Legends of

CountryBlues

GuitarVolume Three

Blues UpThe Country

featuringJosh White

Jesse FullerFurry Lewis

John JacksonPink Anderson

Rev. Gary DavisRobert Pete Williams

Ethel & George McCoy

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LEGENDS OF COUNTRYBLUES GUITAR

(BLUES UP THE COUNTRY)VOLUME THREEby Mark Humphrey

Most accounts of the ‘blues revival’ point to SamuelB. Charters’s 1959 book, The Country Blues, as a piv-otal work in focusing the then-growing interest in pre-War blues styles. In it Charters wrote: “The country blueswere generally sung by men accompanying themselveson the guitar, with a highly developed interplay betweentheir singing and the guitar accompaniment... The coun-try blues were an intense individual expression of thedeepest strains of Negro music in the South.” Revision-ist historians have sought to discredit Charters’s pioneer-ing study, one he admitted was flawed: “A further diffi-culty of a first study,” he wrote, “is that there will be con-siderable error.” Errors aside, however, Charters’ defini-tion of country blues is still operative. Granted, we nowknow that many of the great exponents of country blueslived and worked in primarily urban settings. Country,however, is as much about where an artist was from (andthus perceived the world) as it is about where he or shewound up. Moreover, it’s a broad but useful stylistic defi-nition for a means of expression. Not all the importantguitar-playing pre-War blues singers fit comfortably in acountry blues niche (Lonnie Johnson is a glaring excep-tion). And while we think of country blues as a soloist’sart, usually one employing acoustic guitar, most livingAfrican-American exponents play amplified in small com-bos. The sense we have of country blues, like most ge-neric labels, is imprecise and subject to frequent excep-tions. However, Charters’s definition hasn’t really beenimproved on. It remains useful for placing an importantcorps of artists—such as the ones seen in this video—into a context. Without further caveats then, enjoy thisvaried sampling of “the deepest strains of Negro musicof the South,” commonly called country blues.

FURRY LEWIS

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(1893-1981)“He plays and

sings even better thanhe did thir ty yearsago, singing in thesame beautifully halt-ing country style, buthe doesn’t own a gui-tar, and he movesfrom one furnishedroom to another.”Thus did Charters de-scribe the life of FurryLewis in The CountryBlues. Charters hadfound Furry in Mem-phis where the Sani-tat ion Depar tmenthad employed him asstreet sweeper since1922. Furry had alsoenjoyed a career as

blues singer, one which had produced twenty-three pre-War recordings. Charters observed that Lewis’s earlyrecords “had a beautiful quality of restraint and understate-ment.” Unlike such later rediscoveries as Son House andMississippi John Hurt, however, Furry’s rediscovery didnot initially occasion much stir. It was only in the 1970sthat Furry, having outlived many of his contemporaries,enjoyed the belated status of a ‘living legend.’

“People here considered him to be a celebrity,” DavidEvans reported from Memphis in a 1981 Living Blues obitu-ary. “Everyone knew that the Rolling Stones had insistedthat Furry be booked on their Memphis shows...that Furryhad appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show, that hehad appeared in a Burt Reynolds movie (W.W. and the DixieDance Kings)....that he was the subject of a Joni Mitchellsong (“Furry Sings the Blues”), that he had a constantstream of visitors from all over the world, and that he hadinfluenced countless numbers of younger musicians whohad gone on to successful careers in pop music.”

Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis came to Memphis with his par-

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ents from Greenwood, Mississippi as a boy of six. Boister-ous and musically rich, turn-of-the-century Memphis wouldhost wild jug bands and the more genteel blues of W.C.Handy, who Furry claimed gave him his first real guitar (“Ikept it ‘bout some thirty odd years”). He started playingguitar, he told Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall (BealeStreet Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America’sMain Street), when he was about twelve: “I got a cigar box,”Furry recalled, “I cut a hole in the top, put a board andnail it on there. And I taken four nails, put wire on ‘emfrom a screen door for strings. I couldn’t play it, but I rappedthe sides, hootin’ and hollerin'. I thought I was doin’ some-thing you know.”

Furry developed enough proficiency to substitute onoccasion in W.C. Handy’s band and to work medicine showsdoing music and comedy. His friendship with the legend-ary Jim Jackson, one of the pioneers of Memphis blues,led to Furry’s first recordings in 1927. It was then he firstrecorded “Mr. Furry’s Blues,” heard here in a performancefrom some four decades later. He also made pre-War re-cordings of “Judge Boushe Blues” (originally called “JudgeHarsh Blues”) and “John Henry.” However, his version ofBlind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is KeptClean,” atypical of Furry’s often-humorous pre-War mate-rial, may have been learned after his rediscovery.

The opening performance in this Vestapol video,“Judge Boushe,” is performed, appropriately enough, inVestapol (open D) tuning, D A D F# A D. Furry’s penchantfor ‘clowning,’ evident in his overhand swipes at his gui-tar, followed him from the medicine show and served himwell throughout his professional career. When a heckler atNew York City’s Gaslight once berated Furry for “actin’ afool,” he retorted: “You’re a bigger fool than me! I’m up onthis stage actin’ a fool and gettin’ money and you’re thefool who paid to come see me.”

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JOHN JACKSON(1924- )

It may be one of the greater ironies of the folk revivalthat the Rooftop Singers inadvertently led to the discoveryof John Jackson. Performing was a thing of the past forJackson when, in 1964, his children and their friends urgedhim to get out his guitar and play “Walk Right In,” the 1929Cannon’s Jug Stompers song which the Rooftop Singershad taken to the top of the pop charts early in 1963. “Theywanted to do this dance that Elvis Presley started,” Jack-son explained to Elijah Wald. The postman heard the mu-sic as he brought the day’s mail and informed Jackson hewas himself eager to learn how to play the popular song.Jackson obliged by visiting the postman at his night job ata gas station; Washington D.C. folk music enthusiast ChuckPerdue happened to stop by the Fairfax, Virginia stationfor a fillup and was startled by the sounds of country blues.Perdue invited Jackson to join him at a Georgetown con-cert by John Hurt, whose recordings Jackson had grownup hearing. At a subsequent concert by Mance Lipscomb,Jackson was invited on stage to perform, and on that oc-casion Chris Strachwitz heard him and offered to recordJackson for Arhoolie. Since then the easygoing Virginianhas recorded for both Rounder and Arhoolie, toured Eu-

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rope, and become a mainstay of the Eastern Seaboard folkfestival circuit. None of it might have happened if a pass-ing postman hadn’t heard Jackson entertaining his chil-dren and their friends (“so they could do a hula dance”) to“Walk Right In.”

Jackson was born into a musical family in Woodville,Rappahanock County, Virginia. His father played guitar,banjo, mandolin, ukulele, and homemade pennywhistles.His mother played sacred songs on harmonica and accor-dion. His siblings were likewise musical, but Jackson’smost vivid early musical memories are of “a water boy ona chain gang” called Happy who visited the family afterbecoming a trustee. “He played very much like LonnieJohnson,” Jackson told Wald (Sing Out! Vol. 39 #1, May/June/July 1994), “in open tuning and just regular tuning,and he did fingerpicking...And everybody who ever heardhim said they never heard anything like it.”

Records, too, were a major influence on Jackson, whobegan playing guitar when he was around twelve. “I thinkBlind Blake was one of my biggest influences,” Jacksontold Cheryl A. Brauner and Barry Lee Pearson (Living Blues# 63, January-February 1985). “I just loved his fingerpick-ing style.” Jackson ably demonstrates that love in a 1970performance recorded at the University of Washington ofBlake’s sly 1927 recording, “That’ll Never Happen NoMore.” The piece called “Rag in C” deftly demonstratesthe close connection between the Southeastern ‘Piedmontstyle’ of ragtime blues and the white country style com-monly called Travis picking. (Interestingly, Jackson statesthat Travis’s style came from Blind Boy Fuller, and Travisonce told this writer of his admiration for Fuller’s record-ings.)

“Most people would call me more of a songster,” saysthe multi-talented Jackson, “‘cause I just don’t only playblues; I play a little bit of everything.” Though he loved toplay country house parties and ‘square dances’ in hisyouth, a violent fracas in 1946 made Jackson renouncepublic performance for the better part of twenty years. Still,the emotional nourishment of music was always with him.“When you get hold of a guitar and get to singing the blues,”Jackson told Elizabeth Wiles Dean, “you get to forget aboutthat terrible feeling or whatever it is you got upset

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about...I’ve been working in the fields and get real uptightabout something. The minute I could get hold of a guitar, Icould just feel myself getting better. It was a great relief. IfI hadn’t been able to play music I don’t know if I would beliving today or not, ‘cause I was just crazy about my gui-tar, and when I really got down and out, I could sit up on ahill somewhere and sing songs to myself.”

JOSH WHITE(1914-1969)

Josh White’s performances here demonstrate what aconsummately polished professional he was, a qualitywhich has unfortunately sometimes been held against him.Country blues purists disparage White, claiming he did littleworthwhile after his ‘Pinewood Tom’ recordings of the1930s. However, some of those same purists would, if hon-est with themselves, be forced to admit that their first hintat the riches in the country blues tradition came via JoshWhite and recorded versions of performances like thoseon this video.

If White was smoother than most country blues per-formers, it was with good reason. He had arrived in NewYork City from South Carolina in 1932 and before the endof the year was appearing in a group called the South-ernaires on NBC radio’s Harlem Fantasy. By 1940, he was

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on stage with Paul Robeson in a play called John Henryand singing at Cafe Society Downtown. He was cultivatinga white following even as he was challenging racism insongs about Southern injustice. He sang at both the 1941and 1945 inaugurals of FDR, and found his way into sev-eral Hollywood films. It was a career quite unlike that ofany other country blues artist.

Yet it was unquestionably a country blues backgroundwhich White carried to New York City in 1932. He was bornin Greenville, South Carolina, where the legendary WillieWalker and Gary Davis had worked together in a stringbandprior to White’s 1914 birth. “There seems to have been anundeniable and most distinctive ‘cell’ of musicians fromthis area,” writes Bruce Bastin in Crying for the Carolines,a study of the Piedmont blues and its environment. By thetime he was eight White was acting as lead boy to JohnHenry ‘Man’ Arnold, the first of a succession of blind singer-guitarists for whom White beat the tambourine and col-lected tips. White’s apprenticeship as ‘lead boy’ took himfrom Florida to Chicago during the years 1922 – 1929. Hewatched and learned from the likes of Blind Joe Taggart,with whom White made his recording debut in 1928. “Itwasn’t a life that I’d recommend to anyone,” White ob-served, “but it taught me my trade.”

White was only eighteen when he recorded his firstblues in 1932 as Pinewood Tom. The son of a Baptistpreacher, White simultaneously recorded sacred songs asJoshua White, ‘The Singing Christian.’ He began hintingat the social consciousness which brought him acclaim inthe 1940s in such songs as 1936’s “Silicosis Is Killing Me,”though Pinewood Tom wasn’t above covering such popu-lar double-entendre blues as Kokomo Arnold’s “Milk CowBlues.”

White perfected his cabaret performance style at NewYork’s legendary Cafe Society Downtown, where his goodlooks, open shirt and suavely insinuating manner drovewomen wild. (“A pre-Belafonte sex symbol” was ArnoldShaw’s description of him.) It was still a devastating actover twenty years later, as his performance here of “YouKnow Baby What I Want from You” illustrates. The firsttwo songs here were performed for Swedish television au-diences in 1962, while “Nobody Knows You When You’re

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Down and Out,” in which White is joined by his daughterCarolyn, is from Swedish TV in 1967. It’s easy to see why,in the early 1940s, the nation’s First Lady made her wayto Greenwich Village to see this phenomenon, and to be-lieve that, twenty years later, President Kennedy told himhow his records had inspired him when that President wasa college student in the Roosevelt era. ‘The GreenvilleSheik,’ as White called himself on an early record, went along way from ‘lead boy’ in his 55 years. And he opened agreat many ears along the way, as his friend Lee Hays ofthe Weavers once observed: “Many a white middle-classblues singer wouldn’t know a blues if he tripped over onehad it not been for Josh.”

ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS(1914-1980)

By contrast to theurbane White, RobertPete Williams was asresolutely rural and in-trospective as any re-corded blues artist. Dis-covered by folkloristsHarry Oster and Rich-ard Allen while servinga life sentence for mur-der at Angola StatePenitentiary, the Lead-bel ly-l ike circum-stances of Williams’sdiscovery and subse-quent parole attractednational attention: “Alifer for shooting andkilling a man, Williams

has the tremendous drive and anguish that characterizedthe fabled Leadbelly,” Time reported. What Williams lacked,however, was a “Goodnight Irene” or “Midnight Special.”His music was relentlessly personal and often amountedto a diary of Williams’s inner life at the moment of a givenrecording. Oster wrote that once, when he asked Williamswhat he about to sing, “he scratched his head and stam-

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mered, ‘Wait till I sing it.”’ His lyrical spontaneity tendedto spurn conventions of blues verse structure and his jaggedguitar accompaniments were as idiosyncratic as anythingever recorded in the blues idiom. Williams, who by acci-dent or design may have tapped into an African pre-blueswellspring, was both dismissed as a primitive and hailedas a genius.

Born into a large sharecroppers’ family in Zachary,Louisiana, Williams didn’t begin playing guitar till he wastwenty, when he made one for himself out of copper wireand a cigar box. In time he acquired a real guitar and be-gan entertaining at parties and fish fries. “They all used tocall me Peetie Wheatstraw,” he told Peter Guralnick, “‘causeI could holler pretty good and raise my voice...” His careeras bluesman in the Baton Rouge area was short-circuitedwhen his wife, jealous of the attention of admiring women,torched Williams’ guitar.

Williams claimed he played a more conventional bluesstyle in his ‘Peetie Wheatstraw period,’ only developinghis signature style somewhat later. “I changed my stylewhen I see where I could find more notes on a guitar,” heexplained to researcher David Evans. “If you’re going topick a guitar...play from the box (body) on back down tothe key (tuners), you see.” Asked what prompted this sty-listic shift, Williams replied: “The sound of the atmosphere,the weather changed my style. But I could hear, since mebeing an air-music man. The air came in with a differentsound of music. Well, the atmosphere, when the wind’sblowing carries music along...I don’t know where it comesfrom—it could come from the airplanes, or the moaning ofautomobiles, but anyhow it leaves an air current in the air,see. That gets in the wind, makes a sounding...and thatsounding works up to be a blues.”

Williams took his air-music to the Newport Folk Festi-val in 1964 and, for the next fifteen years, to many cam-puses, coffeehouses, and festivals. “Undoubtedly RobertPete is as exploratory in his way as John Coltrane or GerardManley Hopkins,” wrote Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Go-ing Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock ‘n Roll. “Robert Petecontinually invents and reinvents a music which is free tothe point of occasional anarchy, and listening to it canhardly be a passive experience.”

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Williams’ performance here of “Dear Old Mother ofMine,” a relative of the traditional ‘holy blues,’ “Mother-less Children,” is a ‘knife piece.’ Williams’ slide playingtended to be somewhat more conventional than his otherwork, and he followed the example of such masters as BlindWillie Johnson in using the slide as an antiphonal element,effectively a second voice. The lyrics, however, show Wil-liams’ highly personal sense of symmetry and verse struc-ture at play.

ETHEL AND GEORGE MCCOYThey were brother and sister, nephew and niece of

Memphis Minnie. But it was another remarkable earlyblueswoman, Bessie Tucker, who was the inspiration fortheir performance of “Everything I Tell You,” which com-bines Tucker’s “Black Mary” and “Penitentiary.” They wereoriginally from Booneville near Tupelo, Mississippi, butwere discovered in East St. Louis, where W.C. Handy re-ported hearing “shabby guitarists” play some embryonicblues back in 1892. Big Joe Williams introduced researcherPete Welding to the McCoys in the mid-Sixties, and Weld-ing recorded their sister Ruby McCoy singing this samesong accompanied by Big Joe (“Black Mary,” TestamentTCD 5012, The Sound of the Delta). “They were very nicepeople,” Welding recalls, “who grew up singing and play-ing. Their parents were musical; music was important intheir family, and they carried this with them. When I metthem they were just playing for family and friends.” In ad-dition to Welding, Gene Rosenthal of Adelphi Records re-corded the McCoys and is the source of this wonderfulsnapshot of Mississippi-St. Louis blues leavened by thespirit of a legendary Texan, Bessie Tucker.

PINK ANDERSON(1900-1974)

In rural America, medicine shows were one of the fewforms of entertainment available well into the twentiethcentury. They offered cure-all tonics (often heavily lacedwith alcohol), black-face comics, ribald jokes, and music.Among the disparate talents to perform in medicine showswere silent film comic Buster Keaton, country legends Roy

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Acuff, Jimmie Rodgers, and Uncle Dave Macon, and a hostof bluesmen, including Pink Anderson. “On vacant lots insouthern townshipsthe medicine showswould set up theirstages,” Paul Oliverwrote in The Story ofthe Blues. “A typical‘Southern gentle-man’ in Stetson andgoatee beard wouldintroduce a team ofperformers; a few girl‘hoofers’ perhaps, ora jug band, or just ayoung Negro with hisface nonetheless‘blacked up’ withburnt cork, ‘cuttingthe pigeon wing’ tothe stop-time guitarof his accompanist.The Doctor in theStetson would produce a bottle of miracle tonic, one of thetroupe would take a swig and be galvanized into making apass at the nearest woman as proof of its efficacy. Thecrowd would respond raucously and the bottles would startselling.”

Pink Anderson spent most of his life entertaining inmedicine shows. Born Pinkney Anderson in Laurens, SouthCarolina (also Gary Davis’ birthplace), he was dancing forpennies on the streets of Spartanburg while still a boy.Accounts of the year he joined ‘Doctor’ W.R. Kerr’s medi-cine show vary from 1914 to 1918, but he entertained inmedicine shows well into the late 1950s. In Crying for theCarolines, Bruce Bastin described Anderson’s activities:“His job was to ‘drag the streets,’ that is to say, draw acrowd by playing and joke-telling and slowly draw themback to the ‘Doctor,’ who would then begin his sales talk.He travelled throughout the Piedmont region from Virginiato South Georgia and occasionally into Tennessee and Ala-bama.” Anderson would buckdance as well as play and

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sing on Doc Kerr’s medicine show, earning as much as$10 per week, a princely sum at the time.

When Anderson wasn’t traveling with Kerr he oftenworked with the legendary Blind Simmie Dooley. GaryDavis, who didn’t pass praise lightly, said of Dooley: “Hewas just as good as any man I ever heard playing a guitar,him and Willie Walker.” Kip Lornell wrote: “Pink and Simmiehooked up right after World War I because, at the time,Simmie was in need of a ‘leader’ and Pink was available.Many of the songs that Pink played were learned from BlindSimmie, so it would seem a likely possibility that the styleof guitar playing...represents a style that was well-formedbefore World War I.” Supporting Lornell’s contention isAnderson’s performance in this video of “Crow Jane,” alsoknown as “Slidin’ Delta” and believed to be one of the pri-mordial blues guitar pieces.

Dooley and Anderson recorded four sides for Colum-bia in 1928, an event which little changed their lives at thetime but which would occasion Anderson’s 1962 rediscov-ery by Samuel Charters (Dooley died in 1961). He recordedagain for Prestige Bluesville but a 1964 stroke sadly side-lined Anderson from playing the ‘blues revival’ circuit.However, he slowly regained his ability to play, and thank-fully this never-before-seen footage from his later yearsdocuments what Bastin has called “The infectious, slightlywistful yet mischievous style of Pink’s medicine-showsongs...”

REV. GARY DAVIS(1896-1972)

The power and the glory that was Gary Davis is in fullcry in this stunning performance of “Oh Glory How HappyI Am,” with Pete Seeger acting as enthusiastic chorus. Itshows Davis’s commanding presence at its assured best,demonstrating why he was such a beloved and awe-in-spiring figure during the 1960s folk revival. The extent ofDavis’s influence at the time included covers of his mate-rial (“Samson and Delilah”) by such pop-folk stars as Pe-ter, Paul & Mary and the adaptation of his guitar style bysuch disciples as Dave Van Ronk, Stefan Grossman, JormaKaukonen, and Roy Bookbinder. “Rev. Davis was a com-petitor,” Stefan Grossman wrote in Rev. Gary Davis: Blues

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Guitar. “He always wanted to stay a few yards ahead of allhis students. This he easily managed.”

Born in Laurens County, South Carolina, Davis recalledbeing raised “way down in the country, so far you couldn’thear a train whistle blow unless it was a cloudy day.”Blinded in infancy, Davis developed an early sensitivity tothe world of sound. “The first time I ever heard a guitarplayed,” he told Samuel Charters, “I thought it was a brassband coming through. I was a small kid and I asked mymother what was it and she said it was a guitar. I said,‘Ain’t you going to get me one of those when I get largeenough?”’

“I made my first guitar out of a tin can,” Davis toldGrossman. “I was a boy about ten years old. I drove me ahole in each end of a pie-pan, run me up a stick throughthere, that’s the way I made it.” A banjo was his first realinstrument, and he was soon acquiring his song stock fromsundry sources: “Candyman,” he recalled, came from a1905 ‘carnival show.’

By his teens, Davis was already performing: “I used toplay for white folks’ picnics,” he told Grossman, and, likemany blind musicians of the era, he traveled incessantly.“I was playing from town to town,” he recalled. “Anywhere!Playing on the streets then. I would get run off by the po-lice more times than I can remember.”

Around 1912 Davis teamed up with another legend-ary guitarist, Wil l ie Walker, in a Greenvil le-basedstringband. Over the next twenty years Davis movedthroughout the Carolinas, settling around 1931 in Durham,North Carolina, where he met Blind Boy Fuller (FultonAllen). Davis claimed Fuller “didn’t know how to play butone piece and that was with a knife” when they met. Caro-lina guitarist Willie Trice corroborated Davis’s influenceon Fuller, who told him: “All us boys can play, Willie, butGary is our daddy!”

At the time of their meeting, Davis remembered, “Iwas a blues cat then.” However, by the time of his solepre-War recording session in 1935, Davis was performingprimarily sacred material. (Reissued on Yazoo 2011, TheComplete Early Recordings of Rev. Gary Davis.) He movedto New York City in 1940, where he struggled: “We weren’tallowed to play on the streets,” He recalled. “Sometimes

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the police chased me...Also I had guitars stolen off me asfast as I could get them.” But Davis stubbornly perservered,and in time word of his talent spread from the streets ofHarlem to the city’s folk enthusiasts. Befriended by BrownieMcGhee, Davis’s performance at a 1950 Leadbelly Me-morial Concert at Town Hall was a breakthrough. His firstalbum was recorded or Stinson in 1954, and further re-cordings throughout the 1950s paved the way for Davis’seager participation in the folk revival of the 1960s.

Throughout his often-difficult life, Davis’s implacablefaith and pride in his remarkable talent sustained him. “Ilearned all by myself,” he told his student, Stefan Gross-man. “My motto’s always been to bring out somethingsomebody else hadn’t heard before. I always loved to dothings different than anybody else did.”

JESSE FULLER(1896-1976)

On the back sleeve of the 1958 album, Jesse Fuller:Jazz, Folk Songs, Spirituals & Blues (Good Time Jazz L-12031), this announcement appears: “Jesse Fuller singsand accompanies himself in actual performance on twelve-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo, cymbals & fotdella. Nooverdubbing, multiple recording, tape editing, or other elec-tronic techniques have been used to create any of hissounds.” Fuller’s one-man-band appearances here bear

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witness to the truth in this disclaimer. Handling five instru-ments and singing were seemingly no chore for Fuller, whodidn’t really begin cultivating his remarkable one-man-band talent until he was well into his fifties.

Born in Jonesboro, Georgia, Fuller spent his early yearsin the country around Atlanta, where such men as Barbe-cue Bob (Robert Hicks) and Blind Willie McTell wouldrecord with twelve string guitars. However, we can onlyguess at the impact of the Atlanta twelve-string traditionon Fuller, who was already in California, where he got hisfirst twelve-string, before any of the Atlantans recorded.

Before leaving Georgia, however, Fuller picked up alot of music. “The first music I ever heard,” he told LesterKoenig, “I used to make a bow like the Indians make abow and arrow, put some wax on the string, put the bow inmy mouth and pick the string-sound like a jew’s harp.” Healso heard track-lining songs, a banjo-picking brother-in-law, and “some fellows that could really play guitar” pick-ing blues. By the time Fuller began riding the freights atabout twenty, he was doing that himself.

Fuller became adept at both playing for tips and swing-ing onto the freights which brought him to California. “Icould catch them trains runnin’ thirty miles an hour withmy guitar strapped behind my back,” Fuller told Koenig.“Every time I’d hit a railroad division I’d go amongst thestore people and play a song. There wasn’t any radios in

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them days. They’d fill my cap up.”Arriving in California around 1917, Fuller found var-

ied employment in silent movie era Hollywood, none of itmusical. Carving and selling wooden snakes was lucrativefor awhile: “I’m a professional on wooden snakes,” Fullerproudly recalled. “I can make ‘em so they scare anybody,tongue licking out...” Fuller shined stars’ shoes in a barbershop near the United Artists Studio and did some movieextra work himself (“I was the fellow carrying the balloonson my head in The Thief of Baghdad,” he said). He fondlyrecalled that director Raoul Walsh helped him set up a hotdog stand inside the United Artists Studio. Memorabilia ofFuller’s Hollywood days were with him for life: a framedpicture of Fuller with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and SidneyGrauman hung on the wall of his West Oakland home.

Fuller’s Hollywood interlude was followed by decadesof hard work: picking cotton in California’s Central Valley,working for the Southern Pacific Railroad and, during WorldWar II, welding in the shipyards of Oakland, his home since1929. Music was a sideline at best during this time. But in1951, having heard about musicians and singers making“lots of money” on records, the 55 year-old Fuller decidedto join them. It wasn’t easy at first. “I tried to get somefellows to play with me,” he told Koenig, but that didn’twork out. “So,” Fuller recalled, “I thought, ‘I’m going toget me up a one-man band.’ I took me a whole week onetime when I wasn’t doing anything, and I made this thing Icall the fotdella in my back room...I thought about doingsomething like that so I could have something to go alongwith me and help me out instead of another fellow. I justtook some masonite, heated some wood in hot water androunded it off around a wheel. I learned that in the barrelfactory where I used to work—that’s the way they do thestaves...I tried to use bass fiddle strings but they don’t doso good, they stretch out of tune, so I use piano strings.My wife named it the Fotdella because I played it with myfoot, like ‘foot diller.’ I’d been playing harmonica and kazoo.I added the cymbals later, welded it myself. I decided I’dget into it and might make me some money...If I didn’t, I’djust be the same old Jesse. I wouldn’t cry about it.”

Reviving busking skills learned around the time ofWorld War One, Fuller hit the streets of Oakland and San

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Francisco with his arresting one-man band. His hunch that“I might get lucky” paid off. In 1955, a ten-inch album onthe World Song label (Folk Blues: Working On the Rail-road with Jesse Fuller) was released. One of its songs was“San Francisco Bay Blues,” described by Tom Mazzolinias “a classic train blues put to sea.” It would become astandard of the 1960s folk revival and bring an unlikelycelebrity to the gently anachronistic Fuller, whose nick-name was ‘The Lone Cat.’ It seems somehow fitting thatthe only country bluesman to have sold hot dogs to silentmovie stars would near the end of his life supply music forThe Great White Hope, a 1970 film about Jack Johnson,heavyweight champion of the world during the years (1908-15) a young Jesse Fuller was first hearing the Georgiacountry blues.

RECORDING INFORMATIONThe footage presented in this video is some of the

rarest material we have ever discovered. The performancesfrom The University Of Washington were not known toexist but Stefan Grossman had a feeling that out-takesfrom sessions recorded between 1968-1972 should be instorage somewhere at the University. Between the years of1993 and 1994 with the great help of University OfWashington archivist Laurel Sercombe, the material wasdiscovered in long forgotten boxes and rusty film cans in adusty corner at the Ethnomusicology Archive offices.

Furry Lewis recorded May, 1968 at the University OfWashington.

John Jackson recorded 1970 at the University OfWashington.

Robert Pete Williams recorded 1970 at the UniversityOf Washington.

Jesse Fuller recorded April, 1968 at the University OfWashington.

Josh White performing YOU KNOW BABY WHAT IWANT FROM YOU and NUMBER 12 TRAIN from SwedishTV 1962; NOBODY KNOWS YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWNAND OUT from Swedish TV 1967.

Ethel & George McCoy recorded Memphis, 1969.Pink Anderson recorded in 1970 in North Carolina.Rev. Gary Davis performance from Pete Seeger's

Rainbow Quest, 1969.

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FURRY LEWIS1. Judge Boushe Blues

JOHN JACKSON2. That Will Never Happen

No MoreJOSH WHITE

3. You Know Baby What I Want4. Number 12 Train

ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS5. Dear Old Mother Of Mine

ETHEL & GEORGE MCCOY6. Black Mary

PINK ANDERSON7. She Knows How To Stretch It8. Ain't Nobody Home But Me

FURRY LEWIS9. Furry's Blues

REV. GARY DAVIS10. Oh Glory How Happy I Am

JESSE FULLER11. Running Wild

JOHN JACKSON12. Rag In C

FURRY LEWIS13. See That My Grave Is Kept

Clean14. John Henry

PINK ANDERSON15. Crow Jane16. You Don't Know What The

Lord Told MeJESSE FULLER

17. The Woman I Had She Left MeJOSH WHITE

18. Nobody Knows You WhenYou're Down and Out

Much of the extremely rare perform-ance footage presented in this videohas never before been publicly seenand documents the diversity of amusic which was as personal as afingerprint yet as universal as theblues itself. John Jackson, Pink An-derson, Rev. Gary Davis and the charismatic Josh White manifest differentaspects of the rich Piedmont ragtime/blues tradition. In Memphis, echoesof the Mississippi Delta could be heard in the music of Furry Lewis. Whilethe delightfully eccentric Jesse Fuller and the introspective Robert PeteWilliams embody country blues which defies regional identity.

Vestapol 13037

Running Time: 60 minutes • B/W and ColorFront Photo Sylvester Weaver & Sara MartinCourtesy of Kyana Blues Society Collection

Back photos: Robert Pete Williams by Tom Copi& Rev. Gary Davis by Stefan Grossman

Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140

Representation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications® 2001 Vestapol Productions

A division of Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop Inc.

ISBN: 1-57940-919-9

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