Ain't Bad for a Pink Read online

  Believing that we would all be reunited, Mum didn’t want us to be unhappy about her death or for there to be a sad place for us to visit. She left generous, uplifting letters full of love and containing no self pity – to be opened posthumously – and she wanted her ashes thrown to the winds.

  We’ll Meet Again (3)

  Darling,

  Goodbye dear don’t worry I shall be waiting for you and I want you to know that this 25 yrs have been the happiest in my life.

  What happens today is what has got to be, but I have plenty to look after me until you come.

  Dearest heart I am with you wherever you go and whatever you do so you are not alone. We have good children Norman and give them my love won’t you, tell them not to worry after all it was my own choice.

  The only regret is that I cannot spend a few more happy happy years with you. But dearest carry on, put the carpet down and so on it will help to keep us together and me happy.

  In a few years maybe you will be able to find someone else to keep you company during the latter years.

  Well dearest Goodbye for now, but if it is predicted that I am not to come back to you I will say Goodbye till I see you again. I have always loved you. I shall go on loving you they say until Eternity but it will be beyond that. Our happy married life has been so wonderful. Sweetheart Goodbye.

  Your Loving and Devoted Wife

  xxxxxx

  PS.

  Ralph x

  Roger x

  Peter x.

  The Amazing Exploding Guitar

  There were only two preoccupations in my early years: my mother’s illness and playing the guitar. When she died, the music occupied the centre. I was fortunate enough to have had the redemptive power of music in my life for a long time. The blues resonated with my emotions in a positive way and the song that best expressed my sense of loss was Sleepy John Estes’ “I’d Been Well Warned”: a song about losing your best friend – in his case, his eyesight.

  A musician is more likely to remember his first guitar than his first lover. When I was eight I bought a handmade guitar from a friend of my brother for a pound. It lasted twelve months: long enough for me to learn all the major chords from a book. Then, as if overstimulated from the intensive learning, it split asunder!

  Bridget’s Barn

  Six months later I persuaded my two brothers to buy me a guitar for Christmas. This was a Spanish guitar which I played at my first gig: a concert at Edleston Road School when I was nine, in front of my class. I played “I Believe” – Frankie Laine’s hit – noting that it went down very well with the girls. I always had an ear for a big song and you can’t imagine a mid-twentieth century western without his voice on the soundtrack. Interestingly, Tex Ritter sang the soundtrack song for High Noon but Frankie’s version was the bigger hit.

  Aged twelve I bought an electric guitar from someone from Willaston who played in The Four Falcons. I remember the name because I just couldn’t get rid of it off the case. I started my own band – can’t remember the name – with school friends who all lived at Wrinehill, rehearsing in Bridget’s Barn on a smallholding there. By now my band had developed a style of music derived from Chuck Berry, doing blues and slide in a rocky style at the school garden party, Betley Village Hall and Wistaston Memorial Hall. And the girls would jive and when they twirled round you could see stocking tops if your eyes caught the moment.

  Leadbelly, Mississippi Fred McDowell And The Honeydripper

  About this time, on my paper round, I was immobilised by the sound of loud, unfamiliar music coming from one of the suburban houses. It caught me in the solar plexus and in the balls; it took me out of my time and out of my place. This wasn’t anything from the Top Twenty; it was a raw, uncompromising sound from the edge of the world.

  Leadbelly.

  From that Damascene moment when I heard the powerful voice and the twelve string guitar on “Black Girl”, the course of my life was fixed. I became a blues musician and Huddie accompanied me through the early turbulent times.

  By this age I had been listening to music by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Leadbelly available – bizarrely – in a series for sale at Woolworth’s for pocket money. But this was blues music directed at a white audience; it hadn’t prepared me for the heart-stopping sounds coming from that British window. None of my peers knew this music although the currently popular Lonnie Donegan did sing Leadbelly numbers. As far as authentic blues music was concerned there was virtually a desert. Fortunately for me it turned out that Bert Bellamy, whose window it was, had hundreds of blues records, many bought from Pete Russell’s record shop. The address is burnt into my brain: 24 Market Avenue, Plymouth. I began to buy all my records from this shop; I still play this rare and precious collection.

  Like many people from Crewe, Bert, originally from Liverpool, worked on the railway, where he had a clerical job. He looked like a white black man and favoured the early blues music that I so admired and like his friend Fred Watts, he was interested in big band jazz as well. I would go to Bert’s house regularly on Tuesday and Thursday evenings to listen to blues records and get information. It became a social event when my girlfriend Linda came – though she was more into jazz – and Bert’s wife joined us. A nourishing time and occasionally, blues musicians stopped at Bert’s house.

  Bert Bellamy and Fred Watts – also the owner of a fine record collection – both wrote articles about music: Fred for a small magazine attached to a jazz shop in London and Bert for Blues Unlimited, a magazine reputed to be “the daddy of all blues magazines ” (4) founded in 1963 and edited by Mike Leadbitter, an authority on post-war blues. Leadbitter also edited a collection of the magazine’s articles in a book: Nothing but the Blues published in 1971. They knew everyone in the business and took me to gigs in Manchester at the Guild Hall, Club 43, and the Free Trade Hall where they had backstage passes. Through this connection, I was not only able to hear live blues – I could actually meet the American bluesmen who were enjoying fame because of the currently awakened interest in their music. Big stars like Jimmy Witherspoon: a great big black man who smoked dope and drank with Bert, with whom he stayed. Everything about him was big – what an amazing, booming jazz voice he had! A big, big voice. We saw him in Club 43 in 1962/63 and I had the privilege of cooking him a full English. Fred Watts also got to know Jimmy Witherspoon very well.

  Halfway Down The Stairs

  My musical awakening began during World War II in my childhood home in Goostrey, Cheshire. This was the age of radio and we relied on it for news of the war. It was always on and I could hear it in bed. But one particular night I found myself halfway down the stairs listening intently to what turned out to be a Jelly Roll Morton number: “The Naked Dance”. Although from a respectable Creole family whose business was timber, Jelly Roll Morton played music in brothels and the reference is to the way the whores danced for their clients. This was heady stuff for a twelve year old and after that I listened to every jazz programme on the radio and started collecting records.

  Jazz led me to country music: Jimmie Rodgers was a particular favourite and country music led to blues, especially Leadbelly, together with Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Josh White was a softer-voiced singer who used to guide blind performers about. That’s how he learnt guitar.

  You had to do a lot of sorting out to find them.

  I also followed the swing music of the contemporary big bands at the Royal Festival Hall. I saw Louis Armstrong at Bellevue, Manchester in 1956 or 1957. A coach trip had been organized from Breeden and Middleton’s – the record shop in High Street, Crewe. I attended both houses; Armstrong varied his repertoire for the second house. I saw The Saints Jazz Band at Crewe’s Royal Hotel but the band members were displeased because of all the talking.

  The first blues performers I saw included Chris Barber and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall where a mixture of jazz and blues was on the bill. This was in the ea
rly Sixties; possibly before that. Then there was a memorable trip to London’s Hammersmith Odeon. I was able to get a ticket from someone who had a spare ticket because he had fallen out with his girlfriend. There were all these old-timers playing steel guitars. Someone had shone them up and they dazzled you. I saw Bukka White, Son House and Skip James.

  I have a photograph with me and Bert on either side of Jimmy Witherspoon, one of my favourite performers. He was a very friendly man. I got to know him well.

  The friendship between me and Jimmy was to lead to some interesting situations. I was in London to see a concert and afterwards I wanted to see Jimmy’s second set at Ronnie Scott’s. I knew I would have some difficulty getting in because I wasn’t a member and sure enough, I did. However, just at the crucial moment, when I was standing in the entrance hall a door opened and Jimmy shouted,“My man! He’s with me!” So I was allowed in. On another occasion I took Bert Bellamy to a record shop in Salford owned by Barry Ansell, a man who was associated with putting on shows in Manchester. Jimmy Witherspoon was in there with Ernie Garside, who ran Club 43 and was responsible for booking blues artists such as Jimmy to come over from the States. This was how Bert met Jimmy who subsequently stayed with him and ate a breakfast cooked for him by Pete Johnson.

  Musically speaking, I would describe Jimmy Witherspoon as what you would call a blues shouter. He was very loud; it was developed to overcome a big band sound. Joe Turner was another one – he used to sing in a café while waiting on – and so was Jimmy Rushing. He was with the Basie band. Unfortunately Jimmy got throat cancer and didn’t get the high notes after that though he lived on a while.

  I also met Sleepy John Estes, his harmonica player Hammie Nixon and Yank Rachell the mandolin player. I do regret the fact that I didn’t get a photograph taken. John Estes did look sleepy and Lightnin’ Hopkins said,“Poor old Sleepy’s a very sick man.” But Sleepy John was musically marvellous. I had quite a good talk with Lightnin’ Hopkins. He was supposed to be a man who was quite reticent. I asked him about travelling – he didn’t like flying much and wrote a song about it! I’ve got nearly all of his records. I met John Lee Hooker but was not so keen on the white bluesmen he played with. John Lee was a stammerer. T-Bone Walker was another bluesman I got to know quite well.

  I have two photographs of JB Lenoir: one with Bert Bellamy; the other with me. The poignant fact is that these photographs were taken on the night before Bert’s death.

  Incidentally, I once saw Bojangles dance at a Louis Armstrong concert. Apparently he had a lot of trouble with his stump bleeding.

  Fred Watts. (5)

  The age profile of the audiences at these early Sixties gigs was older than anything I had come across. These were beatniks – already creating a moral panic in the press – and I remember the heavy smell of marijuana, the tailored beards and baggy sweaters. In spite of the eighteen years age limit I got away with it because I looked older than my thirteen years and because I was with Bert.

  It was at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall that I met Mississippi Fred McDowell – a musician who used to say, “I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll y’all. I jus’ play jus’ straight an’ natchel blue” – and saw for the first time an open-tuned slide guitar. I didn’t know his reputation at the time: that Alan Lomax had said, for example, “In him the great tradition of the blues runs pure and deep” or that I would share the feelings Fred had expressed about the blues: “I’d get the sound of it in my head, then I’d do it my way from what I remembered” or that he played but didn’t own a guitar until he was thirty-seven whilst I had one when I was eight. I wasn’t aware of any of that then: I just observed his self-contained dignity and listened to his strong, penetrating voice and insistent slide playing. I still can’t believe Fred McDowell let me play his guitar! Perhaps he was somehow repaying the white man who gave him his first guitar. Fred offered to get me a drink and when I accepted he passed me a whisky bottle. “No thank you – I meant a beer!” So he got me a beer. And there was more: a man who looked like a boxing promoter was watching me play. This was pianist Roosevelt “The Honey-Dripper” Sykes, a cigar-smoking man with puffy eyes and rings on his deft fingers, whose career as a thundering boogie pianist and reputation for risqué lyrics was to span seven decades. His fleshy, urbane presence formed a contrast to the lean, serious McDowell.

  “Ain’t bad for a pink!” he said – a comment I have treasured ever since.

  Mississippi Fred McDowell drained the rejected whisky bottle in one swallow and went on stage. These bluesmen had generous hearts.

  Sleepy John Estes

  At this age I also met Sleepy John Estes, another bluesman who, like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James, had been brought out of obscurity to tour Europe. Lean, gaunt and still, with John it was the voice rather than the guitar playing that impressed. Sleepy John was one of the best blues poets: the sounds he made were penetratingly expressive of life’s harshness. I later found out that John’s slicing, suffering voice had set the pace for work gangs when he was the leader of a railroad maintenance crew and that Big Bill Broonzy had described him, “crying the blues”. He had enough reason to. He lost one eye aged six when someone threw a rock at him and the other when he was fifty-one in 1950. He was rediscovered living in extreme poverty in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1962. It was believed that John, whose voice sounded so old, was dead! But fortunately Big Joe Williams told researchers where he was living.

  Like many black musicians, he had been an itinerant performer in the Southern states, had done some recording in 1929 and 1930 and returned to sharecropping in 1941 when shellac rationing, followed by the recording ban, cut short musical careers.

  Georges Adins (6) gives a filmic description of a fallow cotton field with an apparently abandoned cabin in the distance, and then the appearance of the elusive John Estes who lived there with his wife and five children. Adins was shocked by the extreme poverty and fear he found there. He was asked to buy food for the family and describes how John’s visits – to the laundry, to the car wash – become an occasion to stop work and play the blues. Joe Boyd (7) writes about fetching Sleepy John and Hammie Nixon, threadbare and carrying cardboard suitcases tied up with string, from the Cornell Folk Festival in Ithaca, New York after their first appearance in front of a white audience. John Estes went on to tour Europe and Japan and appeared at the Newport Festival in 1964.

  Estes’ songs and performances and those of fellow musicians: the plaintive mandolin of Yank Rachell and the driving force of Hammie Nixon’s harmonica, have been much admired by reputable black and white musicians. “Slow Consumption” has been covered by Ry Cooder and “Floating Bridge” by Eric Clapton. The Blues Band did “Someday Baby” and Taj Mahal also covered some of his songs. “I’d Been Well Warned” was to become part of my repertoire from early on in my career. This is one of the bluest of blues songs. I’ve modified the words for the contemporary audience, to emphasise the most poignant aspects and altered the playing to suit the way I do things, with no disrespect intended.

  Sleepy John Estes did keep falling asleep.

  Wear A Hat

  Fred Watts has the signed programme from the time we met Sister Rosetta Tharpe at a blues festival at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester: a powerful, formidable presence and a link with gospel. Like Son House she had experienced tension between her religious background and vocation as a gospel singer, and her liking for singing jazz and blues: the devil’s music. This must have been difficult because her husband was a preacher who became tense if she didn’t wear a hat in church. She played a Gibson electric guitar and was an early exponent of soul, regarded as second only to Mahalia Jackson. By the time she got to her third marriage, 25,000 people attended her wedding. She influenced both Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. (8)

  Sonny And Brownie And John Lee

  I also met Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and John Lee Hooker in those early days. I was to support Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee when they did later tours in the U
K, appearing with them at The Placemate in Newcastle, at The Place in Hanley, at Manchester University, and in Sheffield in the late Sixties.

  Sonny and Brownie were amongst the earliest blues performers to tour Europe; they first came over in the Fifties, then in 1962 when I met them, in 1967 when I supported them and in 1970. Both had long-established and distinguished careers. Just as slide extends the range of an acoustic guitarist, the harmonica extends the range of a singer. Sonny’s harp playing complemented and extended his vocal range. By vocalising through the instrument, he intensified the moaning sounds, punctuating it with loud hollers between blasts. Traditional call and response. He could reproduce the whistles and train rhythms so common, so evocative in blues music. Before he met Brownie, Sonny used to play on street corners with Blind Boy Fuller and the Reverend Gary Davis. He later became linked with popular mainstream culture, appearing on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow in 1946 and in the mid Fifties both he and Brownie appeared in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He also ventured into the folk arena with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie.

  Brownie played acoustic guitar and also sang. Critics have referred to the “Piedmont-style musical interplay” of the partnership which exploited the finger picking technique of this style. Piedmont blues – from the area extending from central Georgia to central Virginia, between the Atlantic coast and the Appalachians – was popularised by such performers as Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, the Reverend Gary Davis, Etta Baker and Elizabeth Cotton. It incorporated elements from city and country, from black and white: ragtime, blues, country dance songs, early string bands and pop songs from the early twentieth century. Some would maintain that this music has more ‘white’ elements in it than the Delta blues and demographically speaking, this would make sense. I’ve always admired the finger picking style used by such musicians as Blind Blake, who incorporated ragtime piano rhythms and chord changes into guitar playing: the left hand piano rhythms produced by the thumb and the right hand piano melody by the fingers.