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  Guitar Heroes

By L. Kevin Johnson

Blind Blake (1893 – 1933)                                                                                                                            Sittin' round  K.Johnson ©2009

"Blind" Blake (born Arthur Blake, circa 1893, Jacksonville, Florida; died: circa 1933) was an influential blues singer and guitarist. He is often called "The King of Ragtime Guitar". There is only one photograph of him in existence. Blind Blake recorded about 80 tracks for Paramount Records in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. He was one of the most accomplished guitarists of his genre with a surprisingly diverse range of material. His complex and intricate finger picking has inspired Reverend Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, Ralph Mctell and many others. He is most known for his distinct guitar sound that was comparable in sound and style to a ragtime piano.

Very little is known about his life. His birthplace was listed as Jacksonville, Florida by Paramount Records but even that is in dispute. Nothing is known of his death. Even his name is not certain. During recordings he was asked about his real name and he answered that his name was Blind Arthur Blake which is also listed on some of the song credits, strengthening his case on his real name, although there is a suggestion that his real name was Arthur Phelps.

His first recordings were made in 1926 and his records sold well. His first solo record was "Early Morning Blues" with "West Coast Blues" on the B-side. Both are considered excellent examples of his style. Blake made his last recordings in 1932, the end of his career aided by Paramount's bankruptcy. It is often said that the later recordings have much less sparkle and, allegedly, Blind Blake was drinking heavily in his later years. It is likely that this led to his early death.

It should be noted that on a few records where white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang sat in with African American groups, the record companies listed Lang as "Blind Blake". Most of those recordings, principally with Lonnie Johnson gave Lang the name Blind Willy Dunn.

It should also be noted that there is an entirely different artist who also recorded multiple LPs under the name "Blind Blake." Alphonso "Blind Blake" Higgs was one of the most popular singers in The Bahamas in the 1950s, leading the house band at the Royal Victoria Hotel. His records were spread all over the U.S. by tourist fans, and several of his songs became folk standards. (Even Johnny Cash was influenced, basing his hit "Delia" on an old blues ballad from Georgia that Blake had adapted into a calypso).

Rev. Gary Davis (1896 – 1972)

Born April 30, 1896 in Laurens County, South Carolina. Died May 5, 1972 in Hammenton, New Jersey, he was the son of John and Evelina Davis; married Annie Bell Wright, 1937. Started playing guitar at age six; became a street singer, playing ragtime, spirituals and dance music; moved to Durham, North Carolina, 1927; became an ordained Baptist minister, 1933. Gary Davis's finger-picking guitar style influenced many other musicians, including Jerry Garcia, Ry Cooder, Dave Van Ronk, Roy Book Binder and Bob Dylan. These musicians in turn delivered his bluesy gospel message to a world-wide audience. Songs like "Baby, Can I Follow You Down," "Candy Man," and "Samson and Delilah" define the common perception of American folk blues.

According to guitarist and author Stefan Grossman, Davis said he was three weeks old when he became blind from chemicals put in his eyes. Despite this affliction, he showed musical talent immediately, making his first guitar from a pie pan and a stick before he was ten.

One of eight children, Gary was raised by his grandmother on a farm near Greenville, South Carolina after his father decided that his mother could not care for him properly. In the South of the early 1900’s street bands provided entertainment, often traveling through the small towns on wagons. The music the young Davis picked up on was a lively combination of spirituals sung in black churches, square dance music, and marches. Davis's distinctive style can be seen as an attempt to translate these types of music to the guitar. In an interview with Sam Charters, Davis said of his chosen instrument: "The first time I ever heard a guitar, I thought it was a brass band coming through. I was a small kid and I asked my mother what it was and she said that was a guitar."

As a youth, Davis sang at the Center Raven Baptist Church in Gray Court, South Carolina. Later, he played in a string band in Greenville and learned to read Braille at the Cedar Springs School for Blind People in Spartanburg. After slipping on ice and breaking his wrist, the bones were set badly, and he was forced to play with an oddly cocked left hand. This may have become an advantage as it allowed him to finger the chords in a unique way. In 1931 Davis moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he met Blind Boy Fuller, another of many blind street musicians of the time. Music was often the only occupation available to these men and their ranks boasted such legendary figures as Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, Blind Blake, Georgia's Blind Willie McTell and Louisiana's Blind Willie Johnson. From the necessity of playing on the street came a style that was forceful and clear, with crowd-pleasing melodies around which the singer invented showy guitar riffs.

While in Durham, Davis met and married his first wife, but left her after discovering she had been unfaithful. He then moved to Washington, North Carolina and became an ordained minister of the Free Baptist Connection Church in 1933. Davis and Blind Boy Fuller journeyed to New York City in 1935 to record for the American Record Company. Although Fuller and another blues singer, Bull City Red, were the more famous participants in these sessions, Davis was able to lay down 15 tracks, among them "I Saw the Light," "I Am the Light of the World," and "You Got to Go Down." Other musicians who recorded this brand of music, which came to be known as the "Piedmont style," included guitarist Brownie McGhee and his partner, harmonica player Sonny Terry.

In 1937 Davis married his second wife, Annie Wright, and together they moved to Mamaroneck, New York, where she found work as a housekeeper. The city's location on the Long Island Sound was close enough to New York City to put Davis in touch with the thriving music business there. He began to record again, making records for producer Moses Asch, and then for the record labels Folkways and Prestige. In 1940 Davis and his wife moved to Harlem to a house on 169th Street where they stayed for the next 18 years. There, Davis became a minister at New York's Missionary Baptist Connection Church and also taught guitar.

In 1968 Davis bought a house in the New York City borough of Jamaica, Queens, and continued to teach and perform in the area, always accessible to scholars and the new generation of country blues guitarists. On May 5, 1972, he suffered a heart attack while on the way to a performance in Newtonville, New Jersey. He died at William Kessler Memorial Hospital and is buried in Rockville Cemetery in Lynbrook, New York.

More than two decades after his death, the influence of Reverend Gary Davis can still be felt. As each new generation is introduced to blues, folk, and other forms of traditional American music, Davis's signature guitar stylings and heartfelt vocals continue to move, entertain, and educate.

By L. Kevin Johnson

Introduction

The people mentioned in this article are recognized as representing the finest in Mississippi blues. The formidable body of work performed by these blues musicians within a relatively short period (between 1925-1938) stands as the foundation of early blues. Behind this significant group of great artists was the influential hand of Charlie Patton, whose impact on traditional Mississippi blues was pervasive. Below is a brief overview of the life of some of these original blues masters.

It is almost impossible to hear Charlie Patton for the first time and not be startled by his immense, gritty baritone, which his discoverer H.C. Speir fondly described as "a regular ol’ Mississippi River voice." It is only after the shock wears off that one recognizes how singular his musical approach was and how monumental his presence was in blues history.

Patton was born in the hill country between Raymond and Bolton, Mississippi. Sometime after 1900 his family moved to Dockery Plantation in the Delta, which comprised some 400 tenant families and probably numbered upward toward 2000 people. Around 1907 he began playing guitar having learned from a man named Earl Harris, a musician from nearby Cleveland, Patton went on to become the Delta’s first blues celebrity.

Patton was probably among the earliest architects of the syncopated 1- 2 beat that he applied to both blues and gospel. By 1910 he had developed most of his front-line pieces and had begun attracting imitators. After his audition for the Jackson, Mississippi scout H.C. Speir in 1929, which led to his recording, he was Paramount Records best selling artist for the next year. Five years later, at the age of 43, Patton was dead of a heart ailment. For a full account of Patton’s life, music and associates, see the book entitled "King of the Delta Blues" by Stephen Calt & Gayle Wardlow.

The first artist to record Patton material was Tommy Johnson, who in turn became a remarkably influential figure in Jackson, Mississippi. Born in Terry, Mississippi in 1896, Johnson had begun learning "common chords" around 1912 from his older brother, LeDell. By age 16, he ran away from home to become a "professional" musician, largely supporting himself by playing on the street for tips. In 1914, he traveled to the Delta with an older woman and returned two years later as an accomplished musician, already forming the majority of the repertoire that he would record more than a decade later.

The legend of Tommy Johnson is hard to ignore. So is his uncontrolled womanizing and alcoholism, both of which constantly got him in trouble. Johnson's addiction to alcohol was so obvious that he was often seen drinking Sterno, denatured alcohol or shoe polish strained through bread for the kick each could offer when whiskey wasn't affordable or available in dry counties throughout the South. Then there is the crossroads story, his deal with the Devil at a deserted Delta crossroad as an explanation of his impressive musical abilities. This was being told repeatedly about Tommy, even before the story was attributed to Robert Johnson.

Tommy Johnson was no doubt an impressive guitar player and song-writer. Two of his best known numbers have survived into modern times; "Big Road Blues" is probably best known to contemporary blues fans from adaptations by Floyd Jones and Rory Block, while the song "Canned Heat Blues" is probably his best masterpiece, a bone-chilling account of his complete addiction to alcohol and his slavish attempts to score it by whatever means necessary. This was the tune that gave a California blues rock band their name. Tommy Johnson was playing a local house party in November of 1956 when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

Born Eddie James House, Jr. in Riverton, Mississippi, Son House was a major innovator of the Delta style, along with his playing partners Charlie Patton and Willie Brown. Few listening experiences in the blues are as intense as hearing one of Son House's original 1930s recordings for the Paramount label. Entombed in a hailstorm of surface noise and scratches, one can still be awestruck by the emotional fervor House puts into his singing and slide playing. He was the main source of inspiration to both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

At the age of 15, House was preaching. He didn't even bother picking up a guitar until he turned 25, but when he finally did, he discovered that he preferred playing music and drinking corn whiskey over plantation labor. After drunkenly launching into a blues at a house frolic in Lyon, Mississippi one night and picking up some coins for doing it, Son House gave up preaching altogether.

Sometime later, at another house party in Lyon, he shot a man and was immediately sentenced to imprisonment at Parchman Farm for murder. He ended up only serving two years of his sentence, with his parents both lobbying hard for his release, claiming self defense. Upon his release, after a Clarksdale judge told him never to set foot in town again, he started a new life in the Delta as a full-time man of the blues.

After hitchhiking and riding the rails, he made it down to Lula, Mississippi, and ran into the legendary blues artist, Charlie Patton. The two of them argued and bickered constantly, and the only thing they had in common was a fondness for imbibing whatever alcohol came their way. Though House would later refer to Patton as a "jerk" and other uncomplimentary names, it was Patton's success as a bluesman, both live and on record that got Son's foot in the door as a recording artist. He soon followed Patton up to Grafton, Wisconsin, and recorded a handful of sides for the Paramount label. These records today are some of the most highly prized collector's items of Delta blues recordings, much tougher to find than, a Robert Johnson or even a Charlie Patton ‘78. After Patton died in 1934, House dropped out of the music business.

But it was those recordings that led Alan Lomax to record him for the Library of Congress in 1941. House had gone a full decade without recording, and this time, he just as quickly disappeared, moving to Rochester, NY. When folk blues researchers finally found him in 1964, he was cheerfully exclaiming that he hadn't touched a guitar in years. One of the researchers, a young guitarist named Alan Wilson (later of the blues-rock group Canned Heat) literally sat down and retaught Son House how to play like Son House. Once the old master was up to speed, the festival and coffeehouse circuit welcomed him.

In 1965, House played Carnegie Hall and four years later found himself the subject of a film documentary. Everywhere he played, he was besieged by young fans, asking him about Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and others. Son House fell into ill health by the early '70s; what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease first affected his memory and his ability to recall songs onstage and later, his hands, which shook so bad he finally had to give up the guitar and eventually live performing altogether by 1976.

He lived quietly in Detroit, MI, for another 12 years, passing away on October 19, 1988. His induction into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 was no less than his due. Son House was the blues.

Robert Johnson, "King of the Delta Blues Singers", was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in Copiah County, on May 8, 1911. Robert and his mother did not stay long in Hazlehurst. After working as migrant labor, his mother moved the family to Memphis where he lived for several years.

Early in life Robert developed an interest in music. He played Jews Harp and harmonica for the next few years until he became interested in guitar in the 1920's. Robert was a good looking boy and he became very popular with the girls. Eventually he became serious and married a sixteen year old girl named Virginia Travis in 1929. She and Robert's first child died during childbirth in 1930.After this early tragic experience, Robert became absorbed in his music.

While living in Robinsonville, Robert met other blues singers who influenced his early style. Among these are Son House and Willie Brown. Bluesman and preacher Son House particularly influenced Robert with his raw and intensely pure emotional music. Eventually,

Robert went back to Hazlehurst searching for his real father, and became more serious about his music. There he met a bluesman named Ike Zinnerman, who became his teacher and mentor.

Robert's understanding of women deepened and he began to understand that they could provide everything he needed. He met a kind and loving woman more than 10 years his senior with three small children. Robert and Calletta Craft were married in 1931. She totally loved and took care of him.

Robert wasn't particularly respected because he was not a hard laborer like many people at the time, his work seemed too easy. He had beautiful hands, wavy hair and looked younger than his age. No one knew he was married, and thought he was being kept by an older woman.

This period in Hazlehurst was beneficial because it helped blossom Robert’s musical ability. He would spend time alone practicing songs until he could perform them perfectly. When he felt ready for more learning, he packed up his family and moved to the Delta. When Robert returned to Robinsonville, he had surpassed his friends Son House and Willie Brown.

He played in bars and on street corners for a few months and then moved on. Robert began to spend time on the Arkansas side of the river, across the river from Memphis in a town called Helena. All the great musicians of that time passed through Helena and west Helena, and many were influenced by Robert.

Robert guarded his musical style well. If he felt someone wanted to be like him, play like him, he would leave in the middle of a performance. He loved traveling and seemed always on the move.  Robert could play most anything requested of him. He had an ability to learn music and lyrics quickly, after only hearing a song once; he could play and sing it, not only the blues, but pop, ballads, and other styles as well.

By the mid-thirties, Johnson was well known through the Delta, Mississippi, and Tennessee, and began to think about recording his music. He contacted H. C. Spier in Jackson, MS, who connected him with someone who could help him. In 1936 he began to record his songs, among them his most popular Terraplane Blues. He made eleven records which increased his fame.

Robert Johnson was a gifted singer, guitarist and songwriter whose life story is wrapped in mystery and legend. Only two photographs are known to exist of him and he recorded only 29 songs before his death in 1938 at the age of 27. Many of his contemporaries believed that he met the Devil at a lonely crossroads at midnight and made a deal to sell his soul in return for becoming the greatest blues musician of all time. More likely, he was blessed with enormous talent and spent a lot of time learning from other blues masters and honing his skills. He achieved some success and fame from recordings and performances during his life and was scheduled to perform at the first "Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall when he died.

Although his burial place remains uncertain, it is generally accepted that his death was not accidental. Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband (or girlfriend) while performing at a juke joint near Greenwood, Mississippi and died on August 16, 1938. Though he only wrote 29 songs, his impact on the world of music has been incredible. Many consider him the father of modern rock and roll. Johnson's music lives on through his recordings, which were first released as a compilation by Columbia Records in the 1960's. In 1990 a complete two-CD box set of all his recordings (every take of every song) was released and over a million sets were sold. For more details about Robert Johnson’s life and music, see the book entitled, Escaping the Delta, by Elijah Wald.

Mississippi John Hurt (1892 – 1966)

John Smith Hurt was born in Teoc, Mississippi. He was number 8 out of 10 children born to Paul Hurt and Mae Jane Smith. They all played music around the house but John was the only one who was serious about it, and according to his widow, he learned to play guitar on his own. His finger picking guitar style was tight and clean. Music tumbled off the strings in perfect timing with his voice, which was clear and pleasant. At times, he would use the instrument like a second voice, dropping the last few words of a repeated line and playing the melody which would fill the gap.

The origin of his music and picking style remains a mystery. Clearly, it was influenced by the white folk traditions of the hills which stretch all the way back to Scottish tunes brought by Scotch-Irish settlers. But it had the blackness of the Delta in it as well. His white landlord asked him once how he made his melodies, and Hurt’s answer was as unhelpful as it was charming: "Well, sir, I just make it sound like I think it ought to."

John did not go to school past the fourth grade, though he did learn to read and write. He worked as a tenant farmer, later switching to day labor when he had gotten his fill of the risks of sharecropping. Unlike many black musicians from Mississippi, he was sedentary and happy, and there was no evidence he had contact with other blues musicians who traveled, sometimes only miles from his house.

John was recruited for a recording session in New York around 1928 by a scout for Okeh Records. He traveled there, made the recordings known as the 1928 Sessions (was paid $20 per song), then returned home to Avalon, Mississippi where he spent the next 35 years farming and playing house

parties, until he was rediscovered in 1963 by two young blues musicians from Washington D.C., named Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart.

They had heard the original Okeh recording of Avalon Blues. Puzzled about how certain parts of the song were played, Tom decided to go to Avalon and see if he could meet John Hurt and ask him about the guitar part. Two days later at sunset, Hoskins pulled into Stinson’s Store, an old combination gas station, general store and post office, which, along with the owners’ house comprised the entirety of Avalon, Mississippi. Hoskins approached several men lounging around the front of the store and asked if anyone knew of a blues singer named Mississippi John Hurt. Hoskins could not believe his ears when the men pointed down a dirt road across the highway and told him, "’bout a mile down that road, third mailbox up the hill. Can’t miss it."

After Tom and John Hurt met, for the next two years, John played clubs, coffeehouses and festivals all over the United States and Canada, and was the resident artist at the Ontario Place coffee house in Washington. He was the first performer to be invited to Newport two consecutive years and in fact played both Newport and Philadelphia every year until his death in 1966.

King of the Delta Blues: The Music of Charlie Patton – Yazoo Records 2001*

Charlie Patton / Founder of the Delta Blues – Yazoo Records 1020

Masters of the Delta Blues: The Friends of Charlie Patton – Yazoo Records 2002

Blues from the Mississippi Delta (1964) Folkways Records

The Legendary Son House: Father of Folk Blues (1965) Columbia 2417

Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (2 CD Set) Columbia Records

The Roots of Robert Johnson (original artists that influenced Robert Johnson) – Yazoo Records 1073

Mississippi John Hurt: 1928 Sessions – Yazoo Records 1065

Mississippi John Hurt: Worried Blues (1963) – Rounder CD 1082

  Scott Dunbar’s Lake Mary’s Blues

L. Kevin Johnson

Old time blues music fascinates me because it is profoundly about emotional expression and feeling. My friend and local bluesman, Ken Johnston says, "When you sing the blues you feel better. It helps you deal with your problems." For me blues is all about experience. The tradition began as a gut-wrenching expression of emotion, which probably developed from the "field holler" of cotton pickers in the Old South.

Of all the different forms of art in the world, blues has the unique quality of blending percussive rhythm, melody and lyrics through call and response. It allows the listener to experience the uplifting groove that penetrates into the human heart. Blues is a kind of communion of feeling from heart to heart which is why it is so similar to old time gospel music. They are two sides of the same coin. Gospel is the celebration of the grace of God, while blues is the mournful expression of feeling disconnected. Both are complementary to human experience.

Recently I came across two wonderful CD’s featuring the 1959 – 1960’s recordings of our own Zachary born, Robert "Pete" Williams (Pete is a nickname he acquired as a teenager). I spent an entire day listening over and over to early selections by Williams, which were archived by Dr. Harry Oster during his years at LSU. Dr. Oster sought out permission from the warden to record Williams who was serving a life sentence for murder at Angola State Penitentiary. (From the mid 50’s until 1963, Dr. Oster was producing records for his Folklyric label, many of which have been reissued by Arhoolie Records.)

Robert Pete Williams was born on March 14, 1914. His parents were sharecroppers and being one of nine children, Williams had almost no formal education. Instead he worked most of his life on farms, highway crews and levee camps, as well as other varied jobs while playing dances and country house parties on the side.

Eventually Williams caught the attention of several local blues singers, such as Walker Green, Willie Hudson and Dan Jackson, and was able to learn bottleneck style guitar as well as regular blues finger picking styles. His favorite artist in the early days of blues development was Blind Lemon Jefferson whose speed and flexibility probably impressed young Robert greatly. Though Robert never saw Blind Lemon perform, he heard his records, which sold in the late 1920’s throughout the rural south.

Around 1935 Robert Pete Williams visited a white woman’s house where a friend of his was working as a cook. The woman sold him a $65 dollar guitar that her son would not play, for just $4.50. Robert Pete developed a unique and personal guitar technique, unlike any other recorded blues musician that I’ve heard yet. Although Williams knew and sang many phrases from traditional songs his most moving performances were often those improvised on the spot whenever a certain problem was tormenting him. Williams was apparently at the height of his creativity when the blues were really down on him.

In 1956, Robert Pete Williams was convicted of murder and sent to Angola. There is an interesting recollection of his version of what happened included on the Arhoolie recordings. Unfortunately the tape ran out when he started telling the court scene. During the second year of his life sentence, at the age of 44, it was his ability to improvise blues that gave him a second chance. Rather than following the strict, sometimes typical bland 3-chord progressions of American pop music, or still worse, the bouncy ragtime patterns of the early bluesmen; Robert Pete’s Music was about as rhythmically strange and spontaneous as things ever get in the blues. His music was highly personal and probably played for himself alone or for local friends and neighbors who could readily accept his own brand of originality.

At the time, Angola State Penitentiary furnished guitars for inmates to use and since the warden knew he could play, Robert was called into the office to see if he could make up a prison blues. When Dr. Oster handed him a 12-string, Robert composed and moaned out a sad tune on the spot. Afterward several sessions were recorded and initially released on Dr. Oster’s album entitled Angola Prisoner’s Blues. This record resulted in a number of letters being sent to Angola officials, which eventually became the deciding factor which moved Governor Earl Long to parole Robert Pete in December 1959.

He was paroled to a farmer in Denham Springs, Louisiana who had heard and was deeply moved by the remarkable recording and offered Robert Pete a job. After several years of semi-freedom, in which he was not allowed to travel, he eventually received a full pardon in 1964, just in time for him to make an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, to which he had been invited in previous years. After that, Robert Pete traveled a great deal and in 1966 made an appearance at the Berkeley Folk Festival. During his stay on the west coast, he recorded an album for Tacoma Records, produced by Barry Oliver. Then he was off to Europe with the annual American Folk Blues Festival tour.

Although he was an accomplished acoustic guitar player and powerful singer, unfortunately Robert’s intensely personal and emotional blues style was never quite the kind of lucrative shuffle beat, live wire entertainment that was popular at the festivals. Consequently he had a hard time making ends meet and putting food on the table. In fact, during an interview in 1975, Robert Pete expressed his frustration in this way:

Robert continued to perform and record extensively thru the 1970’s until sickness overtook him and he died on December 31, 1980. Robert Pete Williams is buried at the Southern Memorial Gardens in East Baton Rouge Parish, in the Masonic Garden, Lot 5-C, Space 1.

When I come across a form of roots music such as Robert Pete Williams, it is such a delight because I can sense the raw source of energy he was drawing from. I appreciate his honesty in being willing to give voice and feeling to his own real life struggle for survival. And in some way I am uplifted with a similar kind of profound mystical strength whenever I find myself facing my own challenges in life. Blues is a part of the creative art of living as well as a living art. To be kept alive it must be shared, listened to, celebrated and enjoyed.

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