Dear John, No more Buddy until he turns 84. No doubt he'll make it. We had a celebration of life for Bill Scherwenka on Sunday. Bill was our bud and the Valley Blues community turned out in force to remember Bill and to comfort Lori. It was sad and fun at the same time. Don't know how that sounds but that's the feeling I got. Thank y'all for turning out. Looks like El Sol is turning down the thermostat for a while. 105 ain't bad. Get out and enjoy the loads of live music offered all over this awesome Valley of the Sun. Showdown is coming....just a reminder....get busy!! And hug somebody this week!! Sincerely, Jim Crawford - PBS |
Buddy (cont'd from last week)
Waters knew the feeling. He produced a loaf of bread, a knife, and a thick package of sliced meat wrapped in butcher paper. "You won't complain none about this salami," he said. "Comes from a Jewish delicatessen where they cut it special for me. Have a taste."As Guy recalls in his 2012 memoir, "When I Left Home," written with David Ritz, he and Waters talked for a long time, about picking cotton in the Delta, about music, about the clubs on the South Side. Guy admitted that things had been tough. Lonely, broke, and frustrated, he was thinking of heading back to Lettsworth.Muddy waved that off. Look at me, he said. He'd grown up on the Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played blues for nickels and dimes, and figured that he'd have to make his livelihood in the fields. But he kept at his music and developed a local reputation. In the summer of 1941, two outsiders, Alan Lomax, representing the Library of Congress, and John Work, a music scholar from Fisk University, came to Coahoma County with a portable disk recorder. Lomax asked folks where he could find a singer he'd been hearing about, Robert Johnson. He was told that Johnson was dead, but that a young fellow named Muddy Waters was just as good. Lomax and Work set up the recording equipment at the commissary of the Stovall Plantation and persuaded Waters to come around. Muddy knew all kinds of songs, including Gene Autry's "Missouri Waltz" and pop hits like "Chattanooga Choo-Choo," but Lomax and Work didn't want the whole jukebox. They wanted the local stuff, and recorded Waters singing "Country Blues." When Waters heard the recording, he had a realization. "I can do it," he said. "I can do it." He headed North, in 1943, to make a life in the blues.In his early days in Chicago, Waters played for change alongside the pushcarts in "Jewtown," a bustling commercial district on Maxwell Street. Some nights, he played in bars. There were a few good acts around-Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd-but it was a dispiriting scene. "There was nothing happening," he said at the time. You couldn't play the country blues and expect to make a living at it. Waters made his living driving a truck. But once he'd armed himself with an electric guitar, a gift from his uncle, in 1947, Waters went about inventing a new form, an urban blues, the Chicago blues, and this caught the attention of the Chess brothers. In 1950, Chess put out a Muddy Waters original, "Rollin' Stone," and sold tens of thousands of records. And look at him now. "I got enough salami for the two of us," he told his new protégé.Guy still didn't see how he could compete in Chicago. But Muddy assured him that Ben Gold would give him gigs. Gold had seen how Guy's performance worked up the crowd, and, he said, when patrons get all "hot and bothered," they drink more, the owner gets paid, and, usually, so does the band."Funny, 'cause tonight was the night I almost called my daddy for a ticket home," Guy said."Tonight, you found a new home," Muddy Waters told him.Over the next generation, Buddy Guy crossed paths with Muddy Waters countless times. He recorded with him, he performed with him, he went drinking with him and heard all the lore. Along with the other top blues performers in town-Junior Wells (who played harmonica alongside Buddy for years), Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Etta James, Mama Yancey, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, and Magic Sam-they played the clubs. But never for much money. Well into his forties, Buddy Guy was often making just a few bucks a night.In the seventies and eighties, Guy ran a club of his own on the South Side, the Checkerboard Lounge. After a stadium gig, in 1981, the Stones dropped by to play with Muddy Waters and Buddy. Guy remembered it as his one chance to make some money on the club, but the Stones entourage was so large, and the room so small, that there were almost no paying customers. He didn't make a dime.In 1983, Ray Allison, Waters's drummer, came by to say, "Old man is kinda sick." Waters was dying of lung cancer, and was frightened of what lay ahead. "Don't let them goddam blues die on me, all right?" he told Guy. A few days later, he was gone.When my father was in his fifties, he developed a tremor in his right hand, the onset of early Parkinson's disease. He was a dentist and it must have terrified him, but, for a while at least, he somehow steadied his hand as he gripped a dental instrument. He kept his sickness a secret as long as he could. His living, his family's well-being, depended on it. A Parkinsonian dentist-it was like a premise for a dark Buster Keaton film, the drill, waggling in the air, inching toward the helpless, cotton-wadded patient. The patients peeled away. Soon he was retired and in a wheelchair. There were nightmares and hallucinations, butterflies flitting in front of his face.He'd spoken very little of his life. When he told me some detail of his past-hearing Sidney Bechet at a club in Paris when he was in the Army-it seemed almost illicit. The singular joy he allowed himself was music, and music was the way I could talk most easily with my father. His recommendations-Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan-seemed to come from a happier time. I'm sure that he was the only dentist in North Jersey who abandoned Muzak for "I Got My Mojo Working."When I was in college, he called to tell me that a singer named Alberta Hunter was performing at a club in the Village called the Cookery. I should be sure to see her, he said, and, as a way of insisting, he sent me a check for twenty dollars to pay the cover charge. Hunter, who was a contemporary of Bessie Smith's, was the Memphis-born daughter of a Pullman porter. As a girl, she ran off to Chicago to sing the blues, and she became friends with Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Sophie Tucker, and King Oliver. She co-wrote "Downhearted Blues" with Lovie Austin: Trouble, trouble, I've had it all my days. After Hunter's mother died, in 1954, she spent the next couple of decades working as a registered nurse at a hospital on Roosevelt Island. Now that she had retired from nursing, Hunter decided that she would sing again. My father had led me once more to the blues, to one of the originals, in her last years. Hunter, that night at the Cookery, was bawdy, fearless, magnificently alive. At my father's funeral, we set up a boom box and played his favorite music. People left the synagogue to the strains of "Downhearted Blues."Buddy Guy doesn't get back to Lettsworth much. In December, though, he flew down from Chicago to collect what he thought of as the honor of his life. The Louisiana legislature had voted unanimously to name a piece of Highway 418 in Pointe Coupee Parish "Buddy Guy Way." The celebration began on a Friday at Louisiana State University, where Guy had worked as a handyman and a driver. The next day, after a gumbo-and-catfish lunch at a place called Hot Tails, Guy and a small group of friends travelled the fifty miles from Baton Rouge to Lettsworth on a chartered bus.It was cold and rainy. Very few people live in Lettsworth these days. "It's a ghost town now," Guy says. Some of the wooden shacks have long since been abandoned by sharecropper families who went North. But today people came out to wave from their porches. Guy looked sharp, in the Carlos Santana leather coat. The honors themselves weren't unusual-speeches, a plaque-but it all struck deep. Guy's mother never saw him perform. "Getting honored at the Kennedy Center and now this, it's hard to say which one is better," he told me. Guy invoked the words of a Big Maceo song: "You got a man in the East, and a man in the West / Just sittin' here wondering who you love the best."Guy grew up in one of those shacks in Lettsworth. No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no glass windows. A white family, the Feduccias, owned the land and lived in a big house; black sharecroppers, like the Guys, picked pecans and cotton. The Feduccias took half of the proceeds. Guy's parents had a third-grade education. His mother cooked in the big house. His father worked in the fields. As a child, Buddy went to a segregated school and early mornings and evenings he'd pick cotton, two dollars and fifty cents for a hundred pounds. Buddy LIVE...!!
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| Out & About Tuesday, August 6 Carvin Jones, 8 p.m., Brass Tap, Mesa Wednesday, August 7 Hans Olson, 7 p.m., Time Out Lounge, Tempe Chuck Hall, 6 p.m., Corrado's, Carefree Mike Eldred, 7 p.m., Wild Vine Uncorked, Chandler Thursday, August 8 The Smokin' Blue Band, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Sugar Thieves Duo, 6 p.m., Culinary Dropout, Gilbert Paris James, 7 p.m., St. Armand Kitchen, Chandler Eric Ramsey Hosts OPEN MIC, 6 p.m., Fatso's Pizza, Phoenix Hans Olson EVERY THURSDAY, 6 p.m., Handlebar, Apache Junction Arizona Blues Project, 8 p.m., Harold's, Cave Creek Friday, August 9 JC & The Rockers, 8 p.m., Fibber Magee's, Chandler Sugar Thieves Trio, 7 p.m., Opa Greek Life Café, Tempe Innocent Joe & The Hostile Witnesses, 7 p.m., Handlebar, Apache Junction Blues Review Band, 7 p.m., TJ Speaks Tavern, Sun City Tommy Grills Band, 6:30 p.m., West Alley BBQ, Chandler Ramsey/Roberson, 6 p.m., Fatso's Pizza, Phoenix Paris James, 6:30 p.m., Scratch Pub, Mesa Dennis Herrera w/Big Daddy D, 7 p.m., Rickety Cricket, Prescott Saturday, August 10 Soul Power Band, 9 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix Hoodoo Casters, 7:30 p.m., Janey's Cave Creek Cadillac Assembly Line, 7 p.m., Speakeasy, Sun City JC & The Rockers, 7 p.m., Handlebar, Apache Junction Thermal Blues Express, 8 p.m., Fibber Magee's, Chandler Mike Eldred, 6 p.m., Kazbar, Scottsdale Ramsey/Roberson, 6 p.m., Fatso's Pizza, Phoenix Nina Curri, 7 p.m., Voodoo Daddy's, Tempe Mother Road Trio 6 p.m., Oakmont Country Club, Flagstaff Sunday, August 11 Eric Tessmer Band, 8 p.m., Rhythm Room, Phoenix True Flavor Blues, NOON , Copper Star, Phoenix Monday, August 12 The Scott Ellison band, 8 p.m. Rhythm Room, Phoenix
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Jams Sunday Rocket 88s JAM, 4 p.m., Chopper John's, Phoenix Bourbon Jack's JAM w/Kody Herring, 6 p.m., Chandler JAM Hosted by The Scott O'Neal Band. Every other Thursday, Windsock, Prescott Sir Harrison, JAM every other Sunday, The Windsock, Prescott MONDAY Bam Bam & Badness Open JAM, 9 p.m., Char's, Phoenix Weatherford Hotel JAM, 6:30 p.m., Flagstaff TUESDAY OPEN JAM Hosted by Jilly Bean & The Flipside Blues Band, 7 p.m., Steel Horse Saloon, Phoenix JAM Sir Harrison, 9 p.m., Char's, Phoenix Gypsy's Bluesday Night JAM, 7 p.m. Pho Cao, Tempe Tailgaters JAM, 7 p.m., Glendale WEDNESDAY Rocket 88s, JAM, 6 p.m., The Last Stop (Old Hideaway West), Phoenix Tool Shed JAM Party, 6 p.m. Gabby's, Mesa THURSDAY Tool Shed JAM Party, 7 p.m., Steel Horse Saloon, Phoenix Jolie's Place JAM w/Adrenaline, 9 p.m., Chandler NEW JAM @ The Bench, Hosted by BluZone, 7 p.m., The Bench, Tempe Friday Saturday Bumpin' Bud's JAM 2nd & 4th Saturdays JAM, 6 p.m., Marc's Sports Grill |
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