Big Road Blues Show 9/23/18: Gon’ Play It For Lil’ Brother – Unissued Field Recordings from Axel Küstner 1972-1978 Pt. 3

ARTIST	SONG	ALBUM
Lee Jackson	Dust My Broom	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Lee Jackson	How Evil Can You Be	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Lee Jackson	All Around Man / Sellin' that Stuff	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Joe Carter	I'm Worried	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Joe Carter	The Sky Is Crying	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Joe Carter	Shake Your Moneymaker	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Pigmeat Jarrett	Instrumental	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Pigmeat Jarrett	Thunderin' & Lightnin' / Look At The People	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Pigmeat Jarrett	Instrumental	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Pigmeat Jarrett	Instrumental	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Louisiana Red	The Sun Is Rising	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Louisiana Red	My Baby Is An Alley Cat	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Louisiana Red	Axel Boogie	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Flora Molton & The Truth Band	When The War Is Over	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Flora Molton & The Truth Band	Your Enemy Can't Harm You	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings
Flora Molton & The Truth Band	Lonesome Highway	Axel Küstner Unreleased Recordings

Show Notes:

 

Prev 1of59 Next

Click to view photo gallery

 

[Article continued from Gon’ Play It For Lil’ Brother Pt. 2]…

It was incredibly hot, you know how Mississippi summers are, and at night when it would cool down Joe would pull out his guitar and sit in front of the trailer and I would park my car, sit in the back of the trunk of my car with the door open, had my tape machine next to me and Joe would play, and I would sit there and make sure the recording sounded all right. Joe played basically, played without any payment for hours and hours for me …Joe played all kind of stuff, he was still improvising stuff. …He was digging back into his history playing a lot of spirituals and gospels, and stuff that he normally maybe not recorded that much. One thing I remember very vividly while we were recording, I mean Joe would always after a while ask for a playback and when the tape was playing back he already started to play the next song, that was difficult situation, so I would have to tell him ‘stop, stop Joe, let me unwind the tape and start!'” At the end of the trip Joe told him if he could find someone to put the stuff out just send him some money. Some of the material came out on the Ornament label run by Axel’s friend Ziggy Christmann who joined Axel on his return to the States in 1980.

To Axel, Big Joe was the “personification of the American Dream, he’s a total self-made man, he was completely illiterate, couldn’t even write Joe, but he went out and made something out of himself. A name that was internationally known and still being talked about almost forty years after he died. That’s an accomplishment you know,” Axel laughs. “Looking back, maybe it was just crazy for a young, middle class European ‘White Boy Lost In The Blues’ like me to stay in a place like Crawford, to live with a tough old man whose life and personality did fit the archetypal story of the hardliving and hardplaying Blues singer. A life which can be easily over-romanticized by those who have not seen the harsh realities people of Joe’s background had – and still have – to face. After 40 years, I now see the times I’ve spent with Big Joe here in Germany and the US as part of my own history that can absolutely never be repeated. There simply will never be another like Big Joe. Charlie Musselwhite once described him as ‘the character of characters.’ Big Joe was still living the Blues right up to his death on Dec. 17, 1982.

Stonewall Mays, Coldwater, Ms., 8/30/1978 (at R.L .Burnside home)

Of course, there is much more I’d like to say, but I think guitarist Mike Bloomfield captures my feelings best when he wrote in his essay Me And Big Joe: ‘Being with Joe was being with a history of the Blues – you could see him as a man, and you could see him as a legend. Joe was part of a rare and vanished breed – he was a wanderer and a hobo and a Blues singer, and he was an awesome man. There was a great pride in this man, a great strength in this man. And there was poetry. He was a poet of the highways, and in the words of his songs he could sing to you his life. And to hear him talk about Robert Johnson or Son House or Charley Patton, to hear life distilled from fifty years of thumbing rides and riding rails and playing joints – to hear of levees and work gangs and tent shows; of madams and whores, pimps and rounders, gamblers, bootleggers, and roustabouts; of circuit-preachers and medicine-show men – well, it was something. He couldn’t read or write a word of English, but he had America memorized. He was wise to every highway and byway and roadbed in the country, and wise to every city and county and township that they led to. Because to know this man was to know the story of black America, and maybe to know the story of black America is to know America itself.'”

Axel was inspired to go to Tennessee by Begnt Olsson, who he had been corresponding with and who gave him some leads to follow up. “I had the great album since 1974 that Begnt did …Field recordings he made in Tennessee and Alabama in 1971 called Southern Comfort Country. That’s still one of the greatest albums of field recording collections. And reading the liner notes it says Lattie Murrell, The Wolf, Somerville, TN, so I always kept that in mind. So I just drove up to Somerville until I found him. I knew, for example, Hammie Nixon was living in Brownsville so I just drove up from Memphis and asked around until I found Hammie Nixon.” Nixon was was married to one of Sleepy John Estes’ daughters and had a son with her who was about 8 years old at that time. “…And knocked on his door and introduced myself and he invited me in, I wound up staying two or three nights. …Staying with Hammie Nixon he took me out to meet Charlie Sangster …Hammie was very friendly, it was unbelievable. You just go there as a total stranger, knock on the door and say my name is Axel Küstner from Germany I like the blues,” Axel laughs incredulously. One of the leads Begnt gave Axel was a guy named Hambone who was a horn player with a band living in Henning. “I drove around Henning, TN”, Axel recalls, “…until I found him. He lived in a wooden shack and I knocked on his door; ‘are you Hambone? I’m looking for you.’ …His old mother was in the house, you know, and she was kinda scared, she was standing behind the screen door, OK. and I remember just like it was yesterday, Hambone was saying ‘hey mamma you don’t have to be scared of white folks,'” Axel chuckles. “I wound up staying with them for two or three nights.

Lattie “The Wolf” Murrell & Liza Mae Weddle & “Lil’ brother from Europe”, Somerville,Tn., 9/3/1978

…We drove around some, I had this list of names that Begnt made, I was trying to do my research part. One guy was called Robert Goots …I was cruising around with Hambone asking for Robert Goots …I remember we cruised around …there was a shack there, an old couple was sitting in front of the shack and I got out; ‘…you ever heard of Robert Goots ?’ and the old black guy just said ‘yeah, me and Sleepy John used to play right smart together,'” Axel laughs. “…Then we cruised around til we found this guy Jumbo Piggee …He played that raw, amplified guitar stuff like Willie Johnson or Pat Hare. …He mentioned that he knew Bobby “Blue” Bland real well in the early days.” Later Axel found an interview with Bland where he mentions a guy who could have been the same person playing the blues around Rosemark, TN.

From his base in Crawford, Axel took trips to the Mississippi Delta, the Hill Country, Coldwater, Como and Memphis. He ran into Alan Lomax filming Napoleon Strickland for The Land Where The Blues Began. “I ran into Lomax and the film crew at Napoleon Strickland’s on Aug. 30. I saw them again a few days later when they filmed a Labor Day picnic at the baseball field behind LP  Buford’s country store way out in the country around Gravel Springs, Ms. The fife and drum bands of Napoleon Strickland and Othar Turner performed there and also R.L. Burnside was filmed.  …Libby Rae and Bobby Rae Watson were also there and the resonator guitar that Strickland plays belongs to Libby Rae and she still performs with it in 2018! …In an out-take from that footage on YouTube you can actually see me taking a photo and standing around watching the scenery. …Today, I wonder why I did not ask Mr. Lomax or folklorist Worth Long, who worked with him on that project, for any more leads to some of the people that they had filmed. I did not see the movie the 1990s. I consider this movie to be one of the best – if not even the best – documentaries on blues. The musicians are all being presented in a most sympathetic way and their music is of an unmatched high quality.” Axel took some photos of the Lomax shoot and recorded several numbers by Strickland in Como and some recordings by Stonewall Mays and R.L. Burnside both who lived fifteen miles away in Coldwater. A little over a month later he was  in Crystal Springs where he met with Houston Stackhouse who took him to see Mott Willis and Charlie Taylor. He ended up staying with the Willis family for a night since his car car broke down. “I also went up to Memphis where I stayed one night with Furry Lewis and also met Gus Cannon, who was 96 at that time (he died one year later) and saw Memphis Piano Red,  harmonica player Sonny Blake, guitarist Joe Willie Wilkins, pianists Mose Vinson and Booker T. Laury and a few others perform.”

Big Joe Williams, Crawford, Ms., 9/26/1978

The number of blues artists Axel has hung out with, befriended, photographed and recorded would make any blues fan envious yet after all these years he still frets about missed opportunities. “Looking back, of course, I have many regrets, probably way too many when I think about it …don’t even get me started, dadgummit …in Chicago I did not try to see Blind Arvella Gray, John Lee Granderson or blues and gospel guitarist Blind Jim Brewer or record producer Cadillac Baby …I did not go to Maxwell Street Radio Shop to buy those Ora-Nelle 78s – well, I was not that much  into collecting old 78s at that time, you know. In Memphis at that time there still was harmonica player Coy “Hot Shot” Love (who had recorded for Sun), Memphis Willie B. and Rev. Robert Wilkins, both of whom had recorded pre-war. I called slide guitarist Lum Guffin, but he did not seem to be as friendly as all the other musicians I met. In Mississippi I did not try to visit Jack Owens in Bentonia or Eugene “Sonny Boy Nelson” Powell in Greenville. Guitarist Hayes McMullan, who had been active in the 1920s and 30s, was still alive in the Delta (he was actually filmed in 1977 for the METV production Good Morning Blues, which was shown to me in Jackson by its producer Rob Cooper, with whom I stayed there for a few days). Well, I guess you can’t do it all and looking back and listening to the music that I recorded and the photos I took I should consider myself very lucky and privileged to have been able to experience all this. Man, I came back to Germany with about 45 reels of tapes and 250 rolls of film!  The enthusiasm and excitement of that 1978 trip (and the 1980 trip as well) can absolutely never be repeated – I was able to have seen and heard a world that is now gone forever. I really don’t need to see any Blues documentaries – the greatest Blues story I experienced myself! As Furry Lewis used to sing: ‘Times done been, won’t be no mo.’

…You can’t do it all,” Axels says philosophically. “Looking at all the people I met, even the ones I did not record like Buddy Moss and stuff, that six months was just incredible. Totally incredible when I look back. …You know the great thing about traveling on a trip like that, I mean, of course I had a few points I wanted to see like Big Joe in Crawford, Juke Boy in Houston and stuff like that but, or Buddy Moss in Atlanta, but it’s no telling …everyday something new was coming up. …I mean I don’t know why I ever got into all that. It’s interesting, I mean, it’s part of my life but then again it’s kinda bizarre in way, but then again thinking what else would I have done. What else is there to talk about, at least I have some interesting stories to tell you know”Axel concludes with a chuckle.

 

---

---

 

The above article is drawn from a lengthy interview I taped with Axel plus numerous follow-up emails and phone calls to correct details and flesh out his trip. There’s some additional information he wanted to add and I’ve included it verbatim (outside of a few grammatical items) as it was sent to me: