Blues Legacy

Tradition and Innovation in Chicago

David Whiteis

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084706
  9780252042881
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252051746
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Chicago blues musicians parlayed a genius for innovation and emotional honesty into a music revered around the world. As the blues evolves, it continues to provide a soundtrack to, and a dynamic commentary on, the African American experience: the legacy of slavery; historic promises and betrayals; opportunity and disenfranchisement; the ongoing struggle for freedom. Through it all, the blues remains steeped in survivorship and triumph, a music that dares to stare down life in all its injustice and iniquity and still laugh--and dance--in its face.

David Whiteis delves into how the current and upcoming Chicago blues generations carry on this legacy. Drawing on in-person interviews, Whiteis places the artists within the ongoing social and cultural reality their work reflects and helps create. Beginning with James Cotton, Eddie Shaw, and other bequeathers, he moves through an all-star council of elders like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy and on to inheritors and today's heirs apparent like Ronnie Baker Brooks, Shemekia Copeland, and Nellie "Tiger" Travis.

Insightful and wide-ranging, Blues Legacy reveals a constantly adapting art form that, whatever the challenges, maintains its links to a rich musical past.

PART I

Bequeathers

“The World Lost a Wonderful Bluesman,
and His Spirit’s Still in the Air …”

I never intended this section to be a valedictory. At the beginning of this project, all the artists profiled here were alive and working. I had completed our interviews and was looking forward to the pleasure of eventually sharing the book with them. Now, of course, that opportunity is gone, and, more importantly, irreplaceable musical voices—James Cotton’s, Eddie Shaw’s, and Eddy Clearwater’s—have been stilled. Nonetheless, as Chicago-based jazz vocalist Dee Alexander has pointed out, when artists make the transition from Elders to Ancestors, they don’t really depart; their spirits live on in the gifts they’ve left behind. And as long as we continue to speak their names, their spirits also live within us. For this reason, I have made the decision to honor, and to help keep alive, the spirits of these ancestors by including their profiles in this book.

James Cotton

“The Blues Is Part of Me”

Harmonica master James Cotton’s career spans the trajectory of postwar blues history. Schooled by the fabled Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) when he was a young boy, he later worked with Howlin’ Wolf in Memphis and recorded for Sun Records. In 1954, he came north to Chicago to join Muddy Waters’s band, and he stayed with Muddy for twelve years. He finally broke out as a frontline artist in 1966, just as the blues “revival” among young white aficionados was kicking into high gear. His bands have historically been versatile and soulful, capable of segueing effortlessly among down-home blues, funk, jazz-flavored innovation, and rock & roll—meaning that for all his reputation as a roots man, Cotton has always been fully contemporary, ready and able to incorporate multiple styles and influences into a sound that nonetheless harks back to the most venerated blues heritage.

He was born on July 1, 1935, and raised on the Bonnie Blue Plantation (named for an early Confederate flag and marching song), near the unincorporated hamlet of Clayton, Mississippi, about six miles south of Tunica. “We were sharecroppers,” he recalls. “Plowed mules, shucked corn, picked cotton—anything you could do on a farm.” Usually, there was musical accompaniment: “While doing that, people strike up a song, sing a song and make their day go a little bit better.”1

James’s parents, Mose and Hattie Cotton, were church people (Mose was a preacher as well as a farmer), and religious music was a staple in the family’s life. Other sounds, though, also resonated through the quiet Delta countryside. “I used to hear ’em singing in church on Sunday morning,” he remembered. “And about a mile from my house, the train whistle used to blow.” Hattie Cotton played the harmonica a little bit, and she showed her son how to imitate the train sounds on it. One Christmas, “my mother made Santa Claus give me a harmonica. Out of nine kids, I learned how to do that.”

“We used to have this old battery radio that my two older sisters put in their room,” he said in a 1975 interview. “One day, I just happened to be plucking around in there, and I run across station KFFA, Helena, Arkansas, and I heard Sonny Boy Williamson—Rice Miller—play the harp. … I was seven years old then.”2

More than seventy years later, he still remembered the thrill: “‘Oooh! Listen at that! I never heard anything like that!’ He’s blowin’ the harp, goin’ off the air—’Tune in tomorrow at 12:00 for Sonny Boy and his King Biscuit Boys’—so every time I got a chance, from then on, I would go and listen to the radio, keep it down low … Fifteen minutes [every day].”

No blues were allowed in the Cotton household, which is why James had to keep the radio “down low” when Sonny Boy was on. He’d sometimes sneak out into the fields to practice the songs he heard (“If my mother had knowed what I would do with that harp, she never would’ve bought it for me—never!”).3 But he had an uncle, Wiley Green, who was more permissive than his parents.

“Wiley was a ‘day hand,’ he explained. “He was the plantation mechanic—fixed tractors and so on. He never chopped cotton and never picked it. He would haul it to the gin. He went out and got one of these windup Victorias [sic: Victrolas]. I could play records, [and] I could play harmonica at his house. I stayed with him more than I stayed home.”

Through the years, there have been conflicting accounts of how young James eventually left that home to join Sonny Boy Williamson. The most dramatic version, in which a wide-eyed runaway charms the crusty harp man into taking him in as a kind of surrogate son, may appeal to our sense of blues romanticism, but the truth is somewhat more prosaic. “My father died when I was seven years old,” James related years later. “My mother, my youngest sister—Lou Willie—and I were the only ones left in the family home. The three of us made two crops together, and then my mother died when I was nine years old. After my mother died, I had no parents, just Uncle Wiley”:

The boss put me on a little small tractor, making three dollars a day, getting paid every two weeks. This particular Saturday, we had got paid. At the commissary, the place we got paid off at, a guy walked up. He heard me play a little bit, said “Why don’t you play some blues on that harmonica?” [I] pulled off my cap, he put fifty cents in there. I started playing when I seen that! Then people, coming up there and getting paid off, I’m sitting there playing, they put quarters, nickles, dimes, all kind of stuff in there.

By the time my uncle got paid and come out there, I had made more money playing the harp than we made for two weeks driving the tractor. We just made thirty six dollars for working two weeks; I had forty six in my cap. [He] come out and looked at my cap full of change. He turned around and looked at me, he said, “This is no place for you.” So he taken me to Helena to [meet] Sonny Boy.

[Wiley] told me to tell Sonny Boy I was lost and I didn’t have no family. We found the radio station; they come out wearing white overalls, black shirts, and chauffeur caps: Sonny Boy; [guitarists] Robert Jr. Lockwood [and] Joe Willie Wilkins; [drummer] Peck Curtis; and a guy called Dudlow [pianist Robert Taylor], we called him Five-by-Five. I’d never seen none of ’em before. I said, “Where’s Sonny Boy?” Everybody pointed at each other, said, “He’s Sonny Boy.” “No, I’m Sonny Boy.” So they gave me the runaround like that.

It wasn’t until the following day, when James returned to KFFA to try again, that he summoned his nascent flair for showmanship and finally met his idol: “I pulled out my harp, and I played the theme song for Sonny Boy’s radio show: ‘Good evening everybody, tell me how you do. We’re the King Biscuit Boys, we come out to welcome you.’ I played it note-for-note. He looked at me, said, ‘Hey, man, I’m Sonny Boy. Come on over here and talk to me.’”

I’d been listening to him for two years. When I played for him, he said, “I don’t know where you come from, but you been listening to me for a long time.” That cat couldn’t figure me out, man. I knew all his tunes. … He took me in on the condition that he was gonna help find my people; he didn’t have time for no kid. But I was kind of a hip cat; I knew what to do. Like they never did have to tell me to do shit. I’d get up and try to help make the beds—stuff like that. And I was always asking questions, you know? He took a liking to me right away. … I stayed in his house and played with him for six years.4

Never less than resourceful, the eager youth managed to keep his gig even when he couldn’t get in the door. “When I started playing with Sonny Boy, by me being a kid, some of the places wouldn’t let me come in. So [fellow harpist] Forrest City Joe [Pugh] would show up, and we’d sit on the front of the car, sit there and play. The people’d come to see Sonny Boy, and they wouldn’t make it in—we stopped ’em right there at the front door. We’d have as much money as [the band].”

Williamson also entertained at parties in people’s homes, where his young apprentice had less trouble getting in. “They’d take out a bed or something … cook some fish and corn, drink some whiskey and have a party that night and put the bed back later and go to sleep. So I started playin’ the house parties.”

James Cotton, SPACE, Evanston, Illinois, 2016.

“I wanted to be just like Sonny Boy,” he added. “I just watched. If he played it tonight, I played it tomorrow. … I watched every move he made, every word he said.”5

One night, after a show at a West Memphis juke called the Bebop Hall, Sonny Boy bought a half-pint of whiskey, told James to take a drink with him (“wasn’t no bar, Sonny Boy went up to the guy who sold the whiskey and bought a half pint and brought it back”) and announced, “Well, I’m fixin’ to leave the band.” At fifteen, with only a few years’ experience under his belt, James Cotton suddenly found himself the leader of one of the region’s most prestigious blues bands.

By his own admission, he wasn’t close to being ready for it. “Me being young,” he said, “the band just kind of went to my head. … When Sonny Boy stepped down, he gave the chicks a better chance to look at me; I never had that before, and it really screwed up my mind. I started getting drunk, half showing up, everything I thought a star was supposed to do. … Those guys had been playing as long as I was old, and every time they tried to tell me, they just couldn’t tell me nothing. So they finally just left, finally just cut me loose … because I was crazy. I don’t blame them.”6

On his own again, he went back to supporting himself with day jobs (“I drove truck, short-order cook, ice man, hauled concrete, I did all that”), but he never gave up on music, even if he was still too young to participate in it as much as he wanted. He gravitated to Memphis, the urban epicenter of the Mid-South and a longtime blues stronghold. “I worked in [Handy] park [on Beale Street] at the shoe-shine box. But every time I’d get a chance I used to slip in [a club]. I used to get on my knees and crawl through the door right through people’s legs into 500 Beale Street, the Hippodrome, Rachel’s Hotel on 11th Street. I saw Ruth Brown and Elvis Presley before he was Elvis Presley.”7

“I knowed B.B. [King] before I knowed anybody,” he added later. “B.B. was playing on Beale Street; I was shining shoes out in the park. So I’d just walk on down the street and listen to B.B., sitting there playing. And then he got on WDIA, and I kept the radio on out there.”

He also scuffled as a musician, and by the early ’50s, he’d begun to make his mark as an up-and-comer on the Memphis/West Memphis circuit. Howlin’ Wolf, then in his own early ascendancy, took him on, which led to his first recording opportunity: On April 17, 1952, he accompanied Wolf on a session at the Sun studio that resulted in Wolf’s “Saddle My Pony” (released on Chess, No. 1515) and “Dorothy Mae” (unissued at the time, but included on several Wolf compilations). Strangely, on Take 2 of “Dorothy Mae,” someone who sounds a lot like James can be heard shouting “Blow, Wolf! Blow, Wolf!” but it’s clear that Wolf is not playing harp.

Some accounts also place James at the October 7, 1952, Howlin’ Wolf session at which Wolf recorded “Oh, Red” / “My Last Affair” (Chess 1528), but there’s no audible harp on “Oh, Red,” although it’s possible that he could have been riffing along with the rough-hewn horn section. The harp solo on “My Last Affair” actually sounds like Wolf, but at this late date it’s difficult to know for sure. Meanwhile, James also worked with drummer/vocalist Willie Nix, and in October he returned to Sun to play harp on Nix’s “Seems like a Million Years” / “Baker Shop Boogie” (Sun 179).

James’s first opportunity to record under his own name came about as the result of a lost gig. Willie Nix, a heavy drinker, “got in trouble” at an engagement and was fired. Realizing the precariousness of his situation as Nix’s harp man, James went to KWEM in West Memphis and hustled his way onto his own radio show. This was probably also when he formed his first working band, James Cotton and the Rhythm Playmates, with guitarist Pat Hare and drummer John Bowers. His KWEM show, meanwhile, led to a call from someone at Sun Records (most likely Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips’s partner and office manager), inviting him in to do some recording. On December 7, 1953, he went to Sun and recorded “My Baby” and “Straighten Up Baby,” released in April of the following year (Sun 199). On these sides, somewhat belying his juke-joint apprenticeship with Sonny Boy, he did his best to approximate the style of a crooning pop singer as two tenor saxophones, along with pianist Billy Love and guitarist Pat Hare, riffed behind him. Moreover, he didn’t play harp—perhaps the attempt to emulate a jazz or jump-blues feel made that instrument seem anachronistic.

For his next Sun session, “I came up with a song that I wrote, ‘Cotton Crop Blues.’ So we did this song, and my drummer, John Bower, didn’t show up. That’s the reason why there’s no harmonica—I played the drums on that and sung the song. The man [Phillips] had a bass drum there, and a foot pedal. So I got that. And I got a box, put it on a chair; [they] gave me two drumsticks, that’s what I played with. Cardboard box, and a little cymbal about like that [the size of a pie plate].”

“Cotton Crop Blues,” recorded on May 14, 1954, and released on July 1 that same year (Sun 206), epitomizes the downhome/big-city dialectic that was coming to characterize what would eventually be dubbed the “postwar” blues sound. James’s lyrics, which echoed Roosevelt Sykes’s earlier “Cotton Seed Blues,” portrayed a sharecropper struggling to wrest a living from the bossman and the uncompromising Delta earth; Pat Hare’s barbed-wire-and-gunpowder fretboard explosions, meanwhile, prophesied the raw urban intensity that would soon characterize both the music and the lives of his generation of Southern bluesmen as they moved North. The flip, “Hold Me in Your Arms,” was obviously based on Jr. Parker’s “Mystery Train” and its B-side, “Love My Baby” (which had been issued the previous year). Apparently, Bowers made it to the studio in time to play drums on “Hold Me”; there’s some powerful percussion work going on behind James’s vocals.

As James recalls those early sessions, vignettes from his days on the Memphis/West Memphis circuit come rushing back with cinematic vividness:

You ever hear of Joe Hill Louis? “The Be-Bop Boy”! He played the guitar, harmonica, and drums—one-man band. He was supposed to open the show for me. He had drums set up everywhere—wouldn’t be no room for me to get on stage. He said, “Every damn thing up there, I’m gonna play it.” He had a stick between his fingers, guitar, harp around his neck, and two bass drums. I said, “I’m gonna watch this!”

First time Koko [Taylor] sang, she was on my stage. [Her husband] Pops Taylor used to drive cab in Memphis, and I worked about twenty miles out of Memphis, when I had my first little trio, in Bridgewater, Tennessee. I played there every Monday and Thursday night, and I didn’t have a car. Had to get a cab driver to drive me down there. [One] Monday night, he had Koko with him. That’s how I met Koko. Junior Parker and I had a “Harmonica Battle.” The rule was that whoever won got a chicken sandwich; the loser got a hot dog. I ate chicken that night.

Finally, in 1954, still working day jobs to help pay the rent, he met the man who’d change his life yet again and set him on the path that would eventually bring him to fame:

I was hauling cement, putting a dog track in, in West Memphis, Arkansas. I got off, stopped at the liquor store, bought a half pint, knocked the dust out of my t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Bequeathers
• Part II: Council of Elders
• Part III: Inheritors
• Part IV: Heirs Apparent
• Postscript: “Our Spirit Makes Us the Blues”
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover