cuts by singer/harmonica player Sylvester Buckley who played on some sides by Lazy Lester and Silas Hogan. He recorded four sides circa 1962/63 that were unissued. There was Monroe Vincent who recorded as Mr. Calhoun for Miller and as Vince Monroe. He moved to New Orleans where he recorded as Polka Dot Slim for Instant. Charles Sheffield was a fine big voiced singer from Lake Charles who cut sessions released on Rocko in 1959 and Excello in 1961. Also from Lake Charles was Blue Charlie(Charlie Morris) who cut sessions for Miller in 1957 and 1958 with many titles unreleased. There were the tough guitar blues of the mysterious Ramblin’ Hi Harris who waxed just three sides for Miller and Joe Johnson who cut a handful of strong sides for Miller in 1966 and 1967. There was fine down-home players like harmonica blower Wild Bill Phillips who backed Lightnin’ Slim on some sessions and on his brilliant cover of Boozoo Chavis’  “Pebble In My Shoe” and guitarist Clarence Locksley who’s backed on percussion by Lazy Lester with Miller himself playing guitar on one cut. Miller recalled of  Locksley: “He thought a meter was something you put a nickel in.” Also worth mentioning is a track supposedly by Buddy Guy, “I Hope You Come Back Home.” The track was found in 1978 on a tape box marked Lonesome Sundown. It is known that on at least one occasion Guy traveled to Crowley to back Lightnin’ Slim and Miller could have auditioned and recorded Guy.

J.D. Short

I suppose it sounds rather romantic spending your time roaming around the south with a tape recorder recording blues but for all the rewards and exciting discoveries it’s a stressful enterprise, not to mention a precarious way to make a living. These days hardly anyone one does it anymore and the sad fact is that blues has largely disappeared as integral part of African-American rural communities; most of the old timers have passed on and few of the younger generation are interested in blues, particularly traditional blues. Much has been written about John and Alan Lomax who scoured the south and beyond making landmark recordings for the Library of Congress from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Less well known are those that followed in the Lomax’s footsteps; there was folklorists and researchers such as David Evans, Sam Charters, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Art Rosenbaum, Pete Welding, Chris Strachwitz ,Bruce Bastin, Bengt Olsson, Dick Spottswood, Kip Lornell, Glenn Hinson, Tim Duffy, Siegfried A. Christmann and Axel Küstner. Some were hunting for the famous names who made records in the 1920’s and 1930’s, others were seeking to fill in biographical blanks regarding some of the older musicians coveted by collectors and then there were those who were seeking to document the blues tradition as it still existed in rural communities, men like George Mitchell and Peter B. Lowry. This was a very different undertaking than 1960’s blues revival which sought out and put back on the circuit such legendary artists of the past as Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and Mississippi John Hurt. The field recordings made during this era were a sort of a parallel undercurrent to the more famous artists. What they recorded in the rural communities of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960’s was a still thriving, if largely undocumented, blues culture.

Today’s abbreviated show is part two of our look at field recordings made in the 1960’s and 70’s. Today’s program spotlights recordings made by Paul Oliver, David Evans, Sam Charters, William Ferris, Fredric Ramsey Jr. and Bruce Jackson. In the second hour we present Truckin’ My Blues an hour-long special which introduces listeners to the stories and sounds of four older Southern bluesmen—and to the efforts of Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, to help lift these musicians from poverty and obscurity.

In the opening set we spin a couple of tracks recorded by Sam Charters.  Charters’ fieldwork, extensive liner notes, production efforts, and books served as an introduction to many who had never heard of artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Robert Johnson. Charters also began his work as a field recorder during the ’50s, and this research would result in his first book in 1959, The Country Blues. “…The Country Blues was the first full-length treatment of the topic,” wrote Benjamin Filene in Romancing the Folk, “and its evocative style inspired thousands of whites to explore the music.” A companion album, also titled The Country Blues, would simultaneously be released on Folkways. Charters compiled vintage blues reissues, produced numerous albums and did extensive field recording, much of it released on the Folkways label.

Baby Tate’s “When I First Started Hoboing” comes from the film The Blues (read loner notes) which  was begun as, Charters wrote, ” an effort to document aspects of the blues that couldn’t be put on to a phonograph record. In 1961 and 1962 I was doing a great deal of recording in the South, and in Memphis I became interested in not only the sound of Furry Lewis’s guitar style, but in the patterns of movement in his hands and fingers as he played. Out of this came the long trip through St. Louis, Memphis, Louisiana, and South Carolina in the summer of 1962 that led to the film. It was shot under very severe limitations of equipment and film knowledge with a hand held Bolex 16 mm camera, and the sound track was recorded with a portable Ampex machine and a small battery operated Uher. The Blues was finished early in 1963, and was premiered at the University of Chicago Folk Festival in January, 1963″

J.D. Short recorded two sessions in the early ’30s for Paramount and Vocalion, then quickly faded into obscurity. Charters recorded Short at his transplanted home base of St. Louis in 1961 while Charters was passing through the area making similar field recordings of Henry Townsend, Barrelhouse Buck Edith North Johnson, Henry Brown, and Daddy Hotcakes. Short’s recordings have recently been reissued on CD as part of the Sonet Blues Story. As Charters writes in the notes: “The recording that we did in his house that summer – mostly in the kitchen to get away from the noises in the street – was his last, but we didn’t have any idea of it. I was filming him for a sequence in ‘The Blues’ and trying to get his ideas about the backgrounds and the aesthetics of the blues for ‘The Poetry Of The Blues’ so we recorded a lot of music – new versions of songs he’d done before – new songs – and his own comments about the styles and the music.” Short unexpectedly passed away shortly after this session at the age of 60. Short also did a 1958 session with pal Big Joe Williams which was released on Delmark as Stavin’ Chain Blues.

Also in the first set we play a recording by another early field recorder, Frederic Ramsey. Ramsey traveled all over the South photographing black life.Much of his fieldwork is to be found in Music From the South, a 10-volume set of recordings that was released on Folkway. His book “Been Here and Gone,” about black culture was published in 1960.In 1958, folklorist Frederic Ramsey, Jr. recorded someone named Cat-Iron in Buckner’s Alley in Natchez, Mississippi. Ramsey wrote a detailed poetic description of his discovery of Cat-Iron for The Saturday Review which, alas, offered no background on the artist. A biographic cipher, Cat-Iron’s sole testament is Cat-Iron Sings Blues and Hymns, described in the 1958 Folkways catalogue as “old-time Negro songs and guitar style.”

We also play a pair of tracks from the CD accompanying William Ferris’ new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. Ferris has written and edited 10 books, including the influential Blues from the Delta, and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. Ferris has produced several albums and made numerous field recordings.

On part one of this feature we played several recordings made by David Evans. It was Evans’ investigation into Tommy 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 began making field recordings in 1965 when he spent about five weeks taping blues artists in Mississippi and Louisiana. The collection Goin’ Up The Country released on Decca in 1968 collects some of the best performances he recorded. The album was reissued in 1976 on Rounder and Rounder also released South Mississippi Blues in 1973, another collection of field recordings from the same period. The Legacy of Tommy Johnson (1972) was issued as  the companion LP to Evans’ Tommy Johnson biography. Today’s selection, Ranie Burnette’s “Shake ‘Em On Down”, comes from the album Afro-American Folk Music From Tate And Panola Counties, Mississippi . The collection is a survey of the hill country, just east of the more famous Mississippi Delta, which has been compiled from recordings made by David Evans in 1969 -71, together with three takes from Alan Lomax’s famous 1942 visit there.

The earliest tracks come from 1960 and were made by Paul Oliver and Chris Strachwitz and come from the albums Conversations With The Blues, a companion to Oliver’s landmark book, and recordings the men made of Alex Moore and the Black Ace which were subsequently issued on Arhoolie Records. Conversation With The Blues is a series of interviews in the artists own words, compiled from interviews with over sixty blues singers. In the Summer of 1960 blues scholar Paul Oliver and his wife made a trip through Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to interview and record older blues artists for a series of programs sponsored by the BBC. Among those recorded were Sam Chatmon, K.C. Douglas, Big Joe Williams, Butch Cage & Willie Thomas, Robert Curtis Smith among several others.Oliver was also in Chicago were he organized a recording session resulting the album Blues From Maxwell Street which features tracks by Arvella Gray, James Brewer, Daddy Stovepipe and King Davis.

Born in Hughes Springs, Texas, Babe Kyro Lemon AKA Black Ace was raised on the family farm, and taught himself to play guitar, performing in east Texas from the late 1920s on. During the early 1930s he began playing with Smokey Hogg and Oscar “Buddy” Woods, a Hawaiian-style guitarist who played with the instrument flat on his lap. In 1937 Turner recorded six songs Decca Records in Dallas, including the blues song “Black Ace”. In the same year, he started a radio show in Fort Worth, using the cut as a theme song, and soon assumed the name. In 1941 he appeared in The Blood of Jesus, an African-American movie produced by Spencer Williams Jr. In 1943 he was drafted into the United States Army, and gave up playing music for some years. However, in 1960, Arhoolie Records owner Chris Strachwitz and paul Oliver persuaded him to record an album for Arhoolie (reissued on CD as I Am The Boss Card In Your Hand). His last public performance was in a 1962 documentary, The Blues, and he died of cancer in Fort Worth, in 1972.

In 1929, Alex Moore made his debut recordings for Columbia Records and recorded again in 1937 for Decca Records. It was 1951 before Moore recorded again with RPM/Kent. However, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Moore performed in clubs in Dallas and occasionally other parts of Texas. He was recorded by Paul Oliver and Chris Stratwichz in 1960 (reissued as From North Dallas To The East Side), and those subsequent recordings saw him obtain nationwide recognition.

Our final selection, the nearly ten minute “I Got Too Much Time For The Crime I Done”, comes from the remarkable album Ever Since I Have Been a Man Full Grown issued on  Takoma in 1965. The recording was made by Bruce Jackson in 1965 at Texas’s Ramsey Prison Farm of a fellow named Johnnie B., or J. B., Smith. As far as I know this is the only LP devoted to a single unaccompanied singer of prison work-song. From the liner notes: “Smitty – J.B. Smith – is eleven years into a forty-five year sentence that begun in 1954; he is 48 years old. This is his fourth time in prison in Texas and he does not expect to be paroled for some time. For him, a song like “No More Good Time in the World for Me”, though it draws heavily on the general inmate song vocabulary, is completely personal; the situation applies to him almost without qualification.” J.B. Smith: “The oldtimers still sing. That is, if whoever is carrying (in charge of) the squad will let them. In some cases the boss won’t let them sing. …The young men don’t get a chance to work with the older men and they haven’t experienced working with older men. A lot of them have never been in the system before. And the crews they work with don’t even know the songs, the worksongs that they work by. But once they get to working with the older men, they learn the songs and they try to carry them on when they can. But like I said, in most cases they can’t because they’re not permitted.”

In the second half of the program we air Truckin’ My Blues Away. From the notes: “This music-rich hour-long special introduces listeners to the stories and sounds of four older Southern bluesmen—and to the efforts of Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, to help lift these musicians from poverty and obscurity. The musicians cover a wide swath of the South: Boo Hanks from Virgina, Va.; Captain Luke from Winston-Salem, N.C.; Eddie Tigner from Atlanta; and Little Freddie King from New Orleans. In their own words and performances, these men bring us the story of a music, an era and a culture that are uniquely American.The program is co-produced and co-written by Richard Ziglar and Barry Yeoman, who traveled around the South collecting interviews and field recordings of the musicians. Yeoman, who co-produced our Gracie Award-winning program ‘Picking Up the Pieces,’ narrates.”

Show Notes:

In his memoir, Big Bill Blues, Broonzy called Sleepy John Estes’ way of singing the blues “crying the blues.” As Tony Russell noted: “The 25-year old man who sat down to record “The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair” for a traveling Victor unit in Memphis would prove to be one of the company’s most striking finds in a city full of distinctive blues artists. High, blurred, plaintive, his voice sounded like that of a man on the verge of tears; sometimes it would even break, momentarily as if overwhelmed by emotion.” While Estes would become for his finely wrought personal songs, these initial numbers were local standards or common themes like “Divin’ Duck Blues” (“If the river was whiskey and I was a divin’ duck”). His storytelling is evident on early numbers like “Street Car Blues” but it wasn’t until signing with Decca in 1937 that he cut his most enduring compositions. Today’s program spotlights  Estes recordings before his comeback, spotlighting the remarkable recordings he made between 1929 and 1941. In addition we feature some of the fine musicians from the Brownsville area who worked and recorded with Estes including Son Bonds, Yank Rachell, Hammie Nixon, Charlie Pickett, Noah Lewis and Lee Brown.

John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes, was born in Ripley, Tennessee, around 1900. Estes first learned to play guitar from his sharecropper father at age twelve. Soon thereafter, while working in the cotton fields with his family, he crafted his own cigar-box guitar and began to hone his skills at local house parties and fish fries. His nickname “Sleepy” stemmed from a chronic blood pressure disorder that gave him fits of narcolepsy. Around 1915, the Estes family moved to Brownsville, Tennessee, which served as Sleepy John’s base residence periodically for the rest of his life. Brownsville was also home to “Hambone” Willie Newbern, an important early influence, as well as Yank Rachell and Hammie Nixon–musicians with whom Estes partnered at local venues and on professional recordings. Other Brownsville musicians who Estes worked with were pianist Lee Brown and guitarists Son Bonds and Charlie Pickett, all who recorded in the 30’s and all who backed Estes on record. Estes teamed with Rachell to play house parties, picnics, and the streets in the Brownsville area from 1919 to 1927. He also partnered with local harmonica player Hammie Nixon, hoboing Arkansas and southern Missouri with him from 1924 to 1927. At this time jug band music was wildly popular, so Estes started the Three J’s Jug Band with Rachell and jug player Jab Jones. The Three J’s played Memphis, where they competed for exposure in a competitive scene dominated by the Memphis Jug Band.

When the Victor recording company sent a field recording unit to Memphis in September 1929, Estes recorded several sides backed by the Three J’s, with Jones playing piano instead of the jug. Other acts to record for Victor on this trip included the Memphis Jug Band, Frank Stokes, and Cannon’s Jug Stompers. He was invited to record again for Victor in May 1930. This session yielded the uptempo “Milk Cow Blues,” a tune Robert Johnson would later record as “Milkcow Calf Blues.” In all the group cut fifteen sides, three were unissued, over the course of eight session in 1929 and 1930. Estes gave the following account of his recording debut: “Well, it was the guy who recorded the ‘Kansas City Blues’, Jim Jackson. We were coming down the street , me and Yank Rachell. He said ‘Boys, that was a mighty good peice you sang on the street the other day.. You can really sings. I can tell you how to make some money.’ Yank said, ‘John we can go ’round ourselves. We don’t need him to carry us.’ I went around to the Ellis Auditorium and we talked to Mr. R.S. Peer of New York City. he told us., ‘Boy’, he was recording two or three other boys there, they’d hit two pieces in an hour. ‘We got some more boys here but I want to see you before you go. I want you to come back late in the afternoon so I can hear what you can do.’ We went back then and we recorded.”

Estes and Nixon moved to Chicago in 1931 where they played parties and the streets. The Depression hit the recording industry hard, and the Estes/Nixon team did not record until a July 1935 date with the Champion label where the duo cut six sides at two sessions. Among the sides recorded were “Drop Down Mama” and “Some Day Baby Blues,” tunes that became staples for a later generation of bluesmen. As Tony Russell remarks: “Nixon is the nightingale of blues harmonica and his parallel melodies echoing Estes singing on “Someday Baby Blues” and “Drop Down Mama”, to mention just the most famous of their duets, are beautiful in their understated melancholy.” They left Chicago in the late 1930’s to travel the country playing lumber camps, parties, and street corners for four years. The Decca label brought Estes to New York City to record in 1937 and again in 1938 where he cut eighteen songs, laying down some of his most enduring songs. He was backed by Charlie Pickett on guitar and Hammie Nixon on harmonica. Among the songs were vivid depictions of the Depression in songs like “Down South Blues”, riding the blinds in “Special Agent Blues (Railroad Police Blues)”  and “Hobo Jungle Blues.” On the latter he sings:

Now, when I left Chicago, I left on that G & M (2X)
Then if I reach my home, I have to change over on that L& N
Now, came in on in that Mae West, and I put it down at Chicago Heights
Now, when I came in on that Mae West, I put it down at Chicago Heights
Now, you know, over in hobo jungle, and that’s where I stayed the night
Now, if you hobo through Brownsville, you better not be peepin’ out (2X)

Now, Mr. Whitten will git you, and Mr. Guy Hare will wear you out
Now, out East of Brownsville, about four miles from town (2X)
Now, if you ain’t got your fare, that’s where they will let you down

He sang many celebrated songs about hometown life in Brownsville including “Lawyer Clark” (“He said if I just stay out of the grave, he’d see that I wouldn’t go to the pen”), he sings about Martha Hardin’s house burning down in “Fire Department Blues”, he describes race relations in the south in “Clean Up At Home” (“I played for the colored, I played for the white/All you got to do, act kinda nice, you got to”) and the personal narrative “Floating Bridge” where describes a near brush with death after falling off a car ferry crossing a river:

Now I never will forget that floating bridge (3X)
Tell me five minutes time under water I was hidW
hen I was going down I throwed up my hands
Now, when I was going down, I throwed up my hands (2X)
Please, take me on dry land
Now they carried me in the house and they laid me ‘cross the blank’t (3X)

“Bout a gallon-and-half muddy water I had drankThey dried me off and they laid me in the bed
Now, they dried me off and they laid me in the bed (2X)
Couldn’t hear nothin’ but muddy water runnnin’ through my head

Estes was paired with younger guitarist Robert Nighthawk, perhaps to modernize his sound, for his last six song Decca session in 1940 which lack the spark of his collaborations with Nixon. A year later he recorded for the Bluebird label backed by kazoos and a tub bass in a swinging session with the Delta Boys (Son Bonds and Raymond Thomas), who echoed Estes’s jug band sensibilities. All three men variously take the lead on exuberant numbers like “Don’t You Want To Know” , “You Shouldn’t Do That” both sporting a vigorous kazoo solo from Bonds who takes the lead on “Black Gal Swing.” On September 24, 1941 the trio made their final sides together, a three song session for Bluebird including the aforementioned “Lawyer Clark” and “Little Laura.” Little Laura, according to Don Kent’s notes to the Yazoo Sleepy John Estes CD, was a neighbor of Sleepy John’s and the Jimmy referred to in the lyrics is Sleepy John’s name for Yank Rachell. This song is essentially the one Sonny Boy Williamson I  recorded for Bluebird a couple of months earlier as “She Was A Dreamer.”

Estes returned to sharecropping in Brownsville in 1941. In 1948, he and Nixon recorded again for the Ora Nelle label (“Harlem Bound” and “Stone Blind Blues”) but the records went unreleased. Estes went completely blind in 1950 and elected to try his hand at recording again. In 1952 he cut four sides for the Sun label. Estes was rediscovered in 1962 during the blues revival. He cut several albums for Delmark and returned to touring with Hammie Nixon before health problems confined him to Brownsville. Sleepy John Estes died June 5, 1977.

After recording with Sleepy John Estes in  1929 and 1930 Yank Rachell decided to try his hand at farming and also worked for the L&N Railroad. During a stopover in New York Rachell teamed up with guitarist Dan Smith and laid down 25 titles for ARC in just three days, though only six of them were issued. Shortly before the ARC date, Rachell had discovered a kid harmonica player that he believed had real talent, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. They worked together at the Blue Flame Club in Jackson, Tennessee starting in 1933. In 1934 Williamson went north to Chicago. With the success of Williamson’s first Bluebird dates of 1937, Rachell decided to join Sonny Boy in Chicago for sessions in March and June of 1938. Yank Rachell also contributed four sides of his own to each session, and then 16 more in 1941 with Sonny Boy backing him up. After Sonny Boy Williamson’s murder in 1948, Rachell drifted away from music and relied solely on straight jobs to make his living, settling permanently in Indianapolis in 1958. His wife passed away in 1961, and afterward he began to resume performing. In 1962, Rachell was re-united with Nixon and Estes, and the three of them began playing college and coffeehouse circuit, recording for Delmark as Yank Rachell’s Tennessee Jug Busters. Estes died in 1977, and from that time Rachell worked mainly as a solo act. He recorded only sporadically in his last years and passed in 1997 at the age of 87.

Sleepy John Estes, American Folk Blues Festival, 1964

Noah Lewis was born in Henning, Tennessee, and raised in the vicinity of Ripley. He played in local string bands and brass bands, and began playing in the Ripley and Memphis areas with Gus Cannon. When jug bands became popular in the mid-1920s, he joined Cannon’s Jug Stompers. He cut seven sides under his own name at sessions in 1929 and 1930. Recording as Noah Lewis’ Jug Band, he was backed on two numbers by Sleepy John and Yank Rachell with just Estes backing him on two other numbers cut a couple of days apart. Lewis died in poverty of gangrene brought on by frostbite in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1961.

Harmonica player Hammie Nixon was born on January 22, 1908, in Brownsville, TN. He began his career as a professional harmonica player in the 1920s, but also played the kazoo, guitar, and jug. “I used to hear a lot about him, John Adam”, Nixon recalled, “and I was just a kid, living out on my parent’s home near Ripley.  …And he heard me playing and he asks me would I like to go and play my harp for him?So I told him yes, but I had o ask my mama first because I was just young, see. So he comes back to my mama’s house with me, but she didn’t want me to go you know. Anyhow he says like he would look after me and provide for me and so forth so she let me go. And we been together ever since.” He performed with Sleepy John Estes for more than 50 years. He also recorded with Lee Green, Charlie Pickett, and Son Bonds. He played with many jug bands. After Estes died, Nixon played with the Beale Street Jug Band (also called the Memphis Beale Street Jug Band) from 1979 onward. Shortly before his death he cut his lone album, the marvelous  Tappin’ That Thing for the High Water label. He died August 17, 1984.

Another associate of Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, Son 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’s songs, “Back and Side Blues” cut in 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” he cut in 1937.Bonds cut a total of fifteen sides over five sessions in 1934, 1938 and 1941. Hammie Nixon backs Bonds on the two 1934 sessions while Estes backs Bonds on his last two sessions in 1938 and 1941.On his Decca and Champion sides Bonds was called Brownsville Son Bonds and Brother Son Bonds at his second Decca session which was religious. Nixon gave the following account of Bonds’ death: “He got killed around the same time that Sonny Boy got killed. Sonny Boy got killed in Chicago, Son got killed in Dyersburg. A fellow shot him, he though he was shooting somebody else. Son was sitting on his porch. This guy wore them great thick glasses and he got into it with the guy who lived next door to Son. It was way about 12:00 at night and he though it was the boy who lived next door.” Estes had a different version involving a woman and a plot to get Bonds’ insurance money.

Little is known about Charlie Pickett, who was from Brownsville, TN. Sheldon Harris reported that he was Estes cousin. Hammie Nixon had him performing in a group with Estes, Nixon, and others on the streets of Chicago in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Nixon told Kip Lornell in 1975, “He started preaching in St. Louis, been living in St. Louis for a couple of years. I think he’s preaching in Los Angeles now.” Of the song “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon”,Nixon said, “I will never forget the first time he started playing that song, how he sung a something like, ‘When I got home, another nigger kicking in my stall.’ The bossman told him ‘don’t say that no more!’” He cut four sides for Decca in 1937 backed by Hammie Nixon and Lee Brown.  Pickett also played guitar behind Estes on 19 numbers at sessions in 1937 and 1938. He or Estes may have played guitar behind pianist Lee Green at a 1937 session.

Pianist Lee Brown was another member of the Tennessee musicians who who worked in Estes orbit. As Tony Russell sums up: “…Brown was subsequently more prolific than his modest talent merited.” His lone hit was “Little Girl, Little Girl” from his second 1937 session, sessions at which he backed Estes and Charlie Pickett. Estes backs Brown on two songs from his first session. In all Brown was involved in six sessions that yielded twenty-nine sides with one unissued. He was backed by some top flight backing musicians including Charlie Shavers, Sammy Price, Buster Bailey, Henry Allen, Robert Lee McCoy and Lil Armstrong among others. Brown cut some post-war material including two songs in 1945 for the Chicago label and a session for King in 1946

Show Notes:

We cover a wide swath of blues spanning from 1927 through 1976. Along the way we spotlight some fine piano blues, several superb blues ladies, lots of pre-war blues including twin spins of Charlie Patton and two by Memphis Slim. Among the featured piano players are a couple from St. Louis; Aaron “Pinteop” Sparks and Charlie McFadden. According to Henry Townsend McFadden could play a little piano but on his records deferred to others including Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Miller and Aaron “Pinteop” Sparks. McFadden was a marvelous vocalist who possessed a plaintive, laid back delivery and was a good lyricist to boot. McFadden used the name “Speck” Pertum when he recorded for Brunswick, nicknamed for the glasses he always wore. Based in St. Louis, he toured extensively with Roosevelt Sykes, traveling as far south as Texas. McFadden cut two-dozen sides between 1929 and 1937 for a variety of different labels. According to Townsend he passed sometime in the early 1940’s.

The Sparks brothers were based in St. Louis and cut four sessions, the first for Victor and the other three for Bluebird, between 1932 and 1935. Milton cut two songs for Decca in 1934 under the name Flyin’ Lindberg. Aaron backed a number of St. Louis artists at their second session: Elisabeth Washington, Tecumseh McDowell, Dorotha Trowbridge, James “Stump” Johnson and Charlie McFadden.Townsend remembered the brothers well:   “He [Marion] just kept getting better and better and got to playing for illegal joints y’know. …Pinetop was doing a lot of house-party playing and uh ’cause this was a trend then. We would go from house-party to house-party and make some money to pay the rent. We’d go from place to place like that I mean it’d be announced at this party before it was over that there would be such and such a place to get their rent paid and Pinetop would play for those kind of parties where they had a piano–and I kinda went around him quite a bit.” Now at that time Milton wasn’t singing, Pinetop was the star when it come to singing. And so just out of nowhere Milton decided he was going to sing and he’d start. …Aaron got the name Pinetop because “He was very good at the number that Smith made [Pinetop Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"]. Today’s selection, “Down On The Levee”, is a typically sensitive mid-tempo number featuring Milton’s fine, mellow delivery and some wonderful right hand flourishes from Aaron.

Mack Rhinehart and Brownie Stubblefield were a piano/guitar team that cut a dozen sides in 1936 and 1937. Rhinehart also recorded solo as Blind Mack in 1935 but only two of his ten  sides were ever released.  According to Blues & Gospel Records some twenty-two sides by the duo remain unissued. Nothing is known about the duo although noted researcher David Evans called Rhinehart “a major artist” with “an outstanding recorded legacy.”

Better known is Montana Taylor who was born Arthur Taylor in Butte, Montana, where his father owned a club. The family moved to Chicago and then Indianapolis, where Taylor learned piano around 1919. Later he moved to Cleveland, Ohio. By 1929 he was back in Chicago, where he recorded a few tracks for Vocalion Records, including “Indiana Avenue Stomp” and “Detroit Rocks”. He then disappeared for some years but was rediscovered by jazz fan Rudi Blesh, and was recorded both solo and as the accompanist to Bertha “Chippie” Hill who sings on today’s track, “Mistreatin’ Mr. Dupree.” His final recordings were from a 1948 radio broadcast. Taylor died in 1954. Taylor’s final recordings are collected on the CD Circle Recordings on the Southland label.

Bertha “Chippie” Hill

We showcase several fine blues ladies including stars Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith plus lesser known singers like Mary Johnson, Hattie Burleson and Hattie Hudson. From 1928 we hear Bessie in top form in “Slow And Easy Man.” The Columbia Records 1927 catalog gave prominence to Bessie as “The Empress of the Blues” and listed a full three pages of her recordings. The advertising read: “Wherever the blues are sung, there you will hear the name of Bessie Smith, best loved of all the Race’s blues singers. Bessie has the knack for picking the songs you like and the gift of singing them the way you want them sung. Every year this famous ‘Empress of the Blues’ tours the country appearing before packed houses.”  Like Bessie Ma Rainey made her debut in 1923. Born in 1886, she said that she added blues in her act in 1902 and by the 1920’s it certainly dominated her repertoire. Our selection, “Leaving This Morning”, is one of eight numbers she cut in 1928 backed by the team of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey.

Of the lesser known ladies, Mary Johnson of St. Louis (sometimes billed as “Signifying Mary”) made her debut in 1929. She cut just shy of two-dozen songs, achieved modest success and never recorded again after 1936 despite living until 1970. Johnson was blessed with superb backing musicians throughout her brief career that elevated her recordings above many of her contemporaries. She was accompanied by either Henry Brown, Judson Brown, Roosevelt Sykes, or Peetie Wheetstraw on piano, many selections featuring trombonist Ike Rodgers, guitarists Tampa Red and Kokomo Arnold and violinist Artie Mosby. Hattie Burleson and Hattie Hudson both hail from Dallas. Hudson cut one 78 in Dallas in 1927.Texas blues singer Hattie Burleson recorded four tracks in Dallas, TX, for Brunswick Records in October 1928. Two years later she recorded three sides in Grafton, WI, for Paramount Records. Little else is known about her life, save that she lived in the famed Deep Ellum area of downtown Dallas, where she operated a dancehall for a time. Her “Sadie’s Servant Room Blues” is a rare protest song dealing with domestic service:

Missus Jarvis don’t pay me much
They give me just what they think I’m worth
I’m gonna change my mind, yes change my mind
Cause I keep the servant room blues all the time

I receive my company in the rear
Still these folks don’t want to see them here
Gonna change my mind, yes change my mind
Cause I keep the servant room blues all the time

We spin a pair of tracks apiece by Memphis Slim and Charlie Patton. From Slim we play tracks form two excellent 1960’s records: Sonet Blues Story cut for Verve in 1967 and  Bad Luck & Trouble cut for Candid in 1961 a session he shared with Jazz Gillum and Arbee Stidham. The former session is a nice date featuring excellent contributions from guitarist Billy Butler and tenor man Eddie Chamblee. Slim is in majestic form on today’s number, “I Am The Blues.” The latter date finds Slim running through some favorites and offering up some spoken commentary about the songs’ originators like Leroy Carr, Big Maceo and Curtis Jones.

We return again to Charlie Patton who we spotlighted at the end of November. I never get tired of listening to Patton and this time we spin a couple of tracks I didn’t get to last time: “Elder Greene” and “Hammer Blues.” “Elder Greene” was likely a song Patton picked up from his mentor Henry Sloan.  As David Evans noted the song is “related melodically to versions of “Alabama Bound,” a song that Patton’s niece identified in Sloan’s repertoire. Of the latter number Evans writes  “‘Hammer Blues’ there are brief mentions of serving a sentence on a road gang and being shackled in preparation for a train ride to Parchman Penitentiary in northern Sunflower County. It is not known whether these verses refer to an experience of Patton or of one or more of his friends.”

We play some more modern blues, relatively speaking, from the 1960’s. Among those are cuts by L.C. Robinson (House Cleanin’ Blues) and Homesick James (Ain’t Sick No More) cut for the Bluesway label. ABC-Paramount formed the BluesWay subsidiary in 1966 to record blues music. The label lasted into 1974, with the last new releases coming in February, 1974. The label issued over 70 albums, numerous 45’s plus several titles that remain unreleased. The label has been ill served reissue wise with only a handful of releases issued on CD, usually by labels other than the parent company MCA, and in many cases these CD’s themselves are out of print. MCA has largely left the catalogue languish. The BluesWay label has a decidedly mixed reputation, cutting many very good records and many downright bad ones. At some point I’ll be doing a feature on the Bluesway label.

Show Notes:

When a woman get the blues, she goes to her room and hides (2x)
When a man gets the blues, he catches a freight train and rides
(Trixie Smith, Freight Train Blues)

For southern Blacks the appeal of the railroads has always been both a real and a symbolic one. For them the train was a symbol of power, of freedom and escape.  As blues historian Paul Oliver wrote: “In the slavery periods when they were unable to travel between districts without written ‘bonds’ from their owners, the snorting engines, with brilliant furnaces traces their progress and clouds of black smoke that hung in the still air above the tracks long after the screaming whistles had died away, inspired them in awe which their descendants still retain.” This image carried on, in the hard times of the 1920’s and 1930s’, when the southern Blacks struggled to make a living and saw the northern cities as their saviors, where work was plentiful and a better life was to be had. As the blues developed, the railroad featured prominently in the songs. Numerous songs were sung about individual trains such as the Flying Crow, the Sunshine Special and the Panama Limited, many simply abbreviated like the C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio), T&P (Texas Pacific) or the L&N (Louisville and Nashville), many songs dealt with the hobos who rode the rails, others dealt with working for the railroad while other songs retold the famous railroad ballads of John Henry, Railroad Bill and Casey Jones. Today’s show will spotlight all of these types of railroad blues.

The title of today’s program comes from the song by Henry Thomas. Thomas, nicknamed “Ragtime Texas”, was born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas. The 1874 date marks him as one of the eldest-born blues performers on record. Thomas was the archetypal rambling musician who went wherever the railroads would take him. According to Mack McCormick, as told to him from a former railroad conductor, “Ragtime Texas was a big fellow that used to come aboard at Gladewater or Mineola or somewhere in there. I’d always carry him, except when he was too dirty. He was a regular hobo, but I’d carry him most of the time. That guitar was his ticket.” Speaking of his famous “Railroadin’ Some”, William Barlow calls it the most “vivid and intense recollection of railroading” in all the early blues recorded in the 1920’s.

Among the famous railroad songs featured today are two associated with Leadbelly, “Rock Island Line” and ‘Midnight Special”, and the folk ballads Casey Jones, John Henry and Railroad Bill. John Lomax recorded “Rock Island Line” at the Cummins State Prison farm, Gould, Arkansas, in 1934 from its convict composer, Kelly Pace. Leadbelly, who was with Lomax at the time, rearranged it in his own style, and made commercial recordings of it in the forties. The song refers to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Lyrics appearing in the “Midnight Special” were first recorded in print by Howard Odum in 1905. The song was first commercially recorded on the OKeh label in 1926 as “Pistol Pete’s Midnight Special” by Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell and the following year by bluesman Sam Collins. In 1934 Lead Belly recorded a version of the song at Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who mistakenly attributed it to him as the author. Leadbelly recorded at least three versions of the song, including the one we feature with the Golden Gate Quartet.

John Luther “Casey” Jones was an American railroad engineer from Jackson, Tennessee who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. On April 30, 1900, he alone was killed when his passenger train collided with a stalled freight train at Vaughan, Mississippi on a foggy and rainy night. His dramatic death trying to stop his train and save lives made him a folk hero who became immortalized in a popular song. We spin two versions on today’s program: “Kassie Jones Pt. 1″ by Furry Lewis and “Southern Casey Jones” by Jesse James.

John Henry is an American folk hero, notable for having raced against a steam powered hammer and won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. He has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels. The truth about John Henry is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Missouri in the 1840s and fought his notable battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. On today’s show we play a version by the duo The Two Poor Boys.

The legend of Railroad Bill arose in the winter of 1895, along the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad line in southern Alabama. Based loosely on the exploits of an African American outlaw known as “Railroad Bill,” tales of his brief but action-filled career on the wrong side of the law have been preserved in song, fiction, and theater. He has been variously portrayed as a “Robin Hood” character, a murderous criminal and a nameless victim of the Jim Crow South. He was never conclusively identified, but L&N detectives claimed he was a man named Morris Slater. Today we spin  “Railroad Bill” by Will Bennett.

Featured today are several songs about specific trains or railroad lines. Our opening track “Sunshine Special” by Blind Lemon Jefferson refers the train of the same name which was inaugurated by the Missouri Pacific Railroad on December 5, 1915, providing service between St. Louis, Little Rock, and destinations in Texas. The Sunshine Special served as the flagship of Missouri Pacific Railroad’s passenger train service. Several songs make reference to the Flying Crow, a train line connecting Port Arthur, Texas to Kansas City with major stops in Shreveport and Texarkana. Black Ivory King, Carl Davis & the Dallas Jamboree Jug Band, Dusky Dailey, Washboard Sam and Oscar Woods all recorded songs about the train. Other songs dealing with specific trains featured today include Jack Ranger’s “T.P. Window Blues” ( Texas Pacific Railroad), Lucille Bogan’s “T& NO Blues” (Texas and New Orleans Railroad), Sparks Brothers‘ “I.C. Train Blues” (Illinois Central Railroad), Little Brother Montgomery’s “A. & V. Railroad Blues” (Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad), Willie Brown’s “M&O Blues” (Mobile and Ohio Railroad), Billiken Johnson’s “Sun Beam Blues” (Sunbeam was a named passenger train operated from 1925 to 1955 between Houston and Dallas by the Texas and New Orleans Railroad), Andrew and Jim Baxter’s “K C Railroad Blues” (Kansas City Southern Railway), George Noble’s “The Seminole Blues” (Seminole Gulf Railway), and Pink Anderson & Simmnie Dooley’s “C.C. and O. Blues” (Chesapeake and Ohio). Sam Collins’ “Yellow Dog Blues” seems to refer to two trains. In 1903 W.C. Handy related how he heard a lean, raggedy, black guitarist in Tutwiler’s railroad depot, singing of going to where the “Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” The “Southern” was the Southern Railway which began operations in 1894.“The Dog” was the Yellow Dog, a name for the Yazoo Delta Railroad which opened in 1897.

Several songs like Bukka White’s ” Special Streamline” and Cripple Clarence Lofton’s “Streamline Train” refer to streamliners. A streamliner is any vehicle that incorporates streamlining to produce a shape that provides less resistance to air. The term is most often applied to certain high-speed railway trainsets of the 1930’s to 1950’s. For a short time in the late 1930s, the ten fastest trains in the world were all American streamliners.

Other trains immortalized in blues songs will be featured in the sequel to today’s show; trains such as the Cannon Ball (an Illinois Central passenger train routing between Chicago and New Orleans, now known as the City of New Orleans), the Santa Fe (Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), the Seaboard (The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad), the Katy (the Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Texas line), the Big four (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad ) and the New York Central among others.

Show Notes:

I was a fan of Art Rosenbaum’s recordings without actually knowing much about him. Among my favorite records of the 1960’s are a pair on the Bluesville label; Scrapper Blackwell’s Mr. Scrapper’s Blues and Shirley Griffith’s Saturday Blues. Rosenbaum, like his contemporaries who went  into the field, men such as George Mitchell, Pete Lowry, David Evans, Sam Charters, Pete Welding, mostly stayed in the background. It wasn’t until recently when a couple of recent well praised reissues put him in the spotlight. Those included two 4-CD box sets on the Dust-To-Digital label, the Art Of Field Recording I & II. The first volume won a Grammy for 2008 Best Historical Album. While Rosenbaum recorded a wide variety of roots music, our focus today will be on his blues recordings. In addition we talk to Art near the end of the first hour.

Art Rosenbaum is a painter, muralist, and illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. His folk music field work in the South and Midwest has resulted in over 14 recordings, several of which are on Smithsonian-Folkways; he wrote and illustrated two books, Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (1983), and Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition on the Coast of Georgia (1998). A performer on a variety of folk instruments, he has appeared at numerous folk festivals both solo and with groups. His field recordings have been collected on two 4-CD box sets on the Dust-To-Digital label called the Art Of Field Recording. Rosenbaum was also involved in producing several albums for Bluesville in the early 1960’s including records by Indianapolis artists such as Scrapper Blackwell, Pete Franklin, Shirley Griffith, J.T.Adams and Brooks Berry.

Scrapper Blackwell began working with pianist Leroy Carr, whom he met in Indianapolis in the mid-1920’s. Carr convinced Blackwell to record with him for the Vocalion label in 1928; the result was “How Long, How Long Blues”, the biggest blues hit of that year. Blackwell also made solo recordings for Vocalion, including “Kokomo Blues” which was transformed into “Old Kokomo Blues” by Kokomo Arnold before being redone as “Sweet Home Chicago” by Robert Johnson. Blackwell and Carr toured throughout the American Midwest and South between 1928 and 1935 as stars of the blues scene, recording over 100 sides. Blackwell’s last recording session with Carr was in February 1935 for the Bluebird label. The recording session ended bitterly, as both musicians left the studio mid-session and on bad terms, stemming from payment disputes. Two months later Blackwell received a phone call informing him of Carr’s death due to heavy drinking and nephritis. Blackwell soon recorded a tribute to his musical partner of seven years (“My Old Pal Blues”) before retiring from the music industry. Blackwell returned to music in the late 1950’s where he was recorded first  in June 1958 by Colin C. Pomroy. He was next recorded by Duncan P. Schiedt  in 1959 and 1950. These recordings appeared on on the album Blues Before Sunrise on the 77 label. Rosenbaum recorded him in 1962 for the Prestige/Bluesville Records label resulting in his finest latter day recording, the album Mr. Scrapper’s Blues. In 1963 Rosenbaum recorded him again for Bluesville, this time with singer Brooks Berry resulting in the album My Heart Struck Sorrow which has yet to be issued on CD. Sadly Blackwell was shot and killed during a mugging in an Indianapolis alley in 1962. He was 59 years old.

Shirley Griffith was a deeply expressive singer and guitarist who learned first hand from Tommy Johnson as a teenager in Mississippi. Griffith missed his opportunity to record as a young man but recorded three superb albums: Indiana Ave. Blues (1964, with partner J.T. Adams), Saturday Blues (1965), both recorded by Art Rosenbaum for Bluesville, and Mississippi Blues (1973) cut for Blue Goose. Unfortunatley all three albums have yet to be reissued on CD. In 1928 Griffith’s friend and mentor, Tommy Johnson, offered to help him get started but, by his own account, he was too “wild and reckless” in those days. In 1928 he moved to Indianapolis where he became friendly with Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr. It was Art Rosenbaum who was responsible for getting Griffith on record. “I recall one August afternoon”, he wrote in the notes to Saturday Blues, “shortly after these recordings were made; Shirley sat in Scrapper Blackwell’s furnished room singing the “Bye Bye Blues” with such intensity that everyone present was deeply moved, though they had all heard him sing it many times before. Scrapper was playing , too, and the little room swelled with sound. When they finished there was a moment of awkward silence. Finally Shirley smiled and said: ‘The blues’ll kill you. And make you live, too.” Griffith achieved modest notice touring clubs with Yank Rachell in 1968, performed at the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival in 1969 and appeared at the Notre Dame Blues Festival in South Bend, Indiana in 1971.

John Tyler Adams was born in Western Kentucky and it was his father who started him out on guitar. In 1941 he went up North, eventually settling in Indianapolis. Adams became good friends with Shirley Griffith and at the time of this recording had been playing together for fifteen years. Adams recorded just one album, Indiana Ave. Blues on Bluesville with Griffith with other sides appearing on the album Indianapolis Jump issued on Flyright.

Neal Pattman was born in Madison County, GA. and at age seven he lost his right arm in a farming accident. His father taught him to play harmonica soon after. His playing and soulful vocals made him something of a local legend but he remained unknown to the blues world at large until 1989, when he performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center and immediately thereafter was flooded with invitations to tour internationally. In 1991, he met Timothy Duffy, head of the Maker Relief Foundation — Duffy teamed Pattman with some of the other acts supported by the organization, most notably singer/guitarist Cootie Stark, with whom he mounted the 48-city Blues Revival Tour in support of Taj Mahal. A 1995 date at London’s 100 Club alongside British guitarist Dave Peabody was the subject of Pattman’s long-awaited debut LP, Live in London. Three years later, Duffy’s Music Maker label released the follow-up, Prison Blues. Pattman died of cancer on May 4, 2005, a few months after contributing to Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s 10 Days Out: Blues from the Backroads. Today’s selection, “Key To The Highway”, comes from the Art Of Field Recording I.

Ceci Barfiled was first recorded by George Mitchell who called Barfield “probably the greatest previously unrecorded bluesman I have had the pleasure of recording during my 15 years of field research.” Using the name William Robertson, in fear of endangering his welfare checks, he cut the LP South Georgia Blues for Southland in the mid-70’s with several other tracks appearing on Flyright’s Georgia Blues Today. He was also recorded by Pete Lowery and Art Rosenbaum. Today’s selection, “Georgia Bottleneck Blues”, comes from the Art Of Field Recording I.

Pete Franklin’s mother was good friend with Leroy Carr, who roomed at their house shortly before he passed in 1935. Franklin eventually became proficient on piano and guitar. After getting discharged from the war Franklin found his way to Chicago where he backed St. Louis Jimmy on a 1947 record and made his debut under his own name for Victor in 1949 waxing “Casey Brown Blues b/w Down Behind The Rise.”  In the late 1940’s and early 5o’s he backed Jazz Gillum, John Brim and Sunnyland Slim. Art Rosenbaum recorded Franklin in 1961 which resulted in the Bluesville album Guitar Pete’s Blues. A few other recordings appear on the album Indianapolis Jump.

Brooks Berry moved to Indianapolis in her early teens. As Art Rosenbaum wrote: “She met Scrapper shortly after she moved to Indianapolis and thus began a long though at times stormy friendship that was to end suddenly some fifteen months after the last of the present recordings were made. On October 6, 1962. Scrapper was shot to death in a back alley near his home. Brooks has been, during the four years I have known her, reluctant to sing blues without her friend’s sensitive guitar or piano playing behind her; and she will sing less and less now that he is gone.”  As Rosenabum observed: “Singing blues is for Brooks not a social activity or a performance for others, although it once might have been, but rather a completely internal and personal expression. She sings with her eyes shut, swaying back and forth to her music, apparently unconscious of those around her. It is a deeply moving and often slightly awkward experience to listen to her sing—one sometimes feels that he is intruding or her most private thoughts and feelings.” Rosenbaum recorded the duo in 1961 resulting in the Bluesville album My Heart Struck Sorrow. Berry was also recorded live with Blackwell at a 1959 concert which are available on the Document CD Scrapper Blackwell with Brooks Berry 1959 – 1960.

Several track were omitted due to the length of the interview. I’ve included those tracks below plus the interview:

Scrapper Blackwell Brooks Berry – Blues And Trouble (MP3)

Shirley Griffith-Yank Rachell – Mandolin Stomp (MP3)

Cliff  Sheats – Got the Blues So Bad (MP3)

Guitar Pete Franklin – How Long Blues (MP3)

Art Rosenbaum Interview (MP3)

Show Notes:

Mission statement released after United had been in existence for one year

The United Record Company was launched in July 1951, by Leonard Allen and Lew Simpkins, a veteran record man who had worked for the Miracle and Premium Records and brought many of their former artists to the new label. A news item in the trade press dated July 21, 1951, announces the formation of the United Recording Company. “The guiding force behind this new company is a Chicago area entertainment entrepreneur by the name of Lewis Simpkins. He had previous experience with the local Miracle and Premium labels in the Chicago areas. Simpkins is unique because he is one of the very few Black record company owners producing this music that is largely by and for the Black community. He joins the Rene Brothers in California (Excelsior and Exclusive) and soon to be executives Vivian Carter and James Bracken in nearby Gary Indiana with the Vee-Jay label.”

United enjoyed early success, scoring hits by Tab Smith, Jimmy Forrest, and the Four Blazes; during its first year it was outdoing its local rival Chess on the charts. The United label took off impressively, scoring two number one R&B hits among its first ten releases: Tab Smith’s “Because of You,” and Jimmy Forrest’s “Night Train.” United formally opened for business with a long recording session on July 12, 1951. The company was able to expand and open a new imprint called States in May 1952. United and States recorded a substantial roster of jazz artists. The company also recorded a substantial amount of blues including artists like Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Slim, J. T. Brown, “Big” Walter Horton, J. T. Brown, Robert Nighthawk, Junior Wells and others. The label also recorded a fair bit of gospel and vocal harmony groups.During its first 2 1/2 years of operation, the company recorded 463 masters. The death of Lew Simpkins, who died suddenly on April 27, 1953, was a serious blow; Leonard Allen was left to run the enterprise with limited help until the label’s demise in 1957. While the company remained fairly healthy during 1954, activity dropped off sharply after that. Of the 281 sides that the company cut during this period, 130 were done in 1954. By the end of 1956 Leonard Allen was reduced to selling off half of the house music publishing company to pay his tax bill. Too many years without hits finally brought United and States down after the company’s Christmas releases in 1957. Bob Koester of Delmark Records acquired most of the label’s masters in 1975 and has reissued the bulk of this material on LP and CD. I want to thank the folks at Delmark for sending me several titles that made this show possible. Below is some background on some of today’s featured artists, most of which comes from the The Red Saunders Research Foundation website.

Roosevelt Sykes, like Nighthawk, was recorded on United’s first day of sessions on July 12, 1951. He cut two additional sessions in August 1951 and March 1953. There is speculation that Nighthawk plays guitar on the first Sykes session. Robert Nighthawk was recorded by United on their very first day of sessions and two of United’s first five releases were by Robert Nighthawk and his Nighthawks Band. Sales never took off and Nighthawk headed back south and wouldn’t record again until 1964. Leonard Allen scoffed: “Robert Nighthawk? I didn’t think nothin’ of him. I didn’t go into those joints where they were playing. Lew knew him- he had Robert Nighthawk in mind for the first session. So after he cut the session it did nothin’.” Nighthawk recorded two sessions for United, one on July 12, 1951 and one on October 25, 1952 for its subsidiary States. His complete recordings for the label are collected on the CD Bricks in My Pillow.

Memphis Slim cut around 30 sides for United at sessions in 1952, 1953 and two in 1954. This was a particularly inspired period for Slim who added his first permanent guitarist, Matt Murphy to his band. These recordings have been reissued on the Delmark CD’s Memphis Slim U.S.A. and The Come Back. Memphis Slim had been recording since 1940. Based in Chicago during this phase of his career, he had been a mainstay at three postwar independents: first Hy-Tone, then Miracle, and finally Miracle’s successor entity Premium. After Premium collapsed in the summer of 1951, Slim cut three sessions for Mercury in Chicago. Lew Simpkins, who knew Slim from the days when he was moving 78’s for Miracle and Premium, brought him to United as soon as he could.

J.T. Brown also recorded during United’s first day – and his “Windy City Boogie” was credited by United proprietor Leonard Allen with “saving our first money.” J.T. is best remembered for the accompaniments he provided for Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Roosevelt Sykes, Johnny Shines, and J.B. Lenoir. In his liner notes for the United reissues on Delmark, Jim O’Neal remarked that he “was a bluesman. By jazz standards, he was not a great instrumentalist. His lack of sophistication, subtlety, and tonal variations prevented him from moving into more ‘progressive’ circles.” Brown first performed as a member of the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the South before moving to Chicago in the early 1940’s.

One of the top R&B records of 1952, “Mary Jo” provided a moment in the national spotlight for one of Chicago’s hottest vocal combos, The Four Blazes. The single moved rapidly to the top, displacing Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” as the #1 R&B song in the nation at the end of August. Bassist Tommy Braden was the main lead singer while all members provided backup harmony vocals. “Jelly” Holt was the founder and drummer in the group, while Floyd McDaniel and “Shorty” Hill played guitars. The Four Blazes formed in 1940 and made their recording debut with a few sides for Aristocrat in 1947 before landing at United in 1952.

In what was likely a response to Chess’ success with Little Walter, United signed harp ace Junior Wells. After a youthful apprenticeship in the Aces and then the Muddy Waters band (when Little Walter went out on his own he took over the Aces, while Junior moved into his chair in Muddy’s band, and appeared on one of Muddy’s sessions for Chess), he was ready to make his first sides as a leader for the States subsidiary.  Down Beat’s Pete Welding wrote “In their power, directness, unerring taste and utter consistency of mood, these may well be the most perfectly distilled examples of Wells’ music ever recorded, taking their place alongside of those of Waters, Walter, Wolf and other masters of the period.” These historic sessions also feature Louis and Dave Myers, Willie Dixon, Johnnie Jones, Fred Below and Odie Payne Jr. Recorded by United Records in 1953 and 1954 at Universal Studio in Chicago, eight sides were issued on the subsidiary States label.

Walter Horton moved to Chicago in the late 1940’s, but during 1951-54 made frequent trips to Memphis to record for Modern, behind other artists and under the name Mumbles. He also made sideman appearances for Chicago-based labels, with Muddy Waters for Chess (January 1953) and Johnny Shines for JOB (the same month). He recorded under the name Big Walter Horton for the first time when he signed with United in 1954. Horton also backed singer Tommy Brown the same year. Brown’s United session on August 26 featured an all-star lineup of Walter Horton (harmonica), Harold Ashby (tenor sax), Memphis Slim (piano), Lee Cooper (guitar), and Willie Dixon (bass); the drums are unknown. Brown remains an active performer.

Leonard Allen  recorded blues artists Morris Pejoe and Big Boy Spires in Al Smith’s basement (5313 South Drexel). Although the Pejoe session was interesting enough to justify putting matrix numbers on it, Allen eventually backpedaled, most likely because of the less-than-professional sound quality. Neither saw release until Delmarkr put them out on an album in 1989. Pejoe was born Morris Pejas in Louisiana, and began his music career on the violin. After moving to Beaumont, Texas, in 1949, he switched to guitar. In 1951 he was in Chicago, performing with pianist Henry Gray. During 1952-53 he recorded three sessions for Checker, accompanied by Gray among others. The United session was held in December 1954.

Arthur “Big Boy” Spires was born in Natchez, Mississippi; he started playing guitar only in the late 1930s. Spires came to Chicago in 1943, and played house-rent parties during the decade. It was not until 1950 or 1951 that he graduated to nightclubs. He first recorded for Checker in 1952 (which produced his best known record, “Murmur Low”), and did a strong session for Chance in January 1953. In December 1953, Big Boy Spires and His Rhythm Rocking Three was advertised as the feature act in the grand opening celebration of the Palace Inn (the ad failed to list an address). The date of the Spires session for Leonard Allen seems to be December 1954 or shortly thereafter.

The most down-home blues session ever recorded by Leonard Allen featured harmonica player Alfred “Blues King” Harris and drummer James Bannister. Bannister got the vocals on “Blues and Trouble” and “Gold Digger,” which were the only titles to be released from the session at the time; States 141 is a very rare record. Harris sang on the rest, which did not see issue until they appeared on a Delmark LP many years later. Bannister had made unissued recordings for Sun in Memphis and for Chess before cutting this session for States. Harris, who could sing in the B. B. King manner and often billed himself as Blues King, made one track for Modern in Memphis. He was booked into the Be-Bop Club for 6 months in 1954 when Allen recorded him. He waxed five sides for United that same year. In the late 1950’s, Harris put out a single on J. Mayo Williams’ low-circulation Ebony label. He dropped off the Chicago scene after 1959 and his later movements are untraced.

Other performers featured today include Jimmy Coe, Eddie Chamblee, Arbee Stidham, L.C. McKinley and Ernie K-Doe among others. United recorded several fine sax players who’s music straddled the line between R&B and jazz. Many are featured on Delmark’s three volume Honkers & Bar Walkers series including Jimmy Coe and Eddie Chamblee. From 1941 to 1946 Chamblee worked as a musician in Army bands; after his discharge he put together his own combo. His first notable work was on the Miracle label, particularly on the huge hit “Long Gone” by Sonny Thompson, which recorded for 1947. After Chamblee went out on his own in 1948, his records for Miracle and Premium sold well, and Lew Simpkins no doubt remembered him. In addition to putting out sides under his own name he also played on many sides backing the Four Blazes. On our selection, “La! La! La! Lady”, Chamblee also takes the vocal. Arbee Stidham was the last blues artist to record for Leonard Allen, and was responsible for the very last release on States. He came to Chicago in the 1940s and his first recording for RCA Victor in 1947 produced a number one R&B hit on the Billboard race chart, “My Heart Belongs To You.” Subsequently he cut sides for Victor, Checker, Sittin’ With and Abco before signing with States in 1957. Only rone record was issued featuring the guitar of Earl Hooker. L. C. McKinley was T-Bone Walker disciple who made from Mississippi to Chicago in 1951. In the early 1950’s he was a regular headliner at the famed 708 Club. In 1951 and 1952, he recorded as a sideman with pianist Eddie Boyd for JOB, appearing on Boyd’s biggest hit, “Five Long Years.” He first recorded as a leader in 1953 for the Parrot label, but Al Benson chose not to release his session. McKinley signed with States around the beginning of 1954 and cut four sides for the label. In 1955 United became the first to record Ernie K-Doe, who was living and performing in Chicago at the time under his real name, Ernest Kador. K-Doe spent nearly his entire life in New Orleans, but in 1953, after winning several singing and dancing competitions back home, he came to Chicago for a brief time to live with his mother. He met the Four Blazes at the Crown Propeller Lounge; the Blazes introduced him to A&R man Dave Clark, who was doing some work for United at the time and supervised the session. In early November he was singing at the Apex Country Club in Robbins, Illinois (13624 Claire Blvd) as “Ernest Kado.” The Chicago Defender ad (12 November) was already billing him as “United Recording Artist.”

Show Notes:

It was Lonnie Johnson who gave the title to today’s program when exclaimed, “Violin, sing the blues for me!” during a recording session for Okeh Records in 1928, released under the name the Johnson Boys. The title was also used for a collection of violin blues on the Old Hat label which we feature extensively on today’s show. We also feature a number of tracks from Old Hat’s companion CD, Folks, He Sure Do Pull Some Bow! The violin once played a significant role in the early history of recorded blues. As collector Marshall Wyatt points out, “the violin once held center stage in the rich pageant of vernacular music that evolved in the American South… and the fiddle held sway as the dominant folk instrument of both races until the dawn of the 20th century.” Today, outside of a few exceptions, African-American music has mostly abandoned the violin to white country fiddlers. Many black musicians active during the 1920s and ’30s came from a string-band tradition rooted in the 19th century, an era predating the blues when fiddles and banjos were the predominant instruments, and guitars a rarity. Black fiddlers and string bands were still common in the South throughout the 1920s, were not entirely ignored by the record industry, but were they were certainly under-represented. Some black string bands incorporated blues into their repertoires in order to keep abreast of trends. As the record business began to rebound in the mid-1930s, musical trends became rapidly modernized due to the spreading influence of mass media, and black fiddlers found even fewer recording opportunities. Below you will find some background on some of today’s featured artists.

Bo Carter, who played guitar and violin, was one of the most popular bluesmen of the ’30’s, cutting over a hundred sides between 1928 and 1940. He also worked with his brothers, Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, in the popular Mississippi Sheiks band. The Mississippi Sheiks were one of the most popular string bands of the late ’20s and early ’30s with a repertoire that drew upon all facets of black and white rural music: blues, pop music, hokum, white country and traditional songs. Their rendition of “Sitting on Top of the World” has become an enduring standard. The group consisted of guitarist Walter Vinson and fiddler Lonnie Chatmon, with frequent appearances by guitarists Bo Carter and Sam Chatmon, who were also busy with their own solo careers.In addition to featuring several tracks by Bo Carter and Mississippi Sheiks, we also hear the Sheiks backing Texas Alexander on the topical “Frost Texas Tornado Blues.” On April 9th 1934 the group backed Alexander on eight numbers.

Beginning in 1926, Peg Leg Howell performed a number of guitar blues for Columbia Records in Atlanta, but he also joined with his “Gang” to record rollicking stomps and rags, led by Eddie Anthony’s wailing fiddle. Our selection, both sides of a 78, “New Jelly Roll Blues” b/w “Beaver Slide Rag” were recorded on April 8, 1927 and advertised in the Chicago Defender. He arrived in the city in 1923 and was recorded by Columbia in November 1926. Howell’s first session featured him solo and are certainly appealing but it’s the rough, exciting stringband music he recorded with His Gang that really grabs attention. The gang consisted of Henry Williams on guitar and the infectious alley fiddle of Eddie Anthony. The duo backed Howell on two dozen sides. Williams apparently died in jail in January 1930 while serving time for vagrancy and Anthony passed in 1934, after which Howell gave up music. Henry Williams & Eddie Anthony cut one 78 together in 1928, the stupendous “Lonesome Blues” b/w/ “Georgia Crawl.” Singer Sloppy Henry cut sixteen sides between 1924 and 1929. At a 1928 session he was backed by Peg Leg Howell and Eddie Anthony, heard to good effect on the colorfully titled “Long Tall, Disconnected Mama” in which Anthony exclaims “I got good chicken and this vio-leen.” Eddie Anthony also recorded as Macon Ed with the mysterious Tampa Joe, cutting eight sides in 1930.

Will Batts was a fine fiddler based in Memphis who worked with Frank Stokes and Jack Kelly. Frank Stokes and partner Dan Sane recorded as The Beale Street Shieks, a Memphis answer to the musical Chatmon family string band, the Mississippi Shieks. Stokes was already playing the streets of Memphis by the turn of the century, about the same time the blues began to flourish. A medicine show and house party favorite, Stokes was remembered as a consummate entertainer who drew on songs from the 19th and 20th centuries. Solo or with Sane and sometimes fiddler Will Batts, Stokes recorded 38 sides for Paramount and Victor. Jack Kelly is believed to be from North Mississippi but spent most of his life in Memphis where he sang on the streets and worked with musicians like Frank Stokes, Dan Sane, Will Batts and later Little Buddy Doyle and Walter Horton. In 1933 he cut 14 sides by the South Memphis Jug Band which included Will Batts on violin, Dan Sane on guitar and D.M. Higgs on jug. He cut ten more sides in 1939 with Batts, and Little Son Joe. Kelly’s last known sides were made in 1952 with Walter Horton for the Sun.

Both Lonnie Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy are best remembered for their guitar playing but both also played violin and luckily recorded with the instrument. By the time Lonnie Johnson recorded his “Violin Blues”, he was already one of the most prolific and influential musicians in blues. Johnson himself led a long and illustrious career as a guitarist, and is primarily remembered for his dazzling guitar work. But it was the violin that first captured his imagination, and his early career in New Orleans was spent honing his skills as a fiddler, first in his father’s string band, then as a young professional performing on excursion boats along the Mississippi. Johnson signed with Okeh in 1925, and played violin on nearly two-dozen early recordings. The State Street Boys were a studio group who cut eight sides in 1935. The group consisted of Big Bill Broonzy (who plays violin on our selection “Rustlin’ Man” plus four others), Jazz Gillum, Carl Martin and others. Martin was also a member of the The Tennessee Chocolate Drops, a group consisting of Howard Armstrong, Ted Bogan and Carl Martin.

Charlie McCoy ranked among the great blues accompanists of his era and his accomplished mandolin and guitar work can be heard on numerous recordings in a wide variety of settings from the late 1920’s through the early 40’s. His brother Joe McCoy was well known for his association with his wife Memphis Minnie where he played the part of Kansas Joe. Between 1929 and 1934 (they divorced in early 1935) they cut around one hundred sides together. After Joe and Minnie separated Joe occupied himself in small bands, singing with the Harlem Hamfats, working as a songwriter and working with his brother Charlie. Charlie McCoy’s “Your Valves Need Grinding” features the violin of Bo Carter while Joe McCoy’s “Look Who’s Coming Down The Road”, a version of Tommy Johnson’s “Maggie Campbell”, features a rousing unknown violinist.

Andrew & Jim Baxter

We play several fine, little known, rural string bands on today’s program. The fiddle-guitar duo known as the Alabama Sheiks cut two records for Victor, which were released in 1931, a time when industry sales were crippled by the Great Depression. Another duo was the father and son team Andrew and Jim Baxter, of Calhoun, Georgia. The duo cut sides for Victor between 1927-29, and even waxed one tune with a white string band, The Georgia Yellow Hammers. Rural string band the Mobile Strugglers got started just as the major record companies began to lose interest in string bands. The group featured two fiddlers, Charles Jones and James Fields, and included guitarist Paul Johnson, banjo picker Lee Warren and Wesley Williams on double bass. The Mobile Strugglers recorded seven songs for the American Music label in 1949. Wilson Jones, who wnet by the moniker Stavin’ Chain, led a fine stingband judging by the group’s six recordings. The group was recorded in Louisiana by John Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1934.

You don’t expect to hear the violin in the context of Delta blues but there are some recorded example. At his second recording session on Oct. 31, 1935 Big Joe Williams was backed by fiddle player Chasey Collins. Collins in turn was backed by Williams on two numbers. Delta bluesman Henry “Son” Sims is best known as the fiddler who played with Charley Patton. Although he led a rural string band called the Mississippi Corn Shuckers for several years, the first recording that Sims did was with Patton, who asked him to come along to Wisconsin for a 1929 Paramount session. Sims also recorded under his own name on two separate occasions; during the Patton session when he cut four songs, including our selection “Tell Me Man Blues,” and several years later with guitarist and singer McKinley Morganfield, (who later became known as Muddy Waters).

Our survey of blues violin players end about mid-century when that kind of music on commercial records became virtually extinct. Eventually, a few black fiddle players returned to the studio, most often for small specialist labels. Among those include Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown who first recorded on fiddle in 1959 for the Peacock label in Houston, Butch Cage of Mississippi who worked with Willie Thomas and recorded extensively by folklorist Harry Oster, L.C. Robinson who made records for Bluesway and Arhoolie in the 1970’s and Howard Armstrong who renewed his career in the 1970s playing mandolin and fiddle with old pals Carl Martin and Ted Bogan on albums for Rounder and Flying Fish.

Show Notes:

We span a good chunk of blues history today, spinning tracks from 1924 through 1976.  On tap on today’s program are a number of fine country blues recordings from the 1960’s and 70’s, a couple of album spotlights and twin spins by pianist Henry Brown and singer Ray Agee. From the blues revival era we open with tracks by Joe Callicott and Sam Chatmon who’s careers bridged the pre-war and post-war blues eras. A product of the Chatmon family that included not only Lonnie of the famous Mississippi Sheiks but also the prolific Bo Carter and several other blues-playing brothers, Sam Chatmon survived to began performing and recording again in the ’60s. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, he recorded for a variety of labels, as well as playing clubs and blues and folk festivals across America. Chatmon was an active performer and recording artist until his death in 1983. Today’s track, “Stoop Down Baby”,  comes from  the collection, Field Recordings From Hollandale 1976-1982 which has recently been issued on the Mbirafon label. Some of these recordings were issued on the Albatros label in the 80’s. It’s interesting to hear Chatmon cover Chick Willis’ “Stoop Down Baby”, a relatively recent hit, it shows that he was still keeping his ears open to new material and the the song itself perfectly fits his repertoire which is built on many such ribald songs.

Joe Callicott waxed a lone 78 in Memphis in 1929, Fare Thee Well Blues b/w Traveling Mama Blues, and a year later played second guitar on Garfield Akers’ “Cottonfield Blues Parts 1 & 2.” It was the indefatigable field recorder George Mitchell who found him in Nesbit, Mississippi off Highway 51 not far from Hernando and short distance from Brights were Akers was supposedly born. Callicott’s “comeback” was about as short as his first recording career, lasting from the summer of 1967 through the summer of 1968; he recorded nineteen sides for Mitchell either late August or early September, four sides at the 1968 Memphis Country Blues Festival and seventeen sides for Blue Horizon in 1968. As Paul Oliver wrote: “A wider recognition came almost too late but Joe appeared at the 1968 Memphis Blues Festival and was looking forward to a European trip. Back at his home, with the birds whistling and witnessed by his wife and their bellcow, he recorded his last testament; he died early in 1969 and with him went the last echoes of Mississippi country music of the earliest phase of the blues.”

From 1969 we spin a trio of cuts from the album Memphis Swap Jam. Released to commemorate the 1969 Memphis Blues Festival, the album features 20 songs by the event’s most notable performers. Although the tracks date from the same period as the festival, they were recorded at Ardent Recording Studio and Royal Recording Studio in Memphis. Chris Strachwitz produced this two-LP set, and it marks one of the few occasions (if not only) when he worked in this capacity for a company other than his own Arhoolie Records. Artists like Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Fred McDowell and Sleepy John Estes had been recorded extensively during the blues revival but still sound quite inspired on these performances. A nice companion CD to this is The 1968 Memphis Country Blues Festival With Bukka White a terrific double CD of live and studio recording by Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Joe Callicott and Robert Wilkins.

We also spotlight another great 2-LP set, Swamp Blues, which has since been reissued on CD by Ace Records. Swamp Blues is a collection of Baton Rogue artists, most of whom had recorded for the legendary Excello label. At this point the label was owned by Nashboro who had a licensing agreement with the British Blue Horizon label owned by Mike Vernon. Blue Horizon already had albums out by Lightnin’ Slim and Lonesome Sundown and was eager to get involved with this project which was issued under the Excello imprint. It was Baton Rogue blues fan Terry Pattison who got the project off the ground. Pattison was in touch with the folks at the great, now defunct, Blues Unlimited magazine and they in turn got in touch with Vernon. An attempt was made to get Lazy Lester and Lightnin’ Slim on board but to no avail. Still it was an impressive roster featuring ex-Howlin’ Wolf pianist Henry Gray, Whispering Smith, Silas Hogan, Clarence Edwards and Arthur “Guitar” Kelly.

As for our twin spins today we play two cuts by pianist Henry Brown, one in a supporting role and one solo number. Henry Brown learned to play the piano from the “professors” of the notorious Deep Morgan section of St. Louis. Brown worked clubs such as the Blue Flame Club, the 9-0-5 Club, Jim’s Place and Katy Red’s, from the twenties into the 30’s. He recorded for Brunswick with Ike Rogers and Mary Johnson in 1929, for Paramount in ‘29 and ‘30. He served in the army in the early 40’s, then formed his own quartet to work occasional local gigs in St. Louis area from the 50’s, and worked the Becky Thatcher riverboat in 1965. In addition to his pre-war recordings, he was recorded by Paul Oliver in 1960, by Sam Charters with Edith Johnson in 1961 and by Adelphi in 1969. Our cuts feature the rollicking (mostly) instrumental “Henry Brown Blues” which was recorded by Paul Oliver and comes from the companion CD to Oliver’s book Conversation With The Blues. “Nickel’s Worth of Liver” features the vocal of Edith North Johnson, a song she first cut in 1929, that time backed by Roosevelt Sykes. Johnson cut 18  sides in 1928 and 1929, including a session with Charley Patton in Grafton, WI, for Paramount Records, although it is doubtful Patton actually appeared on any of her songs. She made her home in St. Louis, where she ran a fleet of taxis during World War II and owned a popular diner. Sam Charters recorded her with Henry Brown in 1961 for his anthology called The Blues in St. Louis Vol. 2 for Folkways Records. Born January 2, 1903, in St. Louis, she died there on February 28, 1988.

We also feature two cuts by the neglected singer Ray Agee. Agee is known primarily for his tough 1963 remake of the blues standard “Tin Pan Alley” for the tiny Sahara logo. Agee recorded for a slew of labels both large and small during the 1950’s and 60’s without much in the way of national recognition outside his Los Angeles home base. After moving to L.A. with his family, he apprenticed with his brothers in a gospel quartet before striking out in the R&B field with a 1952 single for Aladdin Records. Agee slowly slipped away from the music business in the early ’70s. Reportedly, he died around 1990. Thankfully the Famous Groove label has issued all of Agee’s 50’s and 60’s recordings across three CD’s.

Also worth mentioning are tracks by Lonnie Johnson, Little Janice, and Tony Hollis. I never get tired of Lonnie Johnson who’s guitar skills are rightly praised, yet he was also a moving singer and a superb composer. A case in point is his gorgeous “Lines On My Face”, a bit of blues poetry from his 1960 album Losing Game:

Heartaches have caused, these deep lines in my face (2x)
When you’ve been disappointed in love, your heart has no restin’ place

Each line in my face tells a story, the tears tells you the reason why
Deep lines in my face tells a story, teardrops tell you the reason why
When you been hurt in love, it shows on you face until the day you die

If I could take my poor heart and wash it, wash all these aches and pains away (2x)
But I guess I’m so in love, I hope she’ll come back to me some day

My poor heart could talk, there’s so much it could tell (2x)
When the one you love disappoints you in life, life is a livin’ hell

Tony Hollis’ small output belies his influence. Hollis  played around Clarksdale, MS in the 20’s and 30’s which is where he met John Lee Hooker, providing him with his first guitar and was a major influence on Hooker’s style. In 1941 Hollis waxed seven sides for Okeh including the influential “Crawlin’ King Snake” and the first recorded version of “Cross Cut Saw Blues.”Another song from that session, “Traveling Man Blues”, waslater made famous by Hooker as “When My First Wife Quit Me.” He cut one more session in 1951 with Sunnyland Slim. Our selection, “I’ll Get A Break”, which was based on Tampa Red’s 1934 version and comes from that latter session. The song was cut by Hollis at his first session using the title “Big Time Woman.”

Little Miss Janice is a mystery. What little is known about her is that she came from Texas, she played guitar and she had a knack for songwriting as she proves on her tough “Scarred Knees.” After this recording for Proverb, she went on to cut for Paul Gayten’s Pzazz label. Johnny Adams covered “Scarred Knees” on his first LP for Rounder and Esther Phillips cut a stunning version on her 1972 album From A Whsiper To A Scream.