Music Banter - Whip Out That Ol' Guitar, It's Country Blues Week!

There are some fantastic songs in this thread. Thanks to Neapolitan for posting Blind Willie's Dying Crapshooter's Blues which is my absolute all time favorite blues song. The imagery Blind Willie conjures up when he describes the members of his funeral entourage is every bit as poetic as Dylan best lyrics. In fact, Dylan himself has borrowed more than a few lyrics from Blind Willie McTell's songbook over the years.

I was lucky enough to interview Sam Chatmon who was one of the last authentic first generation country blues players as a journalist when I worked in the field for the Smithsonian Folkways Collection in the Seventies. At the time I was on special assignment doing a feature story for the newspaper St. Louis Today.

Sam Chatmon lived in Hollendale Mississippi and was in his late 70s then & was still an amazing player and singer. Sam was once a member of the world famous Mississippi Sheiks which included blues singers Bo Carter, Walter Vinson, Lonnie (Chatmon) Johnson as members. The Sheiks were the sons of Ezell Chatmon, uncle of Charlie Patton and leader of an area string band that was popular around the turn of the 19th/20th century. In the late '20s and early '30s the Mississippi Sheiks were the equivalent of the Beatles in rural regions of the black South. No blues artist sold more records or had a larger following the the Sheiks in their heyday. The Sheiks were among the first black musicians to develop a crossover cult following of white fans.

Robert Johnson was totally enamored with Lonnie Johnson's playing skills and according to bluesman, Son House, as a teenager, Robert Johnson used to boast that he was Lonnie's first cousin, a tall tale that Son House knew was patently false. House describes Robert Johnson as the worst blues player he ever heard... And then according to House, around age 19 Johnson disappeared from the Greenwood Mississippi area for about a year, and returned with diabolically good skills on guitar, which fueled the stories about Robert Johnson selling his soul to Satan to sing and play the blues.

Unlike Lonnie's delta blues approach, Sam Chatmon and Bo Carter played in a less bluesy ragtime style that reflected the popular music of the day. Lonnie went on to establish long lived solo career into the 1950s and even topped the R&B charts in 1948 with a blues ballad, Tomorrow Night. Bo and Sam had successful solo careers well into the 1940s, after the Sheiks broke up in 1935.

Sam died in 1983 and Bonnie Raitt paid for a memorial headstone on his grave site which was engraved with words "Sittin' On Top of The World", the title of an old Mississippi Sheiks song that Sam sang in the 20s and 30s that was eventually popularized by Howlin' Wolf.

Sam had a lightning fast, highly precise three finger picking style that reminds me of the great ragtime blues players like Blind Willie McTell, Blind Blake and his own first cousin, Bo Carter.

I was a frequent visitor to Furry Lewis' home near Beale Street in Memphis in the 70s. Furry was in his 80s back then and had given up music in the 1930s and was silent until 1961 when Sam Charters discovered Furry and recorded him for Folkways Records. When Charters discovered him, Lewis was a retired sanitation department worker for the city of Memphis.

When I first met Furry he was a bit down on his luck and was slowly recovering from a long term illness. I quickly learned that you should never show up at Furry's door without a fifth of Jack Daniels Black Label bourbon in your hand. I never saw a man put away as much whiskey as Furry and I shuddered to think about the quantity of whiskey he must have consumed when he was a younger, healthier man in his prime. There was a legend about Furry's indestructibility & he frequently claimed he was too "ornery & mean" to die. Not even the devil wanted to claim his soul, according to Furry.

Furry was strictly old school and wouldn't dream of making a trip to the 7-Eleven for a can of beer without dressing up in a suit, tie and a fedora. I cracked up, when I saw him raking leaves one day in his front yard in a suit and tie. I asked him if he wore a suit and tie when he worked at the Memphis Dept. of Sanitation and Furry said with a sly smile, "I sure did... back in those days all the trash collectors were dressed to the nines."

At the time of my first visit Furry's house, his beloved Gibson acoustic guitar was hocked at the local pawn shop so I first heard Furry play on my own vintage sunburst Washburn guitar that followed me around on my travels in United States and Europe for most of the Seventies. Eventually the Smithsonian raised money to get Furry's guitar out of hock and he successfully toured the United States and Europe until his death at the ripe old age of 88 years in 1981.

Furry once told me he played guitar in W.C. Handy's legendary Orchestra of Memphis the earliest jazz ensemble that recorded the original St. Louis Blues and Beale Street Blues in 1917, Those sides earned W.C. Handy the title of "Father of the Blues" and are believed to be the earliest recorded blues.

I was never able to confirm Furry's membership in Handy's orchestra because the session logs were long lost but the time frame fits.... Furry would have been 24 years old at the time. Furry's own idiosyncratic improvisational approach to guitar playing suggests he had once played in a jazz ensemble and Handy's Orchestra of Memphis was the only jazz ensemble outside of New Orleans during that era. By 1920 W.C. Handy had relocated to Harlem in New York City and ran a thriving music publishing business and frequently played the clubs of the early jazz era Harlem.

Furry was also a world-class poet and his song lyrics rival those of Blind Willie McTell, my favorite blues lyricist. Robert Johnson & Skip James are the only other great blues lyricist in the came class as Blind Willie and Furry. Many of the great modern day folk and blues songs lyrics are rephrased verses from songs originally composed by Willie McTell, Furry Lewis, Skip James or Robert Johnson in the '20s and '30s.

Furry had mad skills as a bottleneck guitar player and generally played in either an open D or open E tuning. This video of Furry's Blues is an excellent showcase of Furry's highly unorthodox approach to guitar playing.