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| Moncure Road used to be called Osgood Road. The good news is that it's also called SR 1002 - which means the DOT can put a highway marker out by the cemetery if they choose to... Assumptions are dangerous. So. I assumed that because Floyd was buried in an A.M.E. cemetery he belonged to an A.M.E. congregation. However, the Watts, Horton and Watson funeral homes all tended to put their indigents in the Potter’s field at the White Oak A.M.E. cemetery. I’m getting ahead of myself… On Wednesday I drove to Sanford. I visited the cemetery again and had another good long look for Floyd (and got chigger-bit as hell in the process). Then I went and visited about every municipal building in Sanford. Maybe it just felt like all of them. Every person I met who worked for the city or Lee County was as pleasant, helpful and easy to get along with as you please. I was treated particularly well by Gene Hathaway in the Lee County Mapping Department and by Susan Patterson, the city attorney. So this is what the current state of the story looks like: I had it in my mind to track down the current owners of the land the church and cemetery set on and the current (and perhaps former) owners of the land adjacent (in the event that an accessible memorial required right-of-way or other neighbor-navigable support). Also, I hoped maybe to find an old-timer who might have known Floyd – or at least of him. Gene Hathaway helped me by making me a map of the church, cemetery and neighbor-property lots and he found the deed for the church-land for me. We struck gold! As it turns out, the land the cemetery lies on was deeded to the city of Sanford in 1965 – nine years before Floyd’s death. Remember about the assuming? Immediately I assumed this meant that the city would have to have a record – somebody would have bought the plot Floyd was lying in, if Floyd himself, financially flush and looking to the inevitable (if unfortunate)future, hadn’t bought it for himself – so there would be a deed or at least a receipt book. At the very least, the city would have a cemetery legend – some kind of map of the grave plots so that no one was ever buried on top of anyone else… I made an ass out of me – sort of. It turns out that the city was, in fact, deeded the property in 1965 – shortly after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. This being the south of J. Strom Thurmond & George Wallace and generally a place with a white population who was unsympathetic to outsiders telling them…well, anything really…toxic politics rapidly ensued. The black folks who had been maintaining the cemetery (all of this according to local legend, now) wanted the city to maintain it and saw the victories of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act as a sign that it was time to flex a little local muscle and assert their rights to some of the same privileges and advantages the folks in town were enjoying. After all, the city was maintaining the white cemeteries well enough. So the Harringtons deeded the 23 acres south of Osgood road to the city. The city got out of the cemetery business and sold of their cemeteries (white and black) to a cemetery commission for $15,000.00 dollars. The cemetery commission took over the two white cemeteries in town and ignored all the rest of them. Since 1965, the city of Sanford has maintained that they are not in the cemetery business and so, even though the city holds a deed for the White Oak cemetery, they’ve never maintained it, never kept documents about or for it and they’ve never mapped it or sold plots (which would really require a map) for it. Somehow, people still got buried there. The map is out there for the finding… |
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Floyd Council 02
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Floyd Council 01
Hold your arms out in front of you, bend your elbows a little and touch your fingertips together to make a circle. There are trees that big around growing up out of the middle of some of the graves in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery down in Sanford, North Carolina. Floyd Council is buried in an unmarked grave in that cemetery.
Blind Boy Fuller only ever let two guitar players back him on his recordings: Gary Davis and Floyd Council. Gary went on to make hundreds of recordings. Floyd only ever recorded six commercial sides by himself. He appeared as accompanist on fifteen of Fuller's commercial recordings. Long after he'd had a series of strokes he recorded six songs in his home for, I think, Pete Lowry's Trix label, though they apparently weren't worth releasing - twenty...uh...seven total recordings...twenty-one recorded in his prime.
Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 2, 1911. He lived around Chapel Hill most of his life. He was a truck driver. He played with the Strowd Brothers - they called themselves the Chapel Hillbillies. Record companies promoted him as "the Devil's Daddy-In-Law" and "Dipper Boy." His earliest recordings were released under the name "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy." All of those were record company gimmicks. He was called "Mr. Floyd" locally and though strokes started slowing him down in the sixties and had rendered him effectively unable to play by 1970 he was considered until the end of his life one of the finest guitar players in the Piedmont. He died in Sanford, NC. on May 9, 1976.
I am annoyed that he's lying in an unmarked grave.
So this is what I’ve decided to do about it.
Floyd should have a memorial-something at the very least. I thought for a while that he should have a highway marker, but the DOT won’t place a marker in a cemetery with a single noteworthy grave (I’m certain every person in that graveyard was noteworthy somehow to someone, but try telling that to the sign people) and they won’t place a marker on a road that isn’t part of the numbered state highway system. I may have misread my map, but I’m pretty sure Floyd’s buried on a county road and not a state road. Either way, I wrote them and asked them to consider putting a marker out there by Floyd’s grave.
I’m amenable to putting a bust or a tasteful statue in Sanford where he died or in Chapel Hill where he lived most of his life, but that would still leave his grave out there naked. It’d be all right with me if we could figure out how to do both.
Ideally, someone somewhere inherited the records from the church and those records include a map of the plots sold out in the cemetery. If I could find that map, I could find Floyd and we could just buy the man a dignified set of stones and set them out there at his head and feet.
I can’t believe that Pete Lowry and Bruce Bastin didn’t find the information if it was there to find and I can’t figure out how to get a hold of either one of them – hell, Pete Lowry might be dead for all I know (he’s not, he lives in Australia now) – so I reckon I’ve started going over ground others have already covered…
Things done:
I’ve been to the cemetery and had a good long look for myself. Seemed like the right place to start. I would have felt plenty stupid if it turned out that he had a stone the whole time. Let me just say…and I say this as a person from West Virginia who has seen some of the roughest and most neglected - or alternately, some of the most badly coal-company-abused cemeteries you can find anywhere in the world…this cemetery is in pitiful shape. It WILL take a brush hog to clear his grave if we can find it on a map – since we’re already raising money to put a stone in the cemetery, I’m thinking some part of this project should include cutting down trees and clearing some land and making the cemetery generally accessible again for everyone. Regardless, he may yet have a stone out there and I just couldn’t find it…
Since Floyd was buried in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery (at least, according to his death certificate he was), I’ve assumed he was a member of that congregation – therefore I wrote the pastors of the five A.M.E. churches in and around Sanford and asked them:
1. Are there any members of their congregation who might remember/be related to Floyd Council and may I be introduced to them?
2. When White Oak A.M.E. became defunct, did they inherit that church’s records and possibly the cemetery map?
I wrote the two Councils in the Sanford white pages and asked if they were related (not to each other – to Floyd). If so, can I come speak to them? Maybe they have a story to tell or a photograph I haven’t seen (I’ve only ever seen two pictures of him – in one of them his features are indistinct; in the other he looks jolly but sort of goofy) or maybe they actually attended his funeral and can point me to the right spot of ground…won’t know until I get some answers back.
I called the Sanford Public Library and set the reference librarian to work trying to find anything in the fiche that might help and through him contacted the Lee County Historical Society and set them to work looking through the archives for the White Oak records. Everyone I talk to I ask to keep an eye out for an old timer who might have been to the funeral and might have personal knowledge of the location of his grave.
The Triangle Blues Society auctioned off a poster I made for their Nat Reese show at the Rialto – It was the big 41-inch poster that hung out on the street with the movie posters. It is signed by everyone who played: Nat Reese, Me, John D. Holeman, Kelly Pace and Tad Walters. The poster sold for $200.00 and Kim Pearce, the wonderful and attractive young woman who won the auction turned around and donated it back to us so we could auction it off again at our August 7 fundraiser at Bone Daddy’s Hideaway.
The Questell Foundation has offered to donate $200.00 towards Floyd’s stones. Together, that makes four hundred dollars we’ve raised to mark his grave.
In order to do my part fundraising-wise, I’ve done a portrait of Floyd which will be available on an over-priced t-shirt at Reverbnation (link will follow when I figure out how to size the image properly for the t-shirt people). Remember, the money is for a good cause. I will also be selling prints on high-quality acid-free wheat paper at the Hayti Heritage Center on August 20 – most of that money will go to Floyd, getting the damned prints made is going to be expensive. You can contact me at thbullfrogwillardmcghee@yahoo.com if you’d like to buy a print and can’t make the Hayti.
I’d like to have a Floyd Council Blues Festival down in Sanford to coincide with placing the stone. We’ll see if we can make that happen.
I’ve done a few other things, but I’m tired and can’t for the life of me think of what they are right now – I’ll amend this deal when I’m not half asleep.
Tomorrow, I’m going back to Sanford to check with the county clerk’s office to see who owns the land the cemetery is on and who owns the land adjacent. If I can’t find his grave and our best deal is to place a marker somewhere close – like it is with Fuller’s memorial – it may become necessary to buy the land the monument will sit on. I’ll update as information becomes available…
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
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Triangle Blues Society newsletter feature: Blues Geography
Reverend Gary Davis
If you walk down to the intersection of Fayetteville Road and Pettigrew Street, stand on the southern-most corner of the intersection and look around, you’ll be awful close to where Fayetteville Street and Pettigrew intersected when Hayti was still a viable neighborhood. At this corner, there was a barbecue stall owned by a woman whose name is apparently lost to history where Gary Davis liked to set up and play on the sidewalk right around five in the evenings when the tobacco workers were getting out, getting grub and getting home. This was one of his favorite and most profitable spots…
Blind Boy Fuller
If you walk about a hundred feet north on Pettigrew street and stop, you’ll about be where Henry Street used to pour into Pettigrew. It wasn’t much more than an alley – I’m given to believe that this is the street that was colloquially known as “Death Alley.” Fuller wrote a song about it called, appropriately enough, “Death Alley.” He recorded the song in 1937 at the same session where he recorded “Mamie.” The Trice Brothers had gone along with him on that session…
The Wonderland Theater
East Dillard becomes South Dillard at the intersection where it crosses Pettigrew. If you stand on the northwest corner of that intersection, you will be right close to where Ramsey Street used to be. The Wonderland Theater stood at the corner of Ramsey and Pettigrew. Whether for vaudeville shows, live concerts, pig pickin’s or moving pictures, for fifty years the Wonderland needed, used and schooled piano players. Every great piano player in the country at some point played at the Wonderland and as a result, the Wonderland became a rite of passage for some and a musical college for others. Why more of the local piano players were not recorded is a mystery to me.
Reverend Gary Davis
If you walk west along East Dillard between Pettigrew and Roxboro, you will essentially be walking parallel to and about ten feet off from where Poplar Street used to be. When Gary Davis first came to Durham, he lived at 410 Poplar Street. His mother, Belle Davis, lived at 410A Poplar. Apparently, there was a piano in this house, though his welfare case worker described the house as being a two-room tenement where Gary slept in the kitchen.
That’s the deal for this month. Next month I reckon we’ll still be in Rick Hendrick’s parking lot since so much of Hayti vanished underneath it. As always, if you’ve got some pictures, an address or anecdote you want to share with me – and I wish you would – feel free to write me some of your lines. Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…
There is a fantastic blog called "Endangered Durham." I've been using information from this blog to put together the old Hayti neighborhood in relation to all these addresses I've got and can't find. It's a good read besides...
Endangered Durham
New Orleans
I used to drive United Cab 170 around New Orleans with the expectation that somehow there would be some money involved that I would actually get to keep at the end of the week. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved it - sort of the way junkies are about eating eggs.
“During the late 1800s until the early 1920s this property along the with the adjoining 227 Bourbon Street was used by the Chas W. Stumpf Piano Co. LTD. Charles Stumpf was a cornet player and band leader in New Orleans. The musical legacy continured into the 1930s when Leon Prima (1907—1985) operated the Shim Sham Club here. A September, 1935 advertisement for the Shim Sham Club announced “Opening Tonight — Louis Prima and his New Orleans Five Orchestra Direct from the Famous Door in New York at Prima’s Shim-Sham Club for Five Days Only featuring the Kind of Music that made him the Toast of Broadway — Shim-Sham Review…Dimples Dalton, Princess of Blues…Shim-Shamettes, Beauty Chorus…Barron and Lynne”. Louis Prima was Leon’s older brother. By the late 1930s the building became the Swing Club — a detail of the larger sign out front includes “Formerly Prima’s…Tantalizing Swing Music…New Low Price Policy…No Cover Charge…No Miniumum…Under New Management” these 1938 photographs. The smaller sign included “Proudly Presents 2 Shows Featuring Hi-Class Entertainment”(shared caption)” Courtesy of the LSU Digital Library.
Image Source: http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/u?/CLF,2348
I saw a burlesque show at the Shim Sham with an emcee who told terrible jokes, a three piece jazz combo and a half-dozen reasonably attractive women. We were subjected to fan dancing and sword dancing and balloon dancing. Tourists nearby coughed theatrically and waved their hands in front of their wrinkled and upturned noses. They gave us dirty looks for smoking in the bar and my friend Luke so offended one of them - sort of a horsey-faced blondish woman from St. Louis or Denver or one of the Portlands - that they both started channelling noir film from the forties…she tossed her drink into his face, he tossed his drink into her face…bourbon dripping from her bangs, she slapped him…he slapped her…she tried to slap him again and he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her close and gazed wetly down into her smouldering eyes…
they did not, however kiss…
This was not the only time Luke and I were asked to leave a bar…
Triangle Blues Society newsletter review of Rappahannock Blues
I misremembered the name we heard on the radio that night and as a result spent a couple of years rifling through crates of blues records at swap meets and flea markets and in record stores and antique stalls trying to find a Joe Jackson record that sounded anything like what I’d heard on the radio. I was persistent. I finally found one of the Arhoolie albums of his in a record store in New Orleans - nearly two years after I’d heard him on the radio. His name was John, not Joe. Through a series of happy accidents, within weeks of finding that album, a mutual acquaintance was handing me John’s phone number.
John and I became friends. He was born in Woodville, Va. in 1922. He died in 2002 of liver cancer. He was one of the finest men I’ve known. He had a deep integrity and a kind of easy dignity that I admired and respected – and craved for myself. This is what I tried to learn from him. I stole his licks and his songs as much as I was able, but his enduring influence on me was to inspire me to be a different kind of man and, I believe, a better person.
The Smithsonian Folkways label and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture have released a collection of John Jackson’s performances. This recording is the fifth in the Smithsonian Folkways African American Legacy series. The album is called Rappahannock Blues. Each of the twenty tracks on the record is a live recording from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival held in Washington D.C.: John played more of them than any other performer. He plays alone on all of the tracks except “Step It Up and Go,” which he plays with his son, James. He plays guitar on all of these songs except “Cindy” which he plays on the banjo. These are the basic things you can know about the album except for this: you would be a fool not to buy this record and listen to it every day until the songs become a part of your genetic code.
John learned to play early in his life: his parents played and his brothers and sisters (he was the seventh of fourteen children), his neighbors played. His folks loved music and when the wagon came around selling 78’s for the family’s Victrola machine, his people found dimes and quarters and laid in the latest records: Frank Stokes, the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon, Blind Blake and Blind Lemon Jefferson among others. He learned from the records and from his family and his neighbors on a Montgomery Ward guitar his sister bought for him at age nine. His biggest influence as a boy was a water boy for a convict road gang named Happy…
They were building the first blacktop road up through from Charlottesville, up through Rappahannock County. And they just had hundreds and hun¬dreds of convicts with dynamite, mules, wheelbarrows, sledgehammers, and stuff like that, and they built a road; and this one particular convict used to tote water from my spring, we never did know his full name. Everybody called him “Happy,” and he was the happiest man you ever saw. He was whistling, laughing, or singing all the time. And so I was kind of small, and he’d come get a bucket of water and I wondered why he made so much noise when he walked. So when I met him at the spring, I come to find out he had a little chain on his leg. And he got to talking to us, and he wondered what you all do around here, and I told him my father worked on the farm and played the guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and my mom played the harmonica and accordion. He said, “If you bring your daddy’s guitar down here, I’ll play you a song.” So I would take the guitar to the spring and he’d play me a song, and then he’d go. In a little while he’d be back, and he’d do the same thing. It went on like that for three or four weeks. And so my mother heard him playing one day when she come down there, and she told him [when he got off work to come to dinner]. So we little ones went up on the hill where we could look right down at the camp, and he got off at six o’clock, and we walked him back to the house. And he eat dinner, and sat there and played for us until it was time to go back to the camp. Us little ones walked him back to the camp. And it got that way every night pretty near. He’d come over and play, and then he’d sit me on his knee and try to show me how to play some. Man,that man could play! And my father got so amazed at him, he wouldn’t play with him. It was one spiritual he did that my mom used to sing with him. I can’t remember what it was; I declare I don’t. But anyway, he was around there for about a year and a half, or two years. I really got into it when I heard the convict play. He really had a lot of influence on me because I couldn’t leave the guitar alone after hearing him. I just kept right on along with it after that. “Happy.” I never did know his real name.
-John Jackson interview with Barry Lee Pearson
So let me tell you a couple of things you can’t find out from the liner notes when you go out and buy this record. John had a callous on the side of his thumb from picking (and working – he always had a day job) that allowed him to stroke back against the strings – up and down as though a pick were growing out of the side of his thumb. He used to sit sometimes and shape that callous with a pair of nail clippers, genially clipping away at the skin along the side of his thumb. I was both awed and disgusted at the sight of it – now I think back on that image with a perverse fondness for John.
John spoke in the broadest North Country Virginia dialect I have ever heard. His vowels were like taffy in a machine and he could turn any single syllable into a musical scale. Sometimes when John was telling me a story or just sitting around bullshitting with me I’d sort of snap suddenly back into the present realizing that I’d been hearing the music in his talking more than the words he was saying. It was disarming having a conversation with him – sort of like talking to King Oliver’s cornet come to life.
John was a gentle man and he was sweet and funny and kind. He liked to hum and whistle and sing under his breath – often without realizing he was doing it. He could not read or write much more than his own name and so he remembered everything – tiny details about yourself that you’d forgotten you’d told him – and he did this with everyone he ever met as far as I know. John wanted to be remembered as a bluesman – like Lemon Jefferson or Blind Blake. I remember him the way I believe he remembered Happy the convict…as a whistling, humming, grinning meaty pillar of a man who radiated warmth and decency and kindness. Whether he was in a dark suit or a plaid shirt, melodies swarmed around his mouth like honey bees and his great calloused hands shaped and softened the world around him and carved comforts into the world for every person who knew him. I remember John Jackson as a fine bluesman…an exceptional bluesman…and I remember John as an exceptional man…and a great friend.
Buy the record from the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Label:
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Mail Order
Washington, DC 20560-0520
Phone: (800) 410-9815 or 888-FOLKWAYS (orders only)
Fax: (800) 853-9511 (orders only)
To purchase online, or for further information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, go to: www.folkways.si.edu.
Me and Roy
I always liked this picture because I look so much like my Dad here…
This used to be a picture of me with Roy Book Binder at the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, West Virginia. The picture was taken with a disposable camera I had in my pocket by a stranger who happened to pass by at that moment . I asked politely and the stranger (a stranger no more - in the best Willie Rogers sense of the situation) snapped the photo.
I wish I could remember all of what happened next. Someone needed a photo to do some advertising for a show and I had this photo in my guitar case so I let them scan it and use it for something online…since Roy wasn’t going to be part of the deal, he got cropped out. The picture was posted online and everyone was happy. A few years later, after Katrina got everything in the divorce, I searched around desperately on the internet to find evidence that I existed before August of 2005 and found what was left of this picture…
You needed to know all of that to know that I’ve glibly titled this photo of me:
”Me and Roy.”
Davis and Elkins College, Elkins, West Virginia - July of 1997…maybe
New Orleans
New Orleans
I used to drive United Cab 170 around New Orleans with the expectation that somehow there would be some money involved that I would actually get to keep at the end of the week. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved it - sort of the way lesbians are about buying nail polish.
I swear to you this story is true.
I was driving my cab around the CBD trying to hook a call out of Emeril’s or one of the Baptists over at the Morial Convention Center and I get a call from my pal Luke…
“Whatcha doin’?” He asks.
“Workin.’” I says.
“I need you to come down Chartres and get me at the Maison…I’ve got money.”
I have heard these words arranged in this order from Luke’s mouth before. Every other time I’ve heard them I awoke the next afternoon with hair on my tongue, injuries I could not explain and a profound soreness that I promise you does not come from putting in an honest day of hard work.
“Naw, Luke. I gotta work. I owe Jimmy rent on the cab.”
“Seriously, come get me…I got money.”
I can’t go get him. I make decent money driving hack, but I buy a tank of gas every night, pay three-fifty rent on the car every week and I like to drink, which doesn’t cost me anything but time I could be out driving and making a living - so there isn’t enough money, ever.
“Brother,” he says, “It’s a goddamned emergency and I need for you to come down Chartres, park the cab and come into the Maison and get me.”
“All right,” I says, “gimmee a minute – reckon you know our first stop is going to be an ATM…?”
“Just come on…hard.” He says.
So I do.
You ever notice how Sandra Dee or Debra Kerr or Marilyn Monroe come screaming around a corner in some sporty little convertible; they’re on their way to an important rendezvous with a marvelously handsome lantern-jawed man and they screech to a stop - parking beautifully and efficiently mere steps away from the front door of the U.N. Building or the Empire State Building or the counting room at the treasury building or the American embassy in Mogadishu - some place all the rest of us would spend an hour driving around before we gave up and spent the twenty dollars an hour to park in an underground garage? I call this Sandra Dee parking. An open parking place next to the handicapped spots at Wal-Mart? Sandra Dee parking. An open meter on the same block as the court house I am compelled to appear in through no fault of my own? Sandra Dee parking. So this was like that. I needed an open spot around the three hundred block of Chartres that I could both get into and then get out of and I found one.
Inside, the place was long and narrow and dark. Luke was sitting at the far end of the bar nursing something brown and wet and watching an unenthusiastic stripper waddle in a narrowing circle around a brass pole.
“Sit. Sit. Sit.” He says.
“Motherfucker.” I say.
“Seriously, man. Just sit down and shut up and all will be revealed in due course.”
“Gimme a hunnerd bucks,” I say. And he does. Suddenly, I’m considering the possibility of maybe taking him sort of seriously.
“What’s the deal, Luke?”
“Watch this…” He says, and he calls out to the stripper, “Hey! Honey! What color are your panties?”
Her eyes narrow. She thinks. Her forehead starts to wrinkle up. Finally, she surrenders, reaches down and hefts a roll of fat the size of a big pork tenderloin up far enough that she can see the fabric of her panties.
“They’re white. And…uh…sparkly. Gimme a buck.”
And he did.
“I’m calling bullshit and I gotta go back to work. Fuck you Luke.”
“Wait. Wait. Wait. Sit. Sit. It gets better.” He says this with a ferret-like intensity that would be painful to look at on a less attractive man. His smile never faltered. His eyes never left the str…uh…dancer.
He calls out to her, “Take it off, Honey…take it ALL off!”
She’s wearing precious little at this point and New Orleans is no place to take your panties off. For one moment I was bewildered.
She shrugged and started fooling with her garters. A phone was ringing down the bar. Sweat stood out on her lip and forehead and breasts. Suddenly, her whole leg sprang free in her hand. She stumbled, regained purchase on the stage and with one hand on the brass pole liberally subsidizing her balance, casually tossed the prosthesis underhanded behind the bar.
Luke chortled gleefully.
“Gimme twenny bucks.” She said.
And he did.
Later, in the cab, Luke turned to me and said, “Was it worth it, Brother?”
“No, Luke. It was demeaning and creepy and wrong and…hell, I’m just kidding. Of course it was worth it. Now gimme twenny bucks.”
And…astonishingly…he did.
For the most part, this really is a true story.
Raleigh Wide Open - October 24, 2009
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After the storm, it took a while before they started letting people back into New Orleans. When I finally got in to the city to see my house…well…I ruined both the pairs of shoes I had with me trying to walk through the house and assess the damage for the insurance guys. I drove in my stocking feet a long way out of the city before I found a shoe store that was still in business and I went in there in my stocking feet singing “The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes,” and bought these sneakers. I loved these shoes and they made me feel a little better for no reason I can exactly explain. I tore the side out of the right shoe stepping over the corner of the stage at a John D. Holeman concert in Clayton, North Carolina.
Furry Lewis
New Orleans
New Orleans
I used to drive United Cab 170 around New Orleans with the expectation that somehow there would be some money involved that I would actually get to keep at the end of the week. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved it - sort of the way Catholics are about sex and Baptists about beer.
I was what they called a 10-2 specialist. I picked up the drunkest, most obstreperous customers from the dive bars and saloons and took them home - or occasionally to other bars – once to the airport, now and again to the train or bus stations. I carried passengers with great dark stains between their legs – greasy and shiny with piss. Once I carried a boy who inexplicably dug his finger into his collar, tugged himself a fair-sized hole in the clothes around his neck and poured a whole foaming Corona into his shirt. Another boy yanked the door open, tipped first his bottle, then his head back and rolled out of the cab onto Jackson Street.
I carried girls from Tulane who cried and clutched their clothes over their sad pointy breasts and told me frothy and wet stories about how their trust funds would be taken away if they couldn’t stop drinking and screwing inappropriate boys. I carried girls from Loyola who vomited half-digested ramen or macaroni or spaghetti noodles into the gutter on their way into and out of the cab (only once did one of them actually puke inside the cab…it was either Kraft Shells and Cheese or some kind of Farfalle with Alfredo sauce). Occasionally I carried home a girl who had passed out and thus imposed unforgivably on her friendships by becoming a burden to those of her dear friends who were ready to move on to the next bar.
One of them, I picked up as she lay unconscious on the sidewalk at Napoleon and Magazine in front of a bar called Miss Mae’s - her ridiculously short dress was hitched up around her waist and the flossy excuse of her underwear had surrendered any possibility of covering the curly red hair between her legs or the puffy pink lips of her…well, you know. She was lying in a puddle of light maybe ten feet from the front door – rangy men with boney wrists and prominent Adam’s apples slunk along the edge of the light like hydrophobic whippets, watching out of the corners of their yellow eyes for an opportunity to lurch in and do what…? Feel her up? Roll her over hoping to find a purse full of traveler’s checks? Drag her back into the shadows to fondle and fuck her, satisfying once and for all the necrophilliac curiosity that’d nagged them since puberty? Kick her in the neck? Having snatched her up did they expect to hump her bodily down to the port over Tchoupitoulas Street a few blocks away and into the hold of one of the great sea-going vessels there to be kept prisoner on board in the service of lonely Russian or Chinese or South African sailors…?
To amuse myself, I imagined an eerily sedated Marlon Perkins zoomorphically describing the scene as I tried to tuck her clothes around her and gave a marginal shoring up to her modesty if not her dignity. One of her friends - one who did not care enough to wait outside and keep the hyenas at bay, but was frantically worried about her money, Chap Stick, birth control and ID - kept her purse safe at the bar and was willing to root through her wallet and find an appropriate amount of money to get her home.
I promised drinks and the possibility of free cab rides and eventually enlisted the aid of some local barflies who rode along with me - mostly as witnesses. I wasn’t willing to carry her alone in my cab and potentially suffer bleary accusations of lechery or molestation the next morning and if I encountered stairs or even a high curb at any point in the process…well…my back never was what it used to be.
So we planted her on the linoleum next to the commode, washed her face with a cold wet cloth, covered her with a blanket, fumbled about for water and Tylenol which I arranged in a handy pile on the window sill and we left her there: supine, recumbent, insensate…still alive when the key snicked in the lock – I’m pretty sure she was…
Because I solved problems like these regularly for about a dozen different uptown bars, I had a hard time paying for drinks anywhere I liked to drink. Basically, though I’m painting this picture with a broad brush, there are two kinds of bars in New Orleans: bars for us - we who live here…and bars for…you - you who come from other places and behave in ways you would never think to at home. We drink obscenely large un-watered liquor drinks served in genuine glass tumblers and pay a dollar or two while you drink rubbing alcohol poured out of Tanqueray bottles into tiny plastic thimbles - assuming you can get a second mortgage for the third round.
Once I made the mistake of drinking with friends in a German bar on Bourbon Street…it was World Cup time, they had a satellite and despite what you’ve heard about me, I can be accommodating to my friends and loved ones for short periods of time…occasionally. I paid 23 bucks for three drinks and thereafter swore I’d never drink with the tourists again…
I never had to…
The London Lodge is a desperate place out on the edge of New Orleans…maybe it’s in Metairie - sort of a no-man’s land regardless. I carried a few rides out there, but not many. The Lodge doesn’t have the kind of clientele that rides in taxis if they can help it. If you ever wanted to meet a gold tooth pimp or a fourteen-year-old whore or the extended family of a death row inmate in New Orleans to make appeals at the federal courthouse or swarthy mustachioed men who sleep in shifts, taking turns sitting on the bumper of the refrigerated truck parked in front of their room, smoking cigarettes and paring their fingernails with a Greek spring-loaded stiletto, well…this is the place for you.
Were it not for Katrina I might eventually have drunk myself into a room at the London Lodge…
Cliff Wagner & th' Bullfrog
th’ Bullfrog Willard McGhee and Clifford Wagner. We called ourselves Public Domain and put out a record called th’ Crazy Ol’ Man’s Chorus. As it turned out, there was another band out there called Public Domain and they were doing better exposure-wise than we were - so we changed our name to th’ Crazy Ol’ Man’s Chorus and decided the record was called Public Domain.
This photo was taken by Rachel Hickey for the cover of that album - must have been around 1992 or 1993 in Boston, Massachusetts. We were heavily influenced cover-photographically-speaking by Moe Ash.
New Orleans
New Orleans
I used to drive United Cab 170 around New Orleans with the expectation that somehow there would be some money involved that I would actually get to keep at the end of the week. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I loved it - sort of the way deadheads are about dancing.
So the story goes like this:
The Monteleone is at 214 Royals Street in the Quarters. Truman Capote used to claim that he was born in room 214 on Valentine’s Day (2.14 - get it?) His Mother, in fact, stayed there while she was pregnant, but she made it to the hospital in time for the delivery. Occasionally someone’ll tell you the story about how Truman was born with all those two-fourteens…it’s bullshit, but these are bread-and-butter stories for cabbies, mule drivers and tour guides…and the Monteleone is a cool old building.
Triangle Blues Society Newsletter feature: Geography of the Blues
Blind Boy Fuller House:
Fuller lived on Ninth for a little while and then moved to a house at 7th and Chestnut in Winston-Salem. I’m still working out those addresses. I haven’t had a chance to go have a look at those neighborhoods and make sure they’re still there. Anybody wanna go have a look for me?
Blind Boy Fuller:
One of Fuller’s favorite and most profitable places to busk was the train station in Rocky Mount. If you wanna walk in Fuller’s footsteps, get yourself over to 101 Hammond Street in Rocky Mount, find a comfortable bench and play for the weary commuters as they get off the trains there. I’m sure it’s a whole lot different crowd than it used to be when the “commuters” were Tobacco and Soy and Cotton men on their way to Durham to gamble with their commodities. The station was built in 1893 and modernized during the 1960’s. Thankfully, between 1997 and 2000, the station was remodeled again and has been largely restored to its former earlier 20th Century glory.
Sonny Terry and Rev. Gary Davis:
When Sonny Terry first moved to Durham from Rockingham, NC around 1934, Gary Davis invited him to come stay at his house. Terry and Davis lived together for a while at 805 Colfax Street in Durham. Get off the Durham Freeway (147) at 55 and take S. Alston south. You will turn right onto Linwood Avenue and then right onto Colfax Street. The lot where the house stood is on the right up on the next block - now the parking lot for the Oak Grove Freewill Baptist Church.
J.B. Long:
The United Dollar Store Long managed when he discovered Fuller was at 2501 W. Club Blvd. in Durham. This is where Long recorded Fuller’s first demos for the Columbia Recording Corporation. Get off the Durham Freeway (147) at Hillandale Road and drive north. Cross Hillsborough (70) and the next big street is W. Club Blvd. Take a left onto W. Club – the store sat at the corner of W. Club and Georgia Avenue. I’m going to have to do some research on this address – either the neighborhood has changed radically in the last eighty years, always a possibility, or else Durham has changed the way they number their streets…stay tuned campers.
That’s the deal. As always, if you’ve got some pictures, an address or anecdote you want to share with me – and I wish you would – feel free to write me some of your lines. Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…
th' Hillbilly Gypsies
th’ Hillbilly Gypsies - WPSU, State College, PA - 2007.
I was with Trae and Jamie Lynn Buckner in Fairmont, West Virginia when Katrina got the house and everything in it. They are some of the finest human people in the universe and I’m proud as hell that they are my friends.
I was recording an album in Trae’s studio, eating his Granma’s cooking, scratching Bo the dog behind the ears and just generally having a hell of a time. THe storm filled my life up with worry and anxiety. Trae’s family gave me comfort and let me be one of them…
One time, years ago, I asked John Jackson to say something nice about me for my presskit. He went away for a day or so and then called me back and said “Write this down, just like I tell ye…”
”I think he’s a real good musician and a real nice man to go with it. You couldn’t ask for any better. He is a wonderful person.”
So I wrote it down just like that. I thought a minute and said, “Can I put something in there about how you think I’m a genius and a folk-legend?”
He allowed as how he thought I should keep it just the way it was…
Over the years I’ve thought about the compliment John paid me a lot. So I want to say this about that:
Trae Buckner is a hellofa musician - he’s versatile and fluent and expressive on a number of instruments. He’s a patient sound engineer with an astonishing ear. He plays and sings with an exuberance and a joy that is all too often lacking in the musicians I hear working across all genres. And he’s a fine, compassionate, decent, wonderful man who is gentle with his son, loving with his wife and has approached the world with a sense of humor and mischief which infects his music and makes him a personal-pleasure to be around.
Jamie Lynne Buckner has a voice like a nuclear reaction. It’s full of emotion and empathy and it resonates a long time after she’s quit singing - like a well-tuned harmonium. Her phrasing is elegant and powerful. She is a beautiful, generous, quick-witted and wonderful woman who is kind to her husband, proud of her son and has approached the world with a sense of mischief and fun which infects her music and makes her a personal-pleasure to be around.
If you haven’t seen the Hillbilly Gypsies play live, you’ve wasted your life.
Photo by Roger or Regina Asti
Triangle Blues Society newsletter review of Cedric Burnside & Steve Malcolm at Papa Mojo's Roadhouse
Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm @ Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse - Durham, NC. 05.21.2010.
A word about Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse. I used to drive Cab 170 and Cab 154 for United down in New Orleans. Tourists eat Tabasco. Locals eat Crystal or Louisiana Hot Sauce. Papa Mojo’s has all 3. Draw your own conclusions. If you want a real-deal south Louisiana experience from the food to the music…if you need to have Tasso explained to you or Cochon de lait…if you aren’t right this minute listening to Mel Melton blowing a harp on a mixed-tape cassette one of the Meters made you for that drive you took to Memphis ten or twelve years ago…well, then you ought to be eating three or four meals every week over at Papa Mojo’s – that’ll get you your mojo back.
Memory is a funny thing. You know, about twelve or thirteen years ago, I played a show with R.L. Burnside in Pittsburgh. I reckon it’s an exaggeration to say “with” R.L. Burnside. The promoters set me up in the lobby and I played while people milled about and drifted in to the auditorium clutching their R.L. Burnside T-Shirts and grinning excitedly and chatting loudly about the politics of parking downtown in Pittsburgh. The doors closed; the lights came down; I was handed a check and directly I found myself in the abandoned lobby wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do next. Well, next, I snuck into the show.
Down the dark aisle, Burnside said, “Well, well, well…”
Friday night (twelve or thirteen years later) I was folded up at a corner table in Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse while Cedric Burnside, the grandson of R.L. Burnside, sat hunched over a microphone playing one of his Mississippi Hill Country Blues. “Well, well, well…” he said…and he sounded like his grandfather. He looks a little like him too: slim and hard and quick to smile like he’s got a funny secret he’s about to tell on someone. But he is not his grandfather. Cedric’s got the pedigree, but the show is his own – the songs are his stories to tell. Him and Steve “Lightnin’” Malcolm may have been over to R.L.’s house, but they filled their pockets up with blues and carried them home with them and honed and shaped and bullied those blues into something profoundly personal and theirs alone to share.
This blues is swagger and rhythm and exultant noise. This is proud blues swole up skinny-in-the-jailhouse-tough. It’s loud and aggressive: mean-dogs-barking-behind-a-cyclone-fence loud. Sound boils out of them and hangs in the air like smoke. They make their own joyful noise – sometimes barbaric and hypnotic and sometimes oily and urbane.
In the first set, they slid around the songs “Try Not to Pull My Gun” and “It’s Your Life” - songs at once, unconstrained, elastic and tense. It made me think of what it must have been like to see Muddy Waters in some high school gymnasium in Kentucky or Indiana in 1963 on one of those nights when the band cooks and slides into a groove and it quits being about forty-minutes-of-stage-time-and-then-quick-back-on-the-bus; but rather one of those nights when the band starts playing for themselves and each other and for the sheer pleasure of it and ‘cause no one wants to sleep on the bus but all of ‘em are radiating corn-liquor-heat up out of their bellies and out through their lungs and tongues and fingertips. The feeling of it, you know. For eight or ten minutes on Friday night, Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm showed us what that moment in 1963 might have sounded like.
Steve Malcolm is a big man from Missouri. His back and shoulders are broad and hard as hook-hanged meat in a cold locker; his hands put me in mind of the folding mess-kit frying pans they issue in the army. But his fingers are dancer-delicate and precise. He plays with his whole hands like a man should…right-hand-fingers marching up and down the neck, both thumbs on the bass strings, left-hand fingers gathering up the melodies of cricket-loud-nights in the Mississippi hill country. He blends Billy Gibbons’ energy with J.J. Cale’s attitude and comes across as a confident, vigorous, barrel-neck bluesman in size-sixteen sneakers.
Cedric Burnside is an astonishing, crisp drummer. He is lithe and angular, all coils and triangles like a copperhead. He drums as if he were making love in a Pullman berth; a tangle of loose limbs, salty and wet, a primal rhythm – a memory of something buried deep in all of us: our mother’s heartbeat, the rocking of trains, the roll of a lovers’ hips. His drumming has a narrative quality. It is evocative of all this and more…
These two men, with the look and size of Parchman gun bulls, loom over their blues – there is no finesse or tenderness in this blues – just a beautiful, barbaric authenticity shouted out at a volume that’s all about Freddie King, split-atom electricity and the biblical imperative to sing out and make a joyful noise…
Well, well, well…
Cedric Burnside and Steve Malcolm played Papa Mojo’s Roadhouse on May 21, 2010. Buy their record at http://www.myspace.com/jukejointduo and make sure you don’t miss them the next time they come to town.
Nat Reese & th' Bullfrog at the Rialto Theater - Raleigh, NC June 24, 2010
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I’ve known Nat for thirty years or thereabouts - and well enough for the last twenty or so to have spilled numerous potable beverages into his couch. I’ve heard a lot of lies about (and from)Nat over the years and this is one of my favorite ones:
When the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, the promoter of the John Henry Festival in Talcott, West Virginia ran hard south with all the receipts from the show and most of the performers yet unpaid. Nat leapt into his jalopy and sped off down route 3 in blinding pursuit, brandishing a nickel-plated revolver of dubious pedigree and legality, straightening curves through Hinton, Lerona, Athens and Princeton - squeezing off the occasional round and cursing all the way - they crossed into Virginia and, finally, into North Carolina. He caught up with the villainous promoter in the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly just over the North Carolina state line. Shots were exchanged and then words - a few more shots - a few more words - Nat made his determination clear, overwhelmed the promoter and the day went decisively in Nat’s favor.
I think Ed Cabbell told me this story…
So, one time years ago I asked Nat after the veracity of the story and he said this about that:
“Bullfrog,” he said, cause that’s what he called me and everybody’s gotta be somebody and I’m th’ Bullfrog. “Bullfrog,” he says, “I remember everything but the car the gun and the money - other than that, that story is one hundred percent true.”
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Triangle Blues Society Newsletter feature: Geography of the Blues
Willie Trice by th' Bullfrog Willard McGhee
Consider the cradles of civilization: In Mesopotamia they developed the wheel, cultivated grain, domesticated bees and goats. The Chinese discovered paper, cultivated rice, domesticated the silkworm. Mesoamericans made use of mathematics, calendars, the number zero; they domesticated camels; they cultivated maize. So, I have a favorite analogy...
Jellyroll Morton told about hearing the blues in New Orleans for the first time around 1900. Ma Rainey remembered hearing it for the first time in Missouri around 1902. W.C. Handy famously described hearing the “Yellow Dog Blues” on the platform of the train station at Tutweiler, Mississippi in 1903. Howard Odum recorded the presence of blues in Lafayette, Mississippi and Newton, Georgia between 1905-08. The first published blues was Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” in 1912. Handy’s Memphis Blues was first recorded by the Victor Military Band in 1912. The first black singer to record blues, Mamie Smith, waxed “Crazy Blues” for the Okeh label in New York City in 1920.
If there was a single seminal moment in America, a preceding moment when there was no blues followed by one when there was, that moment and the people who shaped it are lost. Blues emerged quickly, nearly whole and spread throughout the south with the speed and the efficiency of the railroads and the river boat traffic moving up and down the Mississippi. Two weeks after “Dallas Blues” was published in 1912, it was being played in saloons and bars along the entire length of the river. Because of the influence of a few individual performers and the idiosyncratic nature of their playing, phrasing and interpretation and despite the speed with which early blues was transmitted around the south there are a dozen or so important regions that have their own distinctive voice. For the early blues, there is East Texas (Lemon Jefferson), the Mississippi Delta (Charlie Patton), New Orleans (Jellyroll Morton), the Turpentine and Lumber camps from Texas to north Arkansas to north Alabama (George Thomas), Atlanta (Willie McTell), the swampy tidewater region of south Georgia and north Florida (Blind Blake) and the Piedmont region of the Appalachians (Blind Boy Fuller) – these are the cradles of civilization for the blues. Before Chicago or St. Louis or Memphis there was the Delta; before New York there was the Piedmont…
About a dozen years ago, I took one of the best drives of my life. I started in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and drove highway 61 the length of the Mississippi Delta down into New Orleans. The guys at Red Rooster Records and the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi used to sell a half dozen mimeographed pages listing sites of interest to the avid blues fan. It included homes where the great men and women were born, homes where they died, graveyards where they lay, and juke joints where they played. I happily ticked each and every one off the list.
The Crooked Road is another Heritage Trail extending over 19 Virginia counties and includes sites where early country musicians lived and played. Part of that project also includes a musician’s directory so teachers and those who book traditional music can find musicians and throw money and prestige at them.
The Piedmont is one of the principle “cradles of civilization” for the blues. I would like for the TBS to be involved in the creation of a Blues Heritage Trail here in the piedmont. As a regular feature in the news(blues)letter I’ll be presenting a few of our local piedmont blues guys and hitting you, the readers, up for any additional information you may have about them and the geography associated with them – any photographs you may have would be appreciated too. Eventually, we’ll have a marked trail you can download from the website so you can conduct yourselves on your own piedmont blues tour.
Blues geography for this month:
Blind Boy Fuller (b. Fulton Allen: July10, 1907 – d. February 13, 1941) – Seminal blues guitarist.
Grove Hill Cemetery, Durham, NC.
Location - Grove Hill is unattended and unused. It is located on private property at the rear of 2919 Fayetteville Street, just south of the Fayetteville Street School and just north of the old railway right-of-way.
904 Massey Avenue, Durham, NC
Location – This is Fuller’s last address; the house where he lived and died.
James Baxter Long (b. December 25, 1903 – d. February 25, 1975) – Dollar Store manager, manager of Fuller, discoverer of Gary Davis. Long is the man responsible for first recording Fuller, Davis, Sonny Terry, Bull City Red and others.
Magnolia Cemetery, Elon, NC.
Location - Cemetery is in Elon, NC and is bounded by E. Trollinger Ave and S. Oak Ave.
Willie Trice (b. February 10, 1910 – d. December 10, 1976) – Guitar player, friend and influence of Blind Boy Fuller.
Richard Trice (b. November 16, 1917 – d. April 6, 2000) – Guitar player, brother of Willie Trice – influenced by Fuller.
Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, Orange County, NC.
Location - NE of Chapel Hill on Mt. Sinai Church Road (SR #1718) about .3 mile east of the intersection with Friends School Road (SR #1719. The cemetery lies to the rear of the church.
Floyd Council (b. February 2, 1911 – d. May 9, 1976) – Guitar player. According to legend, Syd Barrett named his band after South Carolina bluesman Pink Anderson and North Carolina Bluesman Floyd Council.
White Oak AME Zion Cemetery, Sanford, NC.
Location – This cemetery isn’t in the NC cemetery census and is a little difficult to find. Take Hwy 1 south out of Raleigh and drive about forty miles. Get off at the 15-501 exit and at the bottom of the ramp turn left. This is Hawkins Street. Turn left again onto Weatherspoon. The police station is just past this intersection on the left and the officers in there are helpful and friendly. Follow Weatherspoon past the police station to the first stoplight which is Seventh Street. Take a right onto Seventh. At the next light, turn left onto Charlotte. At the next light, you will turn left onto Eleventh, which will quickly turn into Moncure. Exactly two miles from this intersection you will see the remains of the White Oak AME Church on your left. The cemetery is on the right hand side of the road. It is pretty well grown up, so you will want to dress for ticks, chiggers and the like. There is no marker for Floyd Council…perhaps we could have a fundraiser with the TBS and get a small monument or a highway marker for ol’ Floyd.
Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…
Triangle Blues Society newsletter review of Classic Appalachian Blues
I am full of prejudices and nebulously formed judgments about the blues. This is my disclaimer. Please take note.
The Smithsonian Folkways Recordings CD release of Classic Appalachian Blues is a fantastic collection of East Coast and Piedmont blues musicians. The two men who curated this collection, Barry Lee Pearson and Jeff Place, took a vast pool of raw material and distilled it into a smooth, blue-burning liquor that is at once pleasant, rewarding and intoxicating.
This must have been a daunting project. There is scarcely any place in the U.S. that is as culturally varied as the Appalachian region. Geographically, it stretches from coastal Maine in the north to central Alabama in the south and from the fall line in the east as far as central Mississippi in the west. It is topographically diverse, including the rolling hills of the piedmont In the Carolinas, the agricultural lowlands of the Great Tennessee Valley, the undulating ridges and valleys of Virginia and the high Appalachian plateau of West Virginia and the eastern parts of Kentucky and Tennessee. Every state in Appalachia hasregions defined by sparsely populated agricultural communities, but sprawling urban areas like Pittsburgh, Winston-Salem, Atlanta and Knoxville draw people and their talents and their influences from the hinterland and other states. Thousands of musicians have been recorded in this vast region by hundreds of collectors and record labels over a period of roughly one hundred years.
In order to make some sense of this mess, Pearson and Place restricted themselves to using recordings from the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian. Now having crimped the edges of their pie somewhat, Pearson and Place still set themselves a herculean task. The Rinzler collection includes Moe Ash’s entire Folkways catalogue, all of the surviving field recordings gathered in the forties by collectors like Rinzler and Sam Charters and twenty years of recorded performances from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Eleven of the album’s 21 tracks are field recordings or products of the Folkways studio. The other ten tracks were pulled from live performance recordings made in the seventies and eighties at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington D.C.
It is a pleasure to meet old friends on this recording. Men like John Jackson, Howard Armstrong and John Cephas who were conscientious transmitters of culture and teachers of songs. It is a pleasure to be reminded of some musicians who, for no good reason, are not played as heavily in the rotation of my personal soundtrack. Men like Lesley Riddle, who was a great influence on A.P. Carter and the shape of country music as we know it and John Tinsley who was Blind Blake’s eyes as he hoboed around the south playing and singing before Blake’s mysterious disappearance in 1933. It is a pleasure to discover some musicians I had never heard. The Foddrell brothers were a revelation to me as was E.C. Ball.
North and South Carolina’s blues is well-represented on this collection. Doc Watson and Etta Baker come/came from Deep Gap and Morganton, North Carolina; Lesley Riddle had sturdy North Carolina mountain roots as he was born in Burnsville, just north of Asheville. J.C. Burris was born in Kings Mountain, North Carolina and had strong ties to his uncle Sonny Terry who was a Durham resident for many years. Gary Davis also lived in Durham though he came to Durham from Laurens, South Carolina. Brownie McGhee lived in Durham and made his first records as Blind Boy Fuller II recording for J.B. Long’s outfit. Peg Leg Jackson was born in Jonesville, South Carolina and spent part of every year for twenty five years living in Rocky Mount, NC. so he could perform on Fenner’s Tobacco Market: a fifteen minute radio show that aired every morning during the four months the tobacco market was in session. Josh White, Baby Tate, and Pink Anderson were all from Greenville, SC. In all, fully half of the performers on this collection are from the Carolinas. Kind of makes you feel proud, doesn’t it?
I have three complaints: first, there are few actual mountain musicians on the record. The majority of them are piedmont (which is admittedly still a part of the Appalachians geologically, but not so much culturally – more germane to my complaint, I suppose, is the fact that piedmont musicians already tend to be catalogued together as a distinctive type of blues player) or Tennessee Valley musicians…or, men who had transplanted into the hinterland of Washington D.C. and had lived there for so long that they had cut most of their ties to Appalachia. Second, as Barry Lee Pearson writes:
Overall, Appalachian blues tradition is far more integrated than Delta or Texas blues. To be sure, bands like the Mississippi Sheiks had a repertoire suitable to either black or white audiences, and some Mississippi artists like John Hurt played with white musicians— in Hurt’s case with fiddler Willie Narmour. But the blend of black and white tradition appears more prevalent in the mountains, probably due to the closer social interaction between blacks and whites in the region.
Because he makes this point, I wish they had included tracks from Dock Boggs, Dick Justice or Frank Hutchison. They were all mountain people, all were influential, all were white and all had blues repertoires which made clear their interactions with black bluesmen like Luke Jordan (another West Virginian who would have fit beautifully into this collection, but, alas, was left out). I also would have been happy to hear Blind Alfred Reed on this collection. Though he was not strictly speaking a blues musician he did record “Black and Blue Blues” and “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” - a fine anchor for any blues repertoire. In spite of these couple of blues songs, I would have included Reed for his hymn, “There’ll Be No Distinction There,” with the inelegant but powerfully revealing line:
For we’ll all be white in God’s heavenly light and there’ll be no distinction there.
Which brings me to my final complaint. I call it the “Carter Family Rule” This rule comes out of the Carter song “Give Me Roses While I Live.” A rule the Baseball Hall of Fame violates with gleeful abandon. See, for obvious reasons, a lot of dead men’s songs were included in this collection – so I wish that this record included a cut from Nat Reese. He’s still living and could have used the kind of attention one gets when included in a Smithsonian Folkways collection. We’ll have Nat Reese play for the Triangle Blues Society at the Rialto Theater on June 24 both to promote the ClassicAppalachian Blues record and to combine Nat’s powerful living Appalachian blues tradition with the one that is so beautifully and erratically preserved on this album.
Classic Appalachian Blues is a fine album. It is a worthy album and should be included in every blues fan’s collection. But I’ll tell you, my experience with this album makes me want to torture an analogy. See, it’s like craving a Mounds bar and opening the wrapper to discover an Almond Joy. The coconut’s still good; the chocolate’s great and the almond is a pleasant surprise, but none of that really changes the fact that I thought I was opening a Mounds bar.
Buy the record anyway. It makes a fine place to start discovering the blues tradition in our part of the world. You should hear Peg Leg Jackson and then hunt down Tom Davenport’s 1976 film “Born For Hard Luck.” You saw a clip of that short film in the French movie “Amelie.” You should hear Doc Watson and then go to one of his concerts. You should hear Lesley Riddle and be inspired to investigate Brownie McGhee’s records and then the Carter Family and see all of country music laid out in front of you - grown from seeds sown among musicians who were trying to see black and white in ink and paper, in musical notation, on a piano keyboard and not in each other. You should hear J.C. Burris’ gorgeous facility with the harmonica and go out and buy yourself one…give it a try…a harmonica is a lot of fun.
Smithsonian Folkways recordings are available at record stores. Smithsonian
Folkways Recordings, Folkways, Collector, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, Monitor, and
Paredon recordings are all available through:
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings Mail Order
Washington, DC 20560-0520
Phone: (800) 410-9815 or 888-FOLKWAYS (orders only)
Fax: (800) 853-9511 (orders only)
To purchase online, or for further information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings,
go to: www.folkways.si.edu. Please send comments, questions, and catalogue requests
to smithsonianfolkways@si.edu.
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