Ain't Bad for a Pink (3 page)

You had to do a lot of sorting out to find them.

I also followed the swing music of the contemporary big bands at the Royal Festival Hall. I saw Louis Armstrong at Bellevue, Manchester in 1956 or 1957. A coach trip had been organized from Breeden and Middleton’s – the record shop in High Street, Crewe. I attended both houses; Armstrong varied his repertoire for the second house. I saw The Saints Jazz Band at Crewe’s Royal Hotel but the band members were displeased because of all the talking.

The first blues performers I saw included Chris Barber and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall where a mixture of jazz and blues was on the bill. This was in the early Sixties; possibly before that. Then there was a memorable trip to London’s Hammersmith Odeon. I was able to get a ticket from someone who had a spare ticket because he had fallen out with his girlfriend. There were all these old-timers playing steel guitars. Someone had shone them up and they dazzled you. I saw Bukka White, Son House and Skip James.

I have a photograph with me and Bert on either side of Jimmy Witherspoon, one of my favourite performers. He was a very friendly man. I got to know him well.

The friendship between me and Jimmy was to lead to some interesting situations. I was in London to see a concert and afterwards I wanted to see Jimmy’s second set at Ronnie Scott’s. I knew I would have some difficulty getting in because I wasn’t a member and sure enough, I did. However, just at the crucial moment, when I was standing in the entrance hall a door opened and Jimmy shouted,
“My man! He’s with me!”
So I was allowed in. On another occasion I took Bert Bellamy to a record shop in Salford owned by Barry Ansell, a man who was associated with putting on shows in Manchester. Jimmy Witherspoon was in there with Ernie Garside, who ran Club 43 and was responsible for booking blues artists such as Jimmy to come over from the States. This was how Bert met Jimmy who subsequently stayed with him and ate a breakfast cooked for him by Pete Johnson.

Musically speaking, I would describe Jimmy Witherspoon as what you would call a blues shouter. He was very loud; it was developed to overcome a big band sound. Joe Turner was another one – he used to sing in a café while waiting on – and so was Jimmy Rushing. He was with the Basie band. Unfortunately Jimmy got throat cancer and didn’t get the high notes after that though he lived on a while.

I also met Sleepy John Estes, his harmonica player Hammie Nixon and Yank Rachell the mandolin player. I do regret the fact that I didn’t get a photograph taken. John Estes did look sleepy and Lightnin’ Hopkins said,
“Poor old Sleepy’s a very sick man.”
But Sleepy John was musically marvellous. I had quite a good talk with Lightnin’ Hopkins. He was supposed to be a man who was quite reticent. I asked him about travelling – he didn’t like flying much and wrote a song about it! I’ve got nearly all of his records. I met John Lee Hooker but was not so keen on the white bluesmen he played with. John Lee was a stammerer. T-Bone Walker was another bluesman I got to know quite well.

I have two photographs of JB Lenoir: one with Bert Bellamy; the other with me. The poignant fact is that these photographs were taken on the night before Bert’s death.

Incidentally, I once saw Bojangles dance at a Louis Armstrong concert. Apparently he had a lot of trouble with his stump bleeding.

Fred Watts.
(5)

The age profile of the audiences at these early Sixties gigs was older than anything I had come across. These were
beatniks –
already creating a moral panic in the press
–
and I remember the heavy smell of marijuana, the tailored beards and baggy sweaters. In spite of the eighteen years age limit I got away with it because I looked older than my thirteen years and because I was with Bert.

It was at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall that I met Mississippi Fred McDowell – a musician who used to say, “I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll y’all. I jus’ play jus’ straight an’ natchel blue” – and saw for the first time an open-tuned slide guitar. I didn’t know his reputation at the time: that Alan Lomax had said, for example, “In him the great tradition of the blues runs pure and deep” or that I would share the feelings Fred had expressed about the blues: “I’d get the sound of it in my head, then I’d do it my way from what I remembered” or that he played but didn’t own a guitar until he was thirty-seven whilst I had one when I was eight. I wasn’t aware of any of that then: I just observed his self-contained dignity and listened to his strong, penetrating voice and insistent slide playing. I still can’t believe Fred McDowell let me play his guitar! Perhaps he was somehow repaying the white man who gave him his first guitar. Fred offered to get me a drink and when I accepted he passed me a whisky bottle. “No thank you – I meant a beer!” So he got me a beer. And there was more: a man who looked like a boxing promoter was watching me play. This was pianist Roosevelt “The Honey-Dripper” Sykes, a cigar-smoking man with puffy eyes and rings on his deft fingers, whose career as a thundering boogie pianist and reputation for
risqué
lyrics was to span seven decades. His fleshy, urbane presence formed a contrast to the lean, serious McDowell.

“Ain’t bad for a pink!” he said – a comment I have treasured ever since.

Mississippi Fred McDowell drained the rejected whisky bottle in one swallow and went on stage. These bluesmen had generous hearts.

At this age I also met Sleepy John Estes, another bluesman who, like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James, had been brought out of obscurity to tour Europe. Lean, gaunt and still, with John it was the voice rather than the guitar playing that impressed. Sleepy John was one of the best blues poets: the sounds he made were penetratingly expressive of life’s harshness. I later found out that John’s slicing, suffering voice had set the pace for work gangs when he was the leader of a railroad maintenance crew and that Big Bill Broonzy had described him, “crying the blues”. He had enough reason to. He lost one eye aged six when someone threw a rock at him and the other when he was fifty-one in 1950. He was rediscovered living in extreme poverty in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1962. It was believed that John, whose voice sounded so old, was dead! But fortunately Big Joe Williams told researchers where he was living.

Like many black musicians, he had been an itinerant performer in the Southern states, had done some recording in 1929 and 1930 and returned to sharecropping in 1941 when shellac rationing, followed by the recording ban, cut short musical careers.

Georges Adins
(6)
gives a filmic description of a fallow cotton field with an apparently abandoned cabin in the distance, and then the appearance of the elusive John Estes who lived there with his wife and five children. Adins was shocked by the extreme poverty and fear he found there. He was asked to buy food for the family and describes how John’s visits – to the laundry, to the car wash – become an occasion to stop work and play the blues. Joe Boyd
(7)
writes about fetching Sleepy John and Hammie Nixon, threadbare and carrying cardboard suitcases tied up with string, from the Cornell Folk Festival in Ithaca, New York after their first appearance in front of a white audience. John Estes went on to tour Europe and Japan and appeared at the Newport Festival in 1964.

Estes’ songs and performances and those of fellow musicians: the plaintive mandolin of Yank Rachell and the driving force of Hammie Nixon’s harmonica, have been much admired by reputable black and white musicians. “Slow Consumption” has been covered by Ry Cooder and “Floating Bridge” by Eric Clapton. The Blues Band did “Someday Baby” and Taj Mahal also covered some of his songs. “I’d Been Well Warned” was to become part of my repertoire from early on in my career. This is one of the bluest of blues songs. I’ve modified the words for the contemporary audience, to emphasise the most poignant aspects and altered the playing to suit the way I do things, with no disrespect intended.

Sleepy John Estes did keep falling asleep.

Fred Watts has the signed programme from the time we met Sister Rosetta Tharpe at a blues festival at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: a powerful, formidable presence and a link with gospel. Like Son House she had experienced tension between her religious background and vocation as a gospel singer, and her liking for singing jazz and blues: the devil’s music. This must have been difficult because her husband was a preacher who became tense if she didn’t wear a hat in church. She played a Gibson electric guitar and was an early exponent of soul, regarded as second only to Mahalia Jackson. By the time she got to her third marriage, 25,000 people attended her wedding. She influenced both Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.
(8)

I also met Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and John Lee Hooker in those early days. I was to support Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee when they did later tours in the UK, appearing with them at The Placemate in Newcastle, at The Place in Hanley, at Manchester University, and in Sheffield in the late Sixties.

Sonny and Brownie were amongst the earliest blues performers to tour Europe; they first came over in the Fifties, then in 1962 when I met them, in 1967 when I supported them and in 1970. Both had long-established and distinguished careers. Just as slide extends the range of an acoustic guitarist, the harmonica extends the range of a singer. Sonny’s harp playing complemented and extended his vocal range. By vocalising through the instrument, he intensified the moaning sounds, punctuating it with loud hollers between blasts. Traditional call and response. He could reproduce the whistles and train rhythms so common, so evocative in blues music. Before he met Brownie, Sonny used to play on street corners with Blind Boy Fuller and the Reverend Gary Davis. He later became linked with popular mainstream culture, appearing on Broadway in
Finian’s Rainbow
in 1946 and in the mid Fifties both he and Brownie appeared in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
He also ventured into the folk arena with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

Brownie played acoustic guitar and also sang. Critics have referred to the “Piedmont-style musical interplay” of the partnership which exploited the finger picking technique of this style. Piedmont blues – from the area extending from central Georgia to central Virginia, between the Atlantic coast and the Appalachians – was popularised by such performers as Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, the Reverend Gary Davis, Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotton. It incorporated elements from city and country, from black and white: ragtime, blues, country dance songs, early string bands and pop songs from the early twentieth century. Some would maintain that this music has more ‘white’ elements in it than the Delta blues and demographically speaking, this would make sense. I’ve always admired the finger picking style used by such musicians as Blind Blake, who incorporated ragtime piano rhythms and chord changes into guitar playing: the left hand piano rhythms produced by the thumb and the right hand piano melody by the fingers.

Brownie also ventured into the popular limelight by appearing in Langston Hughes’ play,
Simply Heaven
, in films and on TV. The willingness of Sonny and Brownie to be open-minded about the way they earned a living was important in popularising the blues in Europe and the UK, and in linking the blues with the folk boom as well as kindling an interest within the pop
genre
. They brought what I would call commercial country blues music, doing gigs in all the popular venues and discos, performing cabaret blues effortlessly and brilliantly – almost without thinking about it. They made the blues accessible to a wider, mostly white audience for whom the duo had cleaned up their act. Brownie McGhee had originally been known as the second Blind Boy Fuller – a far cry from the toned down versions of the Reverend Gary Davis and Big Bill Broonzy numbers he was now playing. But you couldn’t condemn the commercial instinct of bluesmen to capitalise on the enthusiasm for their music by touring and appearing at festivals. It was better than picking cotton. Ghettoised as “race music”, acceptance into mainstream music and its financial rewards had been previously denied to their work.

But for some less worldly than Sonny and Brownie, the glare of publicity in the Sixties at events like Newport must have been a shock and a pressure. The critics at the time didn’t take this into account. John Hurt stole the show at Newport nevertheless. Joe Boyd
(9)
writes about the tension between the desire of white audiences to hear ‘authentic’ blues and the attempts of the blues singers to be ‘up to date’. This lead to the absurdity of having snappily clad blues singers dressed as sharecroppers. When Muddy Waters first came to the UK he played an electric guitar and British fans were shocked. By the time he returned in 1962 he had relearned some earlier acoustic material. The same attitude gave rise to the cries of “Judas!” when Dylan went electric.
(10)

The blues revival had the effect of exposing black musicians to more liberal attitudes. One bluesman, Champion Jack Dupree, an ex-boxer who served his country in World War II and became a Japanese prisoner of war, sought a life in England and Europe to escape the pressure of segregation in America. He had good reason: born in New Orleans in 1909, Jack Dupree was orphaned when his parents died in a fire allegedly set by the Ku Klux Klan and was brought up in the Coloured Waifs Home for Boys, as was Louis Armstrong.

“These English boys want to play the blues so bad. And they play it so bad.”

Sonny Boy Williamson.
(11)

Parallel to this, pop music had exploded in Liverpool in the early Sixties. In addition to consumer articles unavailable in post-war austerity Britain, the “Cunard Yanks” sailing between Merseyside and New York had brought in equally unavailable jazz and blues records. The influence of black music soon penetrated pop bands such as the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and The Animals. One of the best interviews I experienced was with WRFG: Radio Free Georgia in 1998. The interviewer was enthusiastic and interested in what I had to say and he had things to contribute as well. He mentioned the Stones cutting their first album at Chess Studios, Chicago, and said that such blues virtuosos as Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf would be “hanging around”. I had to disagree: I am entirely certain of the musical superiority of these bluesmen and insisted that it would have been the Stones who were doing the “hanging around” – mentally at least. You only have to listen to what Keith Richards had to say about the musical stature of these men to know this.