Sugaray
Arizona Republic
As Sugaray Rayford headed into 2020, he had every reason to be optimistic.
He won Soul Blues Male Artist of the Year at the 40th Annual Blues Music Awards in Memphis. He was up for Best Contemporary Blues Album at the Grammy Awards for his album "Somebody Save Me," a refreshingly contemporary spin on classic Memphis soul and gritty blues.
He'd recently signed a new management deal with the company that also represents George Benson and was set to tour the world — again — from April through November, booked by one of the world's largest talent agencies.
Then, the novel coronavirus changed everything. Rayford had to put his plans on hold as the entire touring industry went into hibernation to allow for social distancing.
"This should have been the best year I have ever had in music," Rayford says. "Now I'm sitting at home kind of twiddling my thumbs."
To get a sense of how much Rayford tends to work, here's how he spent 2019.
"I probably only had about 100 days I didn't work," he says. "We hit almost every state. Did shows all over Canada, all over France, all over Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Liechtenstein, Germany, Norway, a few Caribbean islands."
That schedule is how Rayford pays the mortgage on the house the Texas native bought in Maricopa, Arizona, in 2009.
"I am a full-time musician," he says, "with a full-time band. And the guys in the band are all full-time musicians."
He's more concerned about his bandmates at the moment.
"My wife has always been really good at making me put money away, not spending every penny," he says. "I mean, if this drags on too, too much longer, I'll be in dire straits also. But I know my regular guys have been having a hard time since day one."
Rayford and his bandmates had already taken three months off, besides a New Year's Eve gig and a blues cruise, after last year's tour concluded on Nov. 22 so he could be home while his wife of 16 years, Pamela, underwent treatment for cancer.
She was diagnosed in August. Four days later, Rayford, whose mother died of cancer when he was 11, had to leave for Europe.
"She's on the back end of it now," he says. "She's been out of the hospital 32 days. She's here actually eating a burger, which I think that's the first time I've seen that in three or four months. So she's getting there."
Rayford, a 2015 inductee to the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame, had just gone back to work when venues started shutting down.
Before the second concert of a two-night stand at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle, he saw how this pandemic was about to rewrite his entire year.
"They came up and told everybody 'This is the last show for the foreseeable future.' So we finished that show and it was like 'OK, wow! That was surreal.'"
Two days later, on March 13, they played a good but "eerie" show in Portland.
"Downtown Portland was a ghost town," Rayford says. "It was a Friday night and there was no one on the streets."
Things got more surreal the next day when the final concert of that West Coast swing took Rayford and his bandmates back to Washington to play the Walla Walla Guitar Festival.
"They had sold like five, six hundred tickets," Rayford says. "But they were only allowed to let 200 people in, and they were being charged for every person over 200. They had police there with a counter."
After that show, Rayford went home to Maricopa.
"I had to be very careful and try to quarantine myself a little bit," he says, "because my wife was literally at Cedars-Sinai (in Los Angeles) going through stem cell replacement. So she had zero immunity. A baby cough could have killed her."
A week after he brought Pamela home from the hospital, Rayford says "the domino effect" started taking out tour dates all over the world.
Now all his bookings through July have been postponed or canceled and he just had his first August cancellation.
"I still have dates for November in Switzerland, and then a few things in December," Rayford says. "But it's probably a few hundred thousand dollars or so that I've lost this year."
It's taken Rayford years to get to where that kind of money was his to lose.
He grew up singing gospel in a Pentecostal church in Tyler, Texas, becoming the choir director in his teens. That formative experience clearly left an imprint on his soulful vocal phrasing. But he'd given up on music by the time he moved to San Diego to join the Marine Corps.
"I just didn't see a future in it, so I went into the military," Rayford says. "And being a musician was the furthest thing from my mind."
Pamela talked him into giving music one more try after 17 years. But rather than go back to singing gospel, he decided to take the voice he'd honed in church and reapply it to his newfound love of blues and Memphis soul.
It was about five years ago, he says, when "everything just kinda went kaboom for me career-wise. The next thing you know I was playing worldwide. I mean, I've done shows at the North Pole, for God's sakes."
Bob Corritore, who owns the Phoenix music venue Rhythm Room and hosts a long-running blues radio show on KJZZ-FM, thinks Rayford has unlimited potential to keep building on what he's accomplished in the past few years.
"He's a tremendous talent," he says. "A great singer. A great personality. A consummate musician and an entertainer like nobody’s business. He’s one of those blessed individuals. I’ve traveled to other countries with the guy. Just being in the airport, he will get a crowd around him. He’s just that magnetic."
Rayford had a ranch in northern San Diego County for a long time and moved to LA when Pamela took a position as a nurse practitioner at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2006.
By that point, Rayford says, he'd been in California, off and on, since 1985.
"And during that time, I had been to LA maybe four times. Never liked it."
But the job was good enough to make them set aside their reservations long enough to sell their ranch and give LA a try.
"We were ranchers," Rayford says. "We made the best of living in LA. And for a while, it wasn't that bad."
By the time they did burn out on LA living, Maricopa just made perfect sense. His son-in-law was big in real estate in Maricopa. Pamela's children and grandchildren all lived in Arizona. And the price was right.
"It worked great," Rayford says. "We were able to see the grandkids all the time." And as he tells his friends in LA when they ask what made him want to move to Arizona, "I bought a 1,900-square-foot house at this price. They're like 'What?! My truck cost more than that.' And it's like 'Yep. And that's why I'm in Arizona.' We can actually retire someday."
Pamela continued working at the hospital, commuting from their home in Maricopa to LA each week until her cancer diagnosis put an end to that.
Rayford says they're lucky they weren't living in LA when COVID-19 took him off the road. "Monetarily-wise," he says, "I would have been in trouble probably the week after we stopped working. That is just being real."
Even so, he says, the impact of not having any way to make a living with no end in sight will definitely take its toll.
"The virus has been a mother, man," he says. "We were the first ones out of work. And even after everybody else has already returned to normal, we'll be the last ones to go back to work."
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