Triangle Blues Society newsletter review of Rappahannock Blues

I was driving back roads between Washington D.C. and Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia deeply enjoying the sense of occasion attendant with crossing the Mason-Dixon and slipping down into the Great Valley in the dark. Against my better judgment, I’d allowed a great hairy mandolin player to ride in the car with me from Boston down Highway 81 to shows we’d been asked to play in Lynchburg, Roanoke and southern West Virginia. He was blind and surly, covered in cat hair and he smelled like coffee beans and laundry detergent. Conversation exhausted, patience nearly depleted, a tight-lipped battle raged between us over the control of the radio. That night, lo, these many years past now, a public radio station in northern Virginia was broadcasting a concert which culminated with a performance by John Jackson. It was the first time I’d heard John and we sat rapt, battle forgotten, hurtling through the dark, listening through the static until the final applause ended and the program switched over to a show about cars or cooking…something appropriate to a public radio crowd. We were redeemed, this mandolin player and I, by the transcendent and healing power of John’s music.


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.