Big Road Blues

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:

An eclectic variety of blues on today’s mix show spanning from 1926 through the 1960′s. We have several spotlights on tap including sets of music featuring Will Ezell, Papa Charlie Jackson, Lonnie Johnson plus recordings from the Bluesville label and the vaults of famed producer Jay Miller. Born in Texas, pianist Ezell played in the jukes around Shreveport before moving to Detroit and Chicago. He was a frequent accompanist for Paramount Records and even took Paramount’s star, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s body back to Texas for burial.  Ezell cut sixteen sides for the label between 1927 and 1929 and backed artists such as Lucille Bogan, Elzadie Robinson, Bertha Henderson, Blind Roosevelt Graves and others. Henderson was powerful singer who delivers a moving performance on the evocative  “Black Bordered Letter” sporting some pungent cornet from Dave Nelson. The record was advertised in the Chicago Defender on September 3, 1927. Ezell and Graves team up on Ezell’s bouncy “Just Can’t Stay Here” and Graves’  exuberant “Crazy ‘Bout My Baby” both from a September 30, 1929 session and both featuring a lively cornet player. Graves was from Mississippi and according to bluesman Ishmon Bracy, was a street and juke-joint musician. His brother played tambourine with him and sang harmony. The duo cut some 20 sides, a mix of gospel and blues, for Paramount and ARC at sessions in 1929 and 1936.

From Paramount’s Book of the Blues 1927

We spin a trio of sides from the neglected Papa Charlie Jackson. Supposedly born in New Orleans in 1885, Jackson moved to Chicago in 1924, when Paramount’s J. Mayo Williams saw him singing in the street and recruited him for the label. Jackson, who played guitar and banjo, went on to be the first self-accompanied male blues singer, a best-seller on record and was the first to cut several blues standards . Between 1924 and 1934 he cut around 70 sides. Jackson cut some superb material but seems to get overlooked perhaps because he doesn’t fit the preconceived idea of what a blues artist should be; for one he usually played the banjo and secondly much of his material is vaudeville slanted, aimed at amusement and dancing. Throughout his body of work, however, there’s plenty of fine playing and some fascinating songs. “I’m Looking For A Woman Who Knows How To Treat Me Right” is a bluesy number with a vaudeville feel and some driving banjo playing,  “Lexington Kentucky Blues” is a terrific straight blues with a reference to the famous racehorse Man o‘ War while “Up The Way Bound” shows off his ample guitar skills.

We did a whole show devoted to Lonnie Johnson a couple of weeks back and hear two more by Johnson including a duet with Clara Smith and in a supporting role behind Mooch Richardson. Much is made of the duets Johnson did with Victoria Spivey, rightly so, yet less has been said about the fine duets he did wit Smith in 1930. “What Makes You Act Like That” is a wonderful, playful number with both artists voices contrasting beautifully and as usual Johnson lays down some stunning guitar work. Johnson backed  singer Mooch Richardson on seven numbers in 1928 (four were never released) including our selection “Helena Blues.”

Bluesville Records, a subsidiary of Prestige, was launched in 1960 to document the growing interest in blues that would lead to the rediscoveries of many artists who recorded in the 20′s and 30′s as well as many who never previously had the opportunity to record.  Two of the best albums cut for the label were Scrapper Blackwell’s Mr. Scrapper’s Blues cut in 1961 and Robert Curtis Smith’s Clarksdale Blues cut the following year. Mr. Scrapper’s Blues has thankfully been issued on CD which is not the case with Clarksdale Blues which has become highly collectible. A chance meeting with Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records, at the Big 6 Barber Shop in Clarksdale led to this album. In the liner notes Mack McCormick wrote: “Robert Curtis Smith is a hard working farm laborer in upper Mississippi. He supports a wife and eight children by driving a tractor ($3 a day top) during the farming season, by hunting rabbits in the winter. He has a borrowed guitar with which he sings of women he has loved, lost, discarded, or found worthy of erotic praise. …The status quo in his world is to sap the strength and exploit the weakness of Negroes. It is a far more vicious crime than the occasional lynching since the end result is the massive weakening of a strong people. Ideas of inferiority are fed to him hand-in-hand with conditions that patently are inferior. Badly deprived of constitutional privilege and the minimum wage, and lacking the know-how to correct his situation, Smith’s way of life is astonishingly out of step with modern times.” Our selection, “Council Spur Blues”, is Smith’s bitter indictment against that way of life:

You ask for money, he’ll give you all up to the store (2x)
Then if you eat that up before the week is out, man, you don’t get no more

You think that’s bad, working for 30 cents an hour (2x)
You just stick around awhile and let me tell you about Mr. Roy Flowers

Mr. Roy Flowers don’t pay but two dollars a day (2x)
Yes, and once you are there, he dare you to leave away

Mr. Roy Flowers – in the winter time he’s got a habit (2x)
When you go to him for food, he’ll tell you to catch some rabbit

A few other tracks by Curtis appear on various anthologies. Smith disappeared from the blues world not long after these recordings but 30 years later he was rediscovered living in Chicago. He had given up blues in the passing years, but he continued to play in church and was recorded performing gospel numbers in 1990.

Also featured today are recordings by Lightnin’ Slim, Leroy Washington, Mr. Calhoun and Joe Johnson from the vaults of J.D. Miller. Miller operated a small studio and record label (Feature) out in Crowley, Louisiana. 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 J.D. 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 others. Many recordings were never released and in the 70′s the Flyright label, with the assistance of Miller, began a series called the The Legendary Jay Miller Sessions that ran to over fifty volumes. These recordings come from those LP’s. In February I’ll be doing whole show devoted to these recordings.

Also in February I’m doing a show on Brownsville Blues spotlighting recordings by Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Charlie Pickett and Son Bonds. Today we give you a little taste of that show with tracks by Bonds and Pickett. An associate of Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, 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’ songs, “Back and Side Blues” (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” (1937). According to Nixon, Bonds was shot to death, while sitting on his front porch, by a nearsighted neighbor who mistook him for another man. Bonds backed Sleepy John Estes at two sessions in 1941 while guitarist Charlie Pickett backed Estes at two sessions in 1937 and one in 1938. At that same 1937 session Pickett waxed four sides of his own including our track, the salacious “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon.”