by Jeff Horton
mason, he was on bass. The guitar player, who is no longer with us,
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was Tommy Lee Thompson. All he did was music. And myself on
vocals and harmonica, that was the group. It was a big record because like most records back then, it was released quickly and radio stations were playing it by the month of February 1957. We had gone over to
the studio on a Sunday night, but we didn’t get a chance to record
anything, because he had several other musicians there who had been
recording for him long before I was. On Wednesday, we recorded it.
I never did receive any royalties, not even from Johnny Vincent. He’d say, “Hey, man, you got a pretty big record out there. I’m proud of my label for doing it. Do you need anything?” And he would give me five, maybe ten bucks. I wouldn’t consider that as being royalties because he never gave me a statement. He was like a lot of people in the recording industry that had artists back then. It was like it was just this little bitty record, and he never thought about it until he saw you. Instead of sitting down like a gentleman and making a royalty statement and a check special to me, he just said, “Here, put this cash in your pocket.”
He had told me the royalty was going to be 2 percent of the record
sales. But the twenty-five-dollar session fee and some pocket change now and then was all he ever paid me. He just never did anything
with the royalties. Dave Campbell was a classical and jazz piano player who used to direct Miss McMurry’s music department on her label.
Dave took the song and wrote it out into sheet music for the session.
But what he did, unbeknownst to me, was to put the song in as being
published by him. In later years, he sold it to some guy in England. He didn’t put anybody else’s name on it, he just said he owned it, and that was good enough as far as anybody else was concerned.
I wish a lot of Texas guys could have got a chance to really get into the real thing, the way they played the blues back in Chicago during that time. They probably wouldn’t be so hung up on what they think
they know now. But music has changed a whole lot since then, a whole lot. I was talking with Mel Brown when I was up in Canada recording
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my CD, remembering back when Miss Lillian McMurry was recording
in her studio at Trumpet Records. They wasn’t paying the guys much
money, but the more songs you had, the more that she would pay you.
But she tried to cut you low on that, too. She’d get a stool and be sitting with a short dress pulled up. When come time to pay the guys for the session, it wasn’t but ten dollars. She would do that stuff just to keep from paying the guy, distracting him that way. She was a good-looking young woman then, in her thirties, maybe close to forty. But overall, something good came out of it.
Trumpet was the recording company back during those days. She did gospel, did a whole lot of stuff. B.B. used to record there, but he didn’t do no stuff under his name. If he was going to be playing a gig in Jackson, he’d come down to the studios and lay down a few tracks.
He knew most of the guys, and he would take his guitar and strum
through some stuff with them. Rice Miller, he was in some of those
sessions. He did a song called “From the Bottom.” He and B.B. were
big buddies, and B.B. played guitar on that. You’d be surprised at a lot of those guys, how they survived a lot of that stuff and who are still around. But the majority of them are gone.
It was a very interesting thing, and I would play a lot of their music on my radio show. I had a thing that I was gonna do on one of my
shows, and we was just about to get it hooked up, but then I just up and left the station. They didn’t fire me; I just up and left. But I came up with a good excuse, which they bought, and it was good for me. What
it was, I decided that I’d like to hit the road again and do nothing but music. That’s the way I left it. But there were a lot of guys in and out of that station, WOKJ, when I was there. It was the only station in Jackson that played a lot of R&B and gospel. I had a whole lot of friends that worked there. They would ship a lot of the DJs around to different
places, but they never really got around to doing me that way because I had quit. I just decided it was time for me to do something different.
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C H A P T E R 9
THE BLUES
What is the meaning of the blues? How does it feel to have the blues?
What’s it like to listen to the blues? There are as many answers to questions like these as there are blues fans, scholars, and musicians. Everyone hears and understands the blues in a different way. A student of the blues could spend the rest of his or her life reading, researching, writing, and talking about the blues and barely scratch the surface of this deep subject.
So, what does one do to try to gain an understanding of the blues? There is really no firm answer, except for what one finds within one’s own soul that resonates to the blues. Or, one can seek out a blues artist, a longtime practitioner of the art and member of a dwindling generation that will all too soon be lost to history as age and time finally take their toll. Here, Sam expresses his feelings on what the blues means to him, discusses some notable blues musicians and blues styles, and describes his unique song-writing process.
Now I’ll talk about the blues and what the blues means to me. I looked at the blues for a long time before even studying its contents. To me, people often look at blues as being depressing and about hardships.
Well, that’s true. But there are three known directions blues can go in. One, there are some happy blues, and then there are blues where
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you have problems, to where you can’t see your economic situation.
And then it can be just a story sung musically about the facts of life.
It don’t always have to be about a woman. It could be something that happened to you, or it could be something that you’ve seen happen
to someone else. I’ve heard it said, and I go along with it, that it takes a worried man to sing a worried song, but that’s not always the blues.
It’s the way you feel about it, the way you express it.
The blues is really expressing in a musical story form the way
you feel about something. And in order for it to go over big for you, you have to have a feeling for what you’re doing. That’s what it really means to me. And it’s not all of the time that the words of a song
should rhyme. It would be better if it did rhyme, but it’s just like telling a story. It’s a very simple thing, but people look at it as being hard.
But it really is a simple thing, that’s why you have a lot of music that is being played right today that got its start from the blues. And it’s just telling a true story about the facts of life, the hardships. Or maybe in some ways, it’s a story about that you are happy. Usually, a blues song is about a woman. If it’s a blues song, in order to make it a happy blues song, it’s in the way that you do your phrasing: “Yes, this chick is coming back, I’m a happy man, I feel like a millionaire even if I don’t have a dime.” By the same token, you might feel good, but even millionaires have the blues. Where their blues starts, people might say,
“Look at that guy standing over there by that Lexus.” “Who you mean, the guy by the Chevrolet pickup?” “No, the one that’s right next to the Mercedes-Benz. That guy’s got plenty money.” So many ways he’s got
money, but he also got blues. Where his blues begins versus a person that don’t have money, his blues begins when he had to get lawyers
that he pays a lot of money for him to keep what he’s got. Where, vice versa, a person that don’t have much, he might be having to scuffle up what he needs to eat or wher
e he needs to live. That’s where would I say even rich people have the blues, because they try to scheme and
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connive to keep what they have. You’ve never heard of a person that
was being sued unless there was a lot of money involved. That’s where your blues starts. Basically, it’s when you don’t have something you need, or it’s something that could be handled in a way that you could still have it and still be blue.
I hear people look at Monday like it’s supposed to be a blue day,
“Blue Monday.” Well, you’re not always supposed to look at Monday
as being a hangover from Sunday night’s party. You could be blue in
a lot of ways come Monday. Maybe you’re not able to work things
out on Monday that you need to work out. Well, you see, you’re blue
about it. And that same thing could not only be on Monday, it could
be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. So that’s my
pronunciation of the blues and what it’s all about.
A really great blues song has certain things about it. Not only
could it be something that happened to you, it could be something
that you see happening in everyday life. It could be the problems of a neighbor, or somebody who you see who had something happen
to them in the streets. It could revolve with people all around you.
Whether it’s a sad blues or if it just rambles on slow, it could still be a good feeling. It’s not always something bad that you see happen, or something that has happened to you, like a relationship with a lady.
Anything can turn to blues. It just goes with the flow of the facts
of life.
Fast and happy songs, like in swing and jump blues, also fit into
the blues world. You could be doing some swing blues: “For you my
love, I’ll do most anything.” You know, you’re happy and you feel free in doing this. Or you have had hardships for a number of days, weeks, months, or maybe a year, and all of a sudden you’re happy because
you got a telephone call or maybe a letter that the one that you dearly love is coming home. So, it is in a blues perspective, but you are happy about it.
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A good example of a great blues musician who could bring out
that kind of emotion would be one of the world’s greatest as he is
known today. He’s a guitarist and he’s recognized. The person that I’m speaking about is known to be one of the world’s greatest at this sort of thing. That would be B.B. King, because to my knowledge he can
do all styles of blues. The next person who also can do that is Bobby Bland. You’ve got what is called hard-core blues. It can go from that to blues tradition. The way it is today, both of those guys are the greatest to me as being vocalists, even though B.B. plays his instrument. They can take today’s music to any level. I would say that those two would be the ones who are alive today, who really have been able to polish that off.
You see, years ago, people looked at blues as being about hard
times when it’s really not that way. Blues can come to you in different forms, like when most women sing about the losing of their old man
and men speak about the loss of their lady. But that’s just one way of the blues. It’s a simple thing; you can be happy and have the blues.
A lot of people don’t believe that. But basically, what the blues can really turn you into a hard-boiled case is, when you broke, you have got nothing but blues. When you’re broke, you’re down and out, you
can’t see nowhere can you get ahead, well, you’re blue. I wish people would stop saying the blues is a good man gone bad. It’s not that, it’s more like a good man feeling bad. Naturally, it’s part of it when you’re broke and can see no way out. Naturally you feel bad about it; you
got blues. But there’s a blues of happiness as well. Also, people have gotten to where they’ve run out of old standard names of music. You
even got stuff now, like rap, it has began to catch on real good. For just throwing something together, I would say it’s doing pretty good. Now they’ve got a new thing called hip-hop, and no one can explain to me what is meant by that, “hip-hop.” What’re you doing, you just hipping and hopping?
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But the old standards are blues, gospel, and jazz. And now, they
have even turned gospel music around so it is called contemporary gospel. There is a Top 40 thing in gospel like there is in the Top 40 charts in Billboard magazine. You’ve even got Christian rock and Christian blues.
That’s where you run out of names. Christian is Christian and blues is blues. It’s more related to gospel than to anything else because you’re singing about Christianity. I know a lot of the quartets have big orchestras backing them up doing gospel, but it sounds like they’re doing a disco song. The only way you can really understand what’s happening is when they sing, “Oh, Lord!” or “My Savior!” or something like that. But otherwise, you wouldn’t know it from anything else.
I believe there is such a thing as Mississippi Delta blues, because
it bends back towards slavery more than anything else. But whether
it’s Texas blues or Chicago blues, they’re just names that people are throwing out there. Maybe that’s just a way to identify the musicians who are from that area. If they are playing Texas blues, they’re maybe a Texas person. But, what do you think about a man playing “Scratch
My Back”? That was a tune that was written by Slim Harpo. Would
you call that Texas blues? I don’t think you’d even have to hear it to answer that. Because you would know that Slim Harpo was the first
one that did it, and he was originally from Louisiana.
From the beginning, you’ve got people who are copying stuff that
T-Bone Walker and B.B. King did. Now here’s what happened to that:
all the bluesmen, even B.B., was somewhat influenced by T-Bone.
That’s what people start out working on, influences, but it don’t have to be just that type of blues that they are playing, like Texas blues. Just because a person is from Texas, that don’t mean that he plays Texas
blues. If Freddie King was still alive and playing, no doubt if his style didn’t change he would be playing Mississippi Delta blues. But he was originally a guy from Texas. So the question still remains unanswered to me.
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A lot of people hear a song and they say, “Oh, that’s Texas blues.”
What is Texas blues? The only definement that I could find of Texas
blues is just Texas blues musicians playing blues, captivating it as being their own. The people who originally did the song that they are covering are miles away from here. Some of them have never even
played in Texas. T-Bone, when he went to California to play in Les
Hite’s band, he definitely didn’t play Texas blues into that. But when he started doing his own thing, a lot of people called him Texas blues because they knew he was from Texas. What it was, T-Bone played
a whole lot of different stuff as well as his own and he was, I would consider being, a blues musician from Texas. But he definitely wasn’t Texas blues like Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lightnin’
was from Texas, but he wrote a lot of songs for Delta blues musicians like Muddy Waters and all those cats. Lightnin’ wasn’t what you’d consider Texas blues either. It’s way over my head what Texas blues really is. I think a lot of musicians say, “It’s just a name.” I go along with what a lot of what people say, but when it comes to having a theory, I have my own beliefs and doubts about it. There are a lot of people who play blues and have gotten away with it over the years, playing the blues and they don’t even really know what it is. They don’t even know the meaning of it when it’s r
ight there in front of them.
You hear a lot of people talk about “West Coast blues,” but you
never hear anybody say “East Coast blues.” You have Piedmont blues,
which is close to the East Coast, but the Piedmont style of playing
blues is acoustic. One of the greatest things from that area, there are more people playing blues on the East Coast than on the West Coast,
like in Boston but not so much of it around New York. Guys do a lot
of old blues standards, mostly Piedmont style. As a matter of fact, they do more blues in that part of the country than they do in the whole
state of California, but yet you got “West Coast blues.” But if it’s acoustic, somehow it all comes under the heading of Piedmont. If that’s the
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case, there was Big Bill Broonzy, a gentleman from Arkansas who lived in Chicago for a number of years. That’s where he died. He played a
lot of acoustic stuff that they called country blues. So why haven’t you ever heard of a large quantity of musicians that came from the part of the country that Big Bill Broonzy came from? He was from Arkansas,
and as many blues musicians as you have in Arkansas, you never hear
about them being from there, ’lessen they get on with a big major
label somewhere else.
Like this guy, Michael Burks, who signed with Alligator, he’s
from Fayetteville, Arkansas. He has a whole lot of guys mixed up in
his strings on guitar. Part of it is B.B., and then Albert King. He has established himself real well, but the reason why a lot of people don’t recognize him as a heavy-duty bluesman is because of these different styles he’s got mixed into one. I don’t know how they do it, but a lot of people are being paraded for what name they have and not by what
they can do. Elvis Presley was like that, everybody looked at him like he was the king. But what they failed to realize at that time, even
though he was a showman in the stuff that he liked to do, it was a
black man, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who inspired Elvis how to play
