HAND ME MY TRAVELIN' SHOES

LUKE JORDAN'S BIRTHDAY

2012-01-28T09:14:00.000-08:00

Luke Jordan would have been 120 years old today. The beguiling Piedmont blues artist was born somewhere in Appomattox County, VA this day in 1892. This marker for him can be found in Lynchburg:

To listen to his 1927 'Church Bell Blues', referred to above, is to feel affected by the beauty of his voice and struck by the song's inclusion of a commonstock formula that Willie McTell was to "jump his way" and incorporate into his own 'Statesboro Blues' the year after. Here is that Luke Jordan track:

KILLING OFF MY BOB DYLAN BLOG

2012-01-17T08:06:00.000-08:00

The day before yesterday I published my decision to call a halt to my blog BobDylanEncyclopedia.Blogspot. It was created almost six years ago, in March 2006

That said, I have no plans to kill off this blog - and I have also created a new blog, OUTTAKES. The latter can be accessed either here or from the drop-down menu cunningly titled 'Blogs' at www.michaelgray.net.

News of what I'm doing will also continue to be posted on my website and I can always be contacted directly by e-mail at michael@michaelgray.net.

2011-12-16T02:52:00.000-08:00

happy christmas & new

year

TO ALL MY BLOG READERS

WITH KINDEST REGARDS

McTELL HELPS HAPPY TRAUM RETURN TO THE 12-STRING

2011-12-10T04:19:00.000-08:00

This interesting blog item by Happy Traum was posted way back in January but came to my attention only yesterday. It's always gratifying when a book influences a bona fide musician, and Happy Traum is certainly one. His post can be found here.

PETER NARVÁEZ

2011-11-29T00:45:00.000-08:00

I have been very saddened to learn of the death, earlier this month, of folklorist, blues musician and cultural historian of Newfoundland, Peter Narváez. He died of lung cancer, aged 69, on November 11.

He was an important figure on the music scene, as this Globe and Mail obituary describes. He was also proud to be able to say that he had played music with Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, Victoria Spivey, Johnny Shines, Fred McDowell and others, and it was his resourceful recording of Skip James’ concert in Bloomington IN in March 1968 that was given official release in 1999.

He was also a good friend to innumerable people - in my case initially and especially in the mid-1980s when I spent three months in Newfoundland and got to know him almost immediately.

Peter introduced me to the several invaluable 1000-pages-each hardbacks Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance and Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology by Michael Taft - from which I came to realise how enormously Bob Dylan had drawn upon, and must have known inside-out, that great ocean of pre-war blues work. Without Peter’s guidance, the huge chapter on Dylan and the blues in my book Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan could not have happened - nor the many talks on the subject I have given at universities and arts festivals in recent years, including this year for the English Department at Stanford.

Peter also gave me a great deal of other material about, and intelligent, enthusiastic comment on, pre-war blues, including photocopying for me the sleevenotes of many rare vinyl albums that featured Blind Willie McTell - an invaluable help when, 20 years later, I was writing Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. I owe him a great deal.

He shared his time very generously - at his home, at the Ship Inn in St.Johns and in showing me rural outposts he loved. He visited us in England a couple of times in later years, endearing himself immediately to our then-small children, and always sent me advance copies of his CDs.

He last wrote to me, as cheerfully as ever, four days after his birthday this year. We have all lost a first-rate guitarist and a distinguished folklorist; some of us have also lost a gregarious, warm-hearted, shrewd-minded friend.

ANNIVERSARY OF ANOTHER GEORGIA BLUES GREAT'S DEATH

2011-10-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, October 21, marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Robert Hicks, aka Barbecue Bob, aged just 29, in Lithonia G.

PIANO RED . . .

2011-10-19T00:45:00.000-07:00

. . . would have been 100 years old today. The pianist who made the doomed, and now non-existent, session with Blind Willie McTell in Augusta GA in July 1936, was born on a farm outside Hampton GA on October 19, 1911.

His real name was William Lee Perryman; his parents were sharecroppers. His last album was released in 2010 - The Lost Atlanta Tapes. There's an interesting local review of it here. Piano Red/Dr.Feelgood died on July 25, 1985 in Atlanta, aged 73.

JIM O'NEAL BENEFIT CONCERTS

2011-10-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

Living Blues founding editor Jim O'Neal has been diagnosed with lymph cancer and is currently undergoing treatment. Like many in the blues world, Jim has no health insurance.

A series of benefit concerts is being pulled together to raise money to assist in paying the mounting bills:

OCT. 20 SURF CLUB, HYATTSVILLE, MARYLAND With Memphis Gold and others
OCT. 28 KNUCKLEHEADS, KANSAS CITY, KANSAS Kenny Neal, Memphis Gold and others
NOV 19 (date tentative) BUDDY GUY'S LEGENDS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Kenny Neal, Memphis Gold, Eddie Clearwater, Eddie Shaw, Billy Branch, Elmore James Jr., Nora Jean Bruso and others.

For anyone wanting to make a direct contribution to assist Jim and his family, a fund has been set up at Commerce Bank in Kansas City. Checks may be sent to: Jim O'Neal Blues Fund, P.O. Box 10334, Kansas City, MO 64171. You can also donate at www.paypal.com to the account onealbluesfund@aol.com For further details and confirmations of time and artists, please check www.Stackhouse-Bluesoterica.blogspot.com.

I post this because Jim O'Neal has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the blues and I hope you might publicise it further if you are reading this. Thank you.

5th ANNIVERSARY OF HENRY TOWNSEND'S DEATH

2011-09-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 5th anniversary of this most interesting man's death. Here is the eloquent obituary Tony Russell wrote for the (British) Guardian newspaper:

Henry Townsend, who has died aged 96, was the last survivor from the blues milieu of St Louis in the 1920s and 1930s, a hub of activity rivalled only by Chicago. Since the death of Yank Rachell (obituary, April 22 1997), Townsend had been the only blues musician who could trace his recording career back to the 1920s, having sat down before a recording microphone in November 1929 to sing his Henry's Worried Blues.

But Townsend was exceptional for more than longevity. Many of the blues musicians of his generation, who survived to find a new audience in the 1960s and 1970s, performed as if nothing had touched their music. It had been made clear to them that this was what their public wanted. How they felt about it themselves, few stopped to ask.

Townsend's attitude was quite different. While he did not scorn his old recordings, he had no taste for spending his later years simply recreating them. Blues, for him, was a living medium, and he continued to express himself in it, most remarkably in his songwriting. Even in his 70s he was producing entire albums of new compositions. Not satisfied with his exceptional skill as a guitarist, he devoted himself to his second instrument and emerged as a blues pianist of succinct delicacy.

He was born in Shelby, Mississippi, but grew up in St Louis. As a boy he worked for a bootlegger. In his late teens he became interested in playing the guitar and began to infiltrate a circle of musicians that included Lonnie Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes and Peetie Wheatstraw.
Such men were making names for themselves in the African-American community with their records, and Townsend took the same path, not only recording in his own right but accompanying other players such as Big Joe Williams and the thoughtful singer and pianist Walter Davis. He was struck by Davis's skill as a songwriter, and they worked together intermittently into the 1950s.

The speakeasies of St Louis's black section were a tough education. In his autobiography, A Blues Life, Townsend vividly recreated their ambience, with their whores, corrupt policemen and violence. To the violence, he sometimes contributed himself. The bluesman JD Short, possibly jealous of his skill, came after him with a knife. Townsend pulled out his .38 and shot him in the genitals. He also met Robert Johnson, by whom he was moderately impressed. "An average kind of guy. He really had some sweet, sweet sounds. But there was plenty of other people before and after him."

A pensive and articulate man, Townsend repeatedly found himself at odds with the times. While doing military service in the second world war, he was judged uncooperative and was brought before his commanding officer, who explained that he should be concentrating on fighting the enemy. "That's not my enemy," Townsend said. "People in St Louis right now, there's places they can't go and eat. There's places right here,off camp and in the camp, that I'm not allowed there. So if I was gonna fight my enemy, it would be you." He was discharged.

In the late 1950s, with little happening in the blues business, Townsend began working as a debt collector. He made enough to be unexcited about taking up music again, and turned down offers to play overseas, or even at local colleges. It was not until he retired in the early 1970s that he immersed himself in music again, often working with his wife Vernell, a fine singer. He made albums for half a dozen labels.

In 1985 he received a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, and 10 years later was inducted into the St Louis Walk of Fame. More recently, he performed in the Delta Blues Cartel with fellow blues veterans David "Honeyboy" Edwards, Robert Junior Lockwood and Homesick James, their combined ages making them the only 300-year-old blues band.

A few days before he died, Townsend went to Grafton, Wisconsin, to participate in another celebration of America's musical past, the opening of the Paramount Plaza Walk of Fame. Some 80 years ago, Paramount was a leading record label for African-American music, producing best-selling discs by Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson, as well as an extremely rare one by Townsend himself. He was too ill to perform, and his son Alonzo accepted the honour for him. He died in hospital a few hours later.

Henry Townsend, musician, born October 27 1909 in Shelby MI; died September 24 2006 in Mequon WI.

BLIND BLAKE DEATH CERTIFICATE FOUND, & MORE!

2011-09-24T02:43:00.000-07:00

One of the most mysterious major pre-war blues figures, Blind Blake, is beginning to give up his mysteries. Read more here.

MAMIE SMITH 65 YEARS GONE

2011-09-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

Mamie Smith died 65 years ago today, aged 63, in New York City.

Who was Mamie Smith?

She was the birth-mother of the blues. It was her 'Crazy Blues', recorded way back in 1920 - recorded when she was already 37 years old - that made the white-owned record labels to realise that there was a commercial market waiting out there to hear and buy black repertoire by black artists. How did 'Crazy Blues' achieve this? by selling a million copies and making Perry Bradford $53,000 in composer’s royalties (and the music publisher at least as much).

THE LAST OF THE PRE-WAR BLUESMEN HAS DIED

2011-08-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

With regret I note the death on Monday, at age 96, of David Honeyboy Edwards. I'm grateful to musician and blues enthusiast Andy Cohen for letting me reprint this summary of Edwards' significance:

I did not know until this minute that he was gone, but knew that he had congestive heart failure and gout, not a good combination. Know that he could still play, until his final hour. I am truly sorry for his family and for Michael Frank, who managed him and built a genuine career for him, for almost forty years.

Know also that he was the very last, truly 'pre-war' bluesman, ... recorded by Alan Lomax in 1941. So that's the end, folks.

He knew and played with Robert Johnson, and in fact was the one who reported that he had been poisoned by a jealous husband, and was witth him as he was on his knees howling like a dog in his final hours. He also knew and played with Big Joe Williams, Robert Jr Lockwood, Tommy McClennan, Pinetop Perkins, Mad Dog Lester, Kansas City Red, Aaron Moore, John Dee Holeman and Fris Holloway, Rev. Dan Smith, Johnny Shines, 'Shaky' Horton, many members of the Memphis Jug Band, Floyd Jones, Homesick James, Frank Frost, Sam Carr, Big Jack Johnson, and in fact, most of the people listed in the Blues Who's Who and the various Blues encyclopedias. Honeyboy's [book] 'The World Don't Owe Me Nothing' [includes] personal accounts of most everybody researched in [other] books. Goodbye, Honeyboy. With you gone, the last vestige of the formative period of blues is now a memory.

REMEMBERING WILLIE'S LAST DAY

2011-08-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

photo © Duncan Hume, 1992

Tomorrow (the 19th), at 4.25am local time, it will be exactly 52 years since Blind Willie McTell died, in the hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia. It's a long time ago - but his music lives on, and is perhaps more widely known and loved than ever before. RIP Willie.

PEG LEG'S ANNIVERSARY

2011-08-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the 45th anniversary of the death of Georgia's wonderful Peg Leg Howell. He died in Atlanta this day in 1966, aged 78. In my book Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, when discussing the music that lay behind Chuck Berry songs such as 'Too Much Monkey Business' (which lies behind Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', of course), I looked particularly at Peg Leg Howell's wonderful 'Coal Man Blues', recorded in Atlanta in 1926. It begins:

'Woke up this morning about five o’clock / Get me some eggs and a nice pork chop / Cheap cigar and a magazine / Had to run through the street to catch the 5.15!'

Peg Leg's real name was Joshua Barnes Howell, and he was born in 1888, so that he was one of those already almost 40 when he made his early recordings (he was Columbia’s first field-recorded rural singer). He was also one of those "rediscovered": he made one post-war LP, in 1963 - which included a revisit to ‘Coal Man Blues’ (The Legendary Peg Leg Howell, Atlanta, Testament Records T-2204, Chicago, 1964).

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BLACK RADIO IN THE US 1921-1955

2011-07-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

I've been made aware of a new hardback book Encyclopedia of Black Radio in the United States, 1921-1955 by Ryan Ellett.

This seems pricey at $95, and the subtext of the publisher's blurb may be that much of the book is just profiles of people like Nat King Cole, but on the other hand it may be of real interest, and yield important new info, about pre-war black radio (a subject only touched on, and then mostly re Atlanta, in Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes).

THE DEATH OF RILEY PUCKETT

2011-07-13T00:18:00.000-07:00

Riley Puckett died 65 years ago today.

Born in 1894 in Alpharetta, just north of what’s now Greater Atlanta, he and Gid Tanner (as I write in Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes)...

"would come together in what their advertisements called the 'Rip Roarin’, Snortin’, Burn ’Em Up String Band', Gid Tanner & His Skillet-Lickers. Riley Puckett would be their blind lead guitarist.

They would get on record before any downhome blues, and attract black listeners too. Puckett would also record an instrumental version of the traditional ‘John Henry’ under the title ‘The Darkey’s Wail’, prefacing this by saying: 'I’m gonna play for you this time a little piece which an old southern darkey I heard play, coming’ down Decatur Street the other day, ’cause his good girl done throwed him down.' It’s pleasant to imagine that the 'darkey' was Willie [McTell], and that these two blind guitarists passed each other on the Atlanta street. McTell was not 'old' but young when Puckett made his record in April 1927 - six months before McTell’s first session - but of course Riley Puckett wouldn’t have been able to see that.

(It’s also been imagined that these two would have met up at the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, and it’s true that both men attended it - but Puckett was there from the age of seven until he was about 12, which is to say 1901 to about 1906, whereas Willie didn’t reach the Macon Academy until the early 1920s. Even if they had attended concurrently, they wouldn’t have met: blacks and whites were in separate buildings, on different streets.)"

UPDATE ON McTELL PAPERS IN STATESBORO

2011-04-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

The Zach Henderson library at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro Georgia has posted an update about the McTell / Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes research papers they acquired from me last year - essentially saying that the catalogued list of the items contained in the papers is now available. This update is here.

TV INTERVIEW ABOUT WILLIE & MY BOOK

2011-04-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

I found out today, thanks to a comment sent to my Dylan blog, that an interview done for the local Fox TV station in Atlanta in October 2009 still exists and can be viewed as a clip. I've just put it up on my website here.

BLIND WILLIE IN IRELAND

2011-04-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that I'll be Searching For Blind Willie McTell at:

CASTLEBAR: LINENHALL ARTS CENTRE TOMORROW, APRIL 14:
Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, County Mayo: 8pm
tickets available on the door

GALWAY: DRUID LANE THEATRE, SATURDAY APRIL 16:
Druid Lane Theatre, off Quay Street, Galway City: 3pm
This event is part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Galway

The full list of my events in Ireland this week and next can be found on the Events page of my website www.michaelgray.net .

BACK IN STATESBORO GA

2011-03-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Statesboro Georgia. Arrived yesterday early evening. This afternoon the sky has finally brightened and around town is looking pretty, with the dogwoods all delicately in blossom.

I've walked the official McTell Trail for the first time - the trail for which I wrote the text on the signs they've erected. Part of this pink and white concrete walkway runs alongside the train tracks, passing the spot where Willie lived in a small wooden shack with his mother when they first arrived in Statesboro, when he was a child - the tracks he travelled along many times in later life.

As everywhere in the Georgia I know, once you turn your back on the malls and you're away from the interstate, the world Willie knew still lies all around you. In Statesboro it's more even than the sense I sometimes have that he might be sitting on a porch around the next corner. I feel him here anyway, shaping my view of the place, a presence, a personality, as if he's showing me round town. I hear his speaking voice in my head.

And as I'm typing this, I can hear that lonesome whistle blowin': that beautiful big acoustic sound, that pushes the molecules of the air around like big brass band instruments do.

Of course these days, revisiting Statesboro means that I'm following in my own old footsteps as well as Willie's. It's sobering to realise that I first went to Thomson GA in 1998 - twelve and a half years ago, and that it's a decade since I first came to Statesboro, and began to write Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes.

SISTER FLEETA MITCHELL

2011-03-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

Fleeta Mitchell at home at the piano

photo by folklorist Art Rosenbaum

I relay with great sadness news of the death of the Georgia-based religious singer and pianist Sister Fleeta Mitchell. As UGA's John Garst has written, she was 98 years old, so we knew it was coming but we're still the poorer for it. I was lucky enough to have interviewed her twice in the 2000s, at her tiny home outside Athens Georgia, for my book Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. Her story was absolutely invaluable, since she had attended the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon GA at the same time as Willie McTell. She had been a child, he a young man. Amazing to be able to be told first hand in the 21st Century the details of life for Willie and his fellow-pupils in a segregated school in the early1920s. And so much detail: the names of the cook, the principal and two music teachers; the role Willie played in a school production of Little Red Riding-Hood; the daily timetable; what day was washing day; the saving grace of the spirituals they were introduced to by the music tutors. Brilliant stuff. She had a strong voice and a detailed recall, too, and I was sure she'd reach 100, despite a long, hard early life filled with family tragedy.

And now she's gone. Her funeral was held on Saturday. There's a decent article about her here.

NEW WEBSITE LAUNCHED TODAY

2011-03-17T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to say that today has seen the launch of my website, www.michaelgray.net.

It won't replace this blog or my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia blog - though both can now be reached via the new site as well as by the traditional routes - but the aim of the website is to offer a solid body of material and information, actively maintained & developed; a way for people to contact me without having to log in to a blog to send a "Comment"; and, since my work is my living, a clear, consistent way of being able to offer my work for sale without having to post recurrent blogs about these things.

As ever, your views and suggestions are welcome.

CHANGE OF DETAILS FOR McTELL TALK

2011-03-14T08:42:00.000-07:00

There is a change of time, and there are added venue & price details, for my event Searching for Blind Willie McTell at the Cúirt International Literature Festival in Galway, Ireland on April 16th:

TIME: 3pm
VENUE: The Druid Theatre, off Quay Street, Galway City
PRICE: €8 (€6 concessions)

2011-03-13T11:32:00.000-07:00

This is a poster for the event on March 25. It doesn't actually say so but the venue is in Atlanta. This is of course hinted by the way that they claim Willie as "an Atlanta legend"!

EXTRA BLIND WILLIE DATE, ATLANTA MARCH 25

2011-03-10T12:11:00.000-08:00

I've been able to add a new Searching For Blind Willie McTell date to my forthcoming US tour. This will be at 7pm on Friday March 25th at City Church Eastside, Stove Works, 112 Krog Street NE, Suite 5, Atlanta GA 30307. I'll be blogposting the specially-designed poster for this gig as soon as they've sent me a jpg, but for now let me just add that this event features music from Mark Miller's band as well as my own audio-visually illustrated talk, and details are up online at www.markmiller.cc.

MY EVENT IN WILLIE'S HOME TOWN, STATESBORO GEORGIA

2011-03-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

Delighted to be coming back to Statesboro GA around the end of this month, for an event that has now shaped up like this:

This poster may suggest that we'll be focussing on white country music, but I can promise we'll be looking at, and listening to, the blues just as much.

DEATH OF BLIND BOY FULLER

2011-02-12T05:42:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of the death of Blind Boy Fuller (Fulton Allen) in Durham, North Carolina at the age of 33. Here is the entry I give this late great performer in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Fuller, Blind Boy [1907 - 1941]

Fulton Allen was probably born on July 10, 1907, and certainly at Wadesboro, North Carolina. He was not born blind but his eyesight began to fail by the age of 20 when, already married to a 14-year-old bride, he moved to the important tobacco-trade town of Winston-Salem. He was a coalyard labourer until forced to give up this job, after which he resorted to musicianship. By 1928 he had gone wholly blind and had begun to apply himself seriously to the guitar, which he had not begun to play till around 1925. (He played a big, steel-bodied National guitar.) He and his wife moved to Durham in 1929, playing to workers coming off shift in all the tobacco towns up and down Highway 70 and around Winston-Salem; he remained in penury, though in the end he became the South-East’s best-selling and most prolific recording artist of the 1930s, characterised not by originality of material but by an ear for a catchy song, a deft finger-picking style and straightforward vocals.

He recorded only between 1935 and 1940, beginning with a New York City solo session on July 23, 1935 that included an attractive re-write of ‘Sittin’ On Top of the World’, named ‘I’m Climbin’ On Top of the Hill’; two days later he was accompanied by Blind Gary Davis and Bull City Red and their three-song session included a title The Band would later borrow, ‘Rag, Mama, Rag’. Next day came a further solo session before he returned to North Carolina. In 1936 he went back to New York for a longer two-day solo session (which included a version of ‘Mama Let Me Lay It On You’, and in 1937 he made the journey no less than four times for further multi-day sessions, the last of these in freezing mid-December. He returned once again in April 1938 but that October was able to record more conveniently in Columbia, South Carolina, with Sonny Terry and Bull City Red; in July 1939 they reconvened in Memphis but were back in New York on March 5, 6 and 7 for sessions that began with a take of what has become one of Fuller’s signature songs, ‘Step It Up and Go', with Bull City Red on washboard but Sonny Terry not playing - though this song had already enjoyed a complex history, and was recorded by others from 1932 onwards.

Fuller's final, long session, again with the same two accompanists, augmented by Brownie McGhee on at least one track (‘Precious Lord’, one of several issued as by Brother George and His Sanctified Singers, a name often used for religious sides by McGhee & Red), took place in New York on June 19, 1940. Twelve numbers were recorded. A month later he was in hospital and on 13 February, 1941 he died in considerable pain, back in Durham, from restriction of the urethra and a bladder infection. He was 33 years old.

Such was his influence and popularity that Brownie McGhee not only recorded as ‘Blind Boy Fuller No.2’ but made a record titled ‘Death of Blind Boy Fuller’. In the 1960s-70s Fuller became a subject of great interest to those blues researchers who liked the Piedmont school (and liked to debate whether there was such a thing), as opposed to those more insistent voices who dismissed Fuller, Blind Willie McTell and others from the South-East as ‘lightweight’ and would only countenance the heavier, fiercer blues of the Mississippi Delta. It was the detailed research by one of the Piedmont-style enthusiasts, Briton Bruce Bastin, that overturned the myth that Fuller had been blinded by a girlfriend (as still relayed in Paul Oliver’s classic work The Story Of The Blues as late as 1969). Fuller and McTell - that other great performer who followed the tobacco season trail in the southeastern states - listened to each other’s work. Fuller’s ‘Log Cabin Blues’ of 1935 is virtually a cover of McTell’s 1929 ‘Come On Around To My House Mama’.

‘Midnight Special’, the Leadbelly song recorded by Harry Belafonte with Bob Dylan as harmonica accompanist in the early 1960s, had been, in between times, a key item in Blind Boy Fuller’s repertoire. In 1937 Fuller recorded ‘Weeping Willow’ (one of those songs that includes the lovely commonstock couplet ‘I lay down last night, tried to take my rest / My mind got to ramblin’ like the wild geese in the west’), which Dylan performed at the Supper Club in New York in 1993. Fuller’s ‘Stealing Bo-Hog’ is one of the cluster of songs that pre-figures Dylan’s opening line of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ (and Little Richard’s ‘Keep A-Knockin’’) with its ‘Say you get away from my window, don’t knock at my door’; his ‘Pistol Snapper Blues’, from 1938, is one of those to invoke that character the monkey man, which Dylan pairs with ‘Tweeter’ in the title of a Travelin’ Wilburys song; and Fuller’s ‘Piccolo Rag’ (from the same 1938 session) is one of the many blues using ‘great big legs’ as a term of approbation - in Fuller’s case ‘Got great big legs and a little bitty feet’ - which gets reprocessed by Dylan into the ‘great big hind legs’ on his ‘New Pony’, on 1978’s Street Legal.

In 1992 Dylan recorded and released his own version of Fuller’s ‘Step It Up and Go’ on the Good As I Been To You album. It was a song that had rapidly become as much a hillbilly property as a blues dance number: it was performed by nearly every bluesman south of Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s and became a standard repertoire item - one of those test numbers, like ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ - that every self-respecting hillbilly blues guitarist had to be able to play. To look at the history of this comparatively recent song is to encounter yet again the extraordinary commonality of American grass-roots music, to see how shared a musical heritage there so often was between, as Tony Russell’s book has it, Blacks Whites And Blues.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the Everly Brothers recorded ‘Step It Up & Go’, and to look at their slim interweaving within the story is to see a representative illustration of how this music passes to and fro. Their ‘Step It Up & Go’ isn’t on the album Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, but Ike Everly would have been their source. Ike had been taught guitar by Arnold Schultz, a black musician who also taught the Monroe Brothers; in turn Ike taught the 14-year-old Merle Travis thumb-pick style - a style Travis developed and showcased on ‘Step It Up & Go’.

The song was also in the repertoire of populist cowboy outfit the Maddox Brothers And Rose, the pre-rockabilly artist Harmonica Frank Floyd (a figure championed by Greil Marcus in Mystery Train) and John Hammond Jr., who includes it on his album Frogs For Snakes. It’s of a type that crops up over and over again. The building blocks of the lyric are commonstock, in some cases shared with those in that other frisky classic of inconsequence, Tampa Red’s ‘It’s Tight Like That’, which, as remembered by Eugene Powell, for instance (a 1930s Bluebird recording artist and veteran blues musician interviewed in Alan Lomax’s The Land Where The Blues Began), includes ‘Had a little dog, his name was Ball / Gave him a little taste and he want it all’, which Dylan puts in as the fourth stanza of ‘Step It Up & Go’: ‘Got a little girl, her name is Ball / Give a little bit, she took it all.

At the same time we find the melody of ‘Step It Up & Go’ used everywhere from the Kansas City jazz-tinged boogie pianist-singer Julia Lee’s 1946 ‘Gimme Watcha Got’ to Elvis Presley’s 1958 New Orleans pastiche ‘Hard Headed Woman’. Another Blind Boy Fuller song, ‘You’ve Got Something There’, and Blind Willie McTell’s ‘Warm It Up To Me’ are more or less the same, as is the Memphis Jug Band’s ‘Bottle It Up And Go’ (cut in 1932 and 1934) and Tommy McClennan’s 1939 ‘Bottle It Up And Go’, later recorded by John Lee Hooker as ‘Bundle Up And Go’, ‘Shake It Up And Go’ and ‘Bottle Up And Go’. Under that last title, it was also recorded in the late 1950s by Snooks Eaglin (at that time a street musician). Then there’s ‘Got The Bottle Up And Gone’, a debut-session track by Sonny Boy Williamson I from 1937, and ‘Touch It Up And Go’, a track by Fuller associate Sonny Terry & Jordan Webb, cut in New York a year after Fuller’s death. ‘Step It Up & Go’ must owe its predominance to having the most accessible and familiar title. Like so many figures of speech, indeed like so much of the poetry of the blues, ‘step it up and go’ crossed over to the world of dancing from the world of work. It was what people said to their mules and horses. They still do, though it’s now more common as an exhortation to the tourist trade horses drawing carriages in New Orleans than in the fields, where tractors now do the ploughing.

Bob Dylan’s version is unambitious, as befits someone who understands the tradition in which the song sits. Conscious that a bravura performance is for the young and brash, and that there’s a hundred voices capable of matching up to what is a simple dance number, Dylan settles quite rightly for something egolessly unexceptional. This is intelligent good-time, on which his robust and clumsy guitar-work is countered by an alert, true-to-the-genre vocal. As John Wesley Harding (aka WES STACE) notes, ‘He screws up the riff at the end…so he goes through the whole sequence again, just for the hell of it.’ It’s true.

[Blind Boy Fuller: ‘Weeping Willow’, NY, 14 Jul 1937, Blind Boy Fuller On Down – Vol. 1, Saydisc SDR143, Badminton UK, c.1967; ‘Stealing Bo-Hog’, NY, 7 Sep 1937, & ‘Pistol Snapper Blues’, NY, 5 Apr 1938, Blind Boy Fuller with Sonny Terry and Bull City Red, Blues Classics BC-11, Berkeley, 1966; ‘You’ve Got Something There’, Memphis, 12 Jul 1939, CD-reissued Blind Boy Fuller: East Coast Piedmont Style, Columbia Roots n’Blues 467923, NYC, 1991 (insert-notes by Bruce Bastin), a‘Log Cabin Blues’, NY, 26 Jul 1935 (a previously-unreleased take) but excluding ‘Step It Up & Go’. representative sample of Fuller’s work, incl.

Bob Dylan: ‘Weeping Willow’, NY, 17 Nov 1993, unreleased. Everly Brothers: ‘Step It Up & Go’, Nashville, autumn 1961, Instant Party, Warner Brothers W (WS) 1430, US, 1962; Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, Nashville, Aug 1958, Cadence CLP 3016, NY, 1958 (reissued as Folksongs By The Everly Brothers, Cadence CLP 3059 / CLP 23059, NY, 1962; CD-reissued on Ace CDCHM 75, UK, 1990). Merle Travis: ‘Step It Up & Go’, nia, Walking The Strings, Capitol nia. (Travis used the refrain of another Fuller song, 1935’s ‘Ain’t It A Cryin’ Shame?’, in his 1946 radio broadcasts.) Maddox Brothers And Rose: ‘Step It Up And Go’, nia, Maddox Brothers And Rose 1946-1951 Vol. 2 (along with ‘Dark As The Dungeon’, nia), Arhoolie 5017, El Cerrito CA, 1976. Harmonica Frank: ‘Step It Up & Go’, The Great Original Recordings of Harmonica Frank Lloyd 1951-1958, Puritan 3003, Evanston IL, 1973. John Hammond Jr: Frogs For Snakes, nia, Rounder nia, Somerville, MA, nia. Julia Lee & Her Boyfriends: ‘Gimme Watcha Got’, LA, Sep 1946, reissued Tonight’s The Night, Charly CRB 1039, UK, 1982. Elvis Presley: ‘Hard Headed Woman’ (composed Claude Demetrius, whose ‘Mean Woman Blues’ also uses the same tune), Hollywood, 15 Jan 1958, King Creole, RCA LPM 1884, NY, 1958. Blind Willie McTell: ‘Warm It Up To Me’, NY, 14 Sep 1933.

Blind Willie McTell: ‘Come On Around To My House Mama’, Atlanta, 30 Oct 1929, King of the Georgia Blues Singers: Blind Willie McTell, Roots RL-324, Vienna, 1968.) The Memphis Jug Band (billed the first time around as Picaninny Jug Band, and then as by Charlie Burse With Memphis Jug Band): ‘Bottle It Up And Go’, Richmond IN, 3 Aug 1932 & Chicago, 7 Nov 1934, both CD-reissued Memphis Jug Band Complete Recorded Works 1932-1934, RST Blues Documents BDCD-6002, Vienna, nia. Tommy McClennan: ‘Bottle It Up And Go’, Chicago, 22 Nov 1939, CD-reissued Travelin’ Highway Man, Travelin’ Man TM CD-06, nia. John Lee Hooker: ‘Bundle Up And Go’, Chicago 10 Jun 1958, unissued, & Detroit, Apr 1959, The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker, Riverside LP 838, c.1960; ‘Shake It Up And Go’, Culver City CA, c.1959, John Lee Hooker's Detroit, United Artists 3LP 127, US, 1973; ‘Bottle Up And Go’, Chicago, 1963, On Campus, VJ LP 1066, 1963, & NY, 23 Nov 1965, It Serves You Right to Suffer, Impulse LP 9103, nia. Snooks Eaglin: ‘Bottle Up And Go’, New Orleans, 1959, Country Boy In New Orleans, Arhoolie LP 2014, El Cerrito CA, nia, CD-reissued Arhoolie CD348, El Cerrito, c.1990. Sonny Boy Williamson I: ‘Got The Bottle Up And Gone’, Aurora IL, 5 May 1937, Sonny Boy Williamson, RCA 75.722 (Treasury of Jazz EP no.22), Paris, 1963, CD-reissued Sonny Boy Williamson Complete Recorded Works, Volume 1 (1937-1938), Document DOCD-5055, Vienna, nd.. Sonny Terry & Jordan Webb: ‘Touch It Up And Go’, NY, 23 Oct 1941.

Alan Lomax, The Land Where The Blues Began, London; Methuen edn, p. 374. John Wesley Harding: ‘Good As He’s Been To Us’, Stereofile, US, Feb 1993.]

UNCLE ART SATHERLEY

2011-02-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Feb 10th, was the 25th anniversary of the death of Art Satherley, an Englishman who became one of Blind Willie McTell's record producers. He died in Fountain Valley, California, at the grand age of 96. He was obviously important, and widely loved, in country music, but he was active in "race records" too. As I write in Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes:

"The producer of the 1933 McTell-Weaver-Moss recording sessions was the 43-year old Arthur Edward Satherley, who had grown up in Bristol, in the west of England, and arrived in the States in 1913 hoping to see a land full of cowboys and indians. Finding himself in Milwaukee with disappointingly few of either type in sight, he had drifted into the record business in 1918 and enjoyed a long and agreeable career within it. At the beginning of the 1930s, he was living in a very mixed, well-to-do immigrant neighborhood on West 140th Street in New York City, and commuting downtown to produce and vet talent for the newly-formed American Record Company, ARC. It was here that Willie McTell and friends recorded for this Englishman in September 1933."

DEATH OF ROBERT TILLING

2011-01-27T03:02:00.000-08:00

Very sorry to learn this morning of the death of Robert Tilling, whose work as an artist was much admired but whom I knew, if only briefly, through his engagement with music. He was the biographer of, but also a pupil and friend of, the Rev. Gary Davis, and thanks to his involvement in the arts in Jersey he invited me to do a gig at the arts centre in St.Helier in 2007 - and, very generously, to have Sarah and me to stay at his house - a house with walls splendidly crowded with paintings, prints, lithographs and more by an amazing array of people. Robert and his wife Thelma were warm & hospitable hosts to us.

The photograph (Thelma, Bob & me) was taken during our visit.

For more information, including brief video footage, see http://tinyurl.com/5sajh9o

UPDATED UPDATE ON MICHAEL GRAY SPRING TOUR

2011-01-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

Since the original version of this post, there's been a change of policy at Liverpool University, where instead of having to reserve a place, you are now simply asked to come in good time on the day.

This is also the policy at the US colleges & universities, where with one exception (the McTell talk in Athens GA) these offer free admission to the public as well as to college people, so these listings have been amended too.

Various start-times, changes of venue room and so on have also been newly added in since the other day.

Before too long I should still be able to post some information about when tickets for each of the Irish dates go on sale. Meanwhile all the earlier dates - except at the bookshop in New Jersey - are at colleges or universities.

The slightly less new news is that dates have been added in Connecticut (April 4) and in County Wicklow, Ireland (April 17), and I'm pleased to say that the previously undecided Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, Ireland, has now decided to choose Searching For Blind Willie McTell as its topic.

Details:

Thu Feb 17, 5pm
Liverpool University
Sherrington Building Lecture Theatre 1, Ashton Street, L'pool L69 3GE
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Tues Feb 22, 11am
West Valley College, Saratoga CA
1400 Fruitvale Avenue, Saratoga CA
free admission to all: be early!
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Wed Feb 23, 7pm
University of the Pacific, Stockton CA
Janet Leigh Theatre, off Atchley Way/Stagg Way
3601 Pacific Avenue, Stockton CA
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Thu Feb 24, tba
Stanford University
Building 260, Room 113,
450 Serra Mall, Stanford CA
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Thu Mar 24, 5pm
New College, University of Alabama
Gorgas Library Room 205, Campus, Tuscaloosa AL
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Tue Mar 29, tba
Georgia Southern University
1400 Southern Drive, Statesboro 30460
tickets will go on sale; details to come
Compressed Version of a Winterlude Weekend, with Dinner

Wed Mar 30, 4pm
University of Georgia
101 Miller Learning Center, UGA, Athens GA 30602
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Thu Mar 31, 3.30pm
University of Georgia
247 Miller Learning Center, UGA, Athens GA 30602
restricted admission
Searching for Blind Willie McTell

Sun Apr 3, 2pm
Nighthawk Books, Highland Park NJ
212 Raritan Ave., Highland Park NJ 08904
free admission but donation requested
Bob Dylan & Beyond: Geniuses of American Music

Mon Apr 4, 4.30pm
Connecticut College
English Dept., 270 Mohegan Ave., New London CT 06320
free admission to all: be early!
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Wed Apr 6, 6.30pm
New School, NYC
5th Floor, Room 510, 66 W. 12th St., NY NY 10011
free admission to all: be early!
Searching for Blind Willie McTell

Sat Apr 9, 8pm
Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Ireland
Main St, Newbridge, Co. Kildare
Box Office: boxoffice@riverbank.ie
or buy online at www.riverbank.ie or phone 045 448327
ticket price tba; tickets will go on sale mid-March
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Tues Apr 12, tba
Passionfruit Theatre, Athlone
9 Northgate, Athlone, Co. Westmeath
Box Office: 086 333 8547 or www.passionfruittheatre.com
tickets: €10
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Wed Apr 13, tba
Dock Arts Centre, Carrick-on-Shannon
St. George's Terrace, Carrick, Co. Leitrim
Box Office: info@thedock.ie or phone 071 96 50828
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Thu Apr 14, 8pm
Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar
Linenhall St., Castlebar, Co. Mayo
Box Office: linenhall@anu.ie or 094 90 23733
tickets €10, on sale end of February
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Fri Apr 15, tba
Locke Bar, Limerick
The Loft at The Locke Bar, 3 Georges Quay, Limerick
Box Office: 085 208 5737
tickets: €12 (concessions €10)
Love Me Slender: The Genius of Early Elvis

Sat Apr 16, 1pm
Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Galway
All enquiries: dani@galwayartscentre.ie
ticket price tba; tickets go on sale March 1
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Sun Apr 17, 8pm
Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
Main St., Bray, Co. Wicklow
Box Office: 01 272 4030 or
http://mermaid.ticketsolve.com/performances/all_shows
tickets €12; on sale now
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Wed Apr 20, 7pm
Cork World Book Festival
Central Library, Grand Parade, Cork
enquiries/tickets: 021 492 4900 or
libraries@corkcity.ie or www.corklibraries.ie
Love Me Slender: The Genius of Early Elvis

Thu Apr 21, 8.30pm
Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda
Stockwell St., Drogheda, Co. Louth
Box Office: in person or online at www.droicheadartscentre.com/booking
or by phone 041 983 3946
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

RE-WRITING HISTORY: NOW NO-ONE SMOKED

2011-01-12T02:18:00.001-08:00

As far as we know, Blind Willie McTell didn't smoke, but, er, here's Robert Johnson then and now. And Winston Churchill never smoked a cigar, apparently. See this fascinating stuff on the Iconic Photos blog.

WILLIE McTELL ON KINDLE

2010-12-29T06:27:00.000-08:00

Just to say that if you go to the RECOMMENDED BOOKS/CDs section (somewhere down on the right hand side) you'll find two Amazon ads for Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, one with a price on and one without. Clicking on the latter should take you to the e-book version (which is about $13, I believe) from US publisher Chicago Review Press.

MICHAEL GRAY SPRING TOUR UPDATE

2010-12-11T04:25:00.000-08:00

Some new dates have been confirmed since my earlier post, and the list now looks like this:

Thu Feb 17, 5pm
Liverpool University School of the Arts
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Tue Feb 22, tba
Saratoga CA: West Valley College
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Wed Feb 23, 7pm
Stockton CA: University of the Pacific, Janet Leigh Theatre
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Thu Feb 24, tba
Stanford CA: Stanford University English Department
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Thu Mar 24, tba
Tuscaloosa AL: University of Alabama New College
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Tue Mar 29, tba
Georgia Southern University
Bob Dylan Discussion + Dinner

Wed Mar 30, 4pm
Athens GA: University of Georgia
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Thu Mar 31, 3.30pm
Athens GA: University of Georgia
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Sun April 3, 2pm
Highland Park NJ: Nighthawk Books
Bob Dylan & Beyond: A Journey into Geniuses of American Music

Mon April 4, 4.30pm
New London, CT: Connecticut College English Dept.
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Wed April 6, 6.30pm
NYC: The New School
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Sat April 9, tba
Newbridge, Ireland: Riverbank Arts Centre
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Tues April 12, tba
Athlone, Ireland: Passionfruit Theatre
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Wed April 13, tba
Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland: The Dock Arts Centre
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Thu April 14, tba
Castlebar, Ireland: Linenhall Arts Centre
topic not yet selected

Fri April 15, tba
Limerick, Ireland: The Loft, The Locke Bar
Love Me Slender: The Genius Of Early Elvis

Sat April 16, 1pm
Galway, Ireland: Cúirt International Festival of Literature
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

Sun April 17, tba
Bray, Ireland: Mermaid Arts Centre
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

Wed April 20, 7pm
Cork, Ireland: Cork World Book Festival
Love Me Slender: The Genius Of Early Elvis

Thu April 21, 8.30pm
Drogheda, Ireland: Droichead Arts Centre
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

Thu-Sat May 19-21, tba
Vienna: Bob Dylan Conference
How did Bob Dylan’s version of Americanness impact 1960s’ British culture?

AUTHOR'S SPRING TOUR 2011

2010-11-25T03:34:00.000-08:00

I'm building a tour of speaking engagements for next spring. The list dates is growing all the time, so this is the up-to-date but unfinished list of events already clinched. I'll be posting updates as they come in.

As you'll see, there are three different topics, and by no means always centred upon Blind Willie McTell, but they are all centrally concerned with the blues:

FEB 17 Liverpool University School of the Arts, England
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

MAR 24 University of Alabama New College, Tuscaloosa AL
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

MAR 30 University of Georgia, Athens GA
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

MAR 31 University of Georgia, Athens GA
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

APR 6 The New School, New York City NY
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

APR 9 Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Ireland
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

APR 12 Passionfruit Theatre, Athlone, Ireland
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

APR 13 The Dock Arts Centre, Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

APR 14 Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Ireland
topic not yet decided

APR 15 The Loft, The Locke Bar, Limerick, Ireland
Love Me Slender: the Genius of Early Elvis

APR 16 Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Galway, Ireland
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

APR 20 Cork World Book Fair, Cork, Ireland
Love Me Slender: the Genius of Early Elvis

APR 21 Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Ireland
Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues

PRE-SOUTHERN HISTORY OF 'AKSED'

2010-11-16T03:20:00.000-08:00

In London, England, they think of the black habit of saying "aksed" instead of "asked" as Black London Idiom. In fact, as revealed in the raved-about exhibition Evolving English at the British Library until April 6 2011, this idiom originated in south-west England - the rural counties of Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.

It was only later that, as Peter Watts' put it in a review of the exhibition on his blog, it "found its way to the Southern US states and the Caribbean through emigration, before returning to London via the West Indian diaspora."

FORTHCOMING BIOGRAPHY OF SON HOUSE

2010-11-05T03:42:00.000-07:00

Coming from Oxford University Press in the States next June - and this is surely tantalising news for all of us - is Preachin' The Blues: The Life and Times of Son House by Daniel Beaumont. Read about it here.

BLIND WILLIE IN THOMSON GA 2009

2010-10-31T03:33:00.001-07:00

photo by Teddy Jackson, October 2009

WILENTZ AND WILLIE

2010-10-18T02:12:00.000-07:00

As noted in an earlier post, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz's recent, and enviably well publicised, book Bob Dylan in America has a chapter on Blind Willie McTell. He was interviewed recently for the UK-based music magazine Word, and, asked about that chapter, he replied: "I was helped a lot by a wonderful biography by Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes."

THE ARSC AWARDS: McTELL GETS A MERIT

2010-10-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to report that, albeit two months late, the 2010 ARSC Awards have been announced, and in the Blues Etc category, while I wasn't the winner, I was awarded one of the two Certificates of Merit, for Hand Me My Travlein' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell.

The press release, received this morning, begins like this:

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections is pleased to announce the winners of the 2010 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research. Begun in 1991, the awards are presented to authors and publishers of books, articles, liner notes, and monographs, to recognize outstanding published research in the field of recorded sound. In giving these awards, ARSC recognizes outstanding contributions, encourages high standards, and promotes awareness of superior works. Two awards may presented annually in each category—one for best history and one for best discography. Certificates of Merit are presented to runners-up of exceptionally high quality. The 2010 Awards for Excellence honor works published in 2009.

BEST RESEARCH in RECORDED BLUES, RHYTHM & BLUES, or SOUL MUSIC
Best Discography:
Chuck Berry International Directory, by Morten Reff (Music Mentor)

Certificates of Merit:
Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues, by William Ferris (University of North Carolina Press)
Hand Me Down My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, by Michael Gray (Chicago Review Press).

This would be more pleasing if they had troubled to get the name of my book right.

WINTERLUDE, WINTERLUDE...

2010-09-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

For those whose musical taste goes beyond the blues and extents to the work of Bob Dylan:

Following our Winterludes, Summer Days and Slowly Into Autumn Weekends, we're pleased to announce a range of New Winterlude Weekends for this coming November.

Arrive on a Friday, stay till the Sunday and enjoy a winterlude of great food and Bob Dylan Discussion here at our house in southwest France, 40-odd miles from the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. The house, an 1870s maison bourgeois, lies on the edge of a small village in deep countryside but within easy access of airports and train stations.

These weekend breaks are limited to a maximum of six guests each time. Meals, with good local wines, are provided by Sarah and taken communally. We have two double rooms and one twin. Every guest bedroom is en suite.

One of the key discussion topics is Dylan & the Blues.

See the New Winterlude Weekends webpage for full details. Act now!

THE PROFESSOR, THE NOVELIST-REVIEWER & McTELL

2010-09-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

It was dispiriting to read in UK broadsheet The Observer last Sunday, in a generally negative review of Professor Sean Wilentz’s new book Bob Dylan In America by Geoff Dyer - here - that in “the chapter on Blind Willie McTell…Wilentz has found out everything you could want to know about the singer on whom Dylan based his greatest song of the past 30 years.”

In fact Wilentz’s book credits me quite properly (also citing Sam Charters’ The Country Blues, Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning, and John Lomax’s The Last Cavalier) and makes quite clear that he’s relying on the work of other writers and has done no research of his own on McTell.

But there’s novelist and reviewer Geoff Dyer effectively denying to the Observer's nation-wide readers the existence of my years of research and my resultant book Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes - despite its James Tait Black shortlisting just two years ago and its terrific reviews - because he hasn’t troubled to read any of Wilentz’s notes or acknowledgments.

Now this might just be too bad for me but an understandable carelessness on a reviewer’s part - except that when Geoff Dyer is the writer, he doesn’t find even small mistakes forgiveable at all.

When Peter Schjeldahl, art critic of the New Yorker, made an error in reviewing Dyer’s novel Jeff in Venice - Schjeldahl mistook 2005 for 2003 - Dyer published a whole screed of abusive protest on Saatchi Online Magazine. This is part of his diatribe:

“I thought I’d take the opportunity to respond to the remarkable ‘reading’ of the Venice part by Peter Schjeldahl ‘or (to quote Philip Larkin on Hugh MacDiarmid) however the cunt spells his name.’ … as I point out in the notes at the end of the book – ‘2003 was the scorcher.’ 2005 was actually quite mild; it even rained a bit. Now, obviously, what’s at stake at this point is not Schjeldahl’s opinion of the book but something far more elementary: his fitness to proceed, his mental health. If he can’t get a simple thing like that right how can we have confidence in anything else he says? Or to put it more simply, just how stupid can a fellow be?”

Indeed.

WILLIE AT THE SHETLAND FESTIVAL SEPT 4

2010-08-20T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to confirm that I shall be giving a new version of my talk In Search of Blind Willie McTell: A Biographer's Adventures in Georgia as part of the arts and music festivals being held in Lerwick, Shetland Isles, Scotland, over the first weekend in September. My McTell talk, which includes vintage and recent photographs plus audio recordings, will be in Room 16 at Islesburgh Community Centre, Lerwick, Shetland ZE1 0EQ,‎ from 4.45pm till 6pm on Saturday September 4. Tickets £5 and £3.50 are on sale now from Shetland Box Office, telephone from within the UK = 01595 745 555; from outside the UK it's +44 1595 745 555.

The following evening, from 5.15pm, I'll be giving a new version of my talk Bob Dylan & The Poetry of the Blues, with rare footage and loud recorded music. Same venue, same details.

Lerwick is on virtually the same latitude as Bergen, and further north than Oslo. It is 125 miles northeast of the northernmost tip of mainland Scotland.

AIN'T IT GRAND: WILLIE'S GOSPEL SONGS

2010-08-10T03:53:00.000-07:00

I've been playing a new CD by Mark Miller, Ain't It Grand: The Gospel Songs of Blind Willie McTell, and I can recommend it. All the tracks were recorded in a church, without overdubs, and there's some excellent playing on it. This is never overdone, and the vocals, similarly, are vibrant with feeling yet free of the mannered or the overwrought. Mark Miller makes no attempt to sound like McTell, yet honours the spirit of the songs throughout. (I shall never like the title song, though at least here we don't have Kate McTell's flat metallic chanting to wade through.) I rarely like McTell covers, but in my opinion this is a fine and honourable album. It's also beautifully packaged.

For more info, see here.

THE BLUES, THE BIBLE & BOB DYLAN

2010-06-04T05:40:00.001-07:00

NEWS: Sarah and I are now offering a new group of just three themed Discussion Weekend Breaks at our house in Southwest France this coming September, for those whose interests include Bob Dylan as well as the blues and Blind Willie McTell.

The weekends run from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning, and include terrific food, good local wines, en suite accommodation and the evening discussions.

There are specific main discussion topics fixed for each weekend, and the first one is going to focus on Dylan's extraordinary use of the blues and the Bible.

Here are the September dates available, and the main themes to be explored:

FRIDAY 10 to SUNDAY 12 - DYLAN, THE BLUES & THE BIBLE

FRIDAY 17 to SUNDAY 19 - DYLAN & THE ROMANTIC POETS

FRIDAY 24 to SUNDAY 26 - DYLAN, PLAGIARISM & BOOTLEGS

Called Slowly Into Autumn (a phrase from Dylan's song 'Idiot Wind' on his classic Blood On The Tracks album), these weekends should be taking place in beautiful weather over here. We live in deep countryside about 45 miles from the Pyrenees and the Spanish border.

Full details, including testimonials from those who've been, are here.

NOMINATED FOR MUSIC RESEARCH AWARD

2010-05-29T04:29:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to say that the American hardback edition of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes has been nominated as a finalist for this year's Association for Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, in the category Best Historical Research in Blues / Gospel / Hip-hop / R&B.

Though there are only four other finalists in this category, and it's an honour to be alongside them, I fear I'm unlikely to win, given that three of the others are blues-research heavyweight Steven Calt; associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, author and documentary film-maker William Ferris; and the great pioneering blues scholar Paul Oliver.

Winners will be announced in August 2010 and awards presented at a ceremony in May 2011 during ARSC’s annual conference.

A DEATH AND A LIFE: FRED & HONEYBOY

2010-04-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, April 28, marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Fred Mendelsohn of Regal Records, for which Blind Willie made his last studio recordings - there are 20 extant tracks - in May 1950. Fred died in Palm Beach County, Florida, at age 82.

Happily, though, there is one important blues figure still alive who was around in the days of Robert Johnson and co. Here's a report from Clarksdale Mississippi, by Andy Cohen, posted on the Yahoo pre-war discussion group just nine days ago, which I quote with his permission:

The Juke Joint Festival is going on as I write... Honeyboy [Edwards] played tonight at Sarah's (recently revitalized) Kitchen, alongwith several other bands. The place was packed to the gills. It's a smallplace, but there must have been a hundred people in there. Heck, you couldn't find a parking space anywhere in town unless you tailed someone who was in the process of pulling out. The whole town was packed... for many businesses, the Juke Joint Festival [brings] in more money than they [make] the rest of the year, the same as Christmas does for Macy's.

In any case, Honeyboy was great. He's ninety five years old, the last living recorded prewar bluesman, for those of you who don't know, and the last person to see Robert Johnson alive. As you might expect, he opened with a rousing version of 'Dust My Broom', and went on as fluently as any nonagenarian I ever heard, for forty five minutes, with barely a breath. I think he's going to outlive all of us.

David Honeyboy Edwards wrote a powerful autobiography, "The World Don't Owe Me Nothing", and in 2002 gave a substantial interview for Livewire, still available online at www.concertlivewire.com/interviews/honeyboy.htm. The photo used above comes from this source. As far as I can see, no photographer is credited.

MARGIE HENDRIX WAS FROM STATESBORO?!

2010-03-13T03:29:00.000-08:00

Maybe everyone knows this but me, but despite researching in Statesboro GA many times for my McTell book (and being there again just last October) no-one has ever mentioned to me that Ray Charles' leading Raelette, Margie Hendricks / Hendrix was born in Statesboro. But apparently so: and today is the 75th anniversary of her birth. (Her birthdate is sometimes given incorrectly as March 3, 1939: it's March 13, 1935.) Ms Hendrix had been one of the three original members of the Cookies, before joinging Ray Charles' backing group. She died in 1973. She is portrayed with deserved prominence in the recording-studio scenes in the biopic Ray.

CHARLIE LINCOLN 110

2010-03-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of another Georgian 12-string guitarist, Charlie Lincoln. He was born in Lithonia, Georgia, east of Atlanta, exactly two and a half years before his brother Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob).

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS No.9: AT WILLIE'S GRAVE

2010-03-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

Photo by Teddy Jackson, 2009.

The author revisiting Blind Willie McTell's grave at Jones Grove Baptist Church, Happy Valley, Thomson GA last October, during his tour of talks following the previous month's publication of the American hardback of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes.

(In fact, as the book establishes, McTell was not born on May 5 1901 but on an unknown date between April 1903 and March 1904, though very possibly May 5 1903. The gravestone shown here, commissioned by the Atlanta journalist and crime novelist David Fulmer in the early 1990s, replaced the original stone, which had given him his final pseudonym, naming him as Eddie McTier - and giving his birthdate as 1898...)

BLIND WILLIE'S GUITARS

2010-03-01T06:01:00.000-08:00

I've had my attention drawn to a webpage that identifies the guitars Blind Willie McTell is holding in various photographs of him. It's on the Stella Guitars website and the McTell page is here. Below is the only picture for which they've not managed a specific identification - though they still offer interesting observations about it.

NEWS: MY McTELL RESEARCH PAPERS

2010-02-15T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to be able to announce that the Zach S. Henderson Library at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro GA, is to acquire the papers and other material created 1998-2009 in the researching and writing of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell.

The material, to be known as the Blind Willie McTell Collection, is being acquired via the Georgia Southern University Foundation, Inc. and courtesy of a grant from the Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Foundation. It mainly comprises:

1. 17 witnesses’ interviews recorded on minidisc
2. two further Statesboro witnesses’ interviews on CD
3. additional interviews with 4 folklorists involved in the 1961 issue of the first McTell LP and the crucial 1970s McTell research
4. typed transcripts of these interviews
5. a cassette copy of the unissued complete recording of Blind Willie McTell’s Last Session (1956)
6. two reel-to-reel tapes of McTell’s brother-in-law, Rev. Andrew Williams, interviewed 1992
7. certified copies supplied by local courts and record offices of certificates such as McTell’s marriage and death certificates, plus similar pertaining to other members of his family
8. printouts and/or computer images of the many available census pages through which my wife and I tried to hunt down Willie and his family
9. copious correspondence to and from other people
10. relevant sections of my notebooks primarily made on the ground in Georgia, including descriptions of interviewed witnesses
11. drafts of early parts of the manuscript, and material pruned out of the finished work
12. a large number of other paper and word-processor documents (in Word), e-mails etc.

It's good to know that this material is to be given a permanent home where it can be accessed by anyone who might find it useful when researching in the future.

Much of it will eventually be made available online as well as inside the library itself, though the recorded interviews, transcripts and notebook material will be accessible only to those visiting the library itself. (It seems only right that anyone with a serious research interest should go to the trouble of visiting the place where McTell himself grew up.)

I'm particularly pleased to be announcing this today, since it is the third anniversary of my completing the manuscript of the first edition of the book (the Bloomsbury hardback) - and especially happy that my papers will find their home in Statesboro: no other city could have been so appropriate a place.

FIVE YEARS AGO: A PRE-OBAMA STEP FORWARD

2010-01-29T06:07:00.000-08:00

Five years ago this month, the Daughters of the American Revolution hosted the release of Marion Anderson US postage stamp at Constitution Hall, Washington DC.... in belated recompense for their refusing to let her perform at a concert there, because she was black, on Easter Sunday 1939.

THE AUTHOR ON ATLANTA RADIO

2010-01-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

I've been sent the URL for the comparatively substantial interview with me, conducted by Jeff Calder for Georgia Public Radio, about Willie and my book, recorded in October and broadcast last month. For anyone interested, it's here.

LOVELY STUFF ABOUT BLIND LEMON & "MATCHBOX"

2010-01-05T06:41:00.000-08:00

A reader of this blog has sent a comment (published underneath the recent post about Blind Lemon Jefferson) that includes the URL to a terrific, albeit mysteriously authored, blogpage. It's about the couplet with the first line 'I'm standin' here wonderin' will a matchbox hold my clothes', and discusses it in relation to Jefferson and not only on to Carl Perkins, Sam Cooke and others but also backwards from Jefferson to the great early blues women, from whose songwriterly records so many of the pre-war guitarist-singers (and pianist-singers) took bits and pieces of lyric to make new songs. The URL in question is:

http://heartonastick.blog-city.com/matchbox01.htm

MEMPHIS JUG BAND MUSIC, 1958

2010-01-04T06:17:00.001-08:00

A pre-war blues discussion group has just brought this wonderful performance to my attention. It's Will Shade and Charlie Burse performing on TV in 1958:

Willie McTell was still alive at this point, and not so far away from Memphis either. He'd have loved this, I believe.

ANOTHER WITNESS GONE

2009-12-26T04:11:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to report the death of a very nice old lady, Mrs. Herbaline Rich, an interesting witness to the history of the church where Willie's mother, and later half-brother, are buried in Statesboro GA. Her testimony is used on pages 159-160 of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. Her funeral takes place today.

The following, courtesy of Del Presley, is from the local Statesboro paper:

Mrs. Herbaline Rich, age 91, passed away peacefully at her residence after a short illness. She was the daughter of the late Mrs. Gertrude Everett and a native of Bulloch County. She lived in Newark, N.J., for many, many years before returning to Statesboro in the early 80s.
She was a member of the Historical First African Baptist Church and was retired from the US Postal Service in New Jersey.

She is survived by an adopted daughter, Mrs. Carolyn Lee, Newark, N.J.; a sister, Mrs. Katherline Coleman, Savannah; and a devoted care giver, Ms. Betty Robbins, Statesboro; and other relatives and friends.

The funeral arrangements for Mrs. Rich will be held 11 a.m. Saturday, December 26, 2009, at Historical First African Baptist Church. The Rev. E. Charles Lee, pastor. The Rev. Stanford Anderson, eulogist. Burial: Bulloch Memorial Gardens.

The family will receive friends from 10 a.m. until the funeral hour. No viewing. James R. Barnes Mortuary is in charge of the arrangements.
Statesboro Herald, December 24, 2009

ALLMAN BROTHERS FANS NOTICE THE BOOK

2009-12-21T07:07:00.000-08:00

A short spread about Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, including a couple of uncontroversial comments on Willie, has suddenly popped up on this Allman Brothers Band discussion forum. (Maybe when the person who's posted it has read the early pages of the book, s/he will comment on the Allmans content...)

BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON

2009-12-19T00:28:00.000-08:00

Today it's 80 years since the death of that most influential bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. Here's what I write about him at the start of Chapter 12 of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, at the point in the narrative at which Willie McTell has just made his first record, in October 1927, for Victor Records:

Willie hoped his first record would make him a big star rising: that it would launch him into that elusive blues stratosphere, with sales to match those of Bessie Smith, Georgia’s own Ma Rainey and the Texan singer-guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, who had shot to prominence only the year before, the first male blues singer to achieve a hit. Jefferson’s second release, ‘Got The Blues’, combined thrilling guitar virtuosity with the striking opening line “The blues come to Texas, loping like a mule”, and he would soon colonise “race records” for male singers with guitars rather than women with pianists and orchestral combos. Jefferson would also reach out over the airwaves, in time, and come to influence generations of white Appalachian mountain musicians who wouldn’t have liked his face at their cabin doors but who loved his music and his high-pitched voice coming out of their crystal-set radios. He didn’t live to enjoy stardom long: he recorded nearly 100 sides in under four years and then died in Chicago at the age of 36, six days before Christmas 1929. It used to be said that he froze to death on the street in a blizzard, but his producer, J. Mayo Williams, alleged later that he’d collapsed in the back seat of his automobile and that his chauffeur, instead of helping him, had run away.

Willie McTell couldn’t freeze to death in Atlanta, but nor did he rise among the stars. He never had a hit record - but he continued to be able to record for major labels, and the sides he made kept on glistening with promise, so that everyone who heard him recognised his artistry and his name became known all over the South. For the first two or three years he must have felt that next time, next time, he’d have a hit.

There's also an entry on Blind Lemon in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, which includes discussing his influence on Elvis Presley as well as on Dylan (and of course on the blues in general). I've reprinted this entry as today's blog entry here on my Dylan blog.

FRANCIS WILFORD-SMITH

2009-12-17T02:55:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry to hear of the death, on December 4, of Francis Wilford-Smith, a splendidly old-fashioned enthusiast for, and early expert on, the pre-war blues, and especially the piano blues.

He was an avid collector of 78rpm records, a broadcaster on BBC Radio 3 and the compiler of some excellent piano blues LPs on the British label Magpie Records, drawing all the material from his own collection, beginning with Magpie 4400, Paramount 1929-1930 'whip it to a jelly' (The Piano Blues Vol. 1), in 1977, and often calling upon Paul Oliver to write the sleevenotes. Wilford Smith also field recorded Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery at his home in Sussex in 1960, yielding two 1980s LPs of the latter: These Are What I Like: Unissued Recordings Vol. 1 and Those I Liked I Learned: Unissued Recordings Vol. 2. More or less Edwardian-bristling-moustache in persona, Wilford-Smith owned more than one penny-farthing bicycle, and there is a photograph of Little Brother Montgomery encountering one of these. (I have failed to locate it online.)

Wilford-Smith had studied under John Minton at Camberwell School of Art, where he was a contemporary of Humphrey Lyttelton and the Canadian-born Wally Fawkes ('Trog'). He made a good living from cartoons published under the pen name 'Smilby' in Playboy (and a bit extra from others in Punch), which allowed him to outbid others for rare 78s.

Wilford-Smith was 82, had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1994, and spent his last years in a nursing home. He died asleep in bed.

GEORGIA PUBLIC BROADCASTING INTERVIEW

2009-12-16T01:21:00.000-08:00

In Atlanta a couple of months ago, I recorded a (comparatively long) interview, conducted by Jeff Calder, about Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes and my researches into the life, work and world of Blind Willie McTell. I've just heard that it's going to be broadcast this coming Sunday. Details are here.

Now I'm back home for Christmas, and the pond in the garden is frozen this morning for the first time since winter arrived. But the sky is trying to brighten, and there's neither rain nor snow.

Meanwhile, I expect to have good news about the book to report shortly!

60th ANNIVERSARY OF LEADBELLY'S DEATH

2009-12-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

Leadbelly died 60 years ago today. Here's his entry in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia ( a name in capital letters mean there's an entry on this person too) but if this were being written now it would add that there is a recent Leadbelly biography, co-compiled by John Reynolds - the man who rescued the classic shot of Blind Willie McTell from a pile of trash back at the beginning of the 1960s, and without whom we simply would not have that crucial photograph of Willie in his prime. Lead Belly: A Life in Pictures by Tiny Robinson and John Reynolds, was first published in Germany in 2007 and then in the UK in April 2008. (You'll find it in the "Recommended" section of the right-hand column of this blog.) But here's the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia entry:

Leadbelly [1888 - 1949]
Huddie Ledbetter was born at Mooringsport, near Shiloh, Louisiana on January 21, 1888 and learnt to play accordion, piano, harmonica and then guitar. By the age of 15 he was a father of two with a police record after his involvement in a shooting, and was singing in the red-light district of Shreveport. Moving to Dallas, Texas he met and learnt songs from BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON and moved onto the 12-string guitar, of which he became an almost incomparable master (perhaps only equalled by BLIND WILLIE McTELL) with a distinctively strong rhythmic style.

He spent nearly as much time in prison as busking on the streets, and when the folklorist John A. Lomax and his then-teenage son ALAN LOMAX encountered him in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola in July 1933, he already had two pardons behind him (he had killed a man in Texas in 1917) and was now serving what was supposed to be another 30-sentence, but after proving an incomparable source of black folksong and 19th century repertoire on the field recordings he made for the Lomaxes for the Library of Congress, they obtained his pardon once again and this time set him to work as their chauffeur and recording assistant. After this, he travelled with them on many field trips but was also presented as a performer to folksong societies and in progressive East Coast establishment society, becoming in the 1940s part of a circle of left-wing folk enthusiasts and musicians (as you can tell by the very title ‘The Bourgeois Blues’) that included WOODY GUTHRIE, SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE McGHEE, Alan Lomax and PETE SEEGER. In Tony Russell’s words, ‘Leadbelly the performer and the Leadbelly songbook are twin peaks on the map of American music. His enormous repertoire has no parallel in black folksong. He sang everything, ballads and blues-ballads, dance songs and children’s rhymes, memories of minstrelsy and freshly made songs about his own rapidly changing circumstances. To his white audiences he seemed a mythic figure, a lone carrier of all-but-lost messages from black worlds of field and prison farm.’

As this implies, little of his repertoire was really the blues, though ‘Good Morning Blues’ and ‘The Bourgeois Blues’ are prized items. In the mid-1940s he tried to ‘make it’ in Hollywood but was unsuccessful and returned to live in New York by 1947, making his one foreign trip in 1949 - to Paris - before dying in New York City that December 6, of a form of motor neurone disease termed Lou Gehrig’s disease. No sooner was he dead than Pete Seeger’s goody-goody group the Weavers had a no.1 hit single with a revoltingly twee version of a song he’d refashioned from a 19th century minstrel number, ‘Goodnight Irene’. (The other Weavers were Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays and Fred Hellerman; Lee Hays is the one who looked, back then, exactly like the 2005 British Home Secretary, Charles Clarke.) By the end of the 1950s we were all familiar with Leadbelly songs: the UK’s father of skiffle, Lonnie Donegan, signalled his 1956 shift from ‘jazz’ to ‘rock’n’roll’ with a hit version of ‘Rock Island Line’, while between them, skiffle and the Folk Revival ensured the continued circulation of ‘Boll Weevil’ (of which Leadbelly’s own recording is soaringly the best), ‘Midnight Special’, ‘Pick a Bale O’ Cotton’, ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, ‘Take A Whiff On Me’ (as ‘Have A Drink On Me’ by Mr. Donegan) and ‘Cotton Fields’.

‘Midnight Special’ was the song on which Dylan had played harmonica behind HARRY BELAFONTE in February 1962, shortly ahead of the release of his own début album; but there is a longer connecting thread between Leadbelly and Dylan’s work than that, and beyond the fact of Leadbelly’s repertoire having both informed the understanding of, and permeated so thoroughly into, the common currency of the Folk Revival - such that, for instance, Dylan was performing ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos (Go Down Old Hannah)’ at the Gaslight Café in October 1962; that when Dylan recorded a version of ‘Milk Cow Blues’ in 1962, he used part of Kokomo Arnold’s lyric, part of ELVIS PRESLEY’s, part of ROBERT JOHNSON’s ‘Milkcow’s Calf Blues’ and part of Leadbelly’s ‘Good Morning Blues’; and that he and HAPPY TRAUM were performing ‘Keep Your Hands Off Her’ in February 1963.

First, it was a set of Leadbelly 78rpm records, given to Dylan as a gift before he left Hibbing, that proved his first revelatory direct initiation into the pre-war black repertoire. He might well have proved the first person Dylan heard who ‘talked his way into a song’, in ROBERT SHELTON’s phrase, as he did duly did himself on his first album.

The Leadbelly favourite ‘Pig Meat Mama’ offers a vivacious demonstration of something we’re likely to think still more Dylanesque. That is, given an ostentatious rhyme, he delivers it with a sly knowingness which, far from downplaying it, milks its comic extravagance to the full, by throwing in a pause just long enough to draw attention to itself immediately ahead of the clamorous rhyme. In this song from 1935, Leadbelly gives us ‘...Louisiana / ...Texacana / ...a girl named [pause] Silvana!’ This is a way of writing and delivering lines that we know well from many Dylan recordings, such as the ‘Angelina’ rhymes in the 1981 song of that name, the risky comedy of ‘subpoena’ being the one that pushes this furthest. It’s the same glee that tops ‘the castle honey’ with ‘El [pause] Paso honey’ in the superb 1966 outtake ‘She’s Your Lover Now’. (Actually, Silvana might not have struck Leadbelly as an especially attention-grabbing name: he had an adopted sister called Australia.)

Leadbelly’s breadth of repertoire is used by Dylan in a quite different way, too. In a speech onstage at the Fox-Warfield Theatre in San Francisco in 1980, Dylan tells the audience this, about Leadbelly switching from prison songs to children’s songs - offering it as a parable about his own switch from secular to Christian songs: ‘He made lots of records there [in New York]. At first he was just doing prison songs, and stuff like that.... He’d been out of prison for some time when he decided to do children’s songs. And people said “Oh my! Did Leadbelly change?”.... But he didn’t change. He was the same man.’

[Leadbelly: ‘Good Morning Blues’, NY 15 Jun 1940 or summer 1943; ‘The Bourgeois Blues’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Irene’, Angola LA, 16-20 Jul 1933 & 1 Jul 1934, & Wilton CT, 20 Jan 1935; ‘Rock Island Line’, Washington D.C., 22 Jun 1937, NY, Jan 1942 & (with the Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Boll Weevil’, Shreveport LA, prob. Oct 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & NY, 19 Jun 1940; ‘The Boll Weevil’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Midnight Special’, Angola LA, 1 Jul 1934, Wilton CT, Feb 1935 & (w Golden Gate Quartet) NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Pick A Bale A’Cotton’, NY 25 Jan 1935; ‘Pick A Bale O’ Cotton’, Wilton CT, Mar 1935; ‘Pick A Bale Of Cotton’ (w Golden Gate Quartet), NY, 15 Jun 1940; ‘Bring Me A Li’l Water Silvy’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Bring Me Lil Water Silvy’, NY, late 1943; ‘Honey Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola 16-20 Jul 1933; ‘Take A Whiff On Me’, Angola, prob. 1 Jul 1934 & Wilton, 1 Feb 1935; ‘Baby Take A Whiff On Me’, NY, 25 Jan 1935; ‘Go Down, Old Hannah’, Wilton, Mar 1935; ‘Ain’t Goin’ Down To The Well No Mo’/‘Go Down Old Hannah’, NY 1 Apr 1939; ‘Pig Meat Mama’, NY, 25 Mar 35; Negro Folk Songs For Young People”, Folkways FC 7533, NY, c.1962; a good general selection of his work is CD-reissued Leadbelly: King Of The Twelve-String Guitar, Columbia Roots N’ Blues Series 467893 4, NY, 1991.

Dylan on Leadbelly & children’s songs, San Francisco, 12 Nov 1980, quoted from ‘Bob Dylan’s Leadbelly Parable’, in Michael Gray & John Bauldie, eds., All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook, London: W.H. Allen, 1987. Tony Russell, ‘Leadbelly’, From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray, London: Aurum Press, 1997, p.38. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, London: Penguine edn, 1987, p.119.]

CRITICS' BLOG REVIEW OF THE BOOK

2009-10-29T08:31:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to be sent another very positive review of my book, this time on blogcritics. I especially like these bits:

"By no means mere biography, it is, instead, a fascinating and often elagaic tale of his quest for information about the Georgia-born bluesman. "

"Of course there's a great deal of biographical information here, and Gray proves a careful and conscientious researcher with an obvious affection for McTell. With dogged persistence, he traces McTell's life through interviews and old documents. He uncovers much new information and gently corrects some common misconceptions based on earlier research. It's the kind of stuff that's often dry and dusty, but Gray, who hails from England, brings the quest to life with lively commentary and an outsider's wonder at the peculiarities — both good and bad — of the South."

and

"Gray's book is a lovely and fitting epitaph to a fine musician and man."

HOME & BEAN

2009-10-27T03:27:00.000-07:00

My tour of Long Island NY (one gig) and Georgia (eight) is over. I flew out of Atlanta on Saturday afternoon, out of JFK that evening, arrived in London Sunday morning, hung around charmless Heathrow Terminal 5 all day (its one virtue being Carluccio's, a bustling, authentically Italian eaterie with genuinely friendly staff and real food [such a contrast to Georgia's]), flew into Toulouse on Sunday evening and made it home about 11.30 that night.

Among much else waiting for me, the URL to 100bookshelf, a blog that was new to me but on which someone named Bean has posted this superbly generous review of my book:

“Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is not just one of my favorite music books, it’s one of my favorite books in general…

[It] goes, exactly as the [sub-]title says, ‘in search of’ Blind Willie. That means that this is not a biography exactly – it’s also the story of the author’s journey to find what is, essentially, a musical needle in a haystack. He meets some very interesting characters, uncovers some weird stories, travels through and to places tourists don’t usually go, and – along the way – finds out some amazing clues to who Blind Willie McTell really was…

If you’re interested in the blues, or a side of American life we don’t normally see, or both, this book is one of the best you’ll ever find. Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is a beautiful portrait of a time and place – both past and present – as well as a fascinating glimpse into a most mysterious man.”

A BIRTH & A DEATH WITH McTELL CONNECTIONS

2009-10-18T13:22:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, October 19, is the 120th anniversary of the birth of Art Satherley, producer of, among much else, Blind Willie McTell & friends' New York session of 1933. Satherley was born in Bristol, England, on this day in 1889.

October 19 is also the 25th anniversary of the death of McTell's younger musical compadre Buddy Moss (who was also recorded at that Satherley session of 1933 - indeed he emerged from it more successfully than Willie). Moss died in Atlanta on this day in 1984. He was 71.

From my own point of view it seems an apt date for me to be giving a talk that brings in all three of these men, at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in downtown Atlanta. October 19, 6.30pm; free admission: ie Searching For Blind Willie McTell: A British Writer in Georgia.

EXTRA DATE ADDED IN ATLANTA GA

2009-10-05T09:23:00.001-07:00

I've accepted an invitation to speak and do a book-signing at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta on Monday October 19 at 6.30pm (free admission).

I’m especially pleased that the Auburn Avenue Research Library - a crucial and leading African American Atlanta institution - should show such interest in my research and my book. I'd begun to rue the fact that with the exception of the Douglass Theatre in Macon (OCT 15, 7pm) I seemed to be booked only by traditionally white institutions.

I leave for the States on Wednesday.

FINAL UPCOMING TOUR DATES: NEW YORK & GEORGIA

2009-10-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

My itinerary is complete now. I'm disappointed not to be able to speak anywhere in Savannah, Milledgeville, Augusta or Athens, but I'm looking forward to these firm dates:

OCT 8, 11am - FARMINGDALE COLLEGE (SUNY) Long Island NY
Ward Hall Great Room, 2350 Broadhollow Road, Farmingdale, Long Island
free general admission

OCT 9, 6.30pm - DECATUR CD, Decatur GA
356 W Ponce De Leon Ave, Decatur, GA 30030-2439 http://decaturcd.blogspot.com/
free admission

OCT 14, 7pm - ATLANTA-FULTON CENTRAL LIBRARY, Atlanta GA
One Margaret Mitchell Square, Atlanta, GA 30303 http://www.afpls.org/
free admission

OCT 15, 7pm - THE DOUGLASS THEATRE, MACON GA
355 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Macon GA http://www.douglasstheatre.org/
tickets $15 ($12 seniors & students)

OCT 20, 7pm - THE McDUFFIE MUSEUM, Thomson GA
121 Main St., Thomson, GA 30824
free admission

OCT 23, 7pm - AVERITT CENTER FOR THE ARTS, Statesboro GA
33 East Main Street, Statesboro GA 30458 http://www.averittcenterforthearts.org/
tickets $18

All those talks are all titled
SEARCHING FOR BLIND WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
but, crucially, they'll all be different talks... partly because the whole story is exotic to Long Island NY students, whereas it's not so exotic to anyone in Georgia; and then within Georgia I want to tell people in Atlanta more about McTell's Georgia, people in Macon more about McTell's time at the Georgia Academy for the Blind there in Macon, people in Thomson more about McTell's Happy Valley & Thomson, and people in Statesboro more about McTell's Statesboro.

The talks will also be different because at Decatur and the Thomson they can't provide the equipment for me to use the DVD I've made with all the photos accompanying two crucial audio tracks, and the library in Atlanta has different restraints.

In other words, and rightly, the two biggest and best talks/shows will be the ones with an admission charge - Macon's Douglass Theatre and Statesboro's Averitt Arts Center. Here you get a proper auditorium with comfortable seats, good lighting and a real stage, professional audio-visual equipment and an altogether fuller performance, including more music tracks.

Finally, the night before that Statesboro McTell talk, I'll be giving my very last performance of Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues - the last one in the UK was at the highly enjoyable Sedbergh Book Festival in Cumbria on Friday September 25th, and the final end for this talk is:

OCT 22, 7pm - GEORGIA SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY, Statesboro GA
Nessmith Lane Assembly Hall/Auditorium, 1400 Southern Drive, Statesboro
http://library.georgiasouthern.edu/news/MichaelGrayFlyer.pdf
free admission.

ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION BLOG

2009-10-02T01:01:00.000-07:00

Good advance publicity from the Arts & Culture blog of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday, calling the book "a compelling account of McTell’s life and times".

The whole thing is here and here.

GOOD ATLANTA REVIEW OF McTELL BOOK

2009-10-01T03:48:00.000-07:00

Good to see, just ahead of my trip to Georgia, that the October issue of Atlanta Magazine is running a very positive review of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. Can't find it online anywhere and Blogger doesn't let me upload Adobe pdf files (which is the way it was sent to me), so this is the text of the review:

Michael Gray, a music historian from England, is a breathless outsider in the exotic American South in this meticulously researched exploration into the life of the great Georgia bluesman, who died in obscurity in 1959. Part travelogue, part detective story, part social history, this unconventional biography has wit and insight, which is sometimes spot on, sometimes annoying, and occasionally both. Here is Gray’s critique of small-town Southern cuisine: ‘Everything’s big and brown and heavy, except when it’s big and lurid red and heavy.’ Gray turns the dearth of documentation on McTell’s life into an entertaining story about the search itself.
(Teresa Weaver, 2009.)

WONDERFUL REVIEW FROM TERRIFIC BLOGGER

2009-09-13T01:27:00.000-07:00

This wonderful review emerged on Steven Hart's always-excellent literary blog three days ago:

At the start of his book Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, Michael Gray name-checks V.S. Naipaul’s cultural travelogue A Turn in the South, and the association is more than apt. Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is not a conventional biography of Georgia’s preeminent bluesman; indeed, one of the book’s themes is the near-impossibility of writing such a book, given the nearly medieval standards of record-keeping that prevailed for American blacks in McTell’s time. The book is loaded with hard-won information and useful spadework, but Gray’s narrative is as much about the search as it is about the object. Time and again I was reminded of Naipaul’s accounts of his journeys through India and the Islamic world, and if Gray’s eye is more forgiving than Sir Vidia’s, it is no less piercing for that fact.

If McTell has a reputation outside hardcore blues circles, most of the credit goes to the Allman Brothers Band, which used McTell’s “Statesboro Blues” as a showcase for muscular musicianship, and Bob Dylan, whose song “Blind Willie McTell” — recorded in 1983 but inexplicably shelved for eight years — reminded everyone that there was more to the music than the dark, heavy blues of the Mississippi Delta.

“Blind Willie McTell” was the focus of one of the most passionate and probing chapters in Gray’s magisterial book Song & Dance Man, so it seemed only appropriate when word got around that Gray was writing a book about McTell. In a way, Gray’s method echoes what Dylan did in his song... The song uses evocative imagery to create an outline of McTell and leaves you, the newly interested listener, the happy task of filling in the center. Which is what Gray sets out to do in Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes, and it’s hard to imagine anyone adding any more details to the picture.

Dylan’s song is so dramatic that listeners going from there to McTell’s recording work might feel some initial letdown. There are no hellhounds on McTell’s trail, no claptrap about meeting the devil at the crossroads or dying young and vanishing into a cloud of brimstone. As Gray notes, McTell . . . explodes every archetype about blues musicians. He is no roaring primitive, no Robert Johnsonesque devil-dealing womanizer. He didn’t lose his sight in a jook-joint brawl, or hopping a freight train. He didn’t escape into music from behind a mule plow in the Delta. He didn’t die violently or young. Instead, blind from birth but never behaving as if blindness handicapped him, this resourceful, articulate man became an adept professional musician who traveled widely and talked his way into an array of recording sessions.

He never achieved a hit record, but he became one of the most widely known and well-loved figures in Georgia. Working clubs and parking lots, playing to blacks and whites, tobacco workers and college kids, Blind Willie McTell, human jukebox and local hero, enjoyed a modest career and an independent life.

It was McTell’s added misfortune to die just as folk and blues revivalists were gearing up to track down and “rediscover” their favorite bluesmen, at least one of whom hadn’t held a guitar in decades and needed to be retaught his own style before he could perform in front of audiences eager to hear “authentic” music. No such rehab work would have been needed for McTell, and one can only dream of the effect his supple wit and agile guitar technique would have had on the festival circuit.

Gray takes great pains to establish clear lines for McTell’s parentage, and weave them through the fraught history of the South. This makes the opening chapters of Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes somewhat dry, but the context pays off later as we see the culture that produced the man and the music he enriched with his talent.

For anyone involved in a long, difficult research project, the two most important rules are (1) spend a lot of time, and (2), spend a lot of money. In Gray’s case we add (3) burn up a lot of shoe leather. Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes is a fit title for both subject and author. This book is an odyssey in which the worst monster is not one-eyed Polyphemus but the dull-eyed bureaucrat or bottom-tier functionary whose darkest fear is that he’ll be asked to put out a little extra effort.

For example, the “pudgy and rather dense young black guy” who repulses Gray’s attempts to learn about McTell’s days with the Metropolitan Association for the Blind in Atlanta:

He told me that they “probably” don’t have any archives “on site” because they’ve moved buildings several times and that, anyway, people in the old days knew no better than to throw stuff away — but that, even if they did have any old documents, they certainly wouldn’t tell me. They wouldn’t tell me whether McTell had ever been helped by them, let alone anything else, because of patient confidentiality. “This man would have had to have signed a form to indicate that you were blessed with his permission.” He was unmoved by the snag that Mr. McTell had died some forty-three years beforehand.

Obtuseness is the last refuge of the incompetent. In this passage, Gray gives us a perfect example of what I call the Policy Punt — “It’s against our policy to tell you that” — to which add the Vacation Evasion (”There’s only one person who can tell anything about that, and he/she is on vacation”) and that reliable evergreen, the Fictional Flood (”We used to have those records, but there was a flood in the basement”). As someone who has heard multiple variations of these songs, I appreciate Gray’s criticism of the tunes.

At times, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes threatens to veer into dyspeptic Paul Theroux territory, with passages in which Gray finds himself marooned at strip-mall eateries, decrying this vast acreage of plastic banquettes and paper cups and fried food and smiling servers paid virtually nothing but their tips . . . and no one seems to care that the food is so gross or that you can’t be a grown-up and have a drink. Late in the book, however, is a description of a blood-freezing encounter with Georgia state prison guards that leaves you happy for Gray’s escape, and thinking about how it must have been for a black man in McTell’s time, when an encounter with whites could have sudden, life-changing consequences.

At such moments, one forgets the grumping about fast food and the unavailability of good wine, and Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes recovers its appeal as an engrossing, unique book — one that, like the music of its subject, pulls unlikely influences into a unified, distinctive whole.

MOSTLY-GEORGIA TALKS UPDATE:

2009-09-05T05:07:00.000-07:00

The following talks of mine are now confirmed for October, in New York and Georgia:

THURS OCT 8, 11am:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
Ward Hall Great Room, Farmingdale State College, 2350 Broadhollow Road
Farmingdale, Long Island, NY 11735-1021
Tel: (631) 420-2050
Admission free but spaces limited

FRI OCT 9, 6.30pm:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
Decatur CD, 356 W Ponce De Leon Ave, Decatur, GA 30030-2439
Tel: (404) 371-9090
Admission free but spaces limited

WED OCT 14, 7pm:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
Central Library, One Margaret Mitchell Square, Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: (404) 730.1898
Admission free but spaces limited

THUR OCT 15, 7pm:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
The Douglass Theatre, 355 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Macon GA 31201
Tel: (478) 742-2000
Tickets $15 ($12 students & seniors)

TUES OCT 20, 7pm:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
The McDuffie Museum, 121 Main St., Thomson, GA 30824
Tel: (706) 595-9923
Admission free but spaces limited

THUR OCT 22, 7pm:
BOB DYLAN & THE POETRY OF THE BLUES With Michael Gray
Georgia Southern University, 1400 Southern Drive, Statesboro GA 30460-8074
Tel: (912) 478-5115 / 478-5027
Admission free but spaces limited

FRI OCT 23, 7pm:
SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia
The Averitt Center for the Arts, 33 East Main Street, Statesboro GA 30458
Tel: (912) 212-2787 Tickets $18

ATLANTA TALK DATE CONFIRMED

2009-09-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to say that an Atlanta date has been confirmed for my tour of talks entitled SEARCHING FOR BLIND WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer In Georgia.

This talk and book signing will take place in the auditorium of the Central Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, One Margaret Mitchell Square, Atlanta, GA 30303 at 7pm on Wednesday October 14. Admission is free but places are limited. For reservations / further information phone (404) 730-1898.

Two further confirmations are expected very soon.

NORTH AMERICAN EDITION ON SALE

2009-08-29T01:43:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to learn that the first North American edition of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (Chicago Review Press) is already in bookstores, though the official publication date is September 1st.

Here's some detailed information about its contents:

The book establishes McTell's ancestry, his links to white McTiers in Georgia (via a white great-grandfather) and much new information about Willie's mother, incuding details of the very room she worked in as a cook in Statesboro GA, her relationship with the father of Willie's brother Robert, and her subsequent pregnancy, death and burial. Setting the historical context includes background on “his” counties and the lynchings there - including the Statesboro Riot lynchings less than ten years before Willie moved there.

The book also establishes his first wife Kate’s family history; reveals that when they were living in Atlanta he beat up the young man she was having an affair with; and that contrary to her claims, both her children were adopted. (Both are interviewed in the book - one from inside jail).

While drawing strongly on the invaluable 1970s research by David Evans, his parents and ex-wife, and on earlier research by Peter B. Lowry and work by Bruce Bastin, I also transcribed and drew on a previously unheeded interview given by Kate McTell to a black interviewer, showing a different side to her character and giving much "new" detail about Willie's working life.

The book interviews many, and mostly "new", people who knew McTell, including someone who saw him at a 1925 revival meeting, a woman whose father took him fishing, a daughter and grand-daughter of his friend & cousin Gold Harris, and a woman able to detail life in the 1920s Georgia Academy For the Blind when she and McTell both attended it.

The book also identifies which Atlanta hotel was the site of the 1940 encounter between Willie and the Lomaxes and the parts of their recorded interview that still remain unreleased.

I describe (courtesy of another new witness) the interior of an apartment Willie shared with his second wife Helen, the details of her 1958 funeral (paid for by Willie) and discover where she is buried (a photo of her grave is included).

The book details Willie’s hospital treatment during the last week of his life, identifies which building he died in, where he was embalmed and the make & model of the hearse that took him on his last ride.

As well as all this, and much more, the book also tells the story of getting the story - of how the new research was achieved and the difficulties involved - and this is included in the narrative precisely because the near-total lack of official documenting of McTell's life is itself a telling part of his story and how things were for black Georgians in his lifetime.

I'm sorry if this is judged by some to be in some way an attack on the South per se. It wasn't intended to be. As it says in the book's Preface, "The call of the South is strong in my ears... Elvis Presley's voice singing 'Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton' is one of the fragments of song I most often find in the back of my head. Ray Charles has only to utter the word 'Georgia'. Even Hoagy Carmichael singing knowingly and satirically of 'oleander'. Alan Lomax's description of the [Mississippi] Delta in Land Where The Blues Began. Anything, really. The very name Charleston, South Carolina."

And the Preface concludes by saying this:

"This book is addressed to anyone curious about how things change and don't change, or about a strange part of the world, or how the past shapes the present. For anyone trying to understand the United States today, I offer, with an outsider's eye, an account of how it might still connect to the world of Blind Willie McTell - a charismatic man from that surreal place, the recent past."

And I'm thrilled to find that the American writer Jonathan Lethem, picking up on all this, has written that Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes is "a superb meditation on a rare American figure, one who grows more mysterious and iconic the more Gray reveals of his facts and context; a brilliant exhibition of how musical study becomes cultural study; and an elegant and passionate book that expands until its subjects seem to be time and memory themselves."

IN MEMORIAM

2009-08-19T03:46:00.000-07:00

William Samuel McTear [McTell] May 5 (?) 1903 - August 19, 1959
photo taken inside the Robert Fulton Hotel, November 5, 1940
by Ruby T. Lomax
(photo c/o the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

MACON DATE CONFIRMED FOR OCTOBER

2009-08-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to be able to confirm that my tour of talks in October will include this:

SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer In Georgia
with Michael Gray, at the Douglass Theatre, Macon
THURSDAY OCTOBER 15, 7pm
tickets $15 ($12 students & seniors). Tickets can be purchased at the Box Office or by phone with a debit or charge card. Visa, MasterCard and Discover accepted.

DOUGLASS THEATRE
355 MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. BLVD.
MACON, GA. 31201
OFFICE 478-742-2000
FAX 478-742-0270
http://www.douglasstheatre.org/index.htm
Tickets may not be available for a week or two yet, but it's a definite tour date.

DEATH OF JAMES LEE HOBBS

2009-08-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

With sadness today I learnt of the death of James Lee Hobbs, of Stapleton GA, one of those who gave me invaluable information and great friendliness when I was researching Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. He died this June 17, aged 83, and is buried at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, Avera, GA.

Here's how I first encountered Mr. Hobbs, on August 5, 2001 (from Chapter 7):

At the 66 gas station, an old guy filling up his quaint, green 1970s sedan tells me I should speak to Mr. James Lee Hobbs: “He knows all about this part of the world, and he’ll just love to tell you about it, too. He’s an old-timer,” he says approvingly, and gives me directions to the house.

The quiet orderliness of Stapleton’s streets is disrupted only by the anarchy of people driving around them on white golf carts, as if they were cars. There’s a craze for it here. It gives suburbia a hint of the sinister - as if a desperate Patrick McGooghan might come panicking round the corner at any moment, pursued by a lumbering giant balloon.

I walk up the steps in the humming heat and cross the wonderfully wide old porch to the door of Mr. Hobbs’ big white house, its paint faded and flaking, and from the porch I look across the road at a nouveau Southfork of a place where a fat pink woman finishes whizzing a strimmer and promptly sits astride a mower as if disciplining a rodeo steed by squashing it. Her vast garden accommodates pagodas, a hot tub, fountains and a motorhome. Its best feature is a row of blood-red canna lilies, thick as a hedge and functioning as one, running forty feet along the edge of her property, facing the big old wooden house.

Mr. James Lee Hobbs comes to the door in his vest and trousers and, as so often, the first minute or two of conversation takes place with some apparent reluctance: he keeps the screen door between us and I can barely make out more than his silhouette. But then he emerges, pale and freckled, the once-ginger hair on his chest now faded to off-white like the paint on his house. He invites me to sit on a rocker on the verandah. The sound of the mower dies across the way and the fitful sounds of mosquitos replace it. We sit in the warm evening air, gazing out toward the small crossroads that is downtown Stapleton, and he tells me how the place used to be.

The uncredited photograph of his house was found online today here.

TOWER RECORDS UPLOADS BOOK PAGE TODAY

2009-08-09T06:04:00.000-07:00

For any reader interested in buying the new North American hardback edition of the book at a big discount, see here:

http://www.tower.com/hand-me-my-travelin-shoes-in-search-blind-michael-gray-hardcover/wapi/113358219

ANOTHER GEORGIA DATE TO BE ADDED?

2009-08-07T07:19:00.000-07:00

Following up the post of July 24 I'm pleased to say another date has been pencilled in, though not yet quite clinched: adding to the dates in Georgia with one at the Douglass Theatre in Macon: a historic and originally black-owned venue that has been restored since I was researching the book in the earliest years of this century. Willie McTell himself performed there in the 1930s, at least according to his first wife Kate, probably in the same way as he played at the Midnight Rambles at the Morton Theatre in Athens and the Delmont in Augusta. So it'll be a great privilege for me to stand on the stage of the Douglass on the evening of Thursday October 15. I hope! Details to come when it's all been clinched.

SAM CHARTERS 80 TODAY

2009-08-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

Sam Charters, the author of The Country Blues (and inventor of that term), is 80 years old today. He was born in Pittsburgh on August 1 1929. Here's a taster of the appearance he makes in my book (Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes):

"... in Memphis, Tennessee, another enthusiast, a Pittsburgh-born 30-year-old called Samuel Barclay Charters, is traveling around with his first wife, Mary Lange, and recording old blues singers a bit more systematically.

Anyone else with a keen interest in music who finds themselves in Memphis in 1956 is in the thrall of rock’n’roll. Memphis is the place to be in 1956. Here is the home of the wondrous Sun Studios, where Sam Phillips has just been producing Elvis Presley’s revolutionary first records, in one small, dark room that is now also capturing on tape the early golden exuberance of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and more. In the same room Phillips has also been commissioning pioneering modern electric blues records since 1951, when he had glued the little white baffle tiles up on the walls and ceiling himself to make the room a studio. Howlin Wolf had started here, right then and there. Phillips said later, 'When I heard him, I said, "This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies."'

But that’s not how Samuel B. Charters feels. He’s not in Memphis for this stuff at all. He doesn’t even notice it. Decades later, when I interview him, I say 'You were in Memphis in 1956?! What a wonderful time to be there!' and he replies: 'It really was, yeah. They were all there,' - and the people he means are old, pre-war blues singers, and street musicians from Memphis jug bands: the very people that everyone else in Memphis has forgotten.

These are the people he finds and records: 'Gus Cannon and Will Shade and everybody with the jug bands.' Gus Cannon and friends, under various names but mostly as Cannon’s Jug Stompers, had done a slew of recordings between 1927 and 1930, and never been back in a studio since. Will Shade had led the rival outfit the Memphis Jug Band, and they had recorded prolifically between 1927 and 1934.

When Charters finds them, and records them again for the first time in over twenty years, it makes him realise something simple and powerful: 'the revelation that these people weren’t from another planet, they were part of our life and some of them were still alive.'

Three years later, in 1959, Sam and Mary [nee Lange] are divorced and in March Sam marries his second wife, Ann Danberg, whom he’s met in music classes at the University of California years earlier, and who will later write the first biography of Jack Kerouac and edit his letters. Sam and Ann Charters live in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, but that fall they’ve driven all the way across the States to stay with Ann’s parents in California before embarking on a year-long trip to Europe.

That November, the New York publisher Rinehart publishes Sam Charters’ book, which is called The Country Blues - and it proves to be one of those rare books that actually makes something happen out in the world. Effectively it kicks off the blues revival that becomes a shaping force within the whole burgeoning scene that encompasses the New Left, the civil rights movement, the Greenwich Village folk phenomenon, the rise of Bob Dylan and more...

On the LP that he issues alongside the book, Charters’ compilation of a few of these old [country blues] records includes an elegant but restless, exhilarating track made in 1928, ‘Statesboro Blues’, written and recorded by Blind Willie McTell."

Remarkably, Sam Charters also produced that great 1960s psychedelic rock album Electric Music for the Mind and Body by Country Joe & the Fish.

50th ANNIVERSARY OF WILLIE'S DEATH

2009-07-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

As you may know, 2009 is the 50th anniversary year of Blind Willie McTell's death. He died in the early morning of August the 19th (1959) in Milledgeville State Hospital. He was 56 years old.

More by chance than good planning, the North American edition of my biography of him (Hand Me My Travelin Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell) will be published on September 1. I shall be doing a promotional stomp round a few bits of the USA - mainly in Willie's home state of Georgia - in October.

I'm right at the beginning of organising this tour of talks, and so far the only firm dates I have are these:

OCT 8, 11am - Ward Hall Great Room, Farmingdale State College (SUNY), Long Island NY
OCT 22, 7pm - Zach S. Henderson Library, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro GA
OCT 23, 7pm - Averitt Arts Center, 33 East Main Street, Statesboro GA 30458

I'm hoping that between Oct 8 and Oct 22 I can arrange a further sequence of talks in Georgia, in the other places that were significant for Willie - Atlanta, Macon, Athens, Thomson, Milledgeville and maybe Augusta.
UPDATE: JUST ADDED:
OCT 15, 7pm - Douglass Theatre, 355 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Macon GA

The talk I'm offering in Georgia is SEARCHING FOR WILLIE McTELL: A British Writer in Georgia and it will include playing records and slideshows of both vintage photos and photos I took while researching the book.

If any reader has contacts at, or even just suggestions for, good venues in any of these places, please do let me know by posting a comment to this blog. All blog comments get moderated - ie I read them before deciding either to publish them or not - so any information you send me this way can be sent privately and in confidence.

Many thanks.

OLD BLUES - BIG MONEY

2009-07-13T02:59:00.000-07:00

Most of us know how valuable old blues 78s can be, but there's some interesting detail in this online New York Times piece (in print yesterday). No mention of Blind Willie McTell...

KIRKUS REVIEW & PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

2009-07-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Advance reviews in for the US edition of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes (due out Sept 1, ISBN 9781556529757) are starting to trickle in. Kirkus Review (June 15) says:

Since the British journalist and music researcher has mainly been known as a Bob Dylan authority (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 2006, etc.), it's natural that Gray would have more curiosity than many about Blind Willie McTell, whose artistry inspired the Dylan song of the same name. Though McTell never enjoyed a popular hit during his brief but rich life, his "Statesboro Blues" posthumously became a signature tune for fellow Georgians the Allman Brothers Band. Less a conventional biography than a mixture of history, travelogue and detective story, Gray paints an evocative portrait of an artist who defied blues stereotypes. He was an educated man whose musical training ranged from church to glee club. He found it so easy to get around that he would help direct other blind people, and he benefited from white patrons and audiences-though the author by no means minimizes the racism of the society in which McTell lived. It's curious that Gray intends the book less for the blues fan than for "those who have never heard of him, and have no particular interest in that particular kind of old music," since it's hard to imagine casual readers wading through all the minutiae, half truths and dead-ends that the author encounters as he attempts to render the details of McTell's life. Yet his recounting of his last years--when the diabetic artist, bereft after the death of his second wife, suffered a stroke that led to his hospitalization in a mental institution, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1959--has a poignancy that rewards all the research. After the book's initial publication in the United Kingdom in 2007, Gray has continued to update. What matters most about McTell is his music, and Gray's solid book will lead readers there.

And now Publishers Weekly (July 6) has said this:

Blind Willie McTell may be “the most important Georgia bluesman to be recorded” in the first half of the 20th century, but so little information about him has survived that, for Gray, who's previously written about Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa, “getting the story is itself part of that story,” making this less a biography of the blind musician than a memoir of the effort to uncover his past. At its best, the results are colorful anecdotes about Gray and his status as a British tourist in rural Georgia, where being neither a Yankee nor a white Southerner usually makes it easy for him to get along (save for one disturbing encounter with a state prison security detail). At other times, however, Gray pads his account with arguably superfluous details, including descriptions of the public libraries he visited during his research. He is quick to acknowledge where the facts leave off and his speculations begin, and unafraid to offer critical judgment, especially when it comes to evaluating the racist culture in which McTell lived. Those who were hoping for a definitive biography of McTell may be disappointed, but enough of his story pokes through for even nonblues fans to grasp his enduring appeal.

Naturally I'm hoping something a little less lukewarm might come along...

THIS VERY NEGLECTED SITE HAS 1 "FOLLOWER"!

2009-06-16T06:18:00.000-07:00

Hello Darlene Halverson! Sorry this blog has been so unrewardingly immobile for so long. This will change soon, as things warm up towards the US hardback publication of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes on September 1st. Meanwhile, greetings...

NEW SON HOUSE ALBUM!

2009-03-01T06:30:00.000-08:00

Good news! I reprint a very recent e-mail announcement from Dick Waterman:

"There is a new Son House live recording coming on Fuel 2000 in a few months. I know that you probably think you have enough live Son House but this one is different.

It was done in October, 1964, during his first national tour following his rediscovery in June of that year.

The late Pete Welding arranged for Norman Dayron to record three concerts. He brought along good professional equipment including a special microphone to pick up Son's conversation because he would slump back in his chair and speak softly.

These are basically Son's first concerts for white people in his life. His stories are funny and blues fans who know his emotional voice will be surprised that his hands were pretty quick on the guitar in 1964.

Bill Dahl is doing the notes and I'll come forth with some never seen photographs.

I think you will find this to be a more robust and stronger Son House that you have ever heard before." (Dick Waterman, Oxford, MS, www.dickwaterman.com.)

US HARDBACK EDITION - AT LAST!!

2009-02-23T08:56:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to report that a North American edition of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell is to be published in hardback on September 1st, from Chicago Review Press / A Cappella. The cover design for this edition is now the version shown top centre at the start of this blog. The text will be updated right up till the end of next month, so any comments on aspects of the text will be especially welcome in between now and mid-March. The ISBN is 9781556529757. More news will follow. The price will be US$26.95.

WILLIE WAS SURELY AMONG THOSE VINDICATED TODAY

2009-01-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

Willie McTell grew up, I believe, modelling himself partly upon the widely-respected black Statesboro GA headmaster William James. As I write in Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes:

"through his own determination and breadth of vision, William James built an institution in Statesboro that offered a far better standard of black education than its pupils could have expected, and received at least some support and encouragement from the rest of the town. What practical alternative route to betterment for blacks in the rural South could James have offered? Revolution? Working-class people have always seen education as a means of rising above their circumstances, and they've been right.

James also inspired by personal example. Everyone knew what he stood for and the dignity he personified. Willie never went to school [until he attended the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon as a young adult]... but when we picture the grown-up Willie McTell, whether as a blind man picking his way along Georgia's red-clay dirt roads or as a street singer in the big city, and then ask why he routinely wore the best clothes he could, and always wore a tie and that snazzy hat, isn't the answer the powerful example of William James?"

Just as surely as Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King, or those who stood before them or behind them, Blind Willie McTell, who never ranted about either disability or race, was surely vindicated today. And would have been moved.

And to mention two other figures of grace and musicality, all hail to Aretha Franklin - another smart person in both senses (and with the best hat of anyone) - and Big Bill Broonzy. Who would have thought that they would hear his song lyrics quoted from the podium at the inauguration of a President of the United States of America?

McTELL EVENT IN CORK PART 2

2009-01-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

Further details have been clinched for this March 25th gig now: ticket prices will be just €8, with €6 for concessions, the start time is 8pm, and a write-up is now on the venue's website at http://www.triskelartscentre.ie/. Phone numbers there, from within the Republic of Ireland, are 021 4272022 and 087 9923184.

McTELL EVENT IN CORK, IRELAND, MARCH 25

2009-01-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to say that later this year I'm going to be making my third appearance at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork. I was last there in April 2004, and it was a great, full crowd. This time I'm delivering In Search of Blind Willie McTell, illustrated with audio and photographs. 8pm, Wednesday March 25th. Details to follow, or from their box office.

Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin Street (off Grand Parade and South Main Street), Cork
tel: 021 427 2022, or from outside the Republic of Ireland +353 21 427 2022.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2009-01-01T05:14:00.000-08:00

Happy 2009... in which at least President Obama will take over from President Bush, and in which it will be 300 years since Alexander Selkirk was found on Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile; 200 years since the USA outlawed participation in the slave trade (ha ha); 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin; 100 years since Louis Blériot became the first person to fly across the English Channel (Calais-Dover, 37 mins); 50 years since Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in a snow-covered Midwestern field; and 50 years since Blind Willie McTell died in Milledgeville State Hospital, Georgia.

MERRY CHRISTMAS...

2008-12-21T06:25:00.000-08:00

My thanks to everyone who has been reading this blog this year, and especially to those who have kept returning despite how few postings I've managed to write. Here's something it's too late to order for this Christmas, though it isn't too late to find downloads of each individual track if you Google for them...

IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING...

2008-11-05T01:33:00.000-08:00

I woke this morning at exactly the right moment to hear, live, Barack Obama's victory speech. We were thrilled, moved and happy. We're not so naive as to think revolutionary political change will sweep away all the meanies, abolish capitalism and the arms race and let the meek inherit the earth - but it is a great victory for all those black Americans who suffered under, and struggled against, the segregation and disenfranchisement that still reigned in the USA when Blind Willie McTell died and Barack Obama was born. And for those of us who were always on their side.

To see those long, long lines of black Americans, and a whole new young generation, waiting to vote with excitement, determination and hope, was electrifying. Obama's speech echoed that hope. He showed himself aware of the wider world, thoughtful about how the US dominates this world, and full of grace and dignity. And it thrills me that while he doesn't thrust black American culture down different cultural throats, his rhetoric sounds resonant chords with everyone at all familiar with black church worship in the States. You couldn't but hear Sam Cooke's 'A Change Is Gonna Come', itself a transmitter of the cadences of black preachers, when Obama said, without sentimentality or triumphalism, "It's been a long time coming..." Blind Willie McTell, adroitly non-political as he was (and needed to be, for safety's sake, in his lifetime) would surely have recognised the eloquent rises and falls of Obama's speech, and smiled, and rejoiced.

And it would have been no surprise to him, I imagine, that his home state of Georgia went to McCain.

CORA MAE BRYANT

2008-11-04T03:42:00.000-08:00

I've just learnt of the death of yet another interviewee in Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes. Cora Mae Bryant (born 1926) died on October 30th. I wonder what will happen to Willie's old church pew from Jones Grove Baptist Church in Happy Valley, Thomson, Georgia - the only obviously valuable item in Ms Bryant's so-called museum at her home in Oxford, Georgia.

NEW REVIEWS OF THE PAPERBACK

2008-10-19T03:02:00.000-07:00

There's a more-a-precis-than-a-review review in yesterday's Guardian, here; and a review in yesterday's Times here; these follow a fine review in last weekend's Independent On Sunday, here.

LIKE BLIND WILLIE McTELL

2008-10-06T06:15:00.001-07:00

photo by Duncan Hume, 1992

Today is official publication date of the paperback of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes in the UK. The publisher is Bloomsbury, and I'm happy to say that there was a brief review in The Observer yesterday, which called the book "magic".

ANOTHER WITNESS GONE...

2008-09-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to say that another of the interviewees I was able to talk to and record during the research for the book has died. Annie Jackson, who was born in 1925, died last week in the hospital in Thomson, Georgia, and her funeral took place yesterday at Mount Aldred Church, Happy Valley. She was a valuable witness to the daily life of the Happy Valley community over a long period, including Willie's end days - and she gave especially strong and interesting information about racial discrimination and about the bootlegging of whisky in the area. She leaves a son, Teddy Jackson, who also contributed to the interview with Annie.

Her death follows that of Ernest Bernard McTell Seabrooks, whom I interviewed in the Phinizy Road jail in Augusta, and who was the adopted son of Willie's first wife, Kate. He died suddenly (cause still unknown to me) in June, aged 43.

UK PAPERBACK OUT NEXT MONTH!

2008-09-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to confirm that the UK paperback of Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes - which includes various updates and other minor changes to the hardback text - is due to be published by Bloomsbury in London on October 6. Yesterday I received the finished version of the front cover (see above) which I think looks terrific.

JAMES TAIT BLACK

2008-08-30T03:24:00.000-07:00

MY wife and I went over to Edinburgh last weekend to attend the awards ceremony for the James Tait Black Prizes for Biography and for Fiction. Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes was one of the five shortlisted biographies - apparently out of about 90 that were considered by the judges. Unhappily for me, I didn't win (Rosemary Hill's God's Architect, about Pugin, did) but it was a good evening. Travel Hell in both directions, though, getting back home 12 hours late and very out of pocket. Cheap flights often aren't.

DEATH OF UTAH PHILLIPS

2008-06-17T06:26:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry to report, and belatedly too, the death of Utah Phillips, a great man and an interesting artist. Obituaries are here and here.

I never met him, but in 2004, when I was still researching Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes, blues writer Elijah Wald told me that Utah had once met Blind Willie McTell. It seemed a wonderfully unexpected yet pleasing conjunction, so I telephoned Mr. Phillips and he gave me a warm and generous telephone interview. In the event, I could only find space for the briefest of mentions of their meeting in the finished book - page 293 of the hardback - and he was omitted from the index in error. This seems a good moment to reproduce that interview more or less in full:

INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE UTAH PHILLIPS
Recorded at our homes by telephone, late May 2004
Transcribed July 2004

MG: My name’s Michael Gray, and I’m a writer, and I’m phoning you from England.

B: You’re calling from England? Wait just a second, let me put my wood down… There, I’ve put it down.

MG: OK.

B: So, er, you’re across the Big Pond.

MG: I am indeed, yes. I live in North Yorkshire.

B: Oh, North Yorkshire. Well you don’t sound like a Geordie.

MG: No. Indeed. Where are you? I know you’re on Pacific Time but …

B: I’m in Nevada City, California - a little gold-mining town of about 2700 people, in the foothills of the sierra here.

MG: Right. Good. I’m ringing you because I’m writing the biography of Blind Willie McTell.

B: Oh, good heavens! Willie McTell, yeah… That’s commendable. He was a very interesting man.

MG: Yes indeed, he certainly was. And Elijah Wald tells me that you met him.

B: Yes I did, I met him many years ago. I met him in, uh, God, you know I think it was Knoxville Kentucky.

MG: Oh! Really!?

B: I was hitchhiking around at the time, and it was Knoxville - through Tennessee, somewhere round there. Where was he living later in his life?

MG: Atlanta.

B: Down in Georgia.

MG: Yes, but I mean y’know he travelled really widely, so -

B: Yeah, I know he did. But I know it wasn’t in Georgia. I didn’t get down to Georgia till the mid-70s, and this would have been in the, uh, early ’60s.

MG: Sorry, when?

B: In the early ’60s.

MG: Actually it must have been earlier than that because he died in August ’59.

B: Well, OK. I was tramping round when I got back from uh - when I got back from Korea, on the troop ship, I was tramping a good bit, on the freight trains, just to kinda sort my thoughts out -

MG: Yes.

B: So yeah, it would have been on that trip, because I didn’t get back to Salt Lake till between ’50 and ’61, so it would have been on that trip.

MG: So it would have been very late in the ’50s.

B: Very very late.

MG: And, er, you happened to bump into him? How did it go?

B: No, I was introduced to him by, um, well what I’d been trying to do was, I’d been trying to learn how to fingerpick the guitar - you know I wanted to learn the drop stop style of guitar... so I was asking, every place I stopped, every place I tramped to, I asked about musicians. And some people were - as I recall: it’s such a long time ago - they were sort of having a party, indoor-outdoor, kind of like a street party -

MG: Yes -

B: - and that’s where I met Mr. McTell, sort of, you know, very briefly.

MG: Uh huh?

B: And I think what Elijah was alluding to was a conversation that, part of a conversation that he and I had. It was very brief. Let’s see, I had just finished listening to [McTell] play: he played ‘Twelve Gates To The City’ -

MG: Oh really!?! -

B: On a -

MG: He did?!

B: Oh yeah, he could play that ‘Twelve Gates to the City’ beautifully. On a twelve-string guitar. I dunno if it was his twelve-string guitar or somebody else’s, but he played ‘Twelve Gates to the City’ on a twelve-string guitar, and uh, you know, to that point I was really unfamiliar with Delta blues, Piedmont blues: I was not familiar with that completely. And I had the yen, you know, I had just from listening to people talk understood that these blues men that I - that I got to know later on, you know, when I left Utah and started working in [???] - I became good friends with John Jackson and especially Robert Pete Williams - and Mississippi Fred McDowell, because we worked together a good bit - and Junior Lockwood - but to that point, you know, I had a yen to understand that the music, it wasn’t very old but it had a long tradition and that all these people used to play that music when they were young - when they were young men, when they were my age at that time: when they were in their late teens or early twenties. And I knew that then there’s a long period of time that no-one pays much attention to them at all, like Son House, and then finally were “discovered” because of the folk-music revival. But I was curious about what this music, when it was in the jazz houses and the jook joints: what did it sound like? When you were young, what d’you sound like? And he said “You want to hear what we sounded like when we were your age, you listen to early Elvis Presley, old Elvis Presley.”

MG: That’s great!

B: Now I don’t think he was joking, either -

MG: - no, no, no!

B: ’Cause when you look back on it, I know that Elvis’ early life he had very strong roots in that music: he understood it.

MG: Yes.

B: Well that’s about what I know about Blind Willie.

MG: Well now, when you had that conversation with him, was this - were you standing around outside, or inside a room?

B: It was on the porch.

MG: Of what?

B: On the porch looking out at the street - it was kind of a street party going on.

MG: And was this a white street or a black street?

B: Well the people that took me over there were white, they were young musicians, and most of the people there, it was a black neighborhood.

MG: And can you picture him now? Can you picture what he was wearing?

B: He was [pause] wearing a yellow shirt, a yellow shirt open at the front, and he was wearing dark pants. That’s all I can remember. I’m also real conscious of shoes, you know: his shoes were pretty well polished, black shoes. That’s all I can remember. Trying to picture him now I don’t know if I remember suspenders or what.

MG: And did he look in reasonable health?

B: Well he looked tired. The thing is, as I recall, we got there - this thing had been going on all day and we got there about seven o’clock in the evening. And he looked tired - I assume he’d been playing all day, but I don’t know. When I arrived, he was playing ‘Twelve Gates to the City’ and I stood on the lawn and listened to it and then I got up on the porch, there were a couple of steps on the porch and he was sat down on the porch, and, er, other people were talking to him and, see I didn’t know who he was. Blind Willie McTell I was told. And then I asked my question.

MG: But when he gave you that answer was he talking about the blues music or the gospel music, d/you think?

B: Well I couldn’t tell yah… and see there were a lot of people playing around there too, there were some young fellers, African Americans playing Delta blues you know? He was playing a gospel tune, and he was the only one who was. I sort of gestured around me to the music that was going on around me, so I think my question was more inclusive than just him. So I think his answer was more inclusive too.

MG: Yeah. You said that he’d said “If you want to know how we sounded…”

B: Yep.

MG: Who told you that it was Blind Willie McTell?

B: Whoever it was that took me over there. I think the people that took me over there, that their intention was, that they knew that Blind Willie McTell was going to be there. But, y’know, if they mentioned the name to me at all when I first got to town I had no way of recognising it.

MG: Right. Now I have to ask this. ‘Twelve Gates to the City’ is generally associated with Blind Gary Davis. So I just need to be sure that you’re sure that it was Blind Willie McTell and not Blind Gary Davis that -

B: Yes. No, I never met Gary Davis…

MG: Great. Good. Excellent. And if you think back, have you any way of pinning down what year this could have been?

B: Well it’s gotta be in’58 - I would say it was in late ’58: ’cause I was headed south then. You know, south for the winter, north for the summer.

MG: Yes. Yes.

B: I can’t remember where I was headed. See that was a pretty upset time in my life: I was pretty upset by what had gone on in Korea, you know, that I had seen and done, and I was on the trains because I was angry and frightened, and I was drifting. And a lot of the time I was drunk.

MG: So you were how old at this point? How young?

B: Well let’s see. I was 22, 23 years old. I’m 69 now.

MG: Well I’m 57. Yes… Well I’ve been aware of you as a figure in the history of all this stuff for a long time, and I’m very respectful of your function as a Wobbly, quite apart from anything else.

B: Well this is my 50th year in that union.

MG: But I had never dreamt of putting you and Blind Willie together. It’s a lovely idea.

B: Yes. Well I appreciate talking to you.

MG; Alright, well me too. Thank you very much. I’m very glad to have caught you.

B: Anything I can do for you, let me know.

MG: Alright. Thank you again.

B: See you later.

MG: Goodbye.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO.4

2008-05-24T01:45:00.000-07:00

This is the cardboard stand-up painting of Willie McTell that stood, at least in the early years of the 21st Century (but apparently not now - has it been put away in a cupboard?), upstairs in the Statesboro City Hall. You may not think it looks particularly like him, but there it is. Or was:

BLIND WILLIE AT STAMFORD GUITAR FEST

2008-05-14T06:42:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to say I've been booked to perform In Search of Blind Willie McTell (a DVD-illustrated talk) at the 10th Stamford Guitar Festival at the Arts Centre in Stamford, Lincs, without question one of England's loveliest towns. It'll be a return visit for me: I gave a Dylan talk there in 2002, and then appeared on the lower reaches of the bill at the 2004 Guitar Festival.

This time my slot is 4.30pm on Saturday June 7th, and tickets for the whole three-day fest, or for a day, or for just that evening, are on sale online here or by phoning 01780 763203.

HAND ME MY TRAVELIN' SHOES SHORTLISTED

2008-05-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to learn that Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell has been shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. The winner will be announced in August. This is a really big and venerable part of the literary scene, and I'm in heavyweight company. As Bob Dylan sings, we'll just have to see how it goes...