Sam Myers, The Blues is my Story

by Jeff Horton

  couple of times. We never did go to Austin or Dallas, but we would

  always go to Houston. That would be the main city that we would play, and then we would go up into southwest Louisiana and come back.

  There was the Satellite Club and the Golden Key Ballroom in Houston.

  All those are gone now, all those clubs up and down the Fifth Ward in Houston. I used to hang out at a lot of them. Don Robey was a big wheel back then; he had the Duke Recording Company. Duke, Sure Shot,

  Peacock, and Back Beat, those were his labels. We’d play at a lot of his clubs there, in and around Houston.

  Back when I was playing drums with Elmore, I never did loan

  my drums to anybody. But if we were working on a gig or a session,

  if a guy didn’t want to set his drums up and mine was set up and he

  wanted to play them, he was welcome to do so. I’ve always been funny about that. If I were there to lend a helping hand to any musician, I would do that. I once had a set of Rogers Black Pearls. I was working with Elmore, and Odie Payne used to tell me all the time, “Man, you

  know you’ve got about the sharpest set around.” I had all these different strobe lights and stuff on them and when I hit the stage, I’d just flip a switch. I could switch them to a stroll, or if I wanted the lights to be moving with the tempo of the music that was playing, I could do

  that, too. A lot of guys thought it was a cool thing, and they respected me. They wouldn’t play my drums like they was driving a nail through a board with the sticks. And they sounded good, playing.

  Odie said, “One day, I’m going to own them drums.” I said, “Well,

  according to whoever’s going to be the longest liver.” Just like that, just

  [ 6 2 ]

  E L M O R E J A M E S

  joking with him. But I got into some trouble, I fell down and needed a hand out and took ’em to a pawnshop. That set of drums had cost me

  fifteen hundred dollars. Odie took it upon himself to find out where my drums went. He found out where I pawned the drums, and he

  went down there and switched the durn pawn ticket and got ’em out

  before the date I was supposed to get ’em out. I had told the guy I’d come back and get ’em. I had pawned ’em for a thousand. But Odie

  went and paid the guy like sixteen hundred. You know how a pawn-

  broker can do stuff. But I messed around and didn’t pursue it after

  he got the drums. He said, “You can play ’em anytime.” I said, “Okay,”

  but I wasn’t thinking right and I went and tore the durn pawn ticket up. What I should’ve done is went before a lawyer and sued the durn

  pawnshop. The ticket was all I needed. But that’s how a lot of those guys, especially around Chicago, stayed in business. Odie’s daughter has still got that same set of drums now. We stayed good friends; I

  didn’t think nothing of it. In this day and time, what a person would do, they probably would really go over the edge. But we never stopped speaking with one another or nothing like that.

  We were getting ready to go overseas in 1963 when Elmore passed.

  We had been touring all down through Mississippi, and then he went

  back to Chicago to get the overseas tour ready. I got my passport and stuff what I would need to go, and I was supposed to join him in

  Chicago that Monday. He was rehearsing with some more musicians

  in Chicago that was going on the tour with us, but I was going to be the one to play drums. This made me think he kind of knew he

  wouldn’t be living long, because before he left, he said something to the club owner where we played in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a place called the S&S, owned by Percy Simpson, out on Moonbeam Street.

  Elmore told him, “Look, we’re going to see about getting this tour

  together, but if things happen, if anything happens to me and you’re still in business, I want Sam to have a job. Would you make me that

  [ 6 3 ]

  E L M O R E J A M E S

  promise?” So after he passed, as long as Percy was in business, I played at his club. You know, a weekend gig. But I had the option of doing my own thing, just so I let him know ahead of time, but I always had a gig whenever I came back to Jackson. I left and went overseas, this was in

  ’64, and when I came back, he was out of business. His nephew John

  Simpson said, “We still got the club. Do you want to work?” I said,

  “Well, I’m working out alone.” He said, “Sure, I understand what you mean, but you got the gig if you want it.” Percy Simpson had died and John had taken over the club, but it still held on, and I played around.

  I’d run to Atlanta, maybe to Florida, but whenever I came back I still had a gig at the club.

  [ 6 4 ]

  C H A P T E R 7

  JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI

  Jackson, Mississippi, was originally a trading post on the west bank of the Pearl River in a spot known as LeFleur’s Bluff. Named for President Andrew Jackson, the little town was designated as the state capital in 1821 due to its abundant timber, attractive countryside, and proximity to navigable waters. In 1839, the first law in the United States granting property rights to married women was passed there. Burned three times during the Civil War, Jackson had a population of only eight thousand at the turn of the century. The advent of the modern railroads after World War I fueled the rapid growth in the timber industry in that part of the state, and the opening of a large (for the region) airport propelled Jackson towards the modern age.

  I was living permanently in Jackson by 1956, rooming with a friend

  of mine, Johnny Temple. Johnny had lived in Chicago for about

  twenty-three years, where he was a big figure in the music field as a guitar player. He did a couple of recordings called “Big Boat Whistle”

  and “New Vicksburg Blues” for the Decca record people. His career

  extended on blues, and he played a lot of orchestration-type stuff, the big band arrangements. He’d strum chords with that, but he actually

  played a lot of lead guitar with his blues. He wasn’t a big infl uence on

  [ 6 5 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  me; I just loved working with him, and I liked the sound of his voice when he’d be singing. I never did any recordings with him, but I did do some gigs with him while he and I were with King Mose and the

  Royal Rockers.

  When Johnny’s mother passed in 1952, he moved back to Jackson

  from Chicago to take care of her house. When I was with King Mose

  there in Jackson, I started rooming at Johnny’s house with my lady

  friend. I never will forget the house where he lived because the address was 905 Anne Banks Street, right off of Whitfield Mills Road. That’s what it was known as then. I lived with him from 1957 until about

  1960. It was a real nice, big house and he had a garden in the back that he worked every day. He did his own cooking, and he was a master of

  the kitchen. We would have lots of fun during the day. When I wasn’t on the road traveling with King Mose, one thing I used to enjoy was

  making ice cream. Johnny had an old ice cream maker, one of those

  with a handle you would turn, and we made a lot of ice cream.

  Elmore James had gotten out of the hospital in Chicago in 1957,

  and he came down to live with Johnny. We were just like one big fam-

  ily. Elmore used to fix gumbo and eggnog. It was a great time we all spent together. Johnny Temple, we all called him Temple, he would be getting those royalty checks from the Decca record people and a lot

  of other people who he had recorded material with, so he had enough

  money to get by on pretty well, with the three of us also living there.

  It was just a joyous time.

  Temple was a real nice man, and he would do what he could to

  help someone. It was in 19
58 when my son was born. Once he got sick

  with diarrhea when I was out on the road. My son’s mother didn’t

  have any transportation, and it was late at night. I think that the fee to be admitted to the emergency room then was five dollars. Temple

  got his car and took my son’s mother and him to the hospital. When

  I got home, I went to pay him his money back. He said, “Oh, man,

  [ 6 6 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  you don’t owe me nothin’. That’s the way life is. You may be able to do something for me, one day.” Just like that. I still insisted on paying him. By him taking the boy to the hospital and what he had spent, I

  took it to be a life saver for him.

  Another time, I forget what year it was, but it was in the summer.

  Elmore came in and he made a big pot of gumbo. After he got the

  gumbo cooking and going on, he told Temple, “Now, don’t let it cook

  too long, because it will get mushy.” Elmore went on out hunting; he loved to hunt and fish. Temple got himself a big bowl of gumbo, and

  then he fed the rest of it to his neighbors. They all thought he was the one who had fixed it. A while later, Elmore came back, and I looked

  for him to be really pissed off about it, but he didn’t say anything, and neither did Johnny. It was just one of those things. After Temple passed in 1968, somehow they tore the house down. Every time when

  I would go back to Jackson, I would look for that particular house,

  knowing it’s not there.

  Not long after I got back to Jackson, when I wasn’t playing a gig

  with Elmore, I started running the road, doing my own thing with my

  own band that I put together. It was called the Shades of Rhythm, with Jimmie King on vocals, Freddie Waite on drums, and Leon Dixon,

  Willie Dixon’s nephew, on bass. We also had Jesse James Russell; we

  called him “Lightnin’. ” He was on guitar, and Walter Berry was on

  piano. I was singing and blowing harmonica. We was together from

  1956 to about 1958. Then I went to do a recording thing with Bobby

  Robinson, since Elmore had vouched for me to record something of

  my own with Bobby. On a couple of the sessions Elmore played gui-

  tar on some of it, so I began to make a name from that. I was inter-

  viewed by a lot of magazines and began to get it together then. In 1959

  and 1960, when we did the records with Bobby Robinson, there was

  “Sad, Sad Lonesome Day,” “You Don’t Have to Go,” “Poor Little Angel

  Child,” “Little Girl,” and I did one called “Sad and Lonesome.” “You

  [ 6 7 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  Don’t Have to Go” and “Sad, Sad Lonesome Day” had the late Dave

  Campbell from Jackson on piano and “King Mose” Taylor on drums.

  Matter of fact, it was Mose’s band who were the session guys. “Poor

  Little Angel Child” and “Little Girl” was recorded with Elmore’s group, but King Mose was playing drums on that. “Big Moose” Walker was

  on piano, Sammy Lee Bulley was on bass and I was on vocal. It was

  two different outfits there. And then after that, I’ve just drifted from recording company to recording company.

  King Mose died of leukemia a week after Elmore passed, around

  the first of June 1963, and he was buried on the fourth. I stayed on with Johnny for a while longer, and then I moved out to what is called west Jackson. For the next three years or so, I traveled all over, coming back to play in Jackson whenever I could. If I wanted to be there for a weekend, I had a club where I could go over and play, and I also did hotel gigs. I would always pick up a little session work and I worked pretty steady, even with things being like they were. When I had a

  hotel gig, I was working six nights a week. In 1965 I went overseas with a blues tour run by a lady out of Chicago named Sylvia Embry. I was

  out of the country for about eighteen months. The band was made

  up of different guys from different groups, sort of an all-star deal. She was married then to John Embry, a guitar player on that tour. We went a whole lot of places, kind of like an international world tour. When I came back, I started back playing around Jackson again with a few

  different groups and on my own, doing my weekend deals. I’d run up

  to Chicago, do a lot of different stuff. But a lot of the clubs closed, and some of them moved out to the North Side.

  The blues was going into a stage like a depression, and I was look-

  ing for job security, so I wound up getting this job at the Industries for the Blind in Jackson. If it worked out that I lived long enough to retire, I would have worked under the Social Security law and got my pension built up. So with that happening, it wound up being a pretty

  [ 6 8 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  good little thing there. I worked five days, sometimes seven days on my job at the Industries for the Blind. But I was still doing music at the same time, and that’s why I always say that music has played a big part in my life.

  I worked all over that place, since I had better vision then. I

  worked in the shipping department and the mop department. It was a

  manufacturing factory deal. They made brooms, mops, gun belts for

  the military, barracks bags, inner springs, box springs, a whole lot of different stuff. This plant was connected with the National Industries for the Blind in New York. There were twenty-seven of those plants,

  and the wage and pay scale and benefits at the plant in Jackson was

  number one over all of them. But there was a few supervisors working there that I didn’t see eye-to-eye with. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the work to be done. It was just that there were people there that I couldn’t get along with.

  I worked there at the Industries for the Blind for fifteen and a

  half of the thirty years in all that I lived in Jackson. But I would still do a lot of weekends at different places. I would get a leave of absence from my day job and I would go and do my engagements. By 1970 I

  had been working about four years at the Industries for the Blind. I was playing a lot at the Sunset Inn, on the same street where Percy

  Simpson’s place was. I did some gigs there with one of my groups, the Downbeats. We had a guy in it named Robert Miller. I left and told

  him to take the band over. I left for a little bit, and then came back and just let him handle the management of it because I had got fed up with that stuff. That’s when I was working with him over at Foster’s Nightclub. That was on Blair Street, right around the corner where I lived at the time, on Monument.

  I had another group called the Blue Light Blues Band, from about

  1968 to about 1972. We played a lot at a club there in Jackson called the Lamar. It was a theater that they had converted into a club. In that

  [ 6 9 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  band with me was James Russell, the same guy that played guitar with me on a lot of that Fire and Fury stuff that I recorded under my name.

  We had Walter Berry on piano and Leon Dixon on guitar and on bass.

  I had Sherman Norwood on drums, and I was singing. We played

  frat parties throughout the south, up at Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi), Mississippi State, at the Holiday Inn in Columbus, then down at Mississippi Southern in Hattiesburg, and just all around. Mel Brown took a break from Bobby Bland, and he worked with me for a

  while. That was the only band that I had under my management.

  In about 1972 I started working with the Sound Corporation. That

  was Willie Silars, he was the drummer, and Pete Garland on piano.

  Jesse Robinson was on guitar. Charles Fairlee would come up from

 
; Moss Point, near the Pascagoula area. He would come up and do a lot

  of weekend stuff with us. He was on tenor sax. We did the Elks Club, the Palm Garden, clubs like that in Jackson that was happening at

  that time. There was another club I played at over in Lula, Mississippi, called the Push N’ Pull Club. That was with a bunch of different guys out of Greenville, places like that. The bass player was George Allen.

  He was the studio bass player at Malaco for a long time. He would

  do sessions with Johnny Barranco and all of them over at Malaco.

  They was really kickin’ in high cotton back then. I never did noth-

  ing for them, recording-wise. We’d play in other places like Talullah, Louisiana, doing pickup gigs around the Delta area.

  In 1979 I went back overseas with the Mississippi Delta Blues

  Band. It was different guys, most of them were from California;

  I was the only guy from Mississippi. Bob Deance, guitar; Richard

  Milton, drums; Gary Asazawa, he was on rhythm guitar. Norman Hill

  was another bass player. The second time around was Bob Deance,

  Richard Milton, and Craig Horton also on guitar. Craig was a really

  good guitarist and songwriter, but the rest of the band wasn’t about nothing. We had another guy, his name was Haskell Sadler, out of

  [ 7 0 ]

  J A C K S O N , M I S S I S S I P P I

  Oakland. We all called him “Cool Papa.” He was a durned good guitar

  player, too. He died here recently; he was a good man. That brings it up to about 1982, when I did the World’s Fair with Robert Lockwood,

  Jr., in Knoxville, Tennessee, in summer of 1982. It was about that time I met Anson when he was playing over at the George Street Grocery in Jackson.

  Overall, the Industries for the Blind was a decent place to work.

  But you had a lot of people, just like the NAACP, they had a lot of

  blacks really wanting to get positions and stuff. On jobs like that, they usually call those people “cheese-eaters.” They were always going to the man in the office, telling him about what one person wasn’t

  doing. They had a meeting once and I mentioned that, and they all

  got messed off with me. One of the guys just got highly pissed about my ideas about things. Right about then I happened to be in New