Legends of
Country Blues Guitar Volume Three
Blues Up The Country featuring Josh White Jesse Fuller Furry Lewis John Jackson Pink Anderson Rev. Gary Davis Robert Pete Williams Ethel & George McCoy
LEGENDS OF COUNTRY BLUES GUITAR (BLUES UP
THE
COUNTRY)
VOLUME THREE by Mark Humphrey Most accounts of the ‘blues revival’ point to Samuel B. Charters’s 1959 book, The Country Blues, as a pivotal work in focusing the then-growing interest in preWar blues styles. In it Charters wrote: “The country blues were generally sung by men accompanying themselves on the guitar, with a highly developed interplay between their singing and the guitar accompaniment... The country blues were an intense individual expression of the deepest strains of Negro music in the South.” Revisionist historians have sought to discredit Charters’s pioneering study, one he admitted was flawed: “A further difficulty of a first study,” he wrote, “is that there will be considerable error.” Errors aside, however, Charters’ definition of country blues is still operative. Granted, we now know that many of the great exponents of country blues lived and worked in primarily urban settings. Country, however, is as much about where an artist was from (and thus perceived the world) as it is about where he or she wound up. Moreover, it’s a broad but useful stylistic definition for a means of expression. Not all the important guitar-playing pre-War blues singers fit comfortably in a country blues niche (Lonnie Johnson is a glaring exception). And while we think of country blues as a soloist’s art, usually one employing acoustic guitar, most living African-American exponents play amplified in small combos. The sense we have of country blues, like most generic labels, is imprecise and subject to frequent exceptions. However, Charters’s definition hasn’t really been improved on. It remains useful for placing an important corps of artists—such as the ones seen in this video— into a context. Without further caveats then, enjoy this varied sampling of “the deepest strains of Negro music of the South,” commonly called country blues. 2
FURRY LEWIS
Photo by Burham Ware
(1893-1981)
“He plays and sings even better than he did thir ty years ago, singing in the same beautifully halting country style, but he doesn’t own a guitar, and he moves from one furnished room to another.” Thus did Charters describe the life of Furry Lewis in The Country Blues. Charters had found Furry in Memphis where the Sanitation Depar tment had employed him as street sweeper since 1922. Furry had also enjoyed a career as blues singer, one which had produced twenty-three preWar recordings. Charters observed that Lewis’s early records “had a beautiful quality of restraint and understatement.” Unlike such later rediscoveries as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, however, Furry’s rediscovery did not initially occasion much stir. It was only in the 1970s that Furry, having outlived many of his contemporaries, enjoyed the belated status of a ‘living legend.’ “People here considered him to be a celebrity,” David Evans reported from Memphis in a 1981 Living Blues obituary. “Everyone knew that the Rolling Stones had insisted that Furry be booked on their Memphis shows...that Furry had appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show, that he had appeared in a Burt Reynolds movie (W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings)....that he was the subject of a Joni Mitchell song (“Furry Sings the Blues”), that he had a constant stream of visitors from all over the world, and that he had influenced countless numbers of younger musicians who had gone on to successful careers in pop music.” Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis came to Memphis with his par3
ents from Greenwood, Mississippi as a boy of six. Boisterous and musically rich, turn-of-the-century Memphis would host wild jug bands and the more genteel blues of W.C. Handy, who Furry claimed gave him his first real guitar (“I kept it ‘bout some thirty odd years”). He started playing guitar, he told Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall (Beale Street Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America’s Main Street), when he was about twelve: “I got a cigar box,” Furry recalled, “I cut a hole in the top, put a board and nail it on there. And I taken four nails, put wire on ‘em from a screen door for strings. I couldn’t play it, but I rapped the sides, hootin’ and hollerin'. I thought I was doin’ something you know.” Furry developed enough proficiency to substitute on occasion in W.C. Handy’s band and to work medicine shows doing music and comedy. His friendship with the legendary Jim Jackson, one of the pioneers of Memphis blues, led to Furry’s first recordings in 1927. It was then he first recorded “Mr. Furry’s Blues,” heard here in a performance from some four decades later. He also made pre-War recordings of “Judge Boushe Blues” (originally called “Judge Harsh Blues”) and “John Henry.” However, his version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” atypical of Furry’s often-humorous pre-War material, may have been learned after his rediscovery. The opening per formance in this Vestapol video, “Judge Boushe,” is performed, appropriately enough, in Vestapol (open D) tuning, D A D F# A D. Furry’s penchant for ‘clowning,’ evident in his overhand swipes at his guitar, followed him from the medicine show and served him well throughout his professional career. When a heckler at New York City’s Gaslight once berated Furry for “actin’ a fool,” he retorted: “You’re a bigger fool than me! I’m up on this stage actin’ a fool and gettin’ money and you’re the fool who paid to come see me.”
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JOHN JACKSON
Photo by Keith Jenkins
(1924- )
It may be one of the greater ironies of the folk revival that the Rooftop Singers inadvertently led to the discovery of John Jackson. Performing was a thing of the past for Jackson when, in 1964, his children and their friends urged him to get out his guitar and play “Walk Right In,” the 1929 Cannon’s Jug Stompers song which the Rooftop Singers had taken to the top of the pop charts early in 1963. “They wanted to do this dance that Elvis Presley started,” Jackson explained to Elijah Wald. The postman heard the music as he brought the day’s mail and informed Jackson he was himself eager to learn how to play the popular song. Jackson obliged by visiting the postman at his night job at a gas station; Washington D.C. folk music enthusiast Chuck Perdue happened to stop by the Fairfax, Virginia station for a fillup and was startled by the sounds of country blues. Perdue invited Jackson to join him at a Georgetown concert by John Hurt, whose recordings Jackson had grown up hearing. At a subsequent concert by Mance Lipscomb, Jackson was invited on stage to perform, and on that occasion Chris Strachwitz heard him and offered to record Jackson for Arhoolie. Since then the easygoing Virginian has recorded for both Rounder and Arhoolie, toured Eu5
rope, and become a mainstay of the Eastern Seaboard folk festival circuit. None of it might have happened if a passing postman hadn’t heard Jackson entertaining his children and their friends (“so they could do a hula dance”) to “Walk Right In.” Jackson was born into a musical family in Woodville, Rappahanock County, Virginia. His father played guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and homemade pennywhistles. His mother played sacred songs on harmonica and accordion. His siblings were likewise musical, but Jackson’s most vivid early musical memories are of “a water boy on a chain gang” called Happy who visited the family after becoming a trustee. “He played very much like Lonnie Johnson,” Jackson told Wald (Sing Out! Vol. 39 #1, May/ June/July 1994), “in open tuning and just regular tuning, and he did fingerpicking...And everybody who ever heard him said they never heard anything like it.” Records, too, were a major influence on Jackson, who began playing guitar when he was around twelve. “I think Blind Blake was one of my biggest influences,” Jackson told Cheryl A. Brauner and Barry Lee Pearson (Living Blues # 63, January-February 1985). “I just loved his fingerpicking style.” Jackson ably demonstrates that love in a 1970 performance recorded at the University of Washington of Blake’s sly 1927 recording, “That’ll Never Happen No More.” The piece called “Rag in C” deftly demonstrates the close connection between the Southeastern ‘Piedmont style’ of ragtime blues and the white countr y style commonly called Travis picking. (Interestingly, Jackson states that Travis’s style came from Blind Boy Fuller, and Travis once told this writer of his admiration for Fuller’s recordings.) “Most people would call me more of a songster,” says the multi-talented Jackson, “‘cause I just don’t only play blues; I play a little bit of everything.” Though he loved to play country house parties and ‘square dances’ in his youth, a violent fracas in 1946 made Jackson renounce public performance for the better part of twenty years. Still, the emotional nourishment of music was always with him. “When you get hold of a guitar and get to singing the blues,” Jackson told Elizabeth Wiles Dean, “you get to forget about that terrible feeling or whatever it is you got upset 6
about...I’ve been working in the fields and get real uptight about something. The minute I could get hold of a guitar, I could just feel myself getting better. It was a great relief. If I hadn’t been able to play music I don’t know if I would be living today or not, ‘cause I was just crazy about my guitar, and when I really got down and out, I could sit up on a hill somewhere and sing songs to myself.”
JOSH WHITE
Photo by Dave Gahr
(1914-1969)
Josh White’s performances here demonstrate what a consummately polished professional he was, a quality which has unfortunately sometimes been held against him. Country blues purists disparage White, claiming he did little worthwhile after his ‘Pinewood Tom’ recordings of the 1930s. However, some of those same purists would, if honest with themselves, be forced to admit that their first hint at the riches in the country blues tradition came via Josh White and recorded versions of performances like those on this video. If White was smoother than most countr y blues performers, it was with good reason. He had arrived in New York City from South Carolina in 1932 and before the end of the year was appearing in a group called the Southernaires on NBC radio’s Harlem Fantasy. By 1940, he was 7
on stage with Paul Robeson in a play called John Henry and singing at Cafe Society Downtown. He was cultivating a white following even as he was challenging racism in songs about Southern injustice. He sang at both the 1941 and 1945 inaugurals of FDR, and found his way into several Hollywood films. It was a career quite unlike that of any other country blues artist. Yet it was unquestionably a country blues background which White carried to New York City in 1932. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, where the legendary Willie Walker and Gary Davis had worked together in a stringband prior to White’s 1914 birth. “There seems to have been an undeniable and most distinctive ‘cell’ of musicians from this area,” writes Bruce Bastin in Crying for the Carolines, a study of the Piedmont blues and its environment. By the time he was eight White was acting as lead boy to John Henry ‘Man’ Arnold, the first of a succession of blind singerguitarists for whom White beat the tambourine and collected tips. White’s apprenticeship as ‘lead boy’ took him from Florida to Chicago during the years 1922 – 1929. He watched and learned from the likes of Blind Joe Taggart, with whom White made his recording debut in 1928. “It wasn’t a life that I’d recommend to anyone,” White observed, “but it taught me my trade.” White was only eighteen when he recorded his first blues in 1932 as Pinewood Tom. The son of a Baptist preacher, White simultaneously recorded sacred songs as Joshua White, ‘The Singing Christian.’ He began hinting at the social consciousness which brought him acclaim in the 1940s in such songs as 1936’s “Silicosis Is Killing Me,” though Pinewood Tom wasn’t above covering such popular double-entendre blues as Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk Cow Blues.” White perfected his cabaret performance style at New York’s legendary Cafe Society Downtown, where his good looks, open shirt and suavely insinuating manner drove women wild. (“A pre-Belafonte sex symbol” was Arnold Shaw’s description of him.) It was still a devastating act over twenty years later, as his performance here of “You Know Baby What I Want from You” illustrates. The first two songs here were performed for Swedish television audiences in 1962, while “Nobody Knows You When You’re 8
Down and Out,” in which White is joined by his daughter Carolyn, is from Swedish TV in 1967. It’s easy to see why, in the early 1940s, the nation’s First Lady made her way to Greenwich Village to see this phenomenon, and to believe that, twenty years later, President Kennedy told him how his records had inspired him when that President was a college student in the Roosevelt era. ‘The Greenville Sheik,’ as White called himself on an early record, went a long way from ‘lead boy’ in his 55 years. And he opened a great many ears along the way, as his friend Lee Hays of the Weavers once observed: “Many a white middle-class blues singer wouldn’t know a blues if he tripped over one had it not been for Josh.”
ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS
Photo by Dick Waterman
(1914-1980)
By contrast to the urbane White, Rober t Pete Williams was as resolutely rural and introspective as any recorded blues artist. Discovered by folklorists Harry Oster and Richard Allen while serving a life sentence for murder at Angola State Penitentiary, the Leadbelly-like cir cumstances of Williams’s discover y and subsequent parole attracted national attention: “A lifer for shooting and killing a man, Williams has the tremendous drive and anguish that characterized the fabled Leadbelly,” Time reported. What Williams lacked, however, was a “Goodnight Irene” or “Midnight Special.” His music was relentlessly personal and often amounted to a diary of Williams’s inner life at the moment of a given recording. Oster wrote that once, when he asked Williams what he about to sing, “he scratched his head and stam9
mered, ‘Wait till I sing it.”’ His lyrical spontaneity tended to spurn conventions of blues verse structure and his jagged guitar accompaniments were as idiosyncratic as anything ever recorded in the blues idiom. Williams, who by accident or design may have tapped into an African pre-blues wellspring, was both dismissed as a primitive and hailed as a genius. Born into a large sharecroppers’ family in Zachary, Louisiana, Williams didn’t begin playing guitar till he was twenty, when he made one for himself out of copper wire and a cigar box. In time he acquired a real guitar and began entertaining at parties and fish fries. “They all used to call me Peetie Wheatstraw,” he told Peter Guralnick, “‘cause I could holler pretty good and raise my voice...” His career as bluesman in the Baton Rouge area was short-circuited when his wife, jealous of the attention of admiring women, torched Williams’ guitar. Williams claimed he played a more conventional blues style in his ‘Peetie Wheatstraw period,’ only developing his signature style somewhat later. “I changed my style when I see where I could find more notes on a guitar,” he explained to researcher David Evans. “If you’re going to pick a guitar...play from the box (body) on back down to the key (tuners), you see.” Asked what prompted this stylistic shift, Williams replied: “The sound of the atmosphere, the weather changed my style. But I could hear, since me being an air-music man. The air came in with a different sound of music. Well, the atmosphere, when the wind’s blowing carries music along...I don’t know where it comes from—it could come from the airplanes, or the moaning of automobiles, but anyhow it leaves an air current in the air, see. That gets in the wind, makes a sounding...and that sounding works up to be a blues.” Williams took his air-music to the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and, for the next fifteen years, to many campuses, coffeehouses, and festivals. “Undoubtedly Robert Pete is as exploratory in his way as John Coltrane or Gerard Manley Hopkins,” wrote Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock ‘n Roll. “Robert Pete continually invents and reinvents a music which is free to the point of occasional anarchy, and listening to it can hardly be a passive experience.” 10
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Photo by Tom Copi
Williams’ performance here of “Dear Old Mother of Mine,” a relative of the traditional ‘holy blues,’ “Motherless Children,” is a ‘knife piece.’ Williams’ slide playing tended to be somewhat more conventional than his other work, and he followed the example of such masters as Blind Willie Johnson in using the slide as an antiphonal element, effectively a second voice. The lyrics, however, show Williams’ highly personal sense of symmetr y and verse structure at play.
ETHEL
AND GEORGE MCCOY They were brother and sister, nephew and niece of Memphis Minnie. But it was another remarkable early blueswoman, Bessie Tucker, who was the inspiration for their performance of “Everything I Tell You,” which combines Tucker’s “Black Mary” and “Penitentiary.” They were originally from Booneville near Tupelo, Mississippi, but were discovered in East St. Louis, where W.C. Handy reported hearing “shabby guitarists” play some embryonic blues back in 1892. Big Joe Williams introduced researcher Pete Welding to the McCoys in the mid-Sixties, and Welding recorded their sister Ruby McCoy singing this same song accompanied by Big Joe (“Black Mar y,” Testament TCD 5012, The Sound of the Delta). “They were very nice people,” Welding recalls, “who grew up singing and playing. Their parents were musical; music was important in their family, and they carried this with them. When I met them they were just playing for family and friends.” In addition to Welding, Gene Rosenthal of Adelphi Records recorded the McCoys and is the source of this wonderful snapshot of Mississippi-St. Louis blues leavened by the spirit of a legendary Texan, Bessie Tucker.
PINK ANDERSON (1900-1974) In rural America, medicine shows were one of the few forms of entertainment available well into the twentieth century. They offered cure-all tonics (often heavily laced with alcohol), black-face comics, ribald jokes, and music. Among the disparate talents to perform in medicine shows were silent film comic Buster Keaton, countr y legends Roy 12
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Photo by David Gahr
Acuff, Jimmie Rodgers, and Uncle Dave Macon, and a host of bluesmen, including Pink Anderson. “On vacant lots in southern townships the medicine shows would set up their stages,” Paul Oliver wrote in The Story of the Blues. “A typical ‘Souther n gentleman’ in Stetson and goatee beard would introduce a team of performers; a few girl ‘hoofers’ perhaps, or a jug band, or just a young Negro with his face nonetheless ‘blacked up’ with burnt cork, ‘cutting the pigeon wing’ to the stop-time guitar of his accompanist. The Doctor in the Stetson would produce a bottle of miracle tonic, one of the troupe would take a swig and be galvanized into making a pass at the nearest woman as proof of its efficacy. The crowd would respond raucously and the bottles would start selling.” Pink Anderson spent most of his life entertaining in medicine shows. Born Pinkney Anderson in Laurens, South Carolina (also Gary Davis’ birthplace), he was dancing for pennies on the streets of Spartanburg while still a boy. Accounts of the year he joined ‘Doctor’ W.R. Kerr’s medicine show vary from 1914 to 1918, but he entertained in medicine shows well into the late 1950s. In Crying for the Carolines, Bruce Bastin described Anderson’s activities: “His job was to ‘drag the streets,’ that is to say, draw a crowd by playing and joke-telling and slowly draw them back to the ‘Doctor,’ who would then begin his sales talk. He travelled throughout the Piedmont region from Virginia to South Georgia and occasionally into Tennessee and Alabama.” Anderson would buckdance as well as play and
sing on Doc Kerr’s medicine show, earning as much as $10 per week, a princely sum at the time. When Anderson wasn’t traveling with Kerr he often worked with the legendary Blind Simmie Dooley. Gary Davis, who didn’t pass praise lightly, said of Dooley: “He was just as good as any man I ever heard playing a guitar, him and Willie Walker.” Kip Lornell wrote: “Pink and Simmie hooked up right after World War I because, at the time, Simmie was in need of a ‘leader’ and Pink was available. Many of the songs that Pink played were learned from Blind Simmie, so it would seem a likely possibility that the style of guitar playing...represents a style that was well-formed before World War I.” Supporting Lornell’s contention is Anderson’s performance in this video of “Crow Jane,” also known as “Slidin’ Delta” and believed to be one of the primordial blues guitar pieces. Dooley and Anderson recorded four sides for Columbia in 1928, an event which little changed their lives at the time but which would occasion Anderson’s 1962 rediscovery by Samuel Charters (Dooley died in 1961). He recorded again for Prestige Bluesville but a 1964 stroke sadly sidelined Anderson from playing the ‘blues revival’ circuit. However, he slowly regained his ability to play, and thankfully this never-before-seen footage from his later years documents what Bastin has called “The infectious, slightly wistful yet mischievous style of Pink’s medicine-show songs...”
REV. GARY DAVIS (1896-1972) The power and the glory that was Gary Davis is in full cry in this stunning performance of “Oh Glory How Happy I Am,” with Pete Seeger acting as enthusiastic chorus. It shows Davis’s commanding presence at its assured best, demonstrating why he was such a beloved and awe-inspiring figure during the 1960s folk revival. The extent of Davis’s influence at the time included covers of his material (“Samson and Delilah”) by such pop-folk stars as Peter, Paul & Mary and the adaptation of his guitar style by such disciples as Dave Van Ronk, Stefan Grossman, Jorma Kaukonen, and Roy Bookbinder. “Rev. Davis was a competitor,” Stefan Grossman wrote in Rev. Gary Davis: Blues 14
Guitar. “He always wanted to stay a few yards ahead of all his students. This he easily managed.” Born in Laurens County, South Carolina, Davis recalled being raised “way down in the country, so far you couldn’t hear a train whistle blow unless it was a cloudy day.” Blinded in infancy, Davis developed an early sensitivity to the world of sound. “The first time I ever heard a guitar played,” he told Samuel Charters, “I thought it was a brass band coming through. I was a small kid and I asked my mother what was it and she said it was a guitar. I said, ‘Ain’t you going to get me one of those when I get large enough?”’ “I made my first guitar out of a tin can,” Davis told Grossman. “I was a boy about ten years old. I drove me a hole in each end of a pie-pan, run me up a stick through there, that’s the way I made it.” A banjo was his first real instrument, and he was soon acquiring his song stock from sundry sources: “Candyman,” he recalled, came from a 1905 ‘carnival show.’ By his teens, Davis was already performing: “I used to play for white folks’ picnics,” he told Grossman, and, like many blind musicians of the era, he traveled incessantly. “I was playing from town to town,” he recalled. “Anywhere! Playing on the streets then. I would get run off by the police more times than I can remember.” Around 1912 Davis teamed up with another legendar y guitarist, Willie Walker, in a Greenville-based stringband. Over the next twenty years Davis moved throughout the Carolinas, settling around 1931 in Durham, North Carolina, where he met Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen). Davis claimed Fuller “didn’t know how to play but one piece and that was with a knife” when they met. Carolina guitarist Willie Trice corroborated Davis’s influence on Fuller, who told him: “All us boys can play, Willie, but Gary is our daddy!” At the time of their meeting, Davis remembered, “I was a blues cat then.” However, by the time of his sole pre-War recording session in 1935, Davis was performing primarily sacred material. (Reissued on Yazoo 2011, The Complete Early Recordings of Rev. Gary Davis.) He moved to New York City in 1940, where he struggled: “We weren’t allowed to play on the streets,” He recalled. “Sometimes 15
Photo by Brian Shuel
the police chased me...Also I had guitars stolen off me as fast as I could get them.” But Davis stubbornly perservered, and in time word of his talent spread from the streets of Harlem to the city’s folk enthusiasts. Befriended by Brownie McGhee, Davis’s performance at a 1950 Leadbelly Memorial Concert at Town Hall was a breakthrough. His first album was recorded or Stinson in 1954, and further recordings throughout the 1950s paved the way for Davis’s eager participation in the folk revival of the 1960s. Throughout his often-difficult life, Davis’s implacable faith and pride in his remarkable talent sustained him. “I learned all by myself,” he told his student, Stefan Grossman. “My motto’s always been to bring out something somebody else hadn’t heard before. I always loved to do things different than anybody else did.”
JESSE FULLER (1896-1976) On the back sleeve of the 1958 album, Jesse Fuller: Jazz, Folk Songs, Spirituals & Blues (Good Time Jazz L12031), this announcement appears: “Jesse Fuller sings and accompanies himself in actual performance on twelvestring guitar, harmonica, kazoo, cymbals & fotdella. No overdubbing, multiple recording, tape editing, or other electronic techniques have been used to create any of his sounds.” Fuller’s one-man-band appearances here bear 16
Photo by Dave Gahr
witness to the truth in this disclaimer. Handling five instruments and singing were seemingly no chore for Fuller, who didn’t really begin cultivating his remarkable one-manband talent until he was well into his fifties. Born in Jonesboro, Georgia, Fuller spent his early years in the country around Atlanta, where such men as Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) and Blind Willie McTell would record with twelve string guitars. However, we can only guess at the impact of the Atlanta twelve-string tradition on Fuller, who was already in California, where he got his first twelve-string, before any of the Atlantans recorded. Before leaving Georgia, however, Fuller picked up a lot of music. “The first music I ever heard,” he told Lester Koenig, “I used to make a bow like the Indians make a bow and arrow, put some wax on the string, put the bow in my mouth and pick the string-sound like a jew’s harp.” He also heard track-lining songs, a banjo-picking brother-inlaw, and “some fellows that could really play guitar” picking blues. By the time Fuller began riding the freights at about twenty, he was doing that himself. Fuller became adept at both playing for tips and swinging onto the freights which brought him to California. “I could catch them trains runnin’ thirty miles an hour with my guitar strapped behind my back,” Fuller told Koenig. “Every time I’d hit a railroad division I’d go amongst the store people and play a song. There wasn’t any radios in 17
them days. They’d fill my cap up.” Arriving in California around 1917, Fuller found varied employment in silent movie era Hollywood, none of it musical. Carving and selling wooden snakes was lucrative for awhile: “I’m a professional on wooden snakes,” Fuller proudly recalled. “I can make ‘em so they scare anybody, tongue licking out...” Fuller shined stars’ shoes in a barber shop near the United Artists Studio and did some movie extra work himself (“I was the fellow carrying the balloons on my head in The Thief of Baghdad,” he said). He fondly recalled that director Raoul Walsh helped him set up a hot dog stand inside the United Artists Studio. Memorabilia of Fuller’s Hollywood days were with him for life: a framed picture of Fuller with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and Sidney Grauman hung on the wall of his West Oakland home. Fuller’s Hollywood interlude was followed by decades of hard work: picking cotton in California’s Central Valley, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad and, during World War II, welding in the shipyards of Oakland, his home since 1929. Music was a sideline at best during this time. But in 1951, having heard about musicians and singers making “lots of money” on records, the 55 year-old Fuller decided to join them. It wasn’t easy at first. “I tried to get some fellows to play with me,” he told Koenig, but that didn’t work out. “So,” Fuller recalled, “I thought, ‘I’m going to get me up a one-man band.’ I took me a whole week one time when I wasn’t doing anything, and I made this thing I call the fotdella in my back room...I thought about doing something like that so I could have something to go along with me and help me out instead of another fellow. I just took some masonite, heated some wood in hot water and rounded it off around a wheel. I learned that in the barrel factory where I used to work—that’s the way they do the staves...I tried to use bass fiddle strings but they don’t do so good, they stretch out of tune, so I use piano strings. My wife named it the Fotdella because I played it with my foot, like ‘foot diller.’ I’d been playing harmonica and kazoo. I added the cymbals later, welded it myself. I decided I’d get into it and might make me some money...If I didn’t, I’d just be the same old Jesse. I wouldn’t cry about it.” Reviving busking skills learned around the time of World War One, Fuller hit the streets of Oakland and San 18
Francisco with his arresting one-man band. His hunch that “I might get lucky” paid off. In 1955, a ten-inch album on the World Song label (Folk Blues: Working On the Railroad with Jesse Fuller) was released. One of its songs was “San Francisco Bay Blues,” described by Tom Mazzolini as “a classic train blues put to sea.” It would become a standard of the 1960s folk revival and bring an unlikely celebrity to the gently anachronistic Fuller, whose nickname was ‘The Lone Cat.’ It seems somehow fitting that the only country bluesman to have sold hot dogs to silent movie stars would near the end of his life supply music for The Great White Hope, a 1970 film about Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world during the years (190815) a young Jesse Fuller was first hearing the Georgia country blues.
RECORDING INFORMATION The footage presented in this video is some of the rarest material we have ever discovered. The performances from The University Of Washington were not known to exist but Stefan Grossman had a feeling that out-takes from sessions recorded between 1968-1972 should be in storage somewhere at the University. Between the years of 1993 and 1994 with the great help of University Of Washington archivist Laurel Sercombe, the material was discovered in long forgotten boxes and rusty film cans in a dusty corner at the Ethnomusicology Archive offices. Furry Lewis recorded May, 1968 at the University Of Washington. John Jackson recorded 1970 at the University Of Washington. Robert Pete Williams recorded 1970 at the University Of Washington. Jesse Fuller recorded April, 1968 at the University Of Washington. Josh White performing YOU KNOW BABY WHAT I WANT FROM YOU and NUMBER 12 TRAIN from Swedish TV 1962; NOBODY KNOWS YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND OUT from Swedish TV 1967. Ethel & George McCoy recorded Memphis, 1969. Pink Anderson recorded in 1970 in North Carolina. Rev. Gary Davis performance from Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest, 1969. 19
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Photo by Stefan Grossman
Vestapol 13037 FURRY LEWIS 1. Judge Boushe Blues JOHN JACKSON 2. That Will Never Happen No More JOSH WHITE 3. You Know Baby What I Want 4. Number 12 Train ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS 5. Dear Old Mother Of Mine ETHEL & GEORGE M C COY 6. Black Mary PINK ANDERSON 7. She Knows How To Stretch It 8. Ain't Nobody Home But Me FURRY LEWIS 9. Furry's Blues REV. GARY DAVIS 10. Oh Glory How Happy I Am JESSE FULLER 11. Running Wild JOHN JACKSON 12. Rag In C FURRY LEWIS 13. See That My Grave Is Kept Clean 14. John Henry PINK ANDERSON 15. Crow Jane 16. You Don't Know What The Lord Told Me JESSE FULLER 17. The Woman I Had She Left Me JOSH WHITE 18. Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out
Much of the extremely rare performance footage presented in this video has never before been publicly seen and documents the diversity of a music which was as personal as a fingerprint yet as universal as the blues itself. John Jackson, Pink Anderson, Rev. Gary Davis and the charismatic Josh White manifest different aspects of the rich Piedmont ragtime/blues tradition. In Memphis, echoes of the Mississippi Delta could be heard in the music of Furry Lewis. While the delightfully eccentric Jesse Fuller and the introspective Robert Pete Williams embody country blues which defies regional identity. Running Time: 60 minutes • B/W and Color Front Photo Sylvester Weaver & Sara Martin Courtesy of Kyana Blues Society Collection Back photos: Robert Pete Williams by Tom Copi & Rev. Gary Davis by Stefan Grossman Nationally distributed by Rounder Records, One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 Representation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications ® 2001 Vestapol Productions A division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.
ISBN: 1-57940-919-9
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