[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome back to entitled opinions. This is our two of our conversation about the blues with bird hail here from KZSU. He's the blues director of the station.
And otherwise known as the word "paradise." Bird a paradise is his blues show from nine to noon on Saturday mornings for the past 20 years, which you can pick up live streaming.
And of course, here live on KZSU. So welcome back, bird. Yeah, we listened to Robert Johnson there to conclude our first hour.
Now, I believe we're listening to some muddy waters whom you refer to it in the front part of our discussion.
What are we hearing here? This is called "Lusiana Blues." And it's one of the first recordings muddy-made accompanied by a harmonic a player.
And the guy that would go on to change modern blues harmonica for ever, Mr. Little Walter.
And this band right here became the signature blues band of all time that changed the course of modern blues.
And this is muddy waters before he goes electric, I believe, right?
He's playing electric, but it's very primitive. It's very early, and he hasn't really discovered that full electric sound yet.
So it's not the muddy that blew you away when you heard him back when I had to reach back for this.
The muddy I heard was the muddy from the sixties when it was real wild.
They were psychedelic before psychedelic was even called psychedelic.
Definitely. But what we are going to hear is muddy's signature tune, "Hoochie-Koochie Man," which really, really put him on the map.
But totally. And to this day, none of this music has ever been matched.
You'd think that somebody would have come along and there would have been another muddy.
But what muddy laid down was so heavy that it's never been touched since then.
And there's never been a group put together. There's been individuals who came close even to this day, but no group has ever done what muddy waters did since then.
Well, I'm here to be persuaded.
About 1954, muddy been recording for some eight, seven, eight years with the chess brothers.
And here he is with "Hoochie-Koochie Man."
[Music]
The gypsy woman told my mother before I was born.
You got a boy, child's coming.
He's going to be a son of a gun. He's going to make pretty women's.
Jumping and shout.
Then the world want to know.
But this hound about what you know.
[Music]
I got a black hat bow.
I got a mojo too.
I got a time to conquer room.
I got to mess with you.
I'm going to make you girls.
Leave me by my hand.
Then the world I know.
I'm a hoochie-Koochie man.
But no, I'm here.
Everybody knows it.
[Music]
Everybody knows it.
I got a time to conquer room.
Everybody knows it.
Hoochie-Koochie man.
Bird, money waters is almost as if Chicago blues.
Where was the guy from originally?
Clark's the El Mississippi.
He's another guy born, raised in the South,
migrates north to Chicago.
That's a very typical pattern.
He's a well-unlike Robert Johnson.
He traveled.
He got up and left where he was and went north as part of this great migration for work.
The other thing was the cotton fields were being mechanized and all that labor that they had was disappearing.
The whole economy was changing.
The Industrial Revolution was exploding.
And it was during the war as well.
We all know that during World War II, America blew up industrially.
There was work anywhere you could get to the north.
Also, if you were a man of money's age in your 20s,
you had to be pretty tired of waking up every day and thinking that that could be your day to get murdered
for something you didn't even do or end up in prison for life for something you didn't do.
And to think of what these guys lived through in their daily life like that and their work life,
working for, they called it, Mr. Charlie.
That was the white man.
And I could see how they were just glad to get the hell out of there.
And Highway 61 was the way out.
It went to Memphis.
It went along the river, along the Mississippi River.
That was the most famous, you know, that's the route.
And from Memphis, you could catch a freight or a bus or somebody at a car and hand straight up towards St. Louis and then on to Chicago
and St. Louis was kind of an industrial base.
A lot of them some folks stayed there, but Chicago had a teaming industrial base.
And is that why Memphis is such a musical kind of center also still today?
Yes, same reason.
It became the catch all spot because all roads led to Memphis in that area.
When you came up out of the Delta, the first big city you wound up in was Memphis.
And just across the river from Memphis, you had West Hill and Arkansas.
And that's where you went to go play the Blues late at night.
I'm curious also about how many of these musicians made a living on their music alone in these years.
You had to probably be very lucky or really good to not have a day job.
You played on the street a lot.
You could do that in Memphis.
And that's how these guys got so good because it was a very tenacious and a very competitive thing, you know, street corners.
And you'd have to be better than the next guy.
And you'd have to get noticed.
And there wasn't like it is today.
Go get a permit from City Hall to make sure that you can know.
It was the good guy, shined.
BB King said that he found out he could, I mentioned this last hour, he could make as much in one day on a street corner as he did all week.
Pickin' cotton.
So did Elvis hear these guys there in Memphis?
That's a very infamous story, Little Milton, the great songster, songwriter, Bluesman, and Soul Man, gave it up.
A lot of them recorded for son records before they went on to Chicago.
And there was a big blues scene at son records long before Elvis started recording there.
And it turns out, Little Milton said this, Sam Phillips had young Elvis in the sound booth with him, looking through the glass window at the artist he was recording at the Blues guys he was recording.
And he was schooling Elvis and telling him, "Look, see how they move, see how they act, see how they sing."
So Elvis got a private education that not too many white kids got at that time.
And so Elvis wasn't some aberration that blew up out of nowhere because he was the most talented of anybody.
He actually got a private education in that sound booth with Sam Phillips.
And Little Milton said, "Many years later, around 1982, I read it in an article."
He said, "If he had known who and what that kid was and what he was doing in that sound booth, he would have told Sam to run him out."
And then there were a bunch of people who actually couldn't get on radio just by virtue of the fact that they were black, no?
That they were radical enough, you know, I'm thinking of little Richards for example, who is a huge influence for a certain kind of rock and roll and so forth.
But he was considered pernicious to the white to the white youth.
Well, not the youth, they loved him.
Yeah.
He was their parents.
And they ran everything.
Little Richard was a product of a guy named Esquirita.
Esquirita was actually Little Richard before Little Richard was Little Richard.
He was a flamboyant, possibly gay, I don't know.
That didn't matter.
He was an entertainer.
He wore his hair up and he was flashy and he dressed in flashy clothes.
A lot of this came from New Orleans. New Orleans had a very, it was a staging ground.
It was a hotbed of a boiling cauldron of, you know, be whatever you want to be.
An entertainment was a big part of it.
Little Richard came out of that scene.
But Little Richard was just, that was just a one example of America's deep-seated, serious, racist hatred that it hadn't confronted yet.
And to this day, in 2009, America still has trouble discussing race.
You know, we just had to thing with Rush Limbaugh, the great radio commentator.
And I only say great in the sense that he has a lot of listeners.
And he wanted to buy a sports team, a football team in America.
And they're not going to let him because he said some remarks about African Americans that got him in some hot water.
Yeah, he was talking about Donup and Donup and McNab, the quarterback of the Eagles.
He was so wrong about that because two years later the guy goes to the Super Bowl.
But so what was the, of course there's racism on the one hand, but there was also a lot of concern that if you let these guys on your televisions, on your radio, is that they're going to get to our girls, no?
They started getting on the radio.
And there was DJs, Black and White, Black radio became a real big thing.
And they were always owned by the radio stations were owned by white people, but the Black DJs had the best personalities.
And there was the white DJs who loved it too.
And they all started playing these race records, what they were called back then.
And Little Richard came along a little later.
He came along in the '50s, but a little later after the heavy blues, blue stuff.
And Little Richard Chuck Berry, Fat Stomino.
And they all got marginalized and pushed off the radio.
And a whole group of white performers were ushered in.
And some of these guys couldn't even perform.
They were just picked, "Hey, you come here.
You look good. We can market you."
And I don't want to mention any names on that front.
I don't have anything against those folks.
But white America's racism really showed, and they marginalized those folks.
But they didn't want them on the radio. They didn't want to perform.
But they bubbled out of the cracks.
They always resurfaced and managed to find a way to get through.
And it was the teenagers, the white teenagers, that did it for them.
And that's the whole thing about America, that the parents had a problem with it.
But the kids didn't.
And back in the day, that's a very overused statement.
But back in the '50s, they would allow black kids and white kids in a theater at the same time to watch a fat
Stomino or a little Richard.
But they would put a rope down the middle, or they would have the black kids up in the balcony
and the white kids downstairs.
One very bleed, just through the excitement of the show, the kids would mix.
They would just start dancing together, partying together.
And the police at the time, or the authorities had a hell of a time keeping them apart.
Well, that's where I think that the parents were right in the sense that they were empirically correct to suspect
that there was something revolutionary about this phenomenon of black music, the blues or rock and roll.
So that it was going to corrupt our values of separateism and superior and ascendancy.
That it was actually the beginning, it was through music that the serious barriers of racism in the cultural sense started to tumble.
And the kids were saying, "Mom, it's just music."
They weren't, they actually, it was more than music. It was in a certain sense revolutionary.
It was revolutionary in the sense that it broke down the barriers and it got the races together for the first time.
And I don't agree with you that the parents were correct. They were correct in their belief that it would get the races together.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
But that music wasn't going to corrupt their kids. What it was going to do is spring the races together so they could understand each other better.
But the parents were so caught up in their ways that those people can't mix with my kids because of whatever reason they've been taught all through the years.
Because we know now through the history since then that it's always been better when the races understand each other.
Because we know the other side of the coin, right?
Although this is a question I often ask myself in a perverse spirit, if you were to subtract all the suffering and pain and grief that slavery engendered for the African Americans.
Could something like the blues have ever originated? Does it take going to the very depths of misery and despair to come out with this powerful form that we call the blues?
Yes, it does. If black people were brought here to America as equals, not brought here. If they had migrated here as equals, they would have been playing classical music.
They would have gotten educated and whatever they would have created would have been great. But it wouldn't have been that that music of pain and suffering because they wouldn't have gone through that.
And you can see that through white people who didn't go through that. If a marriage to subtract African Americans from America altogether and you're just going to have what?
You can have a very impoverished country.
I don't know about it. Probably a bunch of hockey playing, white, bread, eating. You know, listen to maybe country music.
No, not on any of that stuff. But it wouldn't be the America that we know.
In ancient Greece, they believe that the gods used to enjoy the spectacle of human tragedy.
And that therefore they created all this pain and suffering because it would provoke wars and disasters and grief and Greek tragedy was a staging of that.
And while they would stage it on in Greek tragedies for the spectators, human spectators, they believe that human suffering was really something for the enjoyment of the gods.
And that's a really tragic thought when you think about it. Yeah, but unfortunately our humanity something comes out of us in moments of extremity and misery that we don't access otherwise.
I think that's a good saving grace. I've always thought of about the blues that I'm completely ashamed that the country I grew up in had slavery and we still have the legacy today.
But I'm so thankful for this music and no, it's not okay that it happened to those folks so we could have the blues. That's not okay. But since it's here, I hold it up. I revere it. It changed my life and that's a, I guess, the saying is true in every dark cloud. There's some kind of silver lining.
So, Bird why don't we mention just a few names among the, this migratory wave that we're talking about along with muddy waters and because obviously there's a lot of people out there who, if we had, you know, 20 hours instead of two hours, you know, we could do justice to the mall and we can't do that. But who are some of the people you want to draw attention to?
The guys, some of the country guys, some of the electric guys,
uh, mine's names come to mind like blind Willie McTell, Bo Carter, Mississippi Fred McDowell,
Honeyboy Edwards, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Bucklewhite, furry Lewis, Willie Brown, Bumblebee Slim,
Miss, the Mississippi Sheaks, the Memphis Jug Band, Jack Owens and Bud Spires, Yank Rachel, Lead Belly, Forest City Joe, Lightning Hopkins, Big Joe Williams, Sleepy John Estes, Robert Pete Williams,
And Lance Lipscomb, Tommy McLennan, Arthur Big Boy, Cred up, Reverend Gary Davis, Martin Bowgen and Armstrong, the Chicago String Band and there's thousands more I couldn't even begin to mention.
Can I ask you about a few names, Sonny Boy, Williamson. No.
That's a very controversial name. Yeah. Can you tell us about it? Yes.
There was a fellow named Sonny Boweimson, his real name was John Lee Williamson and he migrated north early in the 30s and he got famous as a harmonic a player. He's very distinguished gentleman and whether he had a formal education or not, he was a businessman and he recorded on the Bluebird label very early on.
There was another cat that came up just underneath him, just young a little bit younger than him and stated Mississippi and toured around the South playing juke joints and theaters and he adopted the name of Sonny Boweimson and his name, his real name was Rice Miller and he appeared on record for the trumpet record label started by this lady named Lillian McMurray, who owned a furniture store in the 50s, but he was playing in the 40s as well.
Well, Sonny Boy and Chicago, the number one original one found out that there was a guy down there using his name. So he got on a train and went down south and sued Sonny Boy number two, which is how he's referred to Mr. Rice Miller and forced him to stop using the name.
This was in the early 40s. Well, by 1948, Sonny Boy number one in Chicago was stabbed to death on his doorstep and whenever I tell the story, I was like to say there's no truth to the rumor that right now.
The rumor that Rice Miller, Sonny Boy number two was just around the corner at the time. There isn't that he wasn't there. It was a tragic thing.
He was one of the towns revered. This is just at the time that muddy waters was just showing up in Chicago. Sonny Boy had already been there for many years entertaining people had many records out had cut hundreds of records.
Well, a lot. I don't know if it was hundreds, but it was a lot. And which of the two is the one that most people associate with Sonny Boy Williams. Well, sad fact. Nowadays history being the way it is. People remember the most recent one. Sonny Boy number two because Rice Miller got a chance to go over to Europe. Now he died in 65, but he got a chance to go to Europe early on. And there's even video of him and he got to play with the young white kids, the area.
Claptons and those kids that were coming up. He's been more well known. Since I started my show 20 years ago, I had to actually re-educate them, not re-educate them. I had to educate my audience.
And I would get phone calls to say, "Play some Sonny Boy." And I would have to say, "Okay, I'm going to play Sonny Boy number one, the original one. I know who you're talking about." And I love both of them. They're both great. They were amazing.
But the truth needs to be told on that.
And do you think Sonny Boy two took that name because Sonny Boy one was already a famous person and he was impersonating him or what?
Because, again, I want to go back to Ancient Greece Hippocrates, the founder of Medicine.
He actually, there were so many people who were going around Greece saying that they were Hippocrates and people would pay him a fortune to treat him and to be their physician.
And it sounds like maybe he was cashing in on the name.
There goes, "Does the history repeat itself?" Yes, I do. Of course, Sonny Boy was able to make a living.
And Sonny Boy was a common name. And then the Sonny got dropped and Boy became it, right?
And so maybe he was called Sonny Boy. Maybe the Sonny Boy number two was called Sonny Boy by some folks.
He was touring around the South. He was great. He was prolific.
One of his things he liked to do was theater owners would have him come in and play at the theater before or after a movie.
And they would always have a little house band to back him up.
Well, he could do better by himself and he wanted to get all the money for himself.
So he learned how to make the band look terrible for one song.
And the theater owner would complain and he would say, "Well, get that band out of here and let me do my show."
And then he would get all the money. He was a hustler man. He knew how to get that money.
One other name, just very quickly, Alan Wolf.
Yes, Chester Burnett.
Alan Wolf was an amazing character. He came out of the Mississippi Delta. He didn't go up right away to Chicago as early as
Muddy did or some of the other guys. He showed up a little later. He immediately got signed to chess records.
But he'd been recording in the South for son records.
And he had become a fixture around the Memphis scene. And Alan Wolf had been pretty much given up by his parents.
And he had been given over to an uncle who really didn't like him.
And his uncle locked him underneath the house under the porch.
And Wolf had to run away from home.
And he even met his mother many years later when he was on the road with his band in his car at a gas station.
And it was a real, tearful meeting. He had a tragic childhood.
But he went on to become one of the most prolific singers, performers.
He wasn't a great harmonica player. He wasn't even a great guitar player.
What he was, he was a guy that loved that music. And he created his own sound.
And so he always kept a great band. And it's not legend.
It's the fact that Wolf built up such a great touring life and career in just in the South that he ended up leaving the South going to Chicago.
When he was breaking up with a woman, he wasn't married.
And he left with $3,000 cash in his pocket. And he owned his own vehicles.
And he took his band and just in left. He had the wherewithal to do this.
This is very rare for a blues man back then to be able to do that. And Wolf rolled into Chicago already a king.
And commanded that. But he died way too young. He got in a rear-hander.
He got rear-ended in a car in the early 70s and destroyed his kidneys.
And he died of kidney failure in 1976.
There's one guy I just like to mention is Charlie Dixon who wrote so many great songs that became cover songs.
I don't think he ever got the credit he deserved for being such a great songwriter.
I don't know what you think about that.
I'm not familiar with that name.
Yeah. Well, that's why we'll have to, you know, maybe research him and see if I'm right that he's a Charlie Dixon.
Yeah. I'd like to find out more about him.
So, Bert, how about women and the blues? Because that's something we've been talking about a lot of guys.
But women have a, you know, a major role to play in the genre as well.
That's definitely right. They're, you know, come to mind real quick is Memphis Mini.
Memphis Mini played guitar as good as any man.
She wound up in Chicago and she could fight, gamble, drink, and play as good as any man.
And she was just one of many, not a lot of them played an instrument, but a lot of them sang and they were women.
I mean, they, and they had to suffer the, the fact that a woman was a second class citizen, a true second class citizen.
And then the women that rose up through the ranks to be able to record had to be 10 times better than any man.
And they still wouldn't get the kind of respect they, they, they deserved.
And some of the early ones, if I could just mention some names here because these were the four runners that laid the foundation for the women we see today.
You know, the women we see today wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for these women.
The Smith, the Smith ladies, they weren't all related.
Clara Smith, Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith. Bessie went on to, to have her own empire.
She owned her own, she owned her own tents. She, she ran her own, her own show, her own traveling show and hired all her own people.
She was a big boss. And she commanded respect. And even legend has it that the clan came to burn down her show one night.
And she chased him off. She's a big woman. There's even video on her to even catch her on YouTube.
Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Victoria Spivey, Bessie Tucker.
Blue, Blue Barker, Ida May Mac, Baby Dee, Lil Johnson, We Be a Booze.
Don't ask me what that name came from. Lucille Bowgan, Miss Rhapsody, Big May Bell.
And later on, Dinah Washington, Little Leicester, Abena Jones, Linda Hopkins.
These are some of the women that came up between the twenties and the, and the 40s that laid the foundation for women now.
And you picked out a woman that, that really bounced between the two worlds of jazz and blues. And she was, she was a blues woman. Definitely.
Talking about Billy Holiday. Yes, we are talking about Billy Holiday. And, and she deserves all day.
But she's not a Chicago before we have a listen door, but she's really a more, these coasts know.
Yeah, New York. And I don't know all the facts of Billy's life, but she, and she was recording in the 30s.
So Billy came along early. And she was prolific. And she had a, and you were telling me that sometimes people would call in your blue show and say, play some Billy Holiday.
And you would say, well, I'll do that, but she's not really a blues singer.
And then you repented for this. Why, why were you under the impression that she wasn't really a blues singer?
Well, I was mistaken because I hadn't really listened to a lot of her music and dealt into her life. I was, again, muddy waters changed my life. And, and I was concentrating on, on the music that had come up through Chicago and Memphis and St. Louis and a lot of guitar, but piano.
And I checked out some of the women, but to me, I associated Billy with more jazz, but I was mistaken.
And I have sent to repented and changed my ways.
Well, why don't we have a listen? What are we going to hear? We're going to hear a little thing. Billy did called Billy's blues from way back, way back when she was a youngster.
[MUSIC]
So, Bert, what year were we listening to? This really shows this, this Billy Holiday tune really shows how, how early Billy was really doing her thing.
1936, she was very well established and had a full band. This is from Vochelian Records, one of the earliest record labels there were.
So, for Billy to have this thing going on, Billy Holiday and her orchestra, not playing with some, most of the time a woman had to come up. She had to come up as a singer and some guys band.
And Billy took her cue from Bestie Smith for sure. And I think a lot of the stuff that Billy got caught up in was put on her too.
You know, a lot of people had problems in their life, even with drugs, all depending on what color you were, you got a pass, or maybe you didn't.
And so, Billy to this day is marked as, oh yeah, that woman that had that problem.
Yeah, but that problem, drugs and booze and alcohol and early deaths, these ad charisma, for better for worse, they ad charisma and the American imagination to singers and performers.
And even our writers, if they're not dead drunks by the, you know, at the end of their lives, then Americans don't take them seriously.
If they're not like Faulkner drunks there, they can't be real. So, there's something about this burnout, this early burnout. And again, we saw with Robert Johnson, then he got murdered.
He got murdered. He went on to record many, many years. Many great things.
But through Hendrix, who also had an early death, Billy Holiday, there, it is a genre.
The life must have been very intense to be singing in these clubs night in and night out, and people buying your drinks and going home lonely. I mean, Janice Joplin, they say she was always going home alone, because at a certain point, you know, that people thought that she was unapproachable for whatever reason, and you hit the bottle and the thing, you know, you get on high and you have to stay on there to keep going forward at this level of intensity, which it takes to be a singer and a performer.
Yeah, I don't think there's a one common story though that runs as a thread through all their lives. Each one was unique and different. Billy had it together, but I think that I think she got some bad breaks and again, where somebody of a different color might have got a break, a real break in her career. Billy might not have gotten that break.
And been held back and that had to be frustrating and maybe something like that could cause somebody to turn to drugs or alcohol. Because if you just keep getting the door slammed in your face when you, because Billy was obviously ready in 1936 to go on, you see, these folks weren't let on film and film was the next step.
And what they saw in the movie theaters were all these people that weren't as talented as them getting all those breaks. And that's where the real money was. And that had to be extremely frustrating that, you know, talk about a glass ceiling, right?
Now, by 1939, Billy had just kept it going and she still had the orchestra going playing with guys like Hot Lips, Paige, Tab Smith, Sidney Payne, Kenny, Chrissy, these are all names that are from yesteryear, but some very well known names, especially Hot Lips, Paige and Tab Smith. These are guys that went on to have their own bands. And now here they are in her orchestra. And here's a heavy one, Billy's doing called long gone blues.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Tell me there is what's the man and I ♪
♪ I try to quit me baby ♪
♪ But you don't know how ♪
♪ Open your sleep ♪
♪ Every sense I've been your best ♪
♪ I've been your sleep ♪
♪ Every sense I've been your best ♪
♪ But before me I've known ♪
♪ I'll see you in your grave ♪
♪ So I'm a good girl ♪
♪ When my love is all wrong ♪
♪ I'm a good girl ♪
♪ But my love is all wrong ♪
♪ I'm a real good girl ♪
♪ But my love is all wrong ♪
♪
♪ Hey hey hey hey ♪
♪
(upbeat music)
(audience applauds)