PT Gazzell's "The Loft Sessions"

My first exposure to the harmonica playing of PT Gazell was via his 1978 LP “Pace Yourself” and his recordings with country legend Johnny Paycheck. At that time PT was part of an emerging and very small tribe of diatonic players inspired by Charlie McCoy who were focused not on blues harp but on unlocking the melodic potential of their instrument.

I finally met PT at the SPAH (Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica) convention in St. Louis in 2018 and was in the audience when he played a remarkable set at that festival. I left town with two PT Gazell CDs—“2 Days Out” (released in 2011) and “Madness To The Method” (released in 2016)—in my luggage, and they became instant favorites and part of my steady musical listening rotation back home in Portland.

PT let me know recently that he has released a new recording—“The Loft Sessions”—and for the past few days I have been devouring this fresh collection of stellar jazz, and I feel compelled to help spread the news about this remarkable musician.

Notice I didn’t say “remarkable harmonica player.” I’ve been playing the harmonica for almost fifty years. I wrote a book on the history of the instrument, and I know the work of the players of the past and the present in all genres. It’s almost impossible for me, therefore, to listen to a harmonica recording and not hear it as the work of a mouth organist and to stop myself from measuring it against the existing harmonica catalogue—a sadly narrow perspective that is admittedly unfair to the most talented of those players.

But from the first, I didn’t react to PT Gazell’s recordings that way. I just heard music—really fine music—and not someone pushing the boundaries of his instrument. So when I sat down to write about him I tried to think through why I have this response to his recordings.

First and foremost, PT Gazell is a masterful technician who has confronted and defeated those harmonica-centric limitations—the tendency to sound thin and harsh, the difficulty of achieving a consistent tonality across all the holes, the complexity involved in hitting bent notes on pitch, the struggle inherent in unleashing complex melodies from a diatonic instrument.

Gazell also has the intelligence, good taste, and musicality to steer clear of the shortcomings of most diatonic harmonica players—the lack of good breathing technique and tone, the cluelessness about phrasing and legato, the inability to play against chord sequences more complex than the I-IV-V, and a pathological fear of ballads.

For some reason, there is a Western prejudice that equates playing fast with virtuosity. Like most misperceptions, there is some truth behind it. We’ve all been rendered appropriately slack-jawed by musicians who can play complex music at blazing tempos. But more commonly what we get is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Most musicians will tell you that it is the ballad that separates the great musicians from the rest of the stampeding herd of shredders—that listening to musicians playing at slow tempos reveals the most about their musicality. Gazell became famous in the 1970s for his ability to play bluegrass numbers at insane speeds with incredible precision, but he’s always loved ballads, and on his jazz recordings there are as many of those as there are up-tempo numbers. This not only gives him the opportunity to show the full range of his technical mastery, but it gives the us listeners a more varied and enjoyable listening experience.

Gazell eschews the heavy vibrato used by many harmonicists in favor of a light heartbeat pulse. He puts his harmonica front and center. He takes the time to demonstrate his mastery of the melody before launching into his always surprising improvisations. There is a lifetime’s worth of complex bending happening on his records, but Gazell’s legato phrasing is always even and seamless. PT use of slurring is much more restrained than that of the blues harpists, but there is a unique decay to his notes, and it’s the clarity of his playing that enables him to meld so well with his accompanists. Gazell’s playing is gutsy and fearless, but never forced and always relaxed. Like only a handful of others, he proves that the diatonic harmonica is a great vehicle for jazz.

PT Gazell plays valved diatonics of his own design manufactured by Seydel. I have no personal experience playing his “Gazell method” harps, so I can’t speak to the challenging technical accomplishments he is pulling off within that system or how they help him to do what he does. But that’s the point. PT’s music just sounds like music, not like someone pushing the boundaries on his instrument.

“The Loft Sessions, “Method To The Madness,” and “2 Days Out” are all small-group jazz recordings featuring outstanding musicians who Gazell allows to share his stage. The three records are distinguished from each other by the deployment of different featured instruments—the lap steel on “Madness To The Method,” the trombone and flugelhorn on “2 Days Out”—but Gazell clearly loves the small-combo format, and it loves him back.

These three Gazell recordings are all beautifully recorded, which is another key aspect of his success. They were recorded years apart with different musicians in different studios, but the performances are all superbly captured, the mixes are stellar, and there is a remarkable consistency in the overall sound of these recordings. The absence of effects and post-production trickery is so refreshing that it’s compelling. All the instruments are recorded naturally, including Gazell’s. What you get on these recordings is something that is, weirdly, rarely heard on the studio efforts of other diatonic harmonica players: the unadorned acoustic sound of a diatonic harmonica sound without processing, amplification or effects beyond a very subtle trace of reverb and delay.

PT lives in a musical neighborhood populated by bluesy swing numbers, jazz standards and ballads. I spend a lot time in that same zone, and no doubt PT’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for Harry “Sweets” Edison and Ben Webster makes me predisposed to like him. And he keeps these collections interesting by covering tunes by the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, and Bill Monroe as well.

“The Loft Sessions” is Gazell’s brand-new release, a killer jazz record from an all-star drummerless combo: PT on harmonica, Marek Rejhon on guitar, and Jimmy Sullivan and Roger Spencer on bass. The tunes are impeccably chosen and evenly split between swing numbers (three of which were originally recorded by Gazell’s heroes Edison and Webster) and ballads. The swing tunes (“Taste On The Place,” “Used To Be Basie,” “Candy,” and “Studio Call”) are all perfect vehicles for Gazell’s ultraconfident mastery of that familiar but challenging idiom, his complete command of macro- and microbends, his unerring but always relaxed rhythm, and the incredible evenness of his tone up and down his ten-hole instrument. The ballads on this record are particularly gorgeous and grounded in his beautiful phrasing and wistful tone. Rejhon is a truly great guitarist, and Gazell is smart to share the solo spaces throughout with him, and their work on Oliver Nelson’s ballad “Stolen Moments” is a real highlight. “Val’s Lament” by Johnny Hodges is a great bluesy ballad perfect suited for PT’s style and proclivities, and “Angel Eyes” features some beautiful microbends and high-note wizardry from him.

“Madness To The Method” dates from 2016 and here PT is supported by Pat Bergeson on guitar, Roger Spencer on bass, Rob Ickes on lap steel, Chris Brown on drums and percussion. Ickes is a monster, and the pairing of harmonica and lap steel—two instruments that live in the cracks—on tunes like “Kitty,” “A Smooth One,” and “I’m Confessin’”—is brilliant. Gazell steps up to the mic and sings two Louis Jordan classic barroom rousers—"Boogie Woogie Plate” and “Reet Peet and Gone”—and on the latter Ickes’ steel takes PT back to his country roots. The group takes Rogers and Hart’s “This Can’t Be Love” at the perfect swing tempo and lots of effortless slipping and sliding ensues. Gazell and Bergeson duet exquisitely on Benny Golson’s soulful ballad “I Remember Clifford.” This tune is a test for any player, but Gazell nails it with his seamless bending technique. This CD includes features three other ballads—the Duke’s langorous “All Too Soon” with some marvelous guitar from Bergeson and a sweet cadenza from PT, the pop classic “If I Had You” with more great steel work and PT perfectly navigating the sinuous chords and melody, and the album’s perfect closer, a luminous version of Lennon and McCartney’s “Here There and Everywhere” on which Gazell overdubs his harmonicas in unison an octave below.

“2 Days Out” was released in 2011. It’s another small-group jazz effort with guitarist Andy Reiss, bassist Danny O’Lannerghty, pianists Jeff Steinberg and Bruce Dudley, and drummer Chris Brown supporting PT. Gazell adds a musical twist to this album’s sound in the form of trombonist Roy Agee and flugelhorn ace George Tidwell. The doubling of the muted trombone and the harmonica on tunes like Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought Of You” and the Beatles’ “Fixing A Hole” results in a blend so complimentary that you’re left wondering why such an improbable pairing isn’t used more often. Predictably, the album is replete with standout swing shuffles, including “There Is No Greater Love,” “Out Of Nowhere” (featuring Reiss on guitar and some amazing chromatic runs against the chords from Gazell), “Did You Call Her Today” (piano perfection from Dudley), and “The Best Things In Life Are Free” (featuring sweet unison work and solo sharing between PT’s harmonica and Tidwell’s fat flugelhorn). For this record, Gazell’s ballad selections are Rogers and Hart’s “My Romance,” which is ended by another impossibly pretty PT cadenza, the Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here To Stay,” featuring the piano of Jeff Steinberg, and Stevie Wonder’s “Lately,” on which PT fluently delivers a melody that would be out of reach for most diatonic players. “2 Days Out” also features two really strong blues numbers—“Sweets” Edison’s “Pussy Willow,” on which harmonica and trombone pair up on the head, and “K.M. Blues,” delivered at a blistering tempo and distinguished by Reiss’ guitar work and PT doubling himself at times both in octave and harmony. Gazell ends this great CD with one of my all-time favorite bluegrass numbers, Bill Monroe’s haunting, minor-key “Lonesome Midnight Waltz” with an unforgettable, lonesome melody.

If you’re familiar with “2 Days Out” and “Madness To The Method,” you don’t need me to tell you to rush out and buy PT Gazell’s latest release, “The Loft Sessions.” And if you’re somehow not familiar with PT’s music, purchasing his latest compilation will certainly compel you to buy the earlier two. These three collections definitely represent a cohesive trio of jazz recordings featuring a legitimate harmonica master in a small-group setting with the mouth organ right up front. If you’re a diatonic harmonica player new to jazz, melodic playing, ballads, swing, and standards, you need to check out the template and example that Gazell has set out for doing more than justice to those styles.

To order PT Gazell’s new project “The Loft Sessions” as well as his other releases—“Method To The Madness:” and “2 Days Out”—click on this link: http://www.ptgazell.com/recordings.html.

For more about PT’s career and his special line of “Gazell method” valved diatonic harmonicas, check out his web site at www.ptgazell.com.

Aretha Franklin's "Amazing Grace"

I spent part of this Sunday at church—namely, a nearly empty ArcLight Theater on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, where the Aretha Franklin concert film “Amazing Grace” opened this week.

Aretha charted more times than any other female artist in history. One hundred and twelve times, to be exact. She recorded nearly fifty albums, and the biggest of them all was “Amazing Grace,” a double-platinum live gospel recording she made in 1972 at New Temple Baptist Church—which still stands, about fifteen miles from the ArcLight Theater on Sunset.

The 1972 concert that produced that album was also filmed by a movie crew directed by Sidney Pollack, but somehow he failed to link the film footage with the audio, and the film sat in the vaults for nearly forty years until 2008, when Pollack gave the footage to Alan Elliot. Elliott spent two years synchronizing the film and the music and planned to release the picture, but Aretha sued to block it. After Aretha’s death, Elliott showed the restored film to Franklin’s family and finally got permission late last year to pursue a distribution deal. The film opened this week in theaters across the country.

The backstory behind the “Amazing Grace” is only hinted at in the film, but it’s an exceedingly dramatic one. Aretha began her musical career singing in the largest black church in Detroit, where her father C. L. Franklin was pastor. C.L. took little Aretha on the road with him and oversaw the release of her first gospel recordings. Aretha, heavily influenced by religious singer Clara Ward, became a sensation in the world of black gospel, but when she was nineteen, she told her father that she wanted to record popular music and C. L. negotiated a contract for her with Columbia Records.

During her six years with Columbia Aretha had her first hits and became a successful concert performer, but she didn’t achieve the success that many had predicted for her, and in 1967 she signed with Atlantic Records. Producer Jerry Wexler let her accompany herself on piano and return to her gospel singing style, and he brought Franklin down south to record with the brilliant Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The first Atlantic single by Aretha was the "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," a huge hit. Aretha was off to the races and within a year she was an international star.

Over the next five years Aretha freed herself from her father’s control and reached a level of musical and professional success that dwarfed that of Ward and other influences. But there was a slice of the black community that did not look kindly on Aretha turning her back on gospel music and leaving her church career, so in 1972 Franklin turned to friend and gospel music legend James Cleveland to help her produce a gospel record, one that would be recorded live at Cleveland’s church in Los Angeles.

The just-released film “Amazing Grace”documents the rehearsals and the two nights of performances at the New Temple Baptist Church. It is a phenomenal film.

James Cleveland was the musical director and soulful host, and his Southern California Community Choir wrapped its huge, joyful sound around the star. Aretha brought her peerless backing band—guitarist Cornell Depree, percussionist Pancho Morales, drummer extraordinaire Bernard Purdie, and the genius bassist Chuck Rainey—which was augmented with the keyboard work of Cleveland, Aretha herself, and Ken Luper.

Most importantly, Aretha brought herself. All of herself. Franklin was thirty years old in 1972, and the Aretha in this film is gorgeous and supremely confident. Vocally, she is at her peak. At the very end of the film, Aretha smiles and appears to relax, but up until that hint of release she is a woman on a mission. She means to show that she is the best singer in the world regardless of style and to do that by proving, once and for all, that she is the the unchallenged queen of gospel music. During the performances she is relentless in digging impossibly deep into the music. She has the church ushers seat her father and Clara Ward right in the middle of the front row so she can simultaneously pay tribute to them and show them in no uncertain terms just how far she has surpassed them both.

There are so many thrilling moments in the film that it’s almost unbearable, but Aretha’s soaring rendition of John Newton’s 1779 hymn “Amazing Grace” is truly shattering. Beginning a capella, Aretha takes the familiar hymn apart and rearranges it, taking each succeeding verse to ever more impossible emotional and musical heights. By the time she is midway through the song Aretha has the members of Cleveland’s choir spontaneously leaping, shouting, and crying, the audience is transported, and James Cleveland is utterly overcome and weeping into a handkerchief.

All cultures have compellingly told their stories in music, and song is the supreme expression of humanity. But Aretha’s performance in “Amazing Grace” leaves no doubt that black gospel music—a music born out of the degradation of slavery—and her unique voice have no equals when it comes to telling the story—all of it—of the human spirit. In these seemingly dark times, when it feels as if the loudest voices are the ones that are preaching hatred, revenge, fear, and cruelty, it is no overstatement to claim that experiencing this film can give us renewed hope and make us better people. Hopefully those theater seats will start filling up in the coming week and “Amazing Grace” will achieve the impact it deserves on a vast audience that sorely needs it.

Happy Birthday to Walter Horton

When I was going to college in NYC, I hitchhiked up to Boston several times to see Walter Horton play at Joe’s Place, where he was backed up by Johnny Nicholas and his great band. Those shows were a total revelation to me—Horton’s sound was huge and gorgeous, and he greatly expanded my notion of what was possible on the harmonica. I also able to spend time with Walter at his table between sets. Walter was by nature a shy person, but after a few drinks he would let out with all kinds of outrageous statements. He gave me his address in Chicago and told me the amazing experience that would be mine if I ever showed up for a lesson. “I got a motherf----n’ x-ray machine, man, and I will slap that f----r up against my face and you will see EVERYTHING.”

A few years later I was back in my hometown of Seattle. Walter brought his band to town to play the Rainbow, a popular music venue. I had a day job downtown then and on the day of Walter’s show I dropped in at a nearby liquor store and there was Walter, standing in line at the checkout counter, wearing the fur hat that he often favored.

I was working a lot with at that time in a band led Brian Butler, a talented singer and guitarist, and the two of us went to the Rainbow to hear Horton. Walter and his band (Left Hand Frank on guitar, Rick Molina on bass, and Ted Harvey on drums) really raised the roof off the joint that night. Walter was in stellar form. When he was on, no one could touch him. He put more air in the harp than anyone, before or since.

At the end of the night, with the crowd going crazy for more, there was a quick huddle between the club owner and Walter on stage. Then the club owner grabbed the mic and let everyone know that they had just worked out a deal to have Walter play the club again the following evening.

Awesome! Except…wait a minute—Brian was booked that night. That was our gig! So another conversation happened with the club owner, Walter, and Brian and we quickly agreed that both bands would play the next night and alternate sets, with us starting out.

I thought a lot that day about sharing the stage with Walter, but by the time I got to the Rainbow I was feeling no pressure and was just determined to do a good show and savor every second of the thrill of sharing a stage with the best harmonica player on the planet. We jumped up and did a solid opening set, Walter and his guys got up and killed it, and we did another short set. I had some friends in the audience that night who had saved me a prime seat, and now it was time to have a couple of well-earned drinks and sit back and watch Walter work his magic.

I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Rick Molina.

“Walter wants you to play the next set with him,” he was telling me. My brain went soft and I looked across the room to see Walter beckoning to me with a crooked finger. Somehow I floated across the room to him.

“You get on stage with the band and play through the amp,” Walter told me. “I’ll put a mic down on the floor and work that.”

I grabbed my harps and microphone, climbed onstage in a daze, took a place on stage between Left Hand Frank and Ted Harvey, and plugged in. Walter put a stand with a vocal mic a couple of feet below us on the dance floor and kicked us off. For the whole set I played fills around his vocals while he and Frank took all the solos. I could have cared less, as long as Walter Horton thought I belonged up there. I just stared down at the back of Walter’s head, listened to his amazing harmonica sound, and did the best I could.

And then it was over. I shook Walter’s hand, thanked him and Rick, and watched the band head off in their station wagon to the motel. I went home and bounced around the walls for a while and then headed out the door and paced the streets until dawn, trying to walk off my excitement, but that was a thrill that’s never worn off. Definitely my most memorable musical experience, bar none.

Happy Birthday, Muddy Waters

I finally made my first visit to the Mississippi Delta three summers ago. We stayed three days in Clarksdale and made the trip out to the old Stovall plantation. We visited the spot where Muddy Waters’ sharecropping cabin had once stood. That humble structure had been moved to the Delta Blues Museum, but it was still an experience to stand on that spot, look across the road to the huge fields in the distance, and imagine McKinley Morganfield on a summer evening after a long day in those furrows, working on his slide guitar playing and beginning his transformation into Muddy Waters, international godfather of the blues.

Like a lot of guys my age, my first blues record was a Paul Butterfield album. Soon after I bought the album “Fathers and Sons,” on which had Paul backed up Muddy. The very next day I was back in the record store to get “The Best of Muddy Waters,” and I just wore that thing out. Muddy was the gate to the blues for me. He quickly led me to Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells—the whole historical blues genius lineup was rolled out for me by Muddy Waters. He changed my life before I ever saw him in person.

From 1968 on I saw Muddy onstage many times. The first time was at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle—that was the first time I saw Paul Oscher in action, too. I’ll never forget Muddy’s Academy-Award enactment of every ounce of drama in “Long Distance Call” that night. I saw him at Ungano’s in New York City two years later, just after his terrible automobile accident—he apologized for sitting down. There was an improbable week-long gig at the posh Maisonette Room at the St. Regis Hotel, where Muddy gamely asked out for requests and a blue-haired matron cradling a martini called out for “When The Saints Go Marching In.” That spurred my friends and I into action, and we began shouting out for all of Muddy’s hits, which he delivered up to us. The great Louis Myers played guitar on that show. There was the time a bunch of us drove from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie to catch a Muddy Waters show at Vassar. We stood outside afterwards and waved goodbye to Muddy and the band as they pulled out of the parking lot in a weathered station wagon and pulling a small trainer with their equipment. I caught Muddy twice at Antone’s, where Jimmie Vaughan, Lou Ann Barton, and Kim Wilson sat in and delighted him. I even got to open for him once, at a show at the Showbox in Seattle.

Onstage, Muddy looked like a king, carried himself like a king, sang like a king, and played like a king. Thirty years after making the move to Chicago as an illiterate field hand and creating a new, amplified update of the Delta blues, Muddy was traveling the globe and delivering one great show after another in country after country, and no one who saw him will forget his regal nature, his total command of the stage, and the intensity and uniqueness of his music. Muddy Waters traveled a personal journey that most of us can’t even begin to comprehend, but we can spend the rest of our lives savoring the gift he left behind—some of the most beautiful and most soulful music ever recorded.

Bobby Hackett

I started out as a trumpet player, and, when the right lips are behind the mouthpiece, I am still a passionate fan of that instrument. Today we celebrate the birthday of a wiry genius who produced some of the most sublime music that ever sprang from a trumpet or a cornet: Bobby Hackett.

Hackett was born into a large family in 1915 in Providence, Rhode Island. By the age of twelve he was making real music on the ukulele, banjo, guitar, violin, and trumpet. He quit high school to become a working musician and played in every club and roadhouse in New England before he came of age.

Hackett’s trumpet heroes were Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. From Pops, Hackett got an education in hip phrasing and a lifelong love for Dixieland, and he learned volumes about playing the changes and finding the pretty notes from Bix. But as far as the remarkable tone he achieved on the horn is concerned, well, that was all Hackett, and he had it from the start.

Hackett went to New York City in 1937 and began a decades-long musical partnership with guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon. By 1938 Hackett’s reputation was such that he was recruited by Benny Goodman to recreate Beiderbecke’s famous solo on “I’m Coming, Virginia” at Goodman’s historic 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert. The next year the MCA agency asked Hackett to form a big band, but the group never took off and Hackett ended up deep in debt. Dental surgery left him temporarily unable to play his horn, and Hackett joined the Glen Miller band—as a guitarist. The stint with Miller enabled Hackett to get back on his feet financially and to ease back into playing the trumpet again. (That’s Hackett doing the famous trumpet solo on the bridge of Miller’s monster hit, “String of Pearls.”)

Bobby Hackett, Eddie Condon, Charles Peterson, and Fats Waller at the Apollo Theater in 1937

Louis Armstrong included Hackett in his 1947 Town Hall jazz concert, and the following year Hackett made a splash with his brilliant playing on Frank Sinatra’s recordings of “I’ve Got A Crush On You” and “Body and Soul.” If you go looking for the ultimate example of an instrumentalist setting up and complementing a singer, you will definitely run into Hackett—who by now had become the undisputed king of the cadenza—brilliantly chaperoning Sinatra’s baritone on “Body and Soul.”

In 1952 comedy star and frustrated musician Jackie Gleason, inspired by seeing how lush music intensified a Clark Gable movie love scene, sold Capitol Records on the idea of an album of romantic instrumentals with a tinge of jazz. (“If Gable needs music, a guy in Brooklyn must be desperate!”) The resulting record, “Music For Lovers Only,” which was built around Hackett’s gorgeous playing, still holds the record for the longest stay (153 weeks!) on the Billboard Top Ten charts. Ten more make-out albums under Gleason’s name followed, seven featuring Hackett. Every one of them sold at least a million copies. (“He brought the checks” was Hackett’s comment when asked what role Gleason had played in recording the records.) Hackett’s solos became the soundtrack to the making of the boomer generation.

Capitol eventually got wise and signed Bobby Hackett to his own contract. Hackett released several great albums for the label over the next few years—some romantic albums of his own, some fronting Dixieland groups, and others featuring his own quartet and pianist Dave McKenna. Hackett also recorded and toured with Tony Bennett between 1965 and 1967.

In 1971 Hackett bought a house on Cape Cod, formed his own record company, and became a fixture at Dunfey’s in Hyannis, where he led a band featuring his son Ernie on drums. Bobby Hackett died of a heart attack in 1976 at the ridiculously young age of 61.

Louis Armstrong was quick to tell anyone who would listen that he was Bobby Hackett’s biggest fan. Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis revered him, too. Hackett’s playing was relentlessly tasteful and always perfectly suited to the material. He snaked through chord changes like no other, and a beautiful melody never had a better friend. Hackett was a supremely smart player who stuck to the trumpet’s sweet spot—its middle register. (When he once tried to sell one of his horns, he claimed—only half in jest—that the upper register was brand new because it had never been used.) Bobby Hackett is “Mister Music” to me.

Feast your ears on this 1973 clip of Bobby Hackett working his magic on “Serenade in Blue” with Ted Easton’s band in the Netherlands.

Kim Wilson

Recently I was in my hometown of Seattle for a gig. I walked around downtown and dropped in at the Pike Place Market. I made my way past the guys flinging monstrous salmons and headed for the back of the Market, where a piece of my personal history hangs about sixty feet above Western Avenue.

When I started playing music in Seattle in the early 1970s, there were only a couple of clubs that regularly hired blues bands—the Place Pigalle (aka “Pig Alley” or “the Pig”) in the Market and the Boulder Lounge right around the corner on First Avenue. I was in a band led by the great guitarist/singer Isaac Scott, who held down the regular gig at the Pig. Tom McFarland and his group were the mainstays at the Boulder Lounge.

The Boulder Lounge was furnished with black and red leather booths and featured not only Tom and his band but Korean go-go dancers of vague immigration status dancing in cages. The Pig was one of the last remnants of Seattle’s wild, bare-knuckle waterfront past. It was a ramshackle wreck of a place with an ancient bar, an even older wood stove that barely kept the interior from icing over in the winter, and a sort of a stage against the back wall. The base clientele were neighborhood derelicts and winos, but on when we played on weekends the core crowd would be augmented by aging beatniks, young wanna-be hipsters, and guys off whatever Navy ship happened to be tied up down the street. Most of the time the Pig was just a harmless dive, but fights could break out in a hurry and it could get really weird in there. I once saw two guys break the ends off of beer pitchers against the bar and go at each other with the jagged pieces, and another night some inspired patron hurled a keg of beer out the window and crushed the roof of a car parked down below on Western.

One night in August in 1975 I was playing there with Isaac’s band when a group of well-dressed folks came down the rickety stairs and into the club. Any kind of stylishness stood out in that venue, so we noted their arrival. The band took a break and I headed to the bar. One of the sharply dressed guys came up to me and introduced himself: “I’m so-and-so from Ada Records in Bellevue, and I’m here with the world’s greatest harmonica player. He’s in town for a big show tomorrow and we were wondering if it would be okay with you if he got up and performed a couple of tunes and plugged the show.”

This announcement put me at ease, because these people were obviously crazy, just like the rest of the people in the Pig. This was not a venue that the world’s greatest harmonica player would home in on, no legitimate record-company executives would be caught dead in there, and none of the people in the club could have afforded a ticket to some big show.

“Hey,” I told him, “If the world’s greatest harmonica player wants to give me a half-hour break, I’m all for it.”

So I cleared it with Isaac and a few minutes later this edgy guy with a pony tail got up on stage with the band and launched into a couple of tunes delivered with a level of dynamism that was not usually experienced by the Pig’s patrons. And sure enough the guy did play some nice harp, in a kind of souped-up style. Afterwards, Mr. Energy and his entourage said some hasty thank yous and disappeared into the Seattle night.

The next day I attended a blues festival held in Sicks’ Stadium, Seattle’s old minor-league ballpark. It was an unreal lineup of acts, including Howlin’Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins, and Margie Evans. Early in the show the emcee announces “Please welcome, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Aces, Straights, and Shuffles featuring the great Kim Wilson,” and out comes a band fronted by the pony-tailed guy from the Pig. They did a powerful set, and I filed away the name “Kim Wilson” in the memory banks.

Flash forward to two years later. After spending time in Memphis, New Orleans, and Lafayette, Louisiana, I finally ran out of money in Austin, Texas. (I think I had subconsciously planned it that way.) I scored a day job and a cheap apartment and went looking for the music. I asked some people I had met what there was in town in terms of blues, and they recommended that I check out this young guitarist who had just put together his first band—Stevie Ray Vaughan. I checked out Stevie with the Triple Threat Review (Stevie, W.C. Clark, and Lou Ann Barton) at the Rome Inn. During the break I followed Stevie, introduced myself as a harp player from Seattle, and asked about sitting in.

"A harp player, huh?" he said. "Do you know Kim Wilson from the Fabulous Thunderbirds?"

I told Stevie that I had been hearing about the T-Birds on the blues grapevine, that I didn’t know that Kim was their harp player, but that I had met and heard Kim a couple of years before in Seattle. Stevie asked me what I thought of Kim's playing. I told him that he was really good but maybe a little busy, or words to that effect. Stevie gave me a confounded look. Then, as if I was a character in an improbable scene in a cheesey movie, Kim Wilson, just returned from the T-Birds first tour of the Northeast, walked through the door a few minutes later.

So it was Kim and not me who sat in that night. Kim pulled out a chromatic and threw out an insanely huge harp sound on George Smith's "Juicy Harmonica" instrumental. After that ear-opening triumph, he leaned back and launched into the incredible vocal intro to 'Otis Rush' "I Can't Quit You Baby." At some point I slipped quietly out the side door.

I got to know Kim pretty well during my time in Austin, and he inspired me to really put time into my own harp playing in those days. Since then I see him when I can. Over the  years I’ve had the thrill of seeing Kim play with Muddy Waters; trade licks with Walter Horton; and catch him on tour with the T-Birds, his blues-only bands, and with an Antone’s West junket that included Buddy Guy, Luther Tucker, and Jimmy Rogers.

Kim has a monster work ethic, impeccable taste, and unsurpassed chops as both a singer and a harp player. I can testify to the fact that the legendary blues performers are among his biggest fans. I recently spent time in Chicago with Billy Boy Arnold, who got harmonica lessons as a twelve year old from John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson and who has heard every harp player since. Here’s what he had to say about Kim Wilson: “There are lots of dynamite harp players. Kim has everything Little Walter had but he’s Kim. He’s got his own thing. Kim can play all night without repeating himself, and that’s what makes Kim the top man.”

Turns out that guy from Ada Records back in 1975 was dead right after all.

(Click here to read my profile of, and interview with, Kim Wilson from my book, “Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers.”)

DeFord Bailey (1899-1982)

One gray afternoon in November, 1977, I parked my car at a street corner on Edgehill Road in a black neighborhood in Nashville. The man I was looking for had managed a shoeshine stand on that corner as recently as six years before, but now there was no sign of it. I walked into a nearby drugstore that had obviously been there for years and asked the pharmacist behind the counter if he might know where I could find DeFord Bailey. He obligingly pointed out a high-rise apartment building across the street.

I walked into a lobby furnished with chairs filled with old men and women reading newspapers and conversing quietly and found Bailey’s name and apartment number listed in a tenant directory on the wall. A few minutes later, I was knocking on the door of number 30, which swung open to reveal a tiny, white-haired black man, impeccably turned out in a white brocaded shirt, sharply creased pants, and gleaming patent-leather shoes. I stammered out an introduction and, stretching the truth only a little, said that I was a harmonica player who had traveled across the country just to meet the man who had recorded “Ice Water Blues.” Smiling, Bailey welcomed me in a quiet voice, stepped aside, and ushered me into his apartment, a small place filled with photographs and train memorabilia in which time seemed suspended sometime between the world wars.

We talked about his songs and DeFord produced a tape recorder containing a cassette of his old recordings. I had heard that Bailey would play his harmonica only on a cash basis, so I placed a twenty-dollar bill on a nearby side table as discreetly as I could and told him how much it would mean to me to hear the sound of his mouth organ in person.

“I play the banjo, you know,” he responded, and produced a five-string from somewhere and began fingerpicking it left-handed. After a time I steered the conversation back to the harmonica again.

“I play the guitar, too,” he volunteered, and in a minute he was cradling a guitar and picking out a melody in a subdued, tuneful style reminiscent of Mississippi John Hurt’s.

I decided to force the issue by pulling out a Marine Band and attempting my own version of my host’s “Ice Water Blues.” I stewed in my embarrassment as he pondered my playing. “You got some of that in there pretty good,” he finally said. “Keep practicing, son—keep practicing. I’ve been playing the harmonica for seventy-five years. You know I must know something.”

Bailey carefully opened a box containing a Marine Band in the key of G, confiding that the A and the G models were the best for his songs but that he could get by with a Bb if he had to. He cradled the harmonica in his right hand, brought it to his mouth, and for the next few minutes his remarkable playing filled the small room.

We listened to the tape of Bailey’s old recordings and discussed the finer technical points of harmonica playing. After a lesson from DeFord on how to play the bones properly, I asked him if I could have a picture taken with him. He agreed, but saying that he would like to change his clothes, he politely excused himself and disappeared behind a curtain that divided the single room into a parlor and a bedroom. A few minutes later he reappeared, this time in a black frock coat, string tie, and a Stetson hat that looked as if it were enjoying its first trip out of the box. He posed with me, we shook hands, I tried to tell him what his records meant to me, and then I was walking down a stairwell, trying to imagine Bailey as a young man in the WSM studios, perched on a Coca-Cola crate in front of a microphone, harmonica in hand, waiting for George Hay’s introduction.

At the close of the NBC “Music Appreciation Hour” on the night of December 11, 1927, host Walter Damrosch commented stiffly that “while most artists realize that there is no place in the classics for realism, I am going to break one of my rules and present a composition by a young composer from Iowa. This young man has sent us his latest number, which depicts the onrush of a locomotive.”

After the stirring orchestral train imitation was finished, those listening to the network broadcast over Nashville’s WSM heard George Hay follow Damrosch’s lead. Promising his audience “nothing but realism, down-to-earth for the earthy,” he called on DeFord Bailey, “The Harmonica Wizard,” to perform his train piece, “Pan American Blues.” After Bailey’s artificial steam had dissipated, Hay reminded listeners that “for the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”

DeFord Bailey, despite his undeniable genius, was an unlikely candidate to become the most popular of the many fine  harmonica players in the early days of country music. He was a quiet man, a tiny hunchback barely four feet ten inches tall. And he was black.

Bailey was born on his parents’ farm near Bellwood, Tennessee. “Everybody in my family played music,” he told Bengt Olsson. His mother and his aunt both played the guitar, his brother was a banjoist, and his father and grandfather were fine fiddlers. Bailey claimed that one of his uncles was the best black banjoist he had ever heard. Two of DeFord’s uncles played the harmonica; one, Albert, had quite a local reputation. DeFord remembered his family as being known as “the best musicians since slavery times.”

Bailey’s physical shortcomings were the result of a bout with polio at the age of three. Bedridden for a year, he spent his convalescence trying to unravel the mysteries of the harmonica and mandolin. “I tried to learn more about my harp from other people when I was a boy,” Bailey told David Morton, “but I didn’t learn very much…I was in a different class.” Bailey told me that as a child he was so obsessed with perfecting a train imitation that he would spend whole days sitting under a nearby railroad trestle, studying the shuddering roar of passing locomotives. He later became justly famous for his harmonica train pieces, which were so accurate that a railroad engineer once visited WSM studios for the express purpose of congratulating the mouth organist on his achievement and to suggest a few subtle corrections to DeFord’s whistle pattern for crossings.

Bailey’s physical problems, the racial climate of his day, and his talent for music all helped to give him an introverted, dreamy character. “I’ve always been like a child,” he told Bengt Olsson. “I have a very vivid imagination. I think like a child and I feel like a child. People say I drive them crazy after a while.” Bailey confided to David Morton that his schooling was sketchy. “I didn’t study nothing else but my harp.” When the white family for whom he did chores moved to Nashville in 1918, DeFord went with them.

His solitary personality notwithstanding, Bailey sought the musical spotlight. Preposterously, he teamed up with mirror image of himself—another diminutive, crippled African American harmonica player named Bob Lee—and together they played around Nashville. Bailey also worked as an elevator operator, playing his harmonica between stops for passengers, one of whom encouraged him to make his first radio appearance as a contestant in a contest sponsored by WDAD. A description of the competition in the Nashville Tennessean reported that “the first prize in the French Harp contest was one by J. T. Bland who played ‘Lost John.’ The second prize was won by DeFord Bailey, a negro boy, who played “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’.”

Dr. Humphrey Bate brought Bailey to an Opry broadcast, introducing him to Hay as “the dangdest harmonica player who ever lived” and convincing the announcer to put DeFord on the air that same night. Bailey was made an Opry regular in 1926 and within a year became the most popular member of its cast with his own regular fifteen-minute segment.

There is no hard evidence that the Opry tried to keep DeFord’s race a secret from the Opry audience. Bailey rarely spoke during his broadcasts, but this may have been in keeping with DeFord’s essentially shy nature, and he did sing occasionally on the air. While Bailey was the only black regular on the Opry, other African American gospel singers, guitarists, and blues performers appeared on the program. Whatever notions the Opry audience had about DeFord’s background, they responded enthusiastically to his performances; his fan mail was sizeable. According to Charles Wolfe, “it wasn’t at all uncommon for DeFord to appear for two or even three sets in a single Saturday night show.” Opry scholar Richard Petersen has documented that in 1928 Bailey performed almost twice as often on the Opry as any other performer.

In 1927, Bailey traveled to Atlanta and cut two sides for Columbia that were never issued. Two weeks later, Bailey was on a train for New York, where he recorded eight tunes in two sessions for the Brunswick label. On October 2, 1928, Bailey was the focus of the first recording session held in Nashville, during which he cut eight sides for Victor.

At the time, record companies had a practice of issuing blues recordings—then aimed solely at black audiences—as “race” records; recordings of white country music performers were sold as “hillbilly” discs. Bailey’s race, his status as a star of the Grand Ole Opry, and the fact that his purely instrumental music reflected the overlapping musical repertoires of blacks and whites in the Tennessee hill country (Bailey himself always contended that he played “black hillbilly music”) enabled Victor to release his recordings in both series. DeFord Bailey had become the first crossover star in country music.

As Paul Oliver’s research has shown, the material that Bailey recorded was not especially original. “Old Hen Cackle” was a traditional fiddle tune, “John Henry” was a well-known favorite of both blacks and whites, “Ice Water Blues” was based on a tune called “The Preacher and the Bear,” and “Davidson County Blues” was a rewriting of the piano showcase “Cow Cow Blues.” Bailey’s recordings, however, do not reveal the full extent of his range, which included blues, pop, sacred, and jazz numbers as well as traditional tunes.

What they do give us is solid evidence of his genius. His tone is unfailingly beautiful and astonishingly full, and his numbers are strongly melodic and cleverly conceived. What puts Bailey squarely in the ranks of the greatest of harmonica players is his polyrhythmic brilliance, which has never been equaled. In tunes like “Ice Water Blues” (a popular record that was released three times), Bailey effortlessly juxtaposes a melody line against two or three rhythmically distinct cadences that somehow dovetail seamlessly. Bailey once tried to describe to David Morton what distinguished his style from that of other players: “My timing is different from theirs….I got a double sound. I can’t play single. It doesn’t sound good to me….I add time to vacant space.” He took great pride in the clarity of his playing, and he liked to inject something unique (he called it “throwing in a little judo”) into each of his pieces.

Bailey often headlined touring package shows featuring Opry stars that drew large audiences. “When I first came to town, he was one of the top stars and was much in demand for personal appearances,” Roy Acuff admitted. “I carried him on my band. I wasn’t known and he drew a crowd….He helped me get where I am.”

“Rabon and I used DeFord on a lot of our personal appearances,” wrote Alton Delmore of the Delmore Brothers. “[He] was a pioneer in the field of playing the harmonica. When we joined the Opry we saw a lot of DeFord and he was a real friendly fellow and we liked him very much. So did the rest of the entertainers on the Opry….We all thought just as much of DeFord as we did our white friends. He was a little fellow who commanded our admiration and respect.”

On the road, Bailey was no longer sheltered by the faceless anonymity offered by radio. He usually could not eat at the same restaurants as his Opry colleagues. Although he suffered some indignities at the hands of his fellow performers on these road trips (on one tour DeFord was wheeled onstage at each performance in an oversize baby buggy), many of them were particularly solicitous of his welfare. When he toured with Uncle Dave Macon, Macon would often claim that Bailey was his valet so that the harmonicist could room with him. Most of the time, however, Bailey had to scour black neighborhoods in each town for lodging. As Bill Monroe told Jim Rooney, “We’d walk the streets together, two, three o-clock in the morning, nobody out, in the roughest parts of town we’d be down there getting him a place to stay….Then he would get in the room and lock the door and stay there until I went to get him the next day .” Bailey slept with a pistol under his head while on these tours.

A trend toward modernization at the Opry led to the steady reduction of Bailey’s airtime, which by 1935 had shrunk to five minutes. By the early 1940s he was called on to play only if time permitted. Bailey’s close friend David Morton feels that Bailey was the victim of a publishing battle between ASCAP, which published most of his repertoire, and BMI. WSM had invested in BMI and pressured its cast of regulars to write new songs that would be published in the BMI catalog.

Bailey was finally given his notice by Hay in 1941. In a souvenir pamphlet published four years later, Hay commented on the end of Bailey’s Opry career: “That brings us to DeFord Bailey, a little crippled colored boy who was a bright feature of our show for about fifteen years. Like some members of his race and other races DeFord was lazy. He knew about a dozen numbers, which he put on the air and recorded for a major company, but he refused to learn more, even though his reward was great. He was our mascot and is still loved by the entire company. We gave him a whole year’s notice to learn some new tunes. But he would not. When we were forced to give him his final notice, DeFord said, without mailice: “I knowed it wuz comin’, Judge, I knowed it wuz comin’.” Bailey himself, however, was steadfastly bitter about his firing, claiming that he never got paid more than five dollars for an Opry performance and that his treatment had not been on a par with that received by other performers.

Bailey had stared a shoeshine parlor with an uncle in 1931, and he went to work there after leaving the Opry. When his parlor became a casualty of a 1971 urban renewal program, he moved into a nearby housing project for the elderly. He steadfastly resisted offers from the Newport Folk Festival, for album projects alone and with folksinger Pete Seeger, for network television appearances, and for a cameo appearance in the Burt Reynolds film W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. When the Opry called, however, Bailey still answered; he stole the show at an Old Timer’s Night at the old Ryman Auditorium in 1974 and played at the new Opryland complex on his seventy-fifth birthday. He would occasionally talk about recording again, but never did.

In 1982 Bailey spent several weeks in the cardiac care unit of Nashville’s Baptist Hospital for treatment of heart disease. Shortly after his release, on July 2, Bailey was rushed to the hospital’s emergency room, where he was pronounced dead on arrival from kidney failure and heart congestion.

The Hohner Company formally petitioned the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct Bailey. Minnie Pearl and Alcyone Beasley, Humphrey Bates’ daughter, urged his selection, but Roy Acuff told the New York Times that Bailey did not deserve a place in the Hall of Fame, saying that the harmonica player’s contributions had done nothing to further country music.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Daniel Morton, June 23, 1983 was declared DeFord Bailey Day in Nashville. A striking granite headstone, engraved with a diatonic harmonica and the words “Harmonica Wizard,” was unveiled in a ceremony at Nashville’s Greenwood Cemetery. Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and Herman Crook were among the crowd. Acuff was still smarting from the criticism he had received over his comments concerning Bailey’s qualifications for the Country Music Hall of Fame. “If his name is ever put on the ballot,” he told reporters, “he will have a vote from Roy Acuff.”

Bailey would have enjoyed the occasion. The Crook Brothers played two of his favorite breakdowns, “Sugar in the Gourd” and “Grey Eagle.” Bill Monroe performed Bailey’s “Evening Prayer Blues” on the mandolin, and James Talley contributed a version of “John Henry.” After the headstone was unveiled, Herman Crook brought the observance to a close with a solo harmonica rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Some of those in attendance then drove to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where several Bailey artifacts—three hats, some shoes, a folding can chair, and two of his megaphones—were donated to the Country Music Museum.

DeFord Bailey was finally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

The previous is an excerpt from my book, “Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers.”

Sinatra

It’s Frank’s birthday.

Even one hundred and three years after his birth, most will get that it’s Mr. Sinatra to whom I refer.

He was one of the most famous men in the world for over fifty years. He was a movie star. He had the most beautiful women on the planet, one of whom he couldn’t stand losing. He once punched out a reporter. He could be generous to a fault. He was a proud liberal who brought down the Jim Crow laws in Vegas who became a Reaganite. He socialized with gangsters. He went broke and voiceless in mid-career but survived to build a business empire.

But let’s put aside Ava Gardner and the Rat Pack and the Jack Daniels and the films and focus on what Sinatra really was, first and foremost: a man who lived to sing. The greatest, most versatile, and most committed popular singer ever.

Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1915. His father was a former prize fighter who rarely spoke. Sinatra took after his mother, Dolly, an aggressive, profane woman who was prominent in local Democratic politics. Sinatra the young adult was famous for being as thin as a pencil, but, improbably, he weighed 11 pounds at birth and was left permanently scarred from the forceps the doctor used to forcibly pull him into this world. Dolly had no other children, and she doted on Frank. He had so many clothes as a child that his playmates called him “Slacksie.”

Somewhere, somehow the teenaged Sinatra fell under the spell of the phenomenally popular crooner Bing Crosby. He left the distraction of high school after forty-seven days to work odd jobs and focus relentlessly on his dream of becoming a singing star. By the time he was seventeen he had all the required equipment: a folder full of arrangements, a portable p.a. system, a car to travel to gigs in, regular appearances on the radio, a surprisingly sophisticated singing voice, and the ability to attract female fans in large numbers despite a scrawny physique.

His rise was swift. Bandleader Harry James went to see Sinatra at the Rustic Cabin near the George Washington bridge, where Sinatra was working as a singing waiter, and signed him to a two-year contract. Sinatra made his first recordings with James, but sales were anemic and the band struggled financially. The ambitious singer jumped ship nine months later to join the much more popular outfit led by trombonist Tommy Dorsey.

In the two years that Sinatra fronted the Dorsey band, Sinatra recorded 80 sides—including his first hit (“Polka Dots and Moonbeams”) and improved dramatically as a singer. Before the advent of 78-rpm records, singers were theater singers—belters with voices that could reach the balconies. They often used megaphones. Bing Crosby was the first to understand that the recording microphone freed vocalists from bombast and gave them the opportunity sing naturally and intimately. Sinatra developed a strong voice as a professional, but he perfected the art of singing directly to the listener in the recording studio. For Sinatra it wasn’t just about crooning more quietly, it was about conveying emotion by focusing—often playfully—on the lyrics, singing impossibly long phrases with a single breath (a style inspired in part by Tommy Dorsey’s approach to the trombone), stretching or truncating certain words or vowels depending on the desired message, purposefully vocalizing ahead or behind of the beat to draw in the listener, and, overall, creating an illusion of overall casualness out of all this technique. The result, in the words of writer Will Friedwald, was “total credibility. No popular recording artist has ever been as totally believable so much of the time as Sinatra.”

In the early ‘40s, the band was the star. The singer was usually limited to a verse and a chorus in the middle of the arrangement. Sinatra worked on Dorsey, to whom he was contracted, to allow him to make some records as a solo artist, and in 1942 Sinatra recorded four sides for RCA Bluebird with music by Dorsey arranger Axel Stordahl. The supremely confident Sinatra, who was anxious to challenge his idol Bing Crosby, was thrilled with the results and decided that he had to go out on his own—something that no band singer had done successfully to that point. “He had a direction,” producer Mitch Miller noted years later. “He knew where he was going, come hell or high water.”

After some nasty negotiations, Dorsey finally let Sinatra out of his contract with the comment “I hope you fall on your ass.” Sinatra responded by taking Stordahl with him at five times his Dorsey salary.

Popular recorded music had always been aimed at the adult audience, but the vulnerability that Sinatra’s ultra-intimate, masculine recordings displayed was attracting a very new audience:  teenaged girls. The newly solo artist scuffled for a time, but then got a big break: a four-week booking at New York’s Paramount theater in December of 1942 as an “extra added attraction” with Benny Goodman and his band. On opening night, when Goodman introduced Sinatra, a deafening roar went up—the audience was mostly bobby soxers. “What the hell was THAT?,” Goodman blurted out.

Sinatra killed every night that month, and before long there were lines of girls snaked around the block to get into the Paramount. Every song from him was greeted with enthusiastic hysteria. Every move from the 120-pound bow-tied singer was punctuated by screams and wailing. The press billed it “Sinatramania” or “Sinatrauma” and dubbed Frank “Swoonatra.” When Sinatra returned to the Paramount in 1944, only 250 people left after the first show, and 35,000 fans waiting outside nearly rioted.

Sinatra had single-handedly killed the big-band era. Singers were everything now.

Sinatra signed with Columbia, and seven of his first nine discs for them charted. During 1945 and 1946 he starred in four movies and released his first album, The Voice of Frank Sinatra, which quickly topped the charts. The vast majority of Sinatra’s Columbia sides were romantic ballads, but, in a harbinger of things to come, he recorded a swinging, up-tempo version of “Sweet Lorraine” with a dream assemblage of jazz stars: Charlie Shavers, Coleman Hawkins, Harry Carney, Buddy Rich, Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, and Nat Cole. Sinatra was selling a million records a year.

Cue the fall.

Sinatra got flack for not serving in World War II (he was 4F due to a punctured eardrum)—some GIs didn’t appreciate him serenading their girlfriends when they were off fighting in Europe and the Pacific. Newspaper accounts of his Mafia connections began to surface. Critics started to pan his records, and Sinatra slipped out of the “best singer” polls. He made some really bad films, including the embarrassing “The Kissing Bandit.” His long-time press agent, who had carefully cultivated a public image of Sinatra as a devoted family man, died just as news broke of his affair with Ava Gardner. He suffered a throat hemorrhage just before an engagement at New York’s Copa and had to cancel. Sinatra came out of a divorce in such financial straits that he had to borrow money from Columbia to pay his back taxes and so diminished professionally that he was reduced to playing county fairs. The label dropped him in 1952.

And then came the resurrection. With a vengeance.

Sinatra signed with Capitol Records, a hip new label based in Los Angeles. He begged for the part of Maggio in the movie “From Here to Eternity” and miraculously grabbed the Oscar for best supporting actor. Most providentially, in April of 1953 Sinatra held a recording session with charts by Nelson Riddle, a moody genius of an arranger who had been scoring hit after hit for Nat King Cole. The result was punchy and ebullient hit “I’ve Got The World On A String.” Frank was back, all the way back, and this time there would be no stopping him.

Over half of the Sinatra albums recorded during Sinatra’s second career were arranged by Nelson Riddle, who proved to be the perfect partner in Sinatra’s reinvention of himself from the boyish romantric crooner into the ultimate middle-aged swingster on the hit albums Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy, Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, and A Swingin’ Affair.

Riddle was equally at home with ballads, where his unique ability to blend strings, woodwinds and bass trombones really shone. In 1955 he and Sinatra produced the concept album—a notion invented by Sinatra—In The Wee Small Hours, which many consider the greatest musical evocation of melancholy ever recorded. “I don't know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics,” Sinatra once said, “but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation.”

My own favorite Sinatra album is another ballad collection—1960’s Nice ‘N Easy, which was Sinatra’s last album for Capitol before launching his own label, Reprise. Outside of the title track, Nice ‘N Easy is the ultimate Sinatra tribute to the great American ballads, most of which he had already recorded in the 1940s. These versions, however, benefit from dramatic advances in recording technology, Nelson Riddle’s most luxurious and emotional arrangements, all the vocalizing wisdom that Sinatra had amassed over the past twenty years, and that unbelievable voice, which was now soulfully seasoned thanks to middle age, cigarettes and Jack Daniels. Nice ‘N Easy is the greatest make-out album of all time. (It’s staggering to ponder how many humans alive today were conceived to a Sinatra record. Johnny Carson once famously asked Sinatra, “When you’re in a romantic mood, whose records do you put on?” Sinatra, who was a huge and knowledgeable devotee of classical music, revealed that in those special moments he would put Ravel’s “Daphne and Chloe” on the spindle.)

Sinatra was a great singer because he loved to sing. He was famous for balking at doing more than one take as a movie actor, but he threw himself into every aspect of his recording projects. Weeks in advance he would decide upon a theme for the upcoming album and pick the tunes that best evoked it. He would work with Bill Miller, his pianist for over forty years, to nail down the tempos and the keys. Then there would be a meeting with Riddle or another hand-picked arranger to discuss and take notes on Frank’s ideas, typically followed by a week to write the charts. Sessions would be done with musicians, mostly jazz veterans from the big bands, that Sinatra personally selected. (The trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, saxophonist Plas Johnson, and drummer Irv Cottler were among Sinatra’s go-to favorites.) Sinatra would record an album’s worth of tunes in four three-hour evening sessions (four completed songs out of each session was the norm) with the musicians sight reading the arrangements. Sinatra was in total control in the studio. He wasn’t afraid to make changes on the spot. He not only sang live with the band but performed before an audience of friends seated on folding chairs in the studio. Sinatra focused intensely from the first run through of each song; he wanted to nail it on the first couple of takes to keep things sounding fresh and to keep the musicians motivated.

The only film we have of Sinatra in the recording studio is one of him cutting “It Was A Very Good Year,” a smash hit for him in 1965. The tune is a folksong lifted from a Kingston Trio record, and Gordon Jenkin’s arrangement makes use of every cliché in the book, but the fifty-year-old Sinatra, standing in the middle of the orchestra, an audience behind him, his trademark fedora ostentatiously hung on a mic stand, does an undeniably brilliant job of applying his acting and singing skills to transform it into something like one of his famous saloon songs. He clearly enjoys the hell out of that four minutes and twelve seconds.

“Throughout my career, if I have done anything, I have paid attention to every note and every word I sing,” Sinatra claimed without overstatement. “If I respect the song, if I cannot project this to a listener, I fail.”

I got to see Sinatra twice. In the 1980s I took my parents (both huge Sinatra fans) to a Sinatra concert in the Tacoma Dome. Frank was in his seventies, and I had worked hard to keep my expectations as low as possible. But the old man was in damn good voice that night and he owned that stage. He and Bill Miller did their legendary boozy duet on “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” and just slayed the house. A decade later I caught him at show at the Centrum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and time had caught up with him—despite four huge teleprompters, he lost track the lyrics during the first song (a cover of “Bad Bad Leroy Brown,” of all the monstrosities). But the unembarrassed love the audience gave Frank that night was genuine and moving.

That was Frank Sinatra down there, for pete’s sake—a titan among bleating pygmies.

If you’re a fan of Frank Sinatra or would like to know more about him, I emphatically recommend Will Friedwald’s “The Song Is You,” a comprehensive, authoritative, and entertaining book that brilliantly recounts Sinatra’s musical career, recordings, and legacy.

R.I.P. Jody Williams (1935-2018)

There’s nothing like that phase when you’re falling deep into a musical style and learning the musical vocabulary and soaking up all the details you can find about the amazing players that you’re discovering on an almost daily basis. One thing leads to another—you get into Muddy Waters and that leads you to Buddy Guy and then you’re finding out about Junior Wells and pretty soon you’re having to hear more records by this Earl Hooker guy.

That’s how I ended up with a vinyl copy of “The Leading Brand” on Red Lightnin’ Records. I bought it because half of the album was made up of singles by Earl Hooker. The rest were recordings from the ‘50s and early ‘60s by Jody Williams, a Chicago blues musician who I had never heard of. I have played the hell out of “The Leading Brand” ever since, and while it certainly added to my appreciation for the genius of Earl Hooker, it was the spectacular work of Jody Williams that really stuck with me.

Jody Williams’ shimmering guitar tone and solid singing would have been enough, but it was the quality of his original songs that made him truly special. These weren’t blues jams or show-off pieces, but carefully constructed tunes that were far more sophisticated than most of the work by Williams’ contemporaries. Jazz chords, unusual changes, totally unique riffs, latin rhythms, hip melodies—there were lots of glorious surprises when you listened to Jody Williams.

As I dug deeper about him, Jody Williams seemed to show up everywhere. He had started out playing the harmonica as a boy in Chicago. What he learned on that instrument, tellingly, was not the blues harp style but the pop instrumental hits of the Chicago-based Harmonicats. When Williams was 16 he met Bo Diddley at a talent show and, inspired, bought a guitar. Bo showed him how to tune it to open E major, and Williams quickly developed a style heavily influenced by his idols T Bone Walker and BB King.

Five years after he first held a guitar, Williams was playing in Howlin’ Wolf’s band. He toured with Bo Diddley and did club dates with Memphis Slim. Throughout the following decade, Williams was a sought-after session player. The killer lead guitar on Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s classic “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Evil Is Going On,” and on Billy Boy Arnold’s hit “I Wish You Would”? Jody Williams. He also recorded with, among others, Jimmy Rogers, Otis Rush, Otis Spann, Jimmy Witherspoon, Bobby Charles, and Willie Dixon. As Bill Dahl has said, Williams is the string-bending link between T Bone Walker and BB King and Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.

But professional frustrations (there was a protracted lawsuit with Mickey Baker over the authorship of the monster hit “Love Is Strange,” which Williams claimed was stolen from him), a growing family, and some training in electronics gained during a stint in the Army convinced Jody Williams to quit music. The liner notes for “The Leading Brand” ended with this plaintive coda:

“We must savour these recordings because it is unlikely that Jody will consent to cut another disc again, but we can only live in the hope that this distinctive and exciting guitarist will relent and give the world another taste of his amazing talent.”

For the next twenty-five years, that was it in terms of news about Jody Williams. Then in 2001 came the miraculous news of a new Jody Williams CD on Evidence, “Return of a Legend.” The years of pleading by fans and friends like Michael James, Dick Shurman, Scott Dirks, Steve Cushing, and Randy Chortkoff had finally paid off. Williams had retired from his job of nearly thirty years as an engineer for Xerox and, after a lot of deliberation, had decided to pick up his Gibson 345 again and to do some gigs. Williams picked right up where he had left off with “Return of a Legend,” which featured new versions of some of his classic tunes, eight new original songs, and guest appearances by Tinsley Ellis, Sean Costello, and Rusty Zinn, three guitarists heavily influenced by Williams.

Dick Shurman brought Jody Williams to the Pacific Northwest after the new CD came out, and I caught two of those shows. It was a real thrill to finally see him in action. “I put that guitar under my bed and never even looked at it for thirty years,” he told me between sets. He seemed surprised and genuinely moved by the adulation of a new generation of blues fans. Jody Williams’ comeback included another CD, featured spots in the top blues festivals, tours of Europe, and inductions into the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis and the Chicago Blues Hall of Fame.

I did a gig Saturday at the Rockfish Café in Anacortes, Washington, a venue where I saw Jody Williams play in 2002. I noticed that the club had hung his autographed portrait on the wall by the entrance. Jody Williams had died earlier that day in a nursing home in Indiana, but I wouldn’t know that until Sunday.

Even amongst the legion of Chicago blues geniuses—creative giants who all admired and respected him—Jody Williams stood out for his stunning, unique musicianship. We are so lucky and privileged to be able to continue to savor his wonderful creations.

The Search for Speedy's Steel

I got a text yesterday from my friend Jon Hyde. We share a passion for the pedal steel guitar. Jon actually plays one, which I’m not smart enough, adept enough, or crazy enough to even attempt.

If a text could be breathless, Jon’s was.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel has been found.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel has been restored.

Speedy West’s original pedal steel is going to be displayed and played tonight at a steel guitar get-together at a private home near Portland.

Let me back up, in case the pedal steel guitar is foreign to you.

First there was the guitar, perfected in Spain. Then there was the Hawaiian guitar, an instrument developed in the islands that was tuned to a major chord and played on the lap with a piece of pipe or metal. (There was a huge Hawaiian music craze in the States in the early 20th. Black musicians took the Hawaiian approach and created the bottleneck blues style.) Then there was the lap steel guitar, a metal-body instrument that was amplified and played in the lap or on a stand. Then came the console steel, which answered the need to play steel guitar in several keys; it was a massive instrument on a stand that boasted with two or three necks offering different tunings. The pedal steel guitar was the next advancement. It offered pedals added to the console steel so that the player could change tunings without changing necks. Later the pedals were used to change the tuning of specific strings, and then—why not?—knee levers were added as well.

The only instrument designed, built and played by people dismissed by many as unwashed hillbillies turns out to be an insanely sophisticated and complex instrument that asks the player to master finger picks, a metal bar, at least four foot pedals, two knee levers, and, usually, multiple necks in different tunings. It’s totally unique, crying sound has become synonymous with country music. Dave Harmonson,  a friend who is a great steel player, calls it “the sad machine.”

Let me back up again, in case Speedy West is a new name to you.

Speedy West is revered and worshiped by pedal steel fans because he was the original badass wildman on that infernal instrument. Starting with his ear-opening work on Tennessee Ernie Ford and Kay Starr’s huge 1950 hit, “I’ll Never Be Free”—the first of Speedy’s unique, what-the-hell-was-that solos—West spent the next five years playing on over 6,000 recordings, backing up top artists like Doris Day, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Very few of those recordings have legs today, but the dozens of Capitol sides that West recorded with electric guitarist Jimmy Bryant between 1951 and 1956 are still mesmerizing guitarists and music fans the world over. Bryant and West were the fastest pickers ever on their chosen instruments. (They didn’t call him “Speedy” for nothing—check out “Caffeine Patrol.”) Their unison playing of bebop-inspired riffs at insanely fast tempos still seems technically impossible, and the duo relentlessly challenged each other to come up with new and ever wilder sonic effects in the studio. These guys were brilliant AND crazy. No one has ever topped Speedy West for getting space-age, dazzling sounds out of the pedal steel guitar.

Speedy’s classic recordings were done with a four-pedal model made by Paul Bigsby, an instrument maker based in Los Angeles, in February of 1948. It’s considered to be the first “modern” pedal steel in that the console, legs, pedal rack, and connection rods were designed to be disassembled at the end of a gig and packed into a case. Before this critical innovation, pedal steels were nearly as cumbersome as pianos. Speedy switched to a Fender pedal steel in 1956 and sold his Bigsby. Ever since, the pedal steel subculture has been occasionally inflamed by rumors of sightings of West’s Bigsby instrument, but none turned out to be true.

Which brings me back to Jon Hyde’s text message, which included the phone number of Bob Muller, the host for the unveiling of the Holy Grail of pedal steels being held at his house that very evening. I called Bob and asked whether he’d allow a non-playing interloper into his event, and he gave me his address and told me to stop by.

I pulled up to Bob’s house in a new subdivision in a Portland suburb a little after the advertised starting time of 6 p.m. There were a slew of cars parked in Bob’s cul de sac. His gracious wife greeted me at the door and told me to head upstairs. I walked into a music room, complete with a sound system and a small stage, that was packed with people trying to make room for themselves amongst Bob’s seventeen personal pedal steels and several spectacular jukeboxes.

Bob Muller’s music room

The guest of honor was Deke Dickerson, the owner of Speedy West’s original pedal steel. Deke is an ace rockabilly and country guitarist and singer from California who is also a passionate collector of instruments and a prolific music writer and historian. (Save some for us mere mortals, Deke!)

Deke Dickerson

Deke took up a microphone and kicked off the evening by telling the remarkable story of how he came to own Speedy’s steel. After West sold the instrument, it ended up in the hands of a Bakersfield steel player who made some ill-advised modifications to it. The new owner was fond of drink and also seems to have been spectacularly lazy, because for years he refrained from unpacking and packing Speedy’s rig and just kept it, fully assembled, in the open bed of his pickup truck. Naturally, at some point the instrument was stolen.

Deke then flashed us forward to many years later and the Bakersfield office of Buck Owens, who had opened his own museum full of instruments that he had collected. Someone walked in one day and let Buck know that there was a pedal steel guitar just sitting in a nearby trash heap. Buck and a friend eventually checked into it and rescued the pedal steel. It was in no shape to be displayed—it looked like it had been out in the weather for years. Buck later loaned the steel and many other instruments to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Deke entered the picture a few years ago. On a tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame collection, he was shown the beat-up old pedal steel they had gotten from Buck Owens. Dickerson got excited. His trained eye had told him that this wreck might be something very special. He asked the folks at the Hall of Fame to dig out a photo of Speedy West playing his original Bigsby steel. The wood pattern and other details of the trash-heap instrument matched the photo. Deke had found the Holy Grail of lost pedal steels.

Deke owned a nice guitar that had once belonged to Don Rich, Buck Owens’ longtime guitarist, and it only took a brief email exchange with Jim Shaw, Buck’s office manager, to arrange a trade of that guitar for the old pedal steel at the Hall of Fame. Now Deke owned the Holy Grail.

Dickerson’s next move was to contact Todd Clinesmith, an excellent musician and famous maker of steel and resonator guitars based in western Oregon who is an expert on vintage instruments. (Check out his web site at https://www.clinesmithinstruments.com/.) Clinesmith agreed to take on the effort to restore Speedy’s neglected steel to something like its original glory. He spent the next year and a half on the project, much of that looking for spare parts or making his own when they couldn’t be found.

Todd Clinesmith

And so there, standing smack in the middle of the small stage in Bob Muller’s music room, was Clinesmith’s resurrection of Speedy West’s 1948 Bigsby Pedal steel, in all its birds-eye-maple glory, down to the gorgeous reproduction of the famous custom façade with Speedy’s name and the plaque that Paul Bigsby had included on the original guitar to identify his handiwork.

The whole idea of the evening at Bob Muller’s was Deke Dickerson’s desire to give the members of the relatively large pedal steel community in western Oregon the chance to not only see the restored West steel, but to play it. Some of the local steel players who had gathered to pay homage to Speedy’s steel demurred, since the instrument had also restored West’s unique personal tunings, rendering it almost incomprehensible to musicians used to the standard steel tunings. But several steelers took their turn behind Speedy’s three fabled necks, accompanied by a snare drummer, a standup bassist, guitarist Russ Blake, a fiddle player, and Dickerson on acoustic rhythm guitar.

Todd Clinesmith was one of the first to give the steel a whirl. He was followed by Jeremy Wakefield, one of the most talented steel players in the country. He and Russ Blake did a good job of giving us a taste of the unison playing of Speedy and Jimmy Bryant and demonstrating some of the wild sound effects that the rig could generate. They also backed up Dickerson and Mary Rondthaler as they recreated the musical partnership between West, Ernie Ford, and Kay Starr on “I’ll Never Be Free.”

They were succeeded by 84-year-old Dale Granstrom, a local legend who has been playing professional in local bars and clubs for seventy years and who still works regularly. Dale and his peer, guitarist Keith Holter, told stories about driving down to California in 1951 to meet Paul Bigsby and to see Speedy West do his magic in a club. Dickerson owns a myrtlewood Mosrite guitar that Granstrom built in the mid-1950s, and he talked to us about Dale’s beautiful craftsmanship. “When you don’t have much money, you build your own stuff,” Granstrom explained matter-of-factly. Host Bob Muller and Russ Blake also stepped up to play a tune apiece on the shining Bigsby.

At around 9:30, after all the players who wanted to had taken Speedy’s steel for a spin, and after all the requisite group photos and shots of the steel players and Speedy West fans next to Klinesmith’s gorgeous restoration had been secured on cell phones, the crowd began to break up. I thanked Deke Dickerson and Bob Muller and drove back to Portland to the sound of “Stratosphere Boogie,” Razor & Tie’s CD compilation of the best work of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant. Their unique technical brilliance with an equal measure of inspired madness, preserved for us forever. It’s one of the great, happy mysteries how two musicians so obviously made for each other managed to connect in this big wide world.

Here’s to the pedal steel players. They’re all crazy, bless ‘em.

Thanks to Deke Dickerson for sharing Speedy’s steel and for his help with the details on this post.

The End of Highway 99

The Highway 99 Blues Club, Seattle’s top blues and r&b venue for many years, is closing up for good—New Year’s Eve will be the last night for music in the fabled room there on the Seattle waterfront.

The music business is full of comings and goings, but this is tough news. When a music venue shuts its doors, that’s a bad thing. When a blues venue closes up shop, that’s a really bad thing—blues clubs are an endangered species. When one of the best blues venues on the West Coast packs it in, well, that’s a genuine tragedy.

When the Highway 99 opened, I was pretty much out of the music scene. I hadn’t had a band in years, and the unsolicited calls from other musicians and from venues to get out and play had become few and far between. I had other, more important priorities during that time, but I was creatively frustrated and really feeling the urge to make a comeback. But I wanted to resurface with a genuinely great blues band, made up of younger players I had never worked with before, that delivered an entertaining, tight show and played original material. That seemed like a very tall order, but that’s when the Highway 99 showed me the way.

In May of 2006 the Highway 99 hosted a medical-expenses benefit for Curtis Salgado. Lots of great players, most of whom I had known for years, showed up to play and show their support. When I got up to do a couple of numbers, two young guitarists who I only vaguely knew, Eric Daw and Steve Yonck, were set up behind me. As we started playing, I found myself listening to them—how they quickly found complimentary parts, how great they were playing, and how they each had different but totally legitimate blues guitar sounds.

A week later I had built a band around Eric and Steve—the first incarnation of the Mighty Titans of Tone. We pulled the band together by playing a regular weeknight gig at the Highway 99 for a couple of months, and then the club gave us the opportunity to headline on the weekends. We established ourselves at the Highway 99 and even recorded a live album there.

Five years later, I realized another major bucket-list goal of mine—being in a topflight country and western band. The phenomenal singer and guitarist Lisa Theo had come to me with an offer I couldn't refuse—to join her in a band that she was putting together that would pay tribute to the great male/female country music duet singing tradition. We branded ourselves the Titans of Twang. Once again I approached the Highway 99, and they got behind us. We did our first gigs there and then were off to the races for a very successful two-year run.

For the past several years the Highway 99 has let me host my Big Blue Revue shows there two or three times a year. These have featured the Mighty Titans of Tone, the Emerald City horns, and a parade of world-class guest artists, and they have been some of the most fun shows that I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve also had the thrill to have been invited to share the Highway 99 stage with a slew of great artists, including Magic Dick, Lee Oskar, Bob Corritore, and Rockin’ Johnny Burgin.

But what made the Highway 99 Blues Club a truly rare venue were its co-owners, Ed Maloney and Steve Sarkowsky, and their team. These guys genuinely love roots music, and they have worked their asses off to make the Highway 99 Blues Club at top national venue. They are known throughout the worldwide community of musicians for their passion, their professionalism, their integrity, their commitment to treating musicians as artists, their great employees, and for being a lot of fun to hang with. There is no way of telling how many lucky people have had their lives changed thanks to the Highway 99 Blues Club, but I can tell you that I am one of them.

Thank you for everything, Ed and Steve. Love you guys. If I can ever be of help to you, just ask. Hope to get the chance to work with you again down the road.

Fever and Fate

Today marks the birthday of Little Willie John, whose meteoric career as America’s greatest soul singer was impossibly short and inconceivably tragic.

John was born in Camden, Arkansas in 1937. His father, Mertis, moved the family to Detroit, where there were jobs to be had in the automobile plants. Even as a small boy, Willie was an eerily precocious singer who could focus his gift like a cool, seasoned performer. His voice was a bred-in-the-bone treasure that was startlingly powerful, elastic, and full of emotion.

By the time Willie was 11 he had a regular gig at the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit. Three years later he was occasionally fronting the Count Basie band and appearing regularly with Paul Williams’ orchestra. In 1955 an eighteen-year-old Willie John strode into the offices of King Records in Cincinnati and asked for an audition. He left with a recording contract. Before the year was out John (now billed as “Little Willie John”) had scored two monster hit records: “All Around the World” and “Need Your Love So Bad.”

Over the next five years, there would be 13 Top-Ten singles for Willie John, including “Fever,” about which James Brown once said, “‘Fever’ will beat what any dictionary can say about soul.” Peggy Lee cloned John’s sparse, finger-snapping arrangement and had one of the biggest records of the decade with it

Many of John’s hits were sassy blues shuffles, but he seemed to save something extra for his ballad performances. On unhurried masterpieces like “Talk To Me” and “A Cottage For Sale,” John’s voice, with its seemingly unlimited range, relentlessly hip phrasing, the ability to grab hold of an unadorned melody and take it to a stunning territory all his own, and—the trademark of all great r&b vocalists—an overriding tone of bluesy regret.

In performance, Willie John came across as a kind of black Bing Crosby, even down to the pipe. In his homburg hats and tailored, wide-shouldered suits and with his five-foot-four-inch frame, he looked like a boy who had just stepped out of his father’s clothes closet. But when the lights went down and he took the microphone, his head would roll back dreamily and a huge, aching sound would fill the hall.

John married an Apollo showgirl and the couple had two sons. Away from his family out on the road, John’s behavior began to disintegrate. “He was a riot, a constant riot all day long,” recalled one friend. He was careless with his money and racked up large debts.

Then, suddenly, after only six years, when Willie was only twenty-three, the hits dried up. He was busted for marijuana possession in Florida in 1961. He began drinking heavily, which exacerbated the epilepsy he had suffered from all his life and brought on diabetes. He began carrying a gun. Charged with assault in Miami in 1964, Willie John jumped bail and began a series of one-nights on the West Coast. In August John learned that the Beatles had covered his “Leave My Kitten Alone” in the studio, but their powerful version ended up being pulled from the “Beatles For Sale” album.

In 1990, spurred by reminiscences of Willie John by a mutual friend, Seattle-based musician Bill Englehart, I researched and wrote a long piece for The Village Voice about the events that took place over the weekend of October 16 and 17 in Seattle that culminated in Willie John being charged with murder. There were only a few sketchy newspaper accounts, and there was no transcript of Willie’s trial, but I found a court docket that listed the names of all the attorneys, the judge, and the jurors. I got out a Seattle phone book as was able to contact and interview John’s defense attorney, the two prosecutors, and two members of the jury, and from those accounts I was able to piece together what happened on the night of October 17, 1964.

After his show the Magic Inn that night, John showed up at Birdland, another club, and sang a few tunes. John and his valet and two female acquaintances then ended up at a house on 23rd and Marion in the black neighborhood of Seattle, where the owner ran an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling establishment. There were about a half dozen patrons there.

Willie John’s female companion left her seat at the makeshift bar to use the bathroom, and when she returned a man named Kendall Roundtree had taken her seat. Roundtree was a large man with long arrest record who liked to fight, especially when he was drunk, which he was in the wee hours of Sunday morning in the house on 23rd.

John told Roundtree to give up his seat to the lady. Roundtree responded by punching the much smaller man in the teeth. John backpedaled into the kitchen and Roundtree came at him. As three men in the room grabbed Roundtree, Willie John grabbed a small paring knife off a drainboard and stabbed Roundtree in the chest with it. Roundtree’s handlers managed to propel Roundtree upright through the living room, but before they reached the front door the big man collapsed, unconscious. The knife had just knicked Roundtree’s aorta, and he was quickly bleeding to death internally.

For about an hour the other patrons argued about what to do with him. They eventually called an ambulance, telling the EMTs that Roundtree must have had a heart attack. But one of the attendants noticed blood on Roundtree’s chest and called the police. John’s valet finger him as having stabbed Roundtree, and Little Willie John was charged with second-degree murder.

Little Willie John’s murder trial in Seattle started on January 12, 1965 and lasted three days. John appeared relaxed throughout, occasionally joking with prosecutors during breaks. “Willie offered to sell me a record once,” recalled prosecutor Thomas Stang. “I remember one day he called me ‘colored.’ ‘You’re the one who’s colored,’ he said. ‘Look—you got yellow hair and blue eyes and white skin. I’m brown all over.’” When he testified, John denied stabbing Roundtree, contradicting by other witnesses. The jury retired for deliberations after John took the stand. Their initial straw vote was 10 to 2 in favor of conviction. According to one juror, “The general feeling was that something was being covered up. Willie John was a little slick and overconfident. He thought he could talk his way out of it.” Seven hours later, the jury returned to the courtroom to announce that they had found Willie John guilty of manslaughter with a deadly weapon. They rejected the second-degree murder charge because John had reacted to Roundtree’s initial attack.

Little Willie John posted a $20,000 bond and promptly left Seattle. A benefit performance to help with his defense fund was arranged in Indianapolis, but John never made the gig. Bill Lanning, his defense attorney, filed for appeal, but John fired him not long after and it is unclear whether John actively pursued an appeal. Remarkably, in February of 1966 Little Willie John managed to show up in Los Angeles to record an album for Capitol Records in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t released until 2008 due to contractual disputes with King Records.

there is no evidence that his appeal was pursued. He was tracked down by U.S. marshals in early May and returned to Seattle. On July 6, 1966 Little Willie John was sentenced to eight to twenty years in prison, with a minimum sentence of seven and a half years, and transferred to the state prison in Walla Walla. “It was really unjust that Little Willie got so much time in jail, compared to some of the really heavy cases we add,” prosecutor Art Swanson told me.

Many of John’s show business friends rallied behind him. James Brown, who worked to get him released, visited Willie in prison.

“Me and James went up to the penitentiary,” recalled St. Clair Pickney, Brown’s bandleader. “He said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to get out of here.’ He and been sick and was riding in a wheelchair. James would get kind of upset, and Willie would say ‘Don’t ever let it worry you that way, ‘cause I might not come out no way. If I get out, I get out. If I stay, I stay. Still gonna be the same man in or out of here.’”

On May 28, 1968, the Seattle Times ran the following article:

WALLA WALLA (AP)—A rock-and-roll and blues singer who helped write the popular song “Fever” died in his sleep Sunday at the Washington State penitentiary, authorities said today. He was Willie John, 30, known in the entertainment world as Little Willie John. William Macklin, associate superintendent at the prison, said John was found dead with a mild case of pneumonia.

It was an odd story, and many thought the worst. There have been persistent rumors that Willie John died after an operation meant to relieve pressure on his brain following a savage beating.

Bill Lanning didn’t believe the papers. “Somebody killed him over there. He was tough and arrogant. He didn’t like for anybody to be on equal footing with him.”

“When someone is badly beaten, fluid often forms in the lungs,” Art Swanson told me. “Pneumonia can be a handy diagnosis in those situations.”

John’s death certificate states that he died of a heart attack.

But the real mystery—and the real magic—was John would tilt his head back in controlled rapture and unleash a voice that would galvanize anyone within its huge range.

James Brown—who recorded a tribute album to John after John’s death—never forgot that voice. As he told writer Gerri Hirshey: “Please, do not forget the man I was opening for in 1956, ’57. Little Willie John was a soul singer before anyone thought to call it that…The man left his mark. On my music, on lots of singers who understand how to sing with feeling…Willie John did not scream it. No. But you could hear it. To me, it was very loud…I don’t understand why people miss Sam Cooke so, and not Little Willie John. I loved that man’s voice to death.”

*  *  *

If you’re not familiar with Little Willie John’s legendary recordings, you must—immediately—check out his classic recordings for King Records. His 1966 album for Capitol is also available and is a solid effort to update John’s earlier work for a younger audience.

Susan Whitall’s excellent biography, Fever: Little Willie John—A Fast Life, Mysterious Death, and the Birth of Soul (Titan Books, 2011) is the authoritative account of Little Willie John’s life, career, and influence.

The Longevity of the Grievous Angel

The Byrds’ album “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” is fifty years old this year.

Gram Parsons, the visionary behind that trailblazing record, didn’t even come close to that life span. He died five years after the release of “Sweetheart,” at the age of twenty-six. Bandmate Chris Hillman compared Parsons’ brief life to “a classic Tennessee Williams play, about Southern money and alcoholism. Just a tragedy.”

Parsons was a walking contradiction. He discovered Merle Haggard at Harvard. Born into vast wealth, he was a passionate evangelist for shitkicker music. He was natural charmer and a notorious asshole. In his brief career Parsons showed flashes of a strong work ethic—he wrote dozens of stellar tunes, started a musical movement, and recorded six albums. But he squandered opportunities and shunned gigs because he lived off a family trust fund that enabled him to spend long periods neglecting his career in favor of hanging out with the Rolling Stones.

Parsons was born and raised in Florida. His father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, was a country boy with PTSD from World War II and self-esteem issues, primarily due to the fact that he married Avis Snively, heiress to a multimillion dollar orange juice fortune. Coon Dog shot himself just before Christmas when Gram was 12. Gram’s mother remarried a man named Bob Parsons, and Gram took his last name. Parsons pulled out all the stops when it came to ingratiating himself with his stepson. When Gram formed a folk group, Bob Parsons bought Gram a teen club so he would have a place to perform.

The teenaged Gram Parsons was a good-looking kid who always had the best musical gear, the best clothes, and the best-looking girlfriends. He went to the best prep schools and, even though he was an indifferent student, was admitted to Harvard. Gram only lasted a semester in Cambridge, but he put a band together and the guitar player, John Nuese, turned Gram onto the Bakersfield sound of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and from then on Parsons was a committed student of—and a zealous advocate for—country music. After a stint in New York, Parsons arrived in Los Angeles in November of 1966. On his first day in town, Parsons’ stole David Crosby’s girlfriend away from him.

Lee Hazlewood signed Parsons to a recording contract. A country album, “Safe At Home” by the International Submarine Band, was released but went nowhere. In 1968 Parsons met Chris Hillman, the bass player for the Byrds. The Byrds were looking for a keyboard player and Parsons, a competent piano player and organist, auditioned and got the gig. Byrds leader Roger McGuinn had no idea that Gram was into country music when he hired him.

Chris Hillman had begun his career as a bluegrass mandolinist and had recorded some country-tinged tunes with the Byrds, and he and Parsons bonded immediately over their love for country music. The next thing McGuinn knew he had been convinced by Parsons and Hillman that the Byrds should book time in Nashville to record a real country album.

Commercially, this seemed daring and suicidal. The Byrds’ were the best-known American rock group, but their record sales had been slowing. 1968 was the height of the violent culture battles over the Vietnam war, and the rock and roll audience associated country music with pro-war rednecks.

“Sweetheart of the Rodeo” predictably kicked off with another trademark Byrds cover of a Bob Dylan tune, but this one—”You Ain’t Going Nowhere”—was pointedly introduced by the buoyant sound of Nashville studio legend Lloyd Green’s pedal steel guitar. (Honky tonk pianist Earl Ball and the brilliant guitarist Clarence White also joined the group in the studio.) Hillman and Parsons certainly succeeded in recording a legit country album. The original mix had Byrds leader McGuinn singing three tunes and being overshadowed by newcomer Parsons, who crooned twice  as many. Parsons brought two great original tunes (the now-classic “Hickory Wind” and the prophetic “One Hundred Years From Now”), a Merle Haggard tune (“Life in Prison”), a George Jones cover (“You’re Still On My Mind”) and a countrified version of William Bell’s soul ballad “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”

After the “Sweetheart” sessions were over, Parsons joined the Byrds on the road. But tensions between him and McGuinn grew, and Parsons quit the group the night before they were to leave on a tour of South Africa, enraging Hillman and McGuinn. While the Byrds figured out how to perform as a trio, Parsons stayed in London to spend time with new found friend Keith Richards.

Roger McGuinn re-entered the studio as soon as he got back to LA. He had decided that he had surrendered far too much of “Sweetheart” to Parsons, so he replaced Parsons’ vocals on three tunes with his own. (Today you can buy a version of the album with Parsons’ original vocals restored. If you’re not familiar with the album and are interested in checking it out, get that version.)

“Sweetheart of the Rodeo” got predictably mixed reviews from the critics and did not sell well. I saw the Byrds play a schizophrenic set of their big hits and their new country stuff at Eagles Auditorium in Seattle after the album came out, and the crowd enthusiastically booed the new material. But “Sweetheart” left an imprint with the rock fans who had grown tired of psychedelia and who related to Dylan’s latest—the ultra-sparse “John Wesley Harding” album—and the Band’s rootsy debut release, “Music From Big Pink.”

Back in LA, Parsons reconciled with Chris Hillman and convinced the bassist to leave the Byrds and join him in starting a new group that would go all out behind a new kind of country-based sound. The pair rented a house and began writing songs every day. They recruited the third leg of their creative stool, Sneeky Pete Kleinow, a Hollywood animator (he worked on the Gumby show) and brilliant pedal steel guitar player who took his infernal instrument into uncharted sonic waters with the help of distortion pedals and other effects.

A&M Records came knocking and Hillman, Parsons, Kleinow, bass player Chris Etheridge, and a revolving cast of drummers closeted themselves in the studio as The Flying Burrito Brothers. The result was even more trailblazing than “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” which was a wild shift in direction but a pretty standard country record. The album by this new group—“The Gilded Palace of Sin”—was a big step toward Parsons’ vision of a country-based sound that he called “cosmic American music.”

All but two of the songs on “The Gilded Palace of Sin” were written by Parsons and/or Hillman, and they brilliantly transplant country music sensibilities to the seamy world of the LA record business. Groupies, drugs, corrupt attorneys, earthquakes, political protests, assassinations, and other big-city pitfalls weave their way through the tunes. “Hot Burrito #1,” written by Parsons and Etheridge, may stand as Parsons’ masterpiece both in terms of the songwriting and in his ability to deliver heartache vocally. The two covers on the record are both by soul-music legend Dan Penn—Parsons’ vision included a marriage of cowpunk country with Southern soul. Musically, the group’s sound is based heavily on the harmonies of the Everly Brothers and the multitracked layers of Kleinow’s soaring pedal steel. The marketing and the presentation was right in line with Parsons’ bold style. The album cover showed the Burritos in the desert adorned in the rhinestoned Nudie suits favored by traditional country artists, but these outfits were different. Hillman’s sported peacocks, Sneeky Pete’s boasted a gold pterodactyl in flight, and Parsons’ jacket featured marijuana leaves, naked women, Benzedrine, and, on the back, a large cross.

But the band stumbled out of the gate. They had come up with the idea of touring behind the record by train (Parsons was afraid of flying), and the result was the ingestion of massive quantities of drugs and alcohol during the day and sloppy, under-rehearsed shows each evening. A&M lost their shirt and a lot of confidence in their new act. “The Gilded Palace of Sin” peaked at #164 on the charts and quickly sank out of sight. A single, produced by rhythm-and-blues legend Johnny “Guitar” Watson, flopped. Chris Etheridge quit. They tried recording an album of country standards, but those tapes were kept in the vault. An album of second-rate original material was rushed out. The Burritos appeared at the disastrous Altamont festival, and Gram Parsons essentially dropped the Burritos in favor of Keith Richards’ company. After Gram showed up for a gig unable to play or sing, Hillman smashed his guitar in a fury and fired him from the Burritos.

Parsons slid into a solo deal with A&M Records and recorded most of an album (the tapes have never surfaced) with Beach Boys producer Terry Melcher before taking off to live with the Rolling Stones in the south of France. Parsons was a full-blown heroin addict by this point, and he was eventually asked to leave.

Mo Ostin signed Parsons to Reprise Records, a move that surprised many given Parson’s dissolution. But Parsons rallied to write a six fine new songs, and Parsons went into the studio with Elvis Presley’s Vegas band and a new singer named Emmylou Harris who Chris Hillman had discovered singing in folk clubs in Washington, D.C. The result was “GP,” a very solid offering that mixed Parsons’ unique, moody originals with country music covers, and proved that the singing duo of Parsons and Harris was a match made in hillbilly heaven.

But history repeated itself, and the tour in support of “GP” had flashes of brilliance, but many of the shows were like the one I caught at Max’s Kansas City in New York. The band was embarrassingly unprepared and sloppy. Parsons was pasty and flabby, his hands trembled, and he was completely unwilling or unable to assert any control over the show. Bizzarely, given Parsons’ catalogue, much of the set consisted of hoary old rock and roll tunes, and Parsons didn’t have the voice for that kind of material.

But Reprise stuck with him and a second album was recorded, again with Elvis’ band and Emmylou Harris. Parsons only offered a couple of new originals, but those were augmented with older tunes by him and by a carefully selected group of tunes by other songwriters beautifully arranged by Glen D. Hardin. What makes “Grievous Angel” a classic is the now fully realized duet singing of Parsons and Emmylou Harris, which ranks among the greatest vocal partnerships.

Parsons’ friend Clarence White was tragically killed in July of 1973. At White’s funeral Parsons elicited a promise from Phil Kaufman, his friend and road manager, that when Parsons died Kaufman would take his body out to the desert near Joshua Tree—a favorite spot of Parsons’—and set fire to it. Parsons was scheduled to start another tour in October, and a few weeks before hitting the road Parsons and two female friends rented a motel room in Joshua Tree. Parsons spent the afternoon of September 18 drinking tequila and taking barbituates, and as dark fell he was visited by someone who sold him some morphine sulphate. He injected a large quantity and overdosed. His companions spent a half an hour trying to resuscitate him before finally calling an ambulance. Parsons was declared dead at a nearby hospital a few minutes after midnight.

In death, Gram Parsons exceeded anything that Tennessee Williams could have devised. Bob Parsons made arrangements to have Gram’s body flown to New Orleans, but Phil Kaufman showed up at LAX in a borrowed hearse with phony paperwork claiming that the family had changed their plans and wanted the Parsons’ body released to Kaufman. It was a completely insane ruse. And it worked. Kaufman and an accomplice drove Parsons’ coffin to Cap Rock near Joshua Tree, poured five gallons of gasoline on it, and lit it. As a fireball rose in the desert sky, the two rock-and-roll-star arsonists took off for LA, where they later paid a $750 fine for abandoning a corpse. The “Grievlous Angel” album was released posthumously.

Gram Parsons never had a hit record and played a stadium, much less sold one out, but he made an indelible mark on a great many young musicians. A  young Glenn Frey, later of the Eagles, absorbed many lessons watching Parsons’ performances at the Palomino Club. Richie Furay of Poco, a friend of Parsons, wrote a song about him. The Rolling Stones allowed Parsons’ to release his cover of “Wild Horses” before their original version hit the market. Elvis Costello, Steve Earle, and Gillian Welch are all Parsons devotees. Parsons Nudie suit hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The musician who has done the most to establish and maintain the Gram Parsons legend is Emmylou Harris, whose “Boulder to Birmingham” speaks of her devastation after his death. Emmylou regrouped, convinced James Burton and the Elvis show band who had played on “GP” and “Return of the Grievous Angel” to record and tour with her as well. Emmylou had a #4 country hit on her first solo album and never looked back.

“It’s impossible for me to talk about my music, or myself as a person, without talking about Gram,” Harris has said.

I bought “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” after seeing that Byrds show when I was in high school. I grew to love it and still return to it often. I was reminded of the initial controversy it caused and of its chilly reception when last month Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn, and Marty Stuart headlined a Sweetheart of the Rodeo Fiftieth Anniversary tour that performed before rapturous crowds.

I saw Parsons perform five times, which is pretty good for a fan who never lived in LA. The first time was at the Seattle Pops Festival in the summer of 1969, when Gram and the Flying Burrito Brothers played what many claim was their best live show. A month later I went to the second Sky River Festival in Tenino, Washington, and the Burritos performed all three days. I made crude cassette tapes of one of their sets and took some home movies of Parsons on stage in front of a huge American flag, stripped to the waist and wearing war paint. Those were all lost somewhere along the line. And I was in the audience when Gram and Emmylou played Max’s Kansas City in New York.

I’ll pay it back as best I can this week when I take part in the ninth annual Gram Parsons tribute at the Conor Byrne in Seattle organized by the great Country Dave Harmonson, who is an even bigger Parsons freak than I am. (Which is saying something.) It never fails to be a remarkable night, my favorite gig of the year. Four solid hours of Parsons music—a first set consisting of his tunes from his stints with the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers followed by a second set in which Dave and his great band guide the singers through the entirety of the “GP” and “Grievous Angel” albums, performed in sequence. That’ll be me singing “Hickory Wind,” that beautiful Gram Parsons song I first heard fifty years ago.

(If you’re not familiar with Gram Parsons, the “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” “Gilded Palace of Sin,” “GP,” and “Grievous Angel” albums are required listening. No less than seven books have been written about Parsons’ life and music—the best, by far, is David N. Meyer’s Twenty Thousand Roads.)

Otis Rush

I remember the first time I heard Otis Rush's "I Can't Quit You Baby." Few recordings have ever stunned me like that one. In the late 1980s the Slamhound Hunters, the band I was in, had the awesome privilege to open for and back up Otis for a three nights at the Fabulous Rainbow in Seattle. For me, standing three feet from Otis when he sang and played his upside-down guitar was a thrill of a lifetime. He was incredibly nice during the entire run and his performances were really joyful and musically cosmic. Otis Rush was born to play the blues, that is for sure. RIP.

Lazy Lester

We lost Lazy Lester the human being yesterday, and that's a very sad thing. The musical world will not be the same. He left us his music, of course, and that's forever. I met him at Amanda's Roller Coaster in Tucson in 2010. (That's a photo of me and Junior Watson with Lester from that week.) Lester was definitely not lazy--he accomplished so much over his long career--but I think it's true to say that his upbeat nature, his sense of humor (he tossed off down-home one-liners--"I only drink when I'm alone or with somebody"--all day long) and his understanding of how life worked enabled him to go through his life with far less friction that most of us put ourselves through. Lester was a killer musician, vocalist and songwriter and one of the founders of Louisiana swamp pop, one of those rare musical genres that EVERYBODY loves. One of the true blues greats is gone.

Five hundred harmonica players in one hotel

I spent last week in St. Louis at the annual convention of SPAH--the Society for the Preservation and Advancement of the Harmonica, an organization that has been around since 1962. I started attending SPAH conventions in the 1990s, when I was working on my harmonica book. Until last week I hadn't been to SPAH convention in many years. I considered it almost every year, but other priorities always seemed to interfere.

Attending a SPAH convention is a unique experience, to say the least. Living for five days in a hotel filled with harmaniacs can seem at times like you're living in the world's largest aviary. This is an event at which people can talk passionately for hours about the best way to gap a harmonica reed, whether tongue blocking is a superior approach to puckering, or who recorded the first overblow.

It's also an event filled with hundreds of incredibly fine and supportive people and the most astonishing collection of harmonica talent you'll ever see or hear in one place. The convention includes tons of jamming, vendors displaying all the many advances to the instrument, and formal performances by the top players. The photo collage shows some of the musical highlights: a session featuring Will Scarlett, Cheryl Arena (who did the blues harp proud all week), Joe Filisko, Johnny Long, and Buzz Krantz; a predictably killer set by the legendary Charlie McCoy; Chris Bauer and PT Gazell showing brilliantly how the chromatic and diatonic harmonicas are both great jazz instruments; Rob Paprozzi wowing the convention with Howard Levy backing him on piano; Tom Stryker’s fabulous harmonica big band; and Howards Levy and Susan Sauter sending the attendees home with their jaw-dropping performance of Bartok, Bach, and Vivaldi. Richard Sleigh and James Conway also gave a remarkable show, as did Filip Jers.

I had a ball. The best thing about being a musician--by far--is the people you meet. It was SO much fun to hook up with so many old friends, including the amazing Joe Filisko, Buzz Krantz, Kirk Jelly Roll Johnson (who was awarded a no-brainer, well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award on Saturday night), Winslow Yerxa, Richard Sleigh, Michael Rubin, Howard Levy, Rob Paparozzi, Peter “Madcat” Ruth, Kyle Rowland, and any others. I also finally got the chance to meet many new friends and harmonica heroes, including Brendan Power, PT Gazell, James Conway, Paul Messinger, Charlie Barath, and Deak Harp. And I saw the bright future of the instrument in the music of all the outstanding young players, some of whom are years away from voting age.

A special thanks to Tom Albanese and Ron Rosco Selly, even though they were at times corrupting influences (what really happened on Thursday night, anyway?), and everyone at SPAH for going above and beyond in making SPAH 2018 a great experience for yours truly.

R.I.P. Aretha Franklin

Kim Field and the Mighty Titans of Tone at the Jazz in the Valley Festival

The Mighty Titans of Tone in our element at the Jazz in the Valley festival in Ellensburg, Washington. Great gig, especially the indoors part. Thanks to the festival promoters for inviting us back this year! Left to right: Bob Knetzger, Brady Daniel Kish, yours truly, Tim Sherman, and David Hudson.

Johnny Hodges

Years ago I was listening to the car radio during a long commute on the Mass Pike when a tune came on that literally stunned me. I took the next exit and parked the car so I could listen closely, and when I got home (this was before cell phones) I called up the radio station to find out just what the hell I had been listening to--a live version of Billy Strayhorn's "Passion Flower" with the incredible Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone. It's Johnny Hodges' birthday today. Hodges played in Duke Ellington's band from 1928 until 1970, except for a period during the 1950s when he led his own successful small group. Hodges was one of those exceedingly rare players in whom it all came together: astonishing technique, perfect intonation, dynamics, endless creativity, and a huge heart. I was reading an interview with Basie drummer Jo Jones last night in which he said "To be a good jazz musician, you must try to hear and see things that are beautiful." You could think of Hodges' playing as the difference between pretty and beautiful. In 1956 Ellington, who had slipped out of the public's consciousness to a degree, took the stage at the Newport Jazz Festival with Hodges and delivered a concert that put Duke right back in the center of the jazz world. The stellar program included a Hodges feature, "Jeep's Blues," and Hodges reminded everyone that night that the blues, in the hands of a true artist, is all music.

B.B. King tribute at the Winthrop Rhythm and Blues Festival

Had a beautiful drive yesterday over the North Cascades Highway to Winthrop. Had a genuine blast performing at the Winthrop Rhythm and Blues Festival today as part of a B.B. King tribute with David Hudson, Guy Quintino, Jeff Conlin, Mark DuFresne, John Hodgkin, Al Keith, Brian Kent, and the totally amazing Tim Sherman, who summoned the spirit of B.B.'s guitar like few can. Thanks to all the Winthrop crews for having us and for producing another beautifully run, stellar festival!