Dr. David Evans is the the author of Tommy Johnson and Big Road Blues: Tradition And Creativity In The Folk Blues. He is a contributing editor for Blues Review magazine, and also directs the doctorate program in Ethnomusicology (Specialization in Southern Regional Folk and Popular Music) at the University Of Memphis. Dr. Evans is a prominent blues scholar and researcher and has taken a very active role in the field of folk blues since the mid-'sixties. His work has brought him in close personal contact with many (if not most) of the folk blues artists who were still alive and active in the last three decades.

On January 27, 1996 I reached Dr. David Evans by phone at his home in Memphis, Tennessee. Our discussion covered a wide range of subjects within the blues, and his answers to my questions were knowledgable and insightful. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Evans for giving so generously of his time and knowledge.

I began by asking Dr. Evans where he was born and raised.

Evans: I was born in Boston. I lived in various towns in Massachusetts; I never lived in Boston, other than being born there. I lived in Dallas, Texas for a period of four years in the late fifties when my father was transferred there, and then we moved back to Massachusetts. So, I pretty much grew up there in Massachusetts mostly, although the Texas experience - well, I was too young to experience music live, but through the radio I probably got a dose of southern musical taste at a crucial time when the music was changing. I think that was '54 to '58 that I was there.

I've read an interview with Billy Gibbons in which he talks about the radio that was coming from across the border in Texas in the fifties and sixties.

Well, this was just local radio, but they were playing a lot of things like Bo Diddley and of course Elvis, a lot of rock and roll and especially by Southern and rhythm and blues artists. It may have been that way in Boston for all I know.

So was the radio in Texas your first exposure to blues music?

I suppose it was. I didn't really call it blues; it was just rock and roll or popular music at that time, but I know I was hearing some blues. Well, of course a lot of rock and roll was really blues in its form, and I know I was hearing it at that time and I liked it [laughs]. But, of course, all the kids my age did, just about. I don't think that resulted in a blues cult, immediately.

What got me involved in blues came later, really, when I went to college in 1961 at Harvard. I don't believe it was before that. I got exposed to the folk music revival that was then current. I do remember liking Ray Charles also, in the very late fifties, around '59. He was having a lot of hits then, but again, I didn't think of it as blues. In college I started getting interested in folk music, first the - I'm ashamed to admit it [laughs] - the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte. They were very popular at the time, and very accessible. So, I developed a general interest in folk music, as a lot of college-age people did, and in fact it was really as an alternative to rock and roll. It was something that I thought, and many others thought, was better, more meaningful music that had more lasting value than rock and roll which seemed very ephemeral. Rock and roll had its hit system, and folk music was music of the ages, so to speak [laughs].

Now, I guess as a student and having a curiosity or intellectual bent, I wasn't satisfied just to hear Harry Belafonte or the Kingston Trio. I would read the liner notes and so on, and became aware that they had sources, and that they were just interpreting this music, and it wasn't their own music, so to speak, music of their community or upbringing. So I was curious to hear their sources. I also became aware of The Weavers at that time. A fellow student and I were both on scholarship and had a job as busboys at the freshman commons in the dining hall. As we were scraping garbage off the plates he would sing these songs that he had learned off The Weavers records and it seemed a little bit better than the stuff that I had been hearing from the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte [laughs]. So I would sing along with him, much to the consternation of the mostly Irish-American elderly women who also were employed there. [laughs] They didn't quite understand why we were singing at work. Of course, we thought that's what people did - they were works songs.

So anyway, he introduced me to The Weavers, and then again in reading liner notes I would read about these people like Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and others, so I began seeking out their music. Fortunately, we had a very fine record store there, and of course there was already a coffeehouse scene called the Forty-Seven. In Cambridge we had not only the local folkies but people like Jesse Fuller and Josh White and others were appearing.

So I got a guitar and started learning these songs, and got hooked on Leadbelly, who was about the only blues artist you could get records of at that time. Or get very much of - there were a few others, Brownie and Sonny, Josh White - but Leadbelly was the one that impressed me.

And then I went to a concert - it must have been 1962 or '63 - that [featured] Sleepy John Estes with Hammie Nixon. He [Estes] had just been rediscovered. I had heard only one track of his on an album that Sam Charters issued called The Country Blues that accompanied his book. I was very impressed; this was the first live blues that I'd seen. I could hardly understand a word he was singing about, but just the sound of it and the was they looked really impressed me. This was something extremely exotic and different than anything I had ever experienced before. Ironically, of course, many years later I would work with Hammie Nixon and was probably his main accompanist for the last five years of his life. But I certainly didn't anticipate that at the time.

I also met Alan Wilson, who was a young fan too. He had dropped out of Boston college and was just hanging out in the Cambridge area. I think we met at a record store, listening to new blues releases. There weren't very many, so you could keep up with them. Actually, you could have a complete collection at that time, at least as far as LPs were concerned, without spending too much money.

Al was a little bit more advanced into blues than I was at the time, and he introduced me to things like Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton that were beginning to come out on albums, things that he had recently gotten turned onto himself. There was something of a ... you might say almost a cult, or an underground within the underground, if you viewed the folk music revival as a kind of underground or alternative movement. Blues within that, I think, was even something of a fringe or an underground to the folk music revival. At least it was to me and my immediate circle, because our tastes were more narrowly focused just on blues, or just on country blues. There really wasn't much awareness or appreciation of urban blues, because it was loud and electric. We tended to view it as something of a corruption or popularization of something that was more pure.

And of course, more artists starting appearing. Mississippi John Hurt was the next artist that made a big impression on me live, and I got to meet him and see him a number of times. Al got to play with him on some of his gigs in Boston. Al and I started playing together ourselves as a duo at hootenannies around Boston and Cambridge. Not an awful lot - I don't think we really pushed ourselves that much. I was a student anyway, and didn't have that much time. And frankly, there just wasn't that much interest in us or in any of the blues artists, really, except Mississippi John Hurt. He would always draw a good crowd. I remember many times going to see Son House or Skip James and there'd be fifty people or less, often quite a bit less. It was depressing that this music wasn't catching on, wasn't turning people on the way it had turned us on.

Then Booker White was rediscovered. And of course all these artists came through Boston and Cambridge and played, and they'd stay usually a week or three or four days and have a kind of residency in a club. Sometimes they needed lodging, so Booker White stayed at Al's place. The club owner would arrange with some fan who was a regular at the club to put the artist up. Usually we were more than eager to do so.

So Booker stayed with Al for a while, and we got to meet him and talk with him then. We asked him about others, of course, every other Mississippi blues artist that we knew of, and we thought he might know of. Booker was a big talker, and he'd tell you anything, pretty much. So we asked him about Son House, and he said he had seen Son recently coming out of a movie theatre in Memphis. So we got all excited, and told Dick Waterman who was another friend and fan at that time, who was doing a little photography and music and writing, freelance journalism. He and Phil Spiro decided to organize an expedition to try to find Son House on the basis of this tale that Booker had told. So they did, and picked up Nick Perls on the way and went down there. Of course, Dick has told the whole story about that. Anyway, they found Son eventually and brought him to Cambridge for some gigs. He stayed at Phil Spiro's house, and Al and I got to know him then and interviewed him. That was in the fall of '64. We had interviewed Booker White a little bit, but Son House was the first formal interview that we did, trying to be fairly comprehensive.

Was Son a reliable informant?

Yeah - I just finished having the interview transcribed and I checked it over, and Son was very reliable and very accurate. If he didn't know something, he would tell you. His answers were very thoughtful and I'm quite impressed with the results, other than the fact that we didn't know really what questions to ask [laughs]. I can think of all sorts of things I wish we had asked him about. But Son gave excellent interviews. He was a very intelligent man. He was pretty well educated and quite literate. Of course I've seen many subsequent interviews, and this may have been the first lengthy interview that he did. But later on he tended to get his story down. He tended to realize what things people were interested in, and he developed these sort of standard raps and anecdotes. But the germ of some of those are on this interview we did, which I hope to publish pretty soon. Anyway, we went to see Son House many times, and as a musician I was very influenced by him, as a lot of people were I suppose.

Then I guess what got me off into field work.. I was going to graduate in '65 and in late '64 or the spring of '65, Babe Stovall came to the Cambridge area. Babe was an artist from New Orleans. My friend Marc Ryan - or at least he became my friend - was trying to take Babe around on tour of the Northeast. Babe was a total unknown; he was not a rediscovery. He was not what you could call legendary or anything.

He never had any pre-war sides, did he?

No, none at all, so he was at a distinct disadvantage in terms of the ability to generate press and legendry, compared to a John Hurt or a Son House or a Skip James, although he was very much on top of his music. I think he would have been successful if he hadn't been such a big drinker and a little bit of a difficult personality when he drank. Anyway, Marc somehow contacted me - I don't know, somebody told him that I was interested in blues and he contacted me out of the blue. He told me about Babe Stovall. Of course, I wanted to hear him and meet him, and they needed a place to stay, so they wound up crashing in my dorm room [laughs]. Then, we followed Babe around at his gigs, which were not too well attended. At any rate, I got to know him quite well and talked to him about his community and other musicians in south Mississippi around Tylertown, where he was from, and in New Orleans itself, where he had been living for a number of years. It seemed to me that there were still a lot of musicians his age or people he knew that either were still active or could still play. I was planning to go to California to grad school at UCLA in 1965 in the fall, so over the summer as I moved there I stopped through New Orleans and Babe took me around. Mainly that time we visited Roosevelt Holts, his friend up the country a little bit. I just continued from there - I followed a trail of musicians connected with Tommy Johnson. Babe had known Tommy slightly and Roosevelt knew him a lot better, and that led to two of Tommy's brothers and any number of other singers that had been associated with Tommy Johnson.

I was interested in the processes of tradition. It very quickly occurred to me sometime while I was at Harvard that this country blues that was being reissued on albums was in many respects a traditional music, that there were a lot of musical ideas that were shared. These seemed to be not so much a process of just covering or imitation, but a sharing of a tradition. I could imagine that there must have been many unrecorded artists that were around at the same time that were quite good, and just given the physical isolation of rural Mississippi and the south...

So then when people like Babe Stovall and Roosevelt Holts emerged as I began my field work, this just simply confirmed the fact that there had been lots of others all around and that there was in fact a blues tradition. Not that there wasn't also a lot of individual creativity, but that the creativity had been stressed in writing about blues and the tradition had not been stressed.

I had studied formally a little bit about traditions at Harvard. I was a major in classical languages and I studied with Albert Lord, who was a very famous scholar who had researched epic poetry. He had done field work himself, in Bosnia in fact, in the thirties. He also was a student of Homer. So he was basically showing that Homer had come out of a tradition through the analogy with his field work in the living tradition of epic poetry. I had also been interested in mythology, which of course is a product of an oral tradition. So, through the study of folklore I developed sort of a theoretical framework for understanding the blues, although I didn't see it that way at the time. That was a little too sophisticated for my level [laughs] but anyway that's what it was. I went to grad school at UCLA to study in their folklore program. It was one of the few at the time - well, it still is, for that matter. But my interests really shifted to living traditions, especially to the blues, which still seemed to be a living tradition, and away from classical mythology and literature. I began doing field work, and I made two trips in '66 to the south, and one in '67, one in '69, one in '70, one in '71, and one in '73. These were all of anywhere from two to five weeks in duration. [I would] just drive there. I didn't have any funding, it was just my own expense, [out of] savings.

You studied with a number of people there who went on to gain some recognition.

Well, yeah, we had an interesting crew there. John Fahey - John got the first Masters degree in the whole program there, a little bit before I got mine. John was already a bit famous, or notorious [laughs] in some circles. Barry Hansen, who's now Dr. Demento, was a student there. Mayne Smith, who's a Nashville song writer, was a grad student there.

Was Pete Welding there?

Pete Welding came there, yes, in '68 I believe it was, or sooner, maybe '67. Pete came a bit later than I did. Yeah, he was a grad student. He didn't finish his degree - everything went to pieces and he decided academia wasn't for him. It's a shame - he would have been a great teacher. He was a very persuasive speaker and talker, and of course he had done an awful lot by that time, and was still doing recordings. Pete did a lot of great things.

Maybe he was too busy doing what he felt was important in terms of getting recordings out of these people, and felt academics was...

Yeah, I think he found academia to be just a little bit too pedantic for his tastes. I'm not quite sure what it was but he didn't finish his degree. Yeah, it was an interesting crowd of people that were there.

Sounds like a very tight small group of the hard-core enthusiasts.

Yeah, it was. We took a lot of classes together, talked and had a lot of bull sessions, and definitely all influenced one another's thinking. A number of us were record collectors, too - of course, Barry very much. I was beginning to be a record collector at the time, just old 78s. Fahey had turned many of them up, although he would always be selling them, partly just to support what he was doing. I guess we were the main ones. Al Wilson also moved out there at the same time, although he didn't become a student. He and I were roommates for a time in my first year of graduate studies, when he decided to become a musician and formed Canned Heat. He and Bob Hite and Henry Vestine, I think, were the main organizers - all of them record collectors - and they drafted a bass player and a drummer.

Was there an active coffeehouse scene on the West Coast in the late 'sixties that compared to the early '60s East Coast scene?

Yeah, there was. I would say it wasn't as extensive and - well, I'll just talk about the LA area because I didn't get up to San Francisco and Berkeley very much until a bit later - but in '65 and '66 it was pretty much The Ash Grove which was ... the thing that struck me about the Ash Grove in comparison to the Boston and Cambridge and New York coffeehouses that I had seen was that it seemed much more commercially oriented. Of course, this was Hollywood after all, and its scene had more of a pop atmosphere, although it presented a lot of the same artists - traveling artists. I'd continue to see Son House and Skip James and people like that there. But they served beer, and that was something that was a real no-no in the Northeast. You had bars, and you had coffeehouses, and they were two different things. Beer was bad [laughs], it was the thing that un-hip people drank. Hip people drank coffee.

How did that change the relationship between the crowd and the performers?

Well, it seemed that it drew in people that had more of a pop taste, that weren't quite as rarefied in their musical tastes and didn't seem quite as intellectual about the music. That was the impression that I got, anyway.

But, as I come to think of it later, they did have all the same kinds of artists. About that time, they seemed to also present a bit more of electronic music and they'd have the Chambers Brothers and others who were going electric at that time. Maybe it was just the time, because I think it was in '65 that Dylan went electric and that was the year I moved to LA. So it's possible that it was what I was contrasting in my mind that was a new phase that was taking place nationally and which I encountered in California, to the old phase that I left behind. I think probably that those same developments were taking place in the northeast about that time. But they [in LA] did serve beer, and apparently always had, and that struck me as something really different. Of course, I had just become of the age when could legally drink beer, so I guess I got into the swing of things [laughs]. That was pretty much it - it didn't seem to be so much of a scene like [where] you had may coffeehouses as if you had this one place that was the headquarters of it all. Mary [Katherine] Aldin, by the way, worked there. She was sort of the receptionist/ticket-taker at the time, so [that was] the first I encountered her. So that was it and it seemed like it took quite a while for coffeehouses to spread, and most of them did have alcohol, but they seemed to draw somewhat of a more affluent crowd. I guess they were sort of Hollywood hip people and other sort of young successful people on the west coast that patronized folk music, whereas in Boston and Cambridge it seemed to be very much an alternative youth scene. You know, we all looked sort of raggedy, wearing work shirts and engineer boots, or hippy clothes of some sort, whereas in California there was this veneer of affluence and success that was patronizing the music of poor folks. So it wasn't anything that terribly disturbed me, but it was certainly something that I was aware of.

At this point you were doing field research in the South, and you were hearing the music live [in the coffeehouses]...

Yeah, I was making these expeditions, you could call them, to the south, and hearing the music that came around. In fact, some of my expeditions were partly based on artists that I met who were on tour. Robert Pete Williams came to California - let's see, that would have been in the spring of '66 - and he spent several days staying with me. Later that summer I went South with Marina Bokelman and we stayed a couple days at his house and recorded a number of people in his community. They Fred McDowell also came there, I think that was in late '66 or early '67. I got to know him and then met him on any number of subsequent tours. It wasn't until 1969 that I got to visit Fred, but he took me around to a number of musicians in his community, and I did a lot of work there in '69, '70, '71, '73 - an awful lot, much of which I haven't published yet. Skip James gave me some leads in Bentonia, which I pursued.

Did you ever find Henry Stuckey?

No, he had died about two months before I tried to find him [in '66]. Yeah, he died earlier that year. It was a great shame.

Did you ever determine what sort of musical influence Stuckey had on [Jack] Owens and James? Stephen Calt totally denies any sort of Bentonia tradition...

I don't think he's ever been there. Gayle Wardlow had met Stuckey, but I don't think ever heard him play. Or, if he did, I don't think there's any documentation of how he played - recorded documentation, at any rate, which is very unfortunate. Skip certainly said he was influenced by him. There was a whole Stuckey family - there was a whole bunch of them. Skip in fact was sometimes known as Nehemiah Stuckey. I don't know exactly what his relationship was to the family, but it was pretty close.

I've often speculated that maybe the tensions between James and his father may have been because he was possibly an outside child.

That could be, very very possibly. You mean that his real father was a Stuckey?

It's solely speculation.

It could be. In any rate, I did record Cornelius Bright, who was something of a protégé of Henry Stuckey, as well as of Jack Owens. He played and sang a version of The Devil that he said was the way Henry played it. It's very much like Skip James'.

Same tuning, same finger picking style?

Yeah, right. Henry probably did play more rhythmic music too. Skip plays some of that fast duple rhythmic style.

The frailing style?

Yeah, frailing. Jack has demonstrated some of that as well. I'm sure there was a local tradition there. I've recorded other musicians as well - in fact, Cornelius Bright, although he's younger and certainly was influenced by the older people. But there were many who were into that style and I think there's enough evidence to suggest that it was a tradition. Who knows who originated all those ideas.

So you see no evidence that Skip James invented the techniques and the repertoire.

No, but he certainly developed it to a fine point. I mean, his original recording session is extraordinary.

I think it's one of the greatest collections from a single session ever.

Sure, it's brilliant. But, the use of that tuning, many of the specific ideas, the prominence of falsetto singing and some of the themes or the verses are all found within that tradition, among others. Skip certainly acknowledged that he heard some other musicians - he named some names.

Johnny Temple was one...

Sure, although I think Johnny learned more from Skip than vice versa.

Do you see the influence of the Bentonia tradition outside of the geographic area? For example, one song that I've heard from other parts of Mississippi is Catfish Blues, and the whole tonality of that song is one that I associate with Bentonia.

Well, I wouldn't particularly relate it to that. I know Skip did a version of it, and Jack Owens does, but it is very widespread. It's possible. Of course, Tommy McClennan did one of the earliest versions of it, and he was originally from Yazoo City, but Robert Petway did the first recording. He was an associate of McClennan's, up in the delta. I think a lot of it ultimately stems from the Petway and McClennan recordings. They spread the song around. Tommy Johnson was alleged to have done it, and his brother Mager did a version of it. So, it could well be an older song - it probably is. But, I think those early recordings and then some subsequent ones in the fifties made the song very popular. It's a distinctive melody, and it would be one that would stick in the memory, just because it is so different. It fits with a one- or two- chord approach and use of the repeated short figures [which] are well within a general deep-South approach to the blues. So I wouldn't myself posit an origin in or around Bentonia. The style in the early days I think only had a limited influence, and that mostly in respect to particular songs - probably mainly The Devil and mostly very near Bentonia. Of course, Johnny Temple in Jackson picked up on it. Bo Carter's Old Devil is related to it - he was from right around Bolton - we're talking about 30 miles from Bentonia. There was a guy George Mitchell recorded in Canton, which is not far from there. He did a song he called Hard Times which has a relationship to that. And Joe McCoy did The Devil, but he was from right around there too, around Vicksburg, and was always picking up influences from others, and perhaps even got that from Johnny Temple. And Robert Johnson, of course, but Johnson's original home was down in Hazelhurst and he may have traveled around. He clearly was influenced in some way by Skip James.

Probably just through records, would you say?

Well, the 32-20 seems to be off of James' records, but his Hellhound On My Trail suggests some direct influence, though that could possibly be through Johnny Temple who he also seemed to have been influenced by. Johnson evidently got around some in those years immediately before his recording, and must have understudied any number of people because you see so many influences in his playing. He was obviously quick to pick up on good ideas. There's definitely something of Skip James and perhaps more generally of the Bentonia style, in those two songs, anyway. The 32-20 is really a cover. And the other one, Hellhound On My Trail - I don't know if you could call it a version of The Devil, but it's... I don't know what term you could apply to it. But musically it uses many of the same ideas, and of course even thematically it's related. It seems perhaps to be something of a recomposition, sort of inspired by it. It's like taking those ideas and re-writing it in your own language.

Which is how you depict the [blues] tradition in general in Big Road Blues.

Well, yeah. There are many processes of tradition, sort of perhaps microprocesses that I didn't go into. I think in Big Road Blues... I realize increasingly I just painted the broad outlines of how the tradition works. But since then, I've become much more interested in the individual processes of creativity. There is a lot more that one could say. I haven't written much in that area since then, although I've got some entries in an encyclopedia that I assume is going to be published. It's an encyclopedia of - or, a dictionary, I think it is actually - a dictionary of Black composers that's being edited by Samuel Floyd. I did entries on Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake for that, picking four examples by each and trying to show their compositional processes. Although I didn't find very much to discuss of that in Blind Blake, not compared to the other three.

He seemed to influence a whole school of ragtime guitar playing in his technique.

Yeah, but what he did was to sort of play very spectacularly within standard harmonic structures. At least, that was my opinion. [Laughs] No, but he was a brilliant musician as a technician, perhaps he may have been even beyond the others.

Earlier you mentioned Mager Johnson - Is he or any of your other main informants from your field research in the Drew area still around?

No, they've all died as far as I know. The only person really that is from those very earliest days is Jack Owens. There around Como and Senatobia, Fred McDowell's area, Napoleon Strickland and Othar Turner are still living, and, undoubtedly, some others, people I didn't work with too extensively. Then later on after I moved to Memphis I encountered some new people.

Do you have any other field contacts that you would like to see recorded? Is there someone out there just waiting for people to hear?

Well, I did make a recording for a German label in January of '94, about two years ago. It's called The Spirit Lives On [Hot Fox HF-CD-005]. There were five artists on it, and I had a couple tracks as well. There was Mose Vinson who was known somewhat - he did some recordings in around 1970. In fact, he did some for Sam Phillips in the '50s, but has not been recorded as extensively as he should - a very fine pianist. Then, there's Big Lucky, who's really a performer in a more modern band style, but was one of the first in Memphis to play modern lead guitar, probably around 1950 or so, in that movement that B.B. King was part of. He made a few records in the late '60s but has not been recorded extensively. He's a very fine songwriter. So I recorded him solo, although as I say his main thing has always been working in a band. Big Lucky Carter - he certainly deserves a CD.

And then, well, let's see - Glen Faulkner, who plays a one-string instrument - I recorded him back in '73 when he was a young man. He's my age, or a little bit older than I am. And then Robert Balfour - they call him Wolfman. He's again a little older than I am. He grew up in Mississippi and was somewhat of a protégé of Junior Kimbrough. He moved to Memphis in the '60s and has maintained a solo style. He has a very strong voice, and is a good guitar player. A somewhat limited repertoire, as you would probably find in someone who is learning blues in the mid- to late- '50s and early '60s - it's mostly sort of the last gasp of hits by down-home artists - but with a few original and traditional pieces. But a very strong performer. He, I think, deserves to be heard more and recorded more. He's developed a bit of a career - he's been to Europe about five or six times now, and I'm going with him to Venezuela in May.

But he really would represent, to my mind, the last gasp of traditional folk blues in the South. He'd be in his mid-fifties now. The context really was just not continuing after that period of time, let's say the mid-'60s, and there really wasn't much of it then as far as juke joints and house parties were concerned. What there was was bands. So there have been young players coming along since then - we'll say the last thirty years - but they've been learning in a band context, taking that role. As I was saying, he's in his mid-fifties. I think anyone younger than that would have been influenced, and perhaps induced, to be a solo performer by the blues revival. In other words, the person would have been oriented to that audience very quickly, and would have adapted a style to fit the needs and the desires of that audience to have people perform solo country blues. Lonnie Pitchford is an interesting case of that, in that he does come from certainly a background and a community - still lives there, in fact - that has always produced blues music. So he certainly led the life, or led a recent version of that life. But if left to his own devices, and if one were to find him this day, I think you would find that he would be playing in a band, if he was doing anything at all in music. Or perhaps playing gospel or R&B; or he would have moved to the city - something of that sort. But at a very early point in his musical development, sometime back in the seventies, his development was intercepted by folklorists and he was oriented towards solo performance. And certainly he got some good gigs, and he saw the light [laughs]. [He] saw the opportunity and has adapted in that direction. So he's something of an anomaly.

When I was doing recording in the '60s or '70s, when people were being rediscovered by others - of course, these were all artist who had spent years performing in their communities and developed a mature style that was oriented towards those audiences - we weren't trying to influence them in any new direction. We might try to bring them before a new public, but it was to do what they had always been doing. So there [in Pitchford] you have one case who really is an anomaly. And then you have a growing number of young black musicians, mostly from urban backgrounds, who have adopted solo blues, again because there's a market out there. Some of them are pretty good, but it's in a revival context and their repertoires are very eclectic, and often consciously archaic. They go back and dig up old songs as blues revivalists have been doing for some thirty years now. It's like what John Hammond does. Except they bring some consciousness of Black music to it, undoubtedly a more authentic consciousness because they've grown up in that, but it may have been urban music. So, right now it's a growing phenomenon, and it's appeal is mainly to American white and international audiences. But, given a few years time, and some success, some individual successes, it could conceivably have a greater impact on Black audiences. It could still be a growing movement.

There's a widely held opinion that the cultural role of the bluesman has been replaced with the street gangster rap artist.

Well, yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. Rap of course is very urban. Almost all of the blues artists grew up in a rural environment and were from the south - very few that were not. Nowadays it's more common to find some. I think we're in the late phase of the blues as a culturally based music. Rap clearly is the secular music of choice of young blacks, and has been for 10 or 15 years, and blues is very much a minority taste within that constigency. Gospel would be the only serious rival to rap. Well, other rhythm and blues forms too, that are still certainly strong - disco, and...

But, at any rate, blues is not a major musical taste in that young generation, although it's respected - it certainly has gained in respect. Rap, because it draws upon and samples other sources - it certainly samples blues as well as other things - but the rhetoric and the sort-of outsider stance of the attitudes of living for now, of the self-centered approach of the singers, self-centered attitudes of the singers, and the very frank description of one's needs and wants and the conditions in which one lives, all resemble the blues. But the language is different, and I think in fact the language of blues, just the phraseology, the metaphors and so on, many of which are based in rural life, just sound old and old-fashioned to the rappers and so they've developed their own language, their own argot for rap. And of course the rhythmic phrasing is different - the structures of the songs are different. So a lot of the spirit of blues lives on, especially urban blues, because rap mostly describes urban conditions. But it's a very different music, and I think it has pretty successfully replaced the blues. Soul music is the music of choice of young black people, at least outside the church.

Jazz of course has its advocates, but it continues to be somewhat intellectualized, and of course it doesn't have a strong vocal component to it, a lyric component to it.

I appreciate good jazz, but one that's one thing I've always found lacking was the lack of a lyrical tradition - the expression through words. I think that's one of the reasons it's not appealing directly to younger people, black or white.

And often when jazz singers do sing, they just play with the words.

The [lyrical] content is just a vehicle to get the melodies across.

Yeah, exactly, to improvise with. Scat singing and all that. I think there's a lot to that. But, of course, one would have to listen to a lot of rap to really make a careful assessment of it. We often make snap judgments. Certainly a lot of the content of rap is pretty distasteful, even scary to a lot of people. Perhaps deliberately so. But if you examine a lot of blues, urban and rural, there's really a lot of distasteful and scary material in that. I mean, there's an awful lot of threatening and posturing and descriptions of violence and extreme selfishness. A lot of the people that are so enamored of blues these days, I think, don't stop to think about that. Or if they do, and still approve of it all or think that's the way they ought to be, I feel sorry for them. The one thing that's changed about the appreciate of blues today and that of the Sixties, is that I think in the Sixties , while a lot of us identified with blues singers, the view was that they were oppressed. They were clearly the victims of segregation and discrimination, and of course the civil rights movement was in its peak in the mid-'60s too, so everyone was aware of these issues. But the lyrics that did describe violence and all that, I don't think necessarily associated these with ourselves. We just sort of saw those as the inevitable consequences of these bad conditions, and that people were sort of driven to those attitudes. But we concentrated more on the poetry and the humanity of the blues, which of course you also find in this music, and undoubtedly you do in rap, too, although you don't hear so much about it [laughs]. Now, people sort of accept the blues uncritically, and I think the content of it too, and you hear so much of this boosterism and advocacy of the blues. Back in the '60s we wanted to study it to learn about processes of tradition, or to learn about social conditions, or to learn about creativity, or whatever, or just to learn about the lives and lifestyles of people who were very different from those of us who were investigating this. Now, I think a lot of the music and its sentiments are just accepted uncritically, and there really is a lot of content in the blues that is, to my mind, not too ... productive [laughs].

But it's hard to reconcile that sometimes. You're listening to a Skip James song in which the music is just hauntingly beautiful, and you realize that he's singing about violently killing his woman.

Yeah, it is. Of course, these are human emotions - people felt these things all the time. But you have to assess them seriously as an adult when you listen to these things. There are a lot of people who just advocate teaching all this in the schools and getting children to sing these songs. There are some who see blues as a basis for a whole education in general, for learning about all kinds of things. Would you do that with rap? You can adapt the blues form, of course, to introduce any content, as you can with rap. But if you're going to take the music as it is and as it has been, there's all kinds of content in it, some of which expresses great humanity, beauty, truth and all that, and some of which is pretty disturbing.

You perform music in the styles of some of the musicians you've worked with and studied and recorded...

Yeah, I do. I haven't recorded much as a soloist, only the two tracks on that "The Spirit Lives On" CD on the Hot Fox label that I produced a couple of years ago. But I accompanied others on recordings, mostly on our High Water label when they needed accompaniment. Hammie Nixon, Jessie Mae Hemphill, although most of those are out of print. But I've played increasingly in recent years - I started to emphasize my own career. I didn't much in the past because I thought there were all these other traditional artists that were so worthy of being heard. But on my own performance, I've become to tour some. I did some in the '80s, usually backing up others, Hammy Nixon, Jessie Mae Hemphill, Johnny Shines... I did a tour with his last European tour in '89.

He had already lost most of his guitar ability by then.

Yeah, right - he had lost it a number of years earlier, but I managed to get him a tour. So I'd be along with as a kind of road manager / accompanist, and then I'd get to do a set or a few songs on some of these tours, and it seemed to go over pretty well. And then lately, oh, I'd say in the '90s, I've been touring more on my own. I guess I did the first solo tour, mostly in Europe - in '91 in England. then a tour in Germany in '93 and again in '94 in Germany and again this past year, again in Germany. I'll be in Venezuela - sometimes it's in sort of a package tour with other musicians, but least I get my own set. You know, advertised as one of the artists.

But yeah, I've been doing that - I need to try to make some recordings I guess, but it's a little bit hard to do that - the record industry here in Memphis isn't very advanced [laughs]. And locally I work with a jug band called The Last Chance Jug Band - there are five of us, and we play in and around Memphis.

Do you write your own blues?

A few. Most of what I play is stuff that I learned directly from the musicians I've encountered over the years, a lot of them in my field work. I don't try to copy them note-for-note. I try to perform within their styles, but since so many of them didn't have fixed versions of their own songs, or the songs were traditional - I heard them from many different singers - so I put together my own synthesis. I guess certain artists influenced me quite a bit - I would say Babe Stovall and Roosevelt Holts, initially. Before that I was trying to learn off records - Sleepy John Estes and Leadbelly - but I've forgotten all that stuff.

Is Tommy Johnson still a big influence?

Tommy Johnson, through the many relatives and friends and fellow musicians, yeah, definitely. And then, Fred McDowell and Napoleon Strickland, who plays guitar as well as fife. They influenced me a lot. Oh gosh, I'd see somebody do a piece - Jack Owens, to some extent...

He claimed one time to someone on the Blues-L Internet mailing list that he taught you how to play guitar.

Well, in a sense - I've certainly been influenced by him, but I was playing before I met him. Son House influenced me quite a bit. Others that I have known have not influenced me quite as much. Booker White a little bit, but I don't really do anything quite the way he did, although I used to. Robert Pete Williams - I've never been able to get into doing his style, although I admire him very much - I think he's one of the greatest of all time.

I think so as well, but I wouldn't know where to start with a style as idiosyncratic as his. It's also such his own thing, that it would be almost stealing to try to duplicate it.

Well, yeah. I do one piece, or one little set of musical ideas that I picked up from him, but I've incorporated them into another song.

And so yeah, that's basically what I do. All of the songs that I do, or almost all of them, have a kind of personal meaning to me because I associate them with other musicians that I've known or met.

Do you change the lyrics to reflect your own experiences at all? Or do you sing verses about plowing behind the mule? [laughs]

Now and then - certainly some of the verses I sing are not closely related to personal experiences, like hoboing. I don't sing too much about plowing and mules [laughs]. But there are train songs - I've ridden trains in Europe, but it's not riding the rods [laughs]. Certainly the whole rhetoric of what I sing is set in a rural southern environment. But I don't sing a whole lot of verses about mules.

So you do think there's still a valid context for performing the old material?

Sure! Who knows about mules today, except people in their sixties and older? You hardly can see a mule. But those songs have a timeless and universal quality. If it's good music and good poetry, there's no reason it shouldn't be sung. And there's no reason why we shouldn't continue to read Shakespeare.

No-one questions a Baroque performance, but that's as closely tied to a time and place as blues.

Yeah, and I think that's what the music is becoming. Country blues is becoming concert music. And you'll see it start to get taken seriously, probably taught in colleges and things of that sort. You're finding more and more very learned discussion of it in print, detailed, serious analysis of it. Sure, it's being viewed as the art form that is, or was.

Is it too early to say that the blues is over?

Well, it's not over if you look around you. It seems to be stronger than ever. There's more blues activity now than there probably has ever been.

But is it the same thing?

Country blues as a living tradition tied to a rural black culture - there is something of that culture left - I think it's essentially over. It's a memory culture. There's a little bit of it left in some juke houses and house parties that I'm aware of, but the music has not developed in any significant way since probably about 1960. And in fact, urban blues as a black cultural expression also I don't think has developed significantly since about that same period of time. It's just stagnant, stylistically, although at a very high technical level of performance. Back in the '50s, there were a few dozen guitarists of the B.B. King quality. Now, there are thousands. So all of those techniques have been mastered and absorbed by black and white musicians, and internationally it has become part of the international musical vocabulary. So you have a lot of real hotshot players and singers, no doubt too. People are composing songs on themes very much outside the southern black culture that nurtured the blues for so many years. So blues may well have a future, but its future is as in the international popular musical style. And it may not - it may eventually break up and diffuse, and those influences will enter into other styles. It's hard to predict.

But I just can't see it becoming a specific black folk cultural expression once again. It may become at a kind of intellectual level the way jazz is. It may become a counterpart to jazz, where you need some verbal expression. The blues has a lot of advantages for certain types of expression, it's conciseness in particular. The element of surprise, perhaps, within the lyrics, that can make a great impact or help the singer or the composer make a very strong impact on listeners. So it's got plenty of potential as a means of expression.

But Black culture has really changed. The cities now are the dominant force for both population itself - the weight of the populations - and cultural creativity are emanating from urban centers, not from rural areas or from people who have migrated from rural areas within their lifetimes. And of course, Black Americans are also attuned to an national and international culture and all of its influences too. The Caribbean and Africa may play a role in black American music much more directly than they did in the past.

But one never knows - you just can't predict what will happen. Right now blues is flying high, and I can't tell if it's growing or leveling off. Certainly the 1990s surprised a lot of people. I would have thought by the end of the '60s that it was really dying out. I wouldn't at that time have predicted the extraordinary popularity it has today. Of course, an awful lot of its popularity is among whites and international audiences. There is still a residual black community support for blues, for soul blues - pretty strong support, especially in the South. At an intellectual level also there a kind of support for it in the black community. It's viewed as an important historical vehicle of cultural expression. And perhaps still a contemporary vehicle.

Just look at the state of country blues among black artists today, and there really are not very many. It seemed perhaps in the '60s and '70s that there were not very many but in fact there were any number of undiscovered artists. But if one were to try to do field work, just combing the South or even urban centers to find artists in their sixties and seventies who performed solo blues, I think you'd really have some problems and pretty meager results. And, in fact, very few people are doing it these days, and if they are, they tend to be revisiting people that have been known of for twenty years or so.

People like Jack Owens...

Yeah, right - you ask Jack about others in the community and he says there's nobody. Maybe there is, but I don't really know of them. But the fact that hardly anybody is out there looking or finding anyone is pretty good indication of the state of it.

You don't think there's going to be another big rediscovery of someone who's just fell through the cracks between the War and now?

There may be one or two...

But you think pretty well everyone has been accounted for?

Pretty well. Yeah. Because they'd be getting pretty old now, and people tend to give up their music if nobody wants to listen to them. People give it up.

Do Jack and Bud still play on Jack's front porch?

Yeah, sure. Well, they've developed a following. There's a steady stream of perhaps once a week of somebody or a group coming to visit Jack. They pick Bud up in town, and bring him out to Jack's and have a paid recital - a front porch recital [laughs] Jack has made a living to some extent doing this for a number of years now.

And there are others like that, but not an awful lot of new artists have come out of the woodwork in recent years. But there is a continuing demand, especially overseas, and people will be found to fill the niche.

Many thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin, Dick Waterman and Gorgen Antonsson for their assistance in preparing this interview.
-Rob Hutten, © 1996