Blues You Should Know

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Our show today focuses on two Texans with vastly different styles. Texas Alexander was as deep and intense as a bluesman could be. An itinerant, details of his life are scant yet he recorded dozens of sides over a 25 or so year period. Eddie "Vinson was something else entirely. Called "Cleanhead" (for a process job gone horribly wrong), Eddie played alto sax and sang in that area of blues that walks the line between blues and jazz. 

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For a mere five years, the rollicking, hard-driving piano playing of Major "Big Maceo" Merriweather dominated the Chicago blues scene. Maceo was left handed, and no one before or since has been able to create the drive and beat that propelled the recordings he made with Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson I, and under his own name. 
Sadly, a stroke in 1946 deprived him of the use of his right hand. 

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Robert Nighthawk (Robert Lee McCollum) was one of the few Chicago based blues guitarists to make the successful stylistic jump from pre-war acoustic blues playing to post-war electric playing. As a slide player, he was probably the primary guitar influence on Muddy Waters. In addition, he had a wonderfully wry and deceptively smooth vocal style that matched his guitar playing to a tee. Nighthawk never became a major blues star, or achieved the popularity of someone like Muddy or the Wolf, but not for lack of talent. 

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Well hello everybody and welcome to “Blues You Should Know”. I’m Bob Frank and I’m the host and creator of the program. I’ve been a professional musician for the past 45 years or so; also a songwriter, a writer, an educator, a filmmaker and now a podcaster.  I originally began doing these programs as a radio show within a radio show on my friend Marty “Madcat” Puljic’s blues radio program on WJCU-FM in Cleveland, OH.

 The idea, then and now, was to explore the artists and music one level or so deeper than the most popular performers most folks come to know and listen to when they first discover this wonderful music. 

 So, we won’t be doing shows on BB King, or Stevie Ray, though they may come up in the course of a program. What you will hear are shows about some of the people who influenced THEM. In addition, there’ll be theme programs about people who contributed to the music behind the scenes; people like Lillian McMurray, the genteel southern lady who owned and operated Trumpet Records in Mississippi and recorded the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson and Elmore James. There’ll be a multi- part series on Cincinnati’s great eclectic record label King Records, with its colorfully irascible and cantankerous owner Syd Nathan. 

 But most of all, you’re going to hear a lot of really great music along with some great stories to go along with it. Most of it will be blues, but you will hear some other things as well…when they fit the story. 

 So I hope you’ll give these podcasts a listen. And if you enjoy the programs, I hope you’ll give us a like or few kind words in a review. I’m Bob Frank, and this is “Blues You Should Know”.

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Many of the early country blues recordings we love today exist because, in the 1950s and early '60s,  an intrepid group of oddball record collectors went door-to-door in Black neighborhoods the rural South offering to buy old records. Some of them took these records and started small, independent, record labels to get this music to the modern public. Here is the story of three of these releases. 

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Skip James made a handful of recordings for Paramount in 1931. They sounded like nothing else anyone had ever heard and they didn't sell well. Skip dropped out of sight until 1963, when he was "rediscovered" in a hospital in Tunica, MS. Here is the story of how he picked up his career after 30+ years and became a sensation on the mid-sixties folk festival circuit. One of his songs, "I'm So Glad" even became a hit for the English rock group Cream. But there's more to that story...

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 The community of Brownsville, Tennessee lies about 60 miles or so just East of Memphis, just a short ways off of Highway 40,  the long interstate that runs the entire width of Tennessee from North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River.  Brownsville, whose population was roughly ten thousand at the last census, has recently come to recognize two of its most accomplished offspring.  Located in the former Flagg  Grove School, once a one-room schoolhouse for “colored” children, is the Tina Turner Museum.  Immediately nextdoor, and also maintained as a public attraction, is the tiny home, a cottage or really a shack, once lived in by Brownsville’s other great artist, the blues singer Sleepy John Estes. Both Estes and Turner, by the way, actually grew up in Ripley aka./Nutbush, an unincorporated community adjacent to Brownsville once populated almost exclusively by black residents. 

 At the time of Tina Turner’s birth in 1939, Sleep John, born either in 1899 or 1900-no one’s really sure, was already in the middle of a recording and performing career that extended from 1929 right up to his death in 1977. 

 As a child in Ripley/Nutbush, John, like so many bluesmen before and after him, helped out on his family’s share-crop cotton farm and tried to pick out tunes on a homemade cigar box guitar. After a particularly productive season his mother awarded John for his hard work on the farm by buying him a real guitar. 

 For the first decade or so of his musical career, John, along with his “Brownsville Gang” which included harmonica player Hammie Nixon, mandolinist Yank Rachell, jug and piano player Jab Jones, and guitarists Son Bonds and Charlie Pickett, performed and traveled throughout the Western Tennesssee area often performing in Memphis. 

 In 1929 Victor Records talent scout Ralph Peer arranged for John’s first recording session, a three-day affair, which produced one of his most well known songs Diving Duck Blues as well as five others. Legend has it that the gang followed the sessions with a week long binge of drinking, gambling and whoring in West Memphis, the wide-open mostly black community located just across the river from Memphis proper. 

 The following year, 1930 saw John and his gang recording another fourteen songs. John, it seemed, was a highly prolific songwriter. 

 Three things distinguish the music of Sleepy John Estes. First, was his guitar playing. It wasn’t very good. Many have described his playing as “thrashing”. But while John certainly wasn’t in a class with virtuosos like Blind Blake or Big Bill Broonzy, his playing did have a strong propulsive quality that served his music well.  He usually played in standard tuning in the key of G, or in G position with a capo. 

 Second, was his “crying” vocal style that made him sound like an old man long before he was one. 

 The final quality that sets his music apart and was his songwriting; his ability to craft a musical story. While many of John’s songs concern the usual blues subject matter, ie whiskey and women, John was also a chronicler of people and events around him. He wrote about people he knew, people he worked for, people he dealt with and people he admired. 

 In Liquor Store Blues John sings his admiration for the man he buys hootch from:

 Now if you're ever in Forrest City, I'll tell you what to do
Let Mr. Peter Adams get acquainted with you
Well, you won't have to go, well, you won't have to go
You can get what you want, oh, right here in my liquor store

 In Brownsville Blues, John sings the praises of local mechanic Vassar Williams:

 Now, he can straighten your wires, you know Vassar can grind your valves
Now, he can straighten your wires, you know Vassar can grind your valves
Then, when I tu

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Blues isn't just a male thing. Here are three wonderful, if not widely known, female blues singers that I'm just crazy about: Lil Green, Annie Laurie and Julia Lee. Give 'em a listen. I'll guarantee you fall in love with them too.

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Name me a guitar player from a well-to-do Jewish family who revolutionized blues guitar, created a sensation, then died far too young. Mike Bloomfield? Yes, but a couple of decades later Michael Mann, aka Hollywood Fats did pretty much the same thing, and came to the same tragic end. As Bloomfield essentially founded blues-rock guitar, Fats founded the West Coast school of guitar. It's a sad story, and he was woefully under-recorded, but what he left us was absolutely thrilling. 

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Magic Sam exploded like a meteor on the national blues scene. Everyone who knew Sam liked him; he was a powerful singer with a soaring tenor voice, an imaginative songwriter, and an innovative guitarist, but bad luck hounded him throughout his short life. 

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