by Jeff Horton
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S T O R I E S F R O M T H E R O A D
Anyway, he was up there playing, with Clifford Antone on bass,
Derek O’Brien on guitar, Kim was on harp, and Sam was singing. There was a guy who played guitar for the Kentucky Headhunters who at this time was playing piano. I think his name is Richard Young. This guy had real long hair, was kind of heavyset and wore glasses. Sam kind of half-way introduced the people that were up there, and when he got to the guy who was playing piano, he said, “You know, I’m not sure what the young lady’s name is who’s playing piano . . . ,” and everybody just died laughing. Derek went up to him and told him it was a guy who was playing piano, and Sam just said, “Oops! Slippers! Sorry about that!” and just went on like nothing had happened.
Another time we were playing at the Grand Emporium before I was
married to my wife, Renée, even before she started traveling with us as a singer. She was at the show selling CDs for us. She and Sam were really good friends. He’d buy her little presents, and she’d take him to go buy suits, that kind of thing. They had gone out to do something earlier that day, so he wanted to get her up on the stage that night and introduce her. He said, “Now, I’d like to get one of the most angelic specimens of femininigy up here . . . ,” and before he could say Renée’s name, some other woman who he had been talking to at the bar ran up onto the stage and hugged him and kissed his cheek. Sam couldn’t figure out what to do. Here he had this other girl up here whose name he didn’t know.
He looked over at me, and I didn’t know who she was. He finally bent down and said, “What’s your name, honey?” You could hear him over the microphone when he was asking her what her name was. When she finally got down, he looked over at me and said, and you could still hear him through the microphone, “What the hell was she running up here for? I was trying to introduce Renée!” The whole place could hear him!
Once Renée started traveling with us, we had this dog that would come along. Her name was Muddy. We were playing this outdoor show down by the river outside of Kansas City. It was on a flatbed truck, and
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S T O R I E S F R O M T H E R O A D
Mud was up there with us. She was the greatest dog in the world, went everywhere with us. Even Sam loved that dog. He was always accusing us of not feeding her, and he would always be giving her some of his food, fried chicken or whatever he had. He’d always give her a little bite. So we were playing that show, and nobody had a hold of Muddy. She was down at the truck when Sam started singing, “I’d rather drink muddy water . . .” I guess Muddy must have thought he was calling her. She came down out of that truck, ran up onto the stage and started playing around, chasing Sam’s feet. Sam was startled, jumped back and started doing this little dance while Muddy was running around his ankles. It looked like they were dancing and the audience just went crazy, thinking this was all part of the act.
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C H A P T E R 1 4
SAM’S BEST FRIEND,
ANSON FUNDERBURGH
Anson Funderburgh, of Plano, Texas, has been a stalwart of Texas blues guitar for almost thirty years. At the age of fifteen he started playing at local parties and in clubs like the notorious Cellar in Dallas with his first band, Sound Cloud. A year after he graduated from high school in 1973, Anson headed for the blues mecca of Austin to join a newly formed house band called Blue Norther. But the group never jelled, so Anson did a few gigs with Doyle Bramhall and Marc Benno and for a while was a member of the Nightcrawlers. That band had earlier been a spring-board for Anson’s hometown friend, Stevie Ray Vaughan. After a year Anson headed back home to Dallas. He and the late Brent MacMillan put together a short-lived band called Delta Road. Anson’s next band, Bees Knees, was a so-called “tropical rock” band. After two albums in three years, Anson left Bees Knees and returned to his blues roots, reunit-ing with Doyle Bramhall for a stint in Doyle’s Dallas version of the Nightcrawlers. Anson and Doyle opened for national acts Albert King and Lightnin’ Hopkins at the old Granada Theater in Dallas. Five years after leaving high school, Anson struck out alone and the first version of the Rockets was born.
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S A M ’ S B E S T F R I E N D , A N S O N F U N D E R B U R G H
I started the Rockets in 1978. Darrell Nulisch was the first singer in the band. We used to work around the Dallas area, then we started branch-ing off. We played in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, kind of spiraling out. In 1982 we played a little place called the George Street Grocery in Jackson, Mississippi. This was right about when our first record came out, “Talk to You by Hand.” A guy came in and asked me if I wanted to meet Sam Myers. I said, “Yeah, I’d love to meet Sam Myers.” At that time, Darrell and I were doing “My Love Is Here to Stay,”
which is a song of Sam’s that he released in 1957. So he brought Sam up and introduced him to us. Sam sat in, and it was just great. We thought it was the coolest thing. We played at that place quite a bit. It was Freddie Walden, Doug Rynack, and Jackie Newhouse when we first started playing there and later Eddie Stout, and Darrell and me. Every time we’d go over there, we’d all go get Sam and just hang out.
There used to be a place called the White House where we liked to go eat lunch or dinner. It seemed like all of Sam’s friends and all of his relationships kind of originated around a dinner table. We all became such good friends, every time we’d visit Jackson we’d pick up Sam and go out to eat, go to the record store, go look for antique clothes, go to the pawnshops, just do whatever, goofing off. Back in those days, we’d play for three or four days. We’d usually play George Street on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and then their booking agent, Malcolm White, would have an outdoor event or something for us on Sunday, some sort of little afternoon deal. So we were there at least once every three months, and we just all really became great friends with Sam. I had a record deal with Black Top, so instead of making another Rockets record, I got into Hammond Scott’s ear about him coming out to see Sam again and maybe doing a record with him. Hammond drove up to Jackson from New Orleans and hung out with us and visited with Sam again. Hammond knew of Sam from before, so we talked it over and decided to do it. In ’84 Sam and I made that record, “My Love Is Here to Stay.” Sam wasn’t in the band at
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S A M ’ S B E S T F R I E N D , A N S O N F U N D E R B U R G H
that time. It was just a little side project to do something different and to get his name back out there again. I think it’s probably one of our best rec ords, I really do. It’s a good, strong record. In ’84, Sam would have been almost fifty years old, and he just sounded great on it, the whole band did.
So we just kind of tooled along. We’d fly Sam out and include him in some of our performances and tours. He played the San Francisco Blues Festival and the Battle of the Harmonicas out there with us. We played in New Orleans, just a little added deal to the show, and to promote the record for Hammond. And then in ’ 86, when Darrell left the band, hell, I just called Sam up and asked him if he wanted to start to work with us, to move to Dallas and start playing. It just seemed like the thing to do. He wasn’t doing much at the time, and we could use the record that we made to promote ourselves as a calling card and get some work. He said yeah, so I borrowed Fingers Taylor’s van and one of his old Bassman amps and one of his JT30C harmonica microphones. We borrowed all that stuff from Fingers and moved Sam to Dallas, and that’s how we started with Anson and the Rockets featuring Sam Myers. That was in April 1986. He and I rehearsed for about a month, and we started to work in May.
Within six months I took Fingers’s van back and bought our own van and fixed it up. Sam and I hit the road really hard. Hell, we worked 260
to 280 days a year for the first five or six years. I booked the band up until about the first part of 1990, when we hired the David Hickey agency. They really helped us to get out there even further. It’s been a neat trip. You kind of look up and you th
ink, wow, it’s been almost twenty years that’s slipped by.
One of my favorite Sammy stories is from when we were recording
“My Love Is Here to Stay.” I didn’t know much about Sam personally at that time. I mean, I did and I didn’t, because we had hung out together some, but you really don’t know someone until you’re with them all the time. The first night after he joined us we took him out to eat. He ordered
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S A M ’ S B E S T F R I E N D , A N S O N F U N D E R B U R G H
a large combination pizza and a large plate of spaghetti. I thought to myself when he ordered all that food, man, he’ll never be able to eat all that. I’ll be dadgummed, he made a liar out of me. When we left, there wasn’t a noodle left of the spaghetti or a crumb left of the pizza. It just really knocked me out.
After we made that record, we used to fly Sam out to gigs when we’d stay gone for two or three weeks. He’d play the festival gigs that could afford to pay for something like that. On one of our first trips out to California, we picked Sam up in L.A. We were going to do several shows in L.A., work our way up the coast, and end up the weekend playing the San Francisco Blues Festival. So we picked him up and got all his stuff from the luggage area and loaded it into the van. Sam got in and he said, “My old feet hurt.
Look in that little old brown briefcase there and hand me my easy-steppers.” Everybody thought, OK, what’s that, a comfortable pair of shoes?
It was actually a harmonica case and when we opened it up, here on top of all these harmonicas was this stinking, filthy pair of house shoes that he had sitting on those damn harmonicas that he’d been putting in his mouth and blowing on. All of us just got the biggest kick out of that. We said, “This here’s a serious road man!”
I think the thing that’s held us together for so long is that Sam and I have a pretty good respect for one another, and I think we really do love one another. Our friendship and our love for the music has been the vehicle for Sam to play the music he really loves, to play blues and get out there and gain fans. Even though sometimes it hasn’t been absolutely perfect, like maybe the band didn’t jell exactly like we wanted it to with certain members or whatever, but all in all it’s been about a love for the music and our friendship. Even when we’re not on the best of terms, we’ll call each other all the time to see what’s going on. Personally, I really love him; he’s just like part of my family. I’ve known Sam since 1982, so I’ve known him for twenty-four years now and he and I have actually worked together for almost twenty years.
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S A M ’ S B E S T F R I E N D , A N S O N F U N D E R B U R G H
When we first started playing as Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets featuring Sam Myers, there weren’t a whole lot of guys doing what we were doing with someone who was as authentic as Sam and someone that was like myself. I consider myself a traditionalist, even though some people might say I was more contemporary because I’m a younger white guy that’s been playing this kind of music. Sam and I have really been fortunate; when we came out and first started doing the thing, man, the press, they loved us. There’s no telling how big a stack of stories and articles I have about this band. It’s pretty amazing how much people just embraced us. Music is a funny thing; there are so many talented people out there that never make it, who you never hear of. It’s hard to know what really makes things work. Even though our success on a bigger picture is pretty small, for the blues picture our success has been very large. The last twenty years I can say haven’t always been easy, but it’s been pretty damn good, man, and it’s been fun. The first ten years of it were real fun. Over time, people’s priorities change, but Sam and I have had a pretty damn good run of it. We’ve been a whole lot luckier than a lot of people.
Sam as an artist is very unique, because to me he wasn’t a guy that sounded like Little Walter or that really big, heavy, heavy harmonica of Big Walter. He has his own little twist to things, kind of a country taste or flavor to it. He plays it with such different dynamics. I’m not sure I know exactly how to explain what he does or how he does it, but since he’s been playing with this band he’s kind of taken that country sound and electrified it. On a lot of his earlier recordings he’d just play straight harmonica into a bubble mic. In the later years with us he’d use a microphone, and it’s a little bit bigger of a sound, but it’s still not exactly the same kind of bigness as Little Walter. His sound is different; he’s got his own phrasing with the harmonica. I find him very unique in that he’s found a cross between the country sound and more of an electric sound.
Kind of like Muddy did, when he was playing with a bottleneck by himself or with a really small band, and then there’s the later Muddy with
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the electric guitar and a full-blown band. It’s kind of the same kind of sound, but electrified; it sounds different. Sam has done the same kind of thing with his style. He’s still playing the same way as his early stuff, but he’s electrified it, and it’s very unique to me. I think he’s his own guy.
In writing songs with Sam, he and I seem to have a process that we go through to blend our ideas together. Maybe I’ll have some sort of lick that I’m playing. Or it might be some progression that I’ve been working on, and I’ll start playing it for him. Maybe I’ll have some ideas for the theme of the song or some lyrics to try out. I might say that I want a song that’s in the key of E, with kind of a Lightnin’ Hopkins or Jimmy Rogers kind of style. Then I’d start playing things and maybe get an idea about having been on the road for a while and call out some of the cities that we’ve been to, or maybe the roads and highways we’ve been on. Just crazy stuff like that, and we’ll talk about it some. Then Sam might come in with a set of lyrics that he’s been working on. I’ll always set up a little boom box recorder, and I’ll start playing some of the licks and figures behind it. I’ll whisper the words to Sam and he’ll sing them, or maybe it’s something that he’s worked on and he’ll sing it and I’ll try to play some part for it. We just kind of go from there. Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense, so once we’ve recorded it on the boom box and we listen back to it, maybe we’ll say the first verse we sang might work better as the third verse, or vice versa. So we do things like that, swap it around some and get some rough ideas of where we want the song to go. Maybe John Street will come over and play piano while we’re going through this process. I’ve got a small recording studio in my house, so sometimes we’ll just build the song there, with a keyboard for John and my guitar and Sam. We can put drums down from the piano, and while it’s not perfect, it gives us a pretty good idea of where we want to go when we get in the studio. When you’re spending a few hundred dollars an hour for studio time, you really want to have things a little bit more together than just going in and winging it. That can be very expensive these days. But we’ve actually had
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S A M ’ S B E S T F R I E N D , A N S O N F U N D E R B U R G H
a lot of fun writing songs for our records. We try to make at least half of it original and half of it traditional-sounding songs that we like to play.
I think you can measure success as a musician in several different ways. There’s the guy can play a little bit of everything. I respect people who can play anything or sing anything; they just have the ability to play music. But it moves me more, and this is just a personal thing, to see someone who has their own style, like B.B. King. I can hear him play three notes and I know it’s B.B. King. I can hear Sam play three notes on the harmonica or sing a little, and I know it’s him. He has a unique style that’s all his own. As musicians, that’s what we all strive for, to have some unique quality about us that makes us different and sets us apart from everyone else.
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DISCOGRAPHY
LABEL CATALOG
NO.
TITLE
RELEASED
45 RPM SINGLES<
br />
Ace
536
My Love Is Here to Stay
1957
Sleeping in the Ground
White Label
1955
Rhythm with Me
1957
(Dutch label, probably same personnel on Ace sessions)
Fury
1035
You Don’t Have to Go
1960
Sad, Sad Lonesome Day
Ace
3027
You’re So Fine
1979
The Things I Used to Do,
Sam Myers, hca
Mid South
NR 15681
Back in My Baby’s Arms
1984
(B side); billed as Sam
“Blues Man” Myles [ sic]
RECORD ALBUMS
W I T H VA R I O U S M U S I C I A N S :
TJ
1030
Down Home in Mississippi
1979
TJ
1040
Mississippi Delta Blues
1980
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D I S C O G R A P H Y
TJ
1002
Mississippi Delta Blues Band:
1981
In Europe
TJ
1050
Mississippi Delta Blues Band
1981
TJ
