They’re an unlikely pair on the surface, but Ray Charles and Willie Nelson actually share quite a bit in common, from their scrapes with the law to their personal tragedies, and, most importantly, an unparalleled ability to cross musical boundaries.
The Blues Foundation (producers of the W.C. Handy Awards, the Grammies of the blues world) recognized that fact this past October when it named Brother Ray the latest recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and gave the Red-Headed Stranger its 2000 Blues Hero Award. “Is there anyone in America who has not been touched by the music of Ray Charles?” remarked Howard Stovall, Executive Director of the Blues Foundation.
I’d be hard pressed to think of someone who’d never heard “What’d I Say” or “Georgia On My Mind,” but it’s worth remembering that Ray started off right here in New Orleans cutting primo early-’50s blues, jump blues, and R&B. The Foundation obviously agrees, putting him in pretty good company: past recipients of the honorary Lifetime Achievement Award include B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Koko Taylor, Etta James and Ruth Brown.
Willie Nelson, Ashford & Simpson, Diane Schuur and Billy Preston were also on hand to celebrate his life and music, and Nelson was also honored, being presented with this year’s B.B. King Blues Hero Award. This has a lot of folks scratching their heads, but once you factor in his new blues CD, Milk Cow Blues, (there’s the blues part) and his work in launching and maintaining Farm Aid (the Hero part), it all makes sense. Sort of.
Speaking of geniuses, there’s yet another chapter unfolding in the southern gothic melodrama that surrounds Robert Johnson. The blues icon died on August 16, 1938 under what were, for years, mysterious circumstances; his official death certificate read “No Doctor” where the Cause Of Death should be, and no one seemed to even know exactly where he was buried. Myths arise from such circumstances, including the one that Johnson indicated in his famous “Crossroads” song: one could sell one’s soul to the devil to play blues guitar. Fellow bluesman Tommy Johnson explained it best in Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Johnson: “If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little ’fore 12:00 that night so you’ll know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself. . . . A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.”
Of course, Johnson was a gifted player, but that arose from natural talent (he’d already mastered blues piano and harp) and a fixation with the great Son House. Likewise, his death was eventually explained: the notoriously randy bluesman had been done in at the Three Forks bar in Greenwood, Mississippi, from a deadly combo of a jealous husband and a shot of whiskey laced with strychnine. His burial site still remained a mystery: several markers in and around the area proclaimed themselves Johnson’s final resting place. 85-year-old Greenwood native Rosie Eskridge, has revealed to Johnson archivist Stephen LaVere a grave that her husband dug for the singer back in that August of ’38, one which sits near the Three Forks bar under a pecan tree. An official memorial is planned by the city.
Back in the land of the living, Kathleen Rippey informs us here at OffBeat that Hubert Sumlin’s guitar was recently stolen out of his garage in Milwaukee. A Greenwood, Mississippi native, Sumlin is one of the acknowledged blues guitar masters, having been Howlin’ Wolf’s six-string man right up until Wolf’s death in 1975 and in the process inspiring everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Frank Zappa. The guitar in question is a beauty, too: a 1954 Gibson Les Paul reissue, serial no. 5050 G5, gold top. If anyone has any idea of its whereabouts, please get back to us!
Speaking of memorials, the long-awaited Stevie Ray Vaughan box set, entitled simply SRV, is set to be dropped into your waiting hands by Epic/Legacy on November 21st. The Legacy sidearm of Epic has its own legacy of fantastic box sets, and this promises to be no different, featuring 54 tracks on 3 CDs, including 36 previously unreleased performances and an entire DVD/Video with outtakes from his 1989 appearance on “Austin City Limits.” With typical Legacy generosity, the set comes furnished with critical essays on Stevie, a lifeline/chronology, complete info on all tracks, discography, chart figures, Grammy awards, and homage’s by more than 30 fellow musicians, all wrapped up with an introduction by former Texas Governor Ann Richards. The set also includes selections from his last concert in 1990, and some local Stevie performances from sometime during the 1987 Mardi Gras season. You can view the entire track listing, with descriptions, online at http:// sonymusic.com/ artists/ StevieRayVaughan/ srvboxtracks.html.
Speaking of web sites, this month’s Blues Web Site award is a very important one, going as it does to the Goldband site at http://www.ibiblio.org/sfc/goldband/index.html. It’s the official web site for the Southern Folklife Collection, and it hosts the official site for the Goldband Recording Corporation of Lake Charles, Louisiana, a historic label that has recorded some of Louisiana’s greatest blues and roots music from 1944 to the present day. They’ve given us artists like Rockin’ Sidney, Boozoo Chavis, Juke Boy Bonner, Guitar Junior, Big Chenier, Katie Webster, Cleveland Crochet and the Sugar Bees, Cookie and the Cupcakes, and Phil Phillips, and the web site is full to bursting with extensive info and photos about them and their classic sides. It’s worth visiting just to see Cookie of Cookie and the Cupcakes in a cowboy outfit, or to hear Katie Webster’s “Secret Of Love” in streaming mp3 format.
Speaking of… well, we weren’t speaking of live blues music. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of it going around town this month. You can start off your month with some good urban workingman’s blues courtesy of Mem Shannon & The Membership, who’ll be livening up Storyville on the 2nd. That same night, the funk-blues Texan tornadoes Soulhat vibrate the walls of Tipitina’s Uptown. Walter “Wolfman” Washington & The Roadmasters give you a double dose of his heady blues-jazz-funk-whatever two Saturdays in a row at the Maple Leaf: the 18th and the 25th. Local R&B legend Frankie Ford also doubles it up and plays the 18th, this time at Zephyr Stadium, with a repeat performance the very next night. Finally, on the 24th, Tab Benoit leaves the bayou and comes to Mid-City Lanes with a Care package of swamp blues with just a little of that Cajun spice. Work off some of that turkey and stuffing on the dance floor, why don’t you?
