My Secret Blues Life

I was born on an Air Force base in Texas in 1943, my father a young Captain from Illinois. But my mother came from a Southcentral Georgia farm family named Spivey, and all through the later Forties and early Fifties we routinely paid visits to the Spivey tobacco farm (in Mystic, a 300-person village outside Ocilla and somewhat farther from Fitzgerald).

My playmates were young black children mostly, and one summer visit I even worked in the tobacco barn, the only white boy there. Race wasn't an issue I knew anything about, but visiting local sharecropper farms with my Uncle Henry (who was an area Farm Administration bureaucrat of some sort), and listening to the older white guys talk, I later realized I was seeing and hearing white paternalism, and mild racism, in action. If I was hearing any Black Music then, it's missing from my memories.

The Spivey family had in earlier days moved from further north in the state, where Spivey forebears had been plantation folk owning over a hundred slaves (or so I was told); and years later I wondered if somehow I was slavery-connected to the Classic Blues singer Victoria Spivey, but I've never done any research to answer the question.

Meanwhile, as an AF family, we kept on the move--Oklahoma, Texas again, then a few years in New York and Virginia. I remember riding the New York Central railroad a couple of times in those years, treated with kindly attention by black porters, one of whom I swear looked like Son House as he appeared when rediscovered later--he'd been a porter working out of Rochester for many years by then. In Virginia, my Southern belle mom experienced some years of migraine headaches that laid her low and left us kids routinely in the care of a big black woman named Rhoda, our part-time maid who soon became much more.

Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama; the year was 1955-56... which means I soon saw firsthand the results of the Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember my parents actually giving rides to the black people walking along the roads; and for years afterwards I imagined they were displaying their liberal attitude, but I suppose it's more likely they were just helping maids and gardeners and other domestic workers get to their day jobs.

Seventh grade in Montgomery was a shock to me, chubby and awkward and socially inept--and astonished by all the blatant racial remarks I'd hear every day from poor-white and upper-crust adolescents both. Boys planning to pile into a car and go "nig'-knocking." Slurs against black women. Special vituperation reserved for King and the others "interfering in our local business."

But the regional radio was amazing! Elvis and the Memphis Sun guys got air play, and more importantly so did Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all those numerically named black rhythm groups. I was getting my first taste of versions of Blues music as well as seeing harsh aspects of black life and black/white relations. (I started buying records seriously then, adding to the Harry Belafonte 45 set I'd bought back in Virginia.)

Then we were shipped overseas for two years, to Izmir (old Smyrna), Turkey, where I unknowingly heard--drifting from doorways and open windows--the outcast Aegean Greek equivalent of the Blues, that haunting Piraeus-to-Smyrna music known as rembetika. Meanwhile, the local PX did bring in a few 45s and albums by Domino and the Burnette Trio and then Bo Diddley and Johnny and Joe, not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. Yet by the time we got back to the States, the first rush of rock 'n' roll was already over, and the softer pop guys had started their ascension, along with the Kingston Trio and other folk.

It was the latter that interested me most, even though I soon began hearing too the music coming out of Detroit and Chicago, meaning Motown and a bit of Southside Blues. The nearby AF base teen club played popular r&b discs, and I danced with young black women at some teen functions--had a minor crush on one, as I kept denying the racial reality of America. (I don't know what happened to Gwen later, but her younger brother went on to a solid career as Jazz pianist and Music Dept. college prof.)

I went off to Chicago for college in 1960, but still wasn't hip or brave enough to go investigating the area Blues clubs in their heyday. I did catch a concert by Ray Charles and his amazing revue (sing it, Margie!) in a strange warehouse-like venue, but the one album that galvanized me most was this weird-sounding debut LP by a kid named Bob Dylan. I loved "Song to Woody" and enjoyed some other numbers, but was most intrigued by Dylan's covers of songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson (who?) and Bukka White. I immediately wanted to know more about the original performances and singers. (Dylan's music, of course, ranged far and wide during the ensuing decades, yet he never forgot the Blues; his Blind Willie McTell song is one of the great works of 20th Century music of any kind.)

About then, Columbia issued its first albums resurrecting the Blues of Robert Johnson and Leroy Carr... and I was a goner. Suddenly it was all Blues all of the time. Back in Seattle for the second half of college, I went regularly to thrift and junk stores and obscure Central Area disc shops in search of 78s and 45s (eventually sold the small collection I amassed to Bob the Bear Hite, lead singer for Canned Heat). And I started buying every Blues album I could find, especially the mesmerizing reissues of then-still-obscure older Bluesmen, on OJL, RBF, and then Arhoolie Records (thank God for Chris Strachwitz!), followed by Belzona (soon renamed Yazoo). I was in heaven for a while; it was actually possible in those days to keep up with all the Blues LPs being issued.

One of my favorite early buys, though, was a Vanguard set, Blues at Newport 1963, with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt, and others, including a young white guy named John Hammond (son of the famous a&r man and artist discoverer with the same name). Hearing young John's amazing reworkings of Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry--some said slavish copying, but I disagreed--cheered on by the great black elders on stage, convinced me that a white boy could play and sing the Blues. (And he was soon followed on record by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, and other creditable white players.)

This revelation encouraged me to dig even deeper into what I could learn about the Blues. So I subscribed to England's wonderful collector mag Blues Unlimited, kept an eager eye out for Blues articles in DownBeat, scoured bookstores for histories by Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters and eventually others, and also attended what in retrospect were unique, and luckily captured on videotape: the mid-Sixties performances by John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and maybe Skip James too (I missed that one), brought out to Seattle by the Folklore Society.

I also started writing rock criticism, both locally and for newly minted Rolling Stone and then other rival publications. Among my proudest moments at Stone were key reviews of Clifton Chenier, the Memphis Swamp Jam set celebrating some of the rediscovered elders, and a major Chess Records reissue program. I also covered some interesting events for the magazine that brought me into direct contact with Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, John Mayall, Ike and Tina Turner, John Hammond, and one or two other Blues performers. An amazing couple of hours was me as "fly on the wall," backstage at a festival listening to Bo, Collins, Ike, and some of their band guys shoot the shit, talkin' smack and doin' the dozens on each other!

At the same time I had decided by 1967 that I was going to write a screenplay about Robert Johnson (somebody should, was my thinking); and I spent a couple of years researching, writing, re-writing, and finally copyrighting my fictionalization of his then-obscure life, which I titled Hellhound on My Trail. By 1970 it was beginning to circulate in Hollywood and elsewhere. A couple of agents took it on briefly, and then some fledgling producers tried their hand, but urban Blaxploitation pictures were what the studios wanted, and my script was definitely a mix of the film Sounder and some genre not yet filmed, call it maybe (excuse the pun) Blues noir.

On my own I tried to get copies to Eric Clapton and the Stones (via Jerry Wexler as I recall), but I never heard anything back. I did succeed in reaching Taj Mahal's management but not Taj himself; he told me much later that he'd never seen it. And I mailed a copy to actor-director Ossie Davis, who sent back a nice note saying he liked it and would agree to direct the picture if I could get a production going. Nothing along those lines materialized, but I did see the last portion of Hellhound published in Boston magazine Fusion.

In the late Sixties I was also writing educational films, a couple of them with race-conscious content and titles like Black Thumb and The 220 Blues; and I wrote lengthy treatments for proposed films called Betty and Dupree (more Blues) and The Arletha Jones Show (meant to be a television comedy series featuring a black pop star). But by the mid-Seventies I'd mostly become a writer-producer in marketing and advertising, and the inventive radio/TV work we did for Rainier Beer allowed me to write affectionate and successful pastiches of Blues and r&b numbers and also actually record an ale commercial with Bo Diddley. But my Hellhound screenplay languished on the shelves of Hollywood studios or wherever, and I basically forgot about it.

Over the next two decades, though, every five years or so some producer would discover a copy, call me up to praise it and ask my permission to try to get something going, and I always just said, "Okay, fine." Obviously, no movie got made. But I never stopped loving that down-child, uplifting music and I kept buying hundreds of Blues and r&b albums, new and old, and seeing the odd concert or club date by B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, the Meters, Taj Mahal, Gatemouth Brown, the Neville Brothers, and whoever else came to Seattle.

Around 1986 I remember telephoning Columbia Records' John Hammond (famous father, this time) in New York to ask what had become of the long-promised box set offering the complete Robert Johnson on record; he said there were hurdles and delays caused by conflicting financial and copyright interests, but it would appear some year soon... and when it did emerge at last, in 1990, the set went on to become a hugely successful bestseller, making Johnson a modern music hero all over again. I kept hoping for action on Hellhound too, but still nothing happened. So more years passed...

... And they just keep accelerating. I love that rich music as much as ever, even if Chicago-derived Blues by white artists has become something of a cliche. I play scores of Blues and related records and CDs weekly if not daily. And from the early Seventies on I added the Caribbean version, reggae, to that on-going, soundtrack-for-life mix. In fact I program Blues and reggae at home so much, one daughter recently commented that I must have been born a black person in some previous incarnation.

Could be, I suppose... or maybe it's just the South Georgia Spivey blood--luckily, in my case, resulting in an admiration for African-American music and culture (meaning artists Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, writer Ralph Ellison and those of the Harlem Renaissance, and a host of other black figures) rather than a Southern white racist antipathy.

I'm nearing 66 now, and that screenplay has been a well-kept secret for almost 40 years. Time to let it be known. That's why I've posted it now at http://robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com (use the connecting button down at the bottom of this page), in its warts-and-all entirety, for anyone curious to read.

My secret's out.

I'm Tore Down (Part 3)

Bluesman John Hammond briefly had Jimi Hendrix as his lead guitar player, but then Jimi headed for England (see most recent post below)...

"That summer of 1967 I went to Atlantic and told them about the stuff we'd cut earlier for Red Bird. They were interested and bought the tunes and my contract, and used them on the album I Can Tell in the fall. We also cut Sooner or Later then, but it wasn't released till the next year."

From 1967 until last year ((article dates from 1970)), Hammond was just playing anywhere he could, Chicago, both coasts, some festivals--sometimes alone, sometimes as John Hammond and His Screamin' Nighthawks, though the only other mainstay in that time was drummer Charles Otis.

"Let me tell you about him," says Hammond. "Charles Otis is a legend in his own time. He began playing at sixteen in New Orleans with Professor Longhair. Then he went on the road with Lloyd Price--he's on 'Lawdy Miss Clawdy.' He also played with Fats Domino, Little Richard, Huey Piano Smith, Charles Brown, Lowell Fulson, Otis Redding, The Coasters, The Dixie Cups, Alvin Robinson--in other words, everybody in r&b. In The Girl Can't Help It, Charles is the cat drumming behind Little Richard. He's 37 now, but he's ageless. He's had numerous offers from cats like James Brown, But Charles won't go out on the road anymore with anyone but me," concludes Hammond with obvious pride.

Atlantic made no further moves with Hammond, Otis, and whoever else, however, until last fall. "They sent me down to Muscle Shoals, and I think we made a monster--a meat package, no fat on it anywhere. This new guy Duane Allman's on guitar on four cuts, lead and slide. Now I've heard The Allman Brothers album and I don't like it much, but he played his ass off for this one." The new album, called Southern Fried, has just now appeared.

What are Hammond's future plans? "Well," he muses, "right now I could have an eight-piece band of the baddest cats in the land--all these New Orleans cats that are tight with Charles. But I still can't afford to keep a band like that together. But if I could, man, we'd make a shot heard 'round the world.

"If I can't get big money and big concerts," he goes on, "I don't know what will happen. I can't keep going on the road ten months of the year much longer. I've got a wife and kid now. She's a woman, she knows I'm a musician and she's strong; but this year starts my ninth year. I've played everywhere, I've worked hard, I've got all the credentials--now I've got to get into the concert scene."

Hammond listens in silence for a moment to Little Walter blowing blue and lonely in the background, then says, "I've never been in a strong bargaining positions with the record companies. I've never got any front money at all, so they were never forced to put any promotional hype on my albums. Even this new one--Atlantic says they'll push it, but it's all on faith at this point.

"It's hard not to be bitter, but I'm not. I've met and played with so many incredible artists--I've gotten to play with all my idols, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf. Listen, I shared a bill with the Wolf one time, and he used to call me back out every night. He said, 'Damn, oh you got a lot of heart, John.' A black person can see that I feel what I'm doing--that I'm not just imitating. Because of my family, I've just known so many black musicians in my life. Like my middle name Paul--I'm named after Paul Robeson, my godfather. But it's never been, like, being part of a white group looking on a black culture. I've just been there, so I'm not ill-at-ease now wherever I go. I get hassled more by whites," he adds bitterly, "than I do by blacks."

And as a result, Hammond's manner seems a strange mixture of shyness and egotism--of courtly politeness on one hand and occasional nervousness on the other (evidenced possibly by the slight stutter that shows up in his speech, though never in his singing). So many of his friends and one-time back-up men have become astounding successes, and so many white critics have accused him disdainfully of something akin to "blackface" mimickry ((Greil Marcus is one over the many years who never cut John any slack)), that it should be no surprise to find Hammond somewhat defensive in his pride and confidence.

"People think I've had all these inroads in music because of my father," he says. "He's really a spectacular man, and I got to hear the music because of his position. But I've done it all myself. I wanted to be on my own, making my own living, making my own mistakes--and I have been since I was eighteen. In fact, there was a time when my father tried to discourage me from music.

"I began playing because I loved the blues, I loved all these black musicians who are truly great figures in American culture. And I wanted to help propagate, help continue the life of this stuff that was going out of style. I knew I could do it, and I have--I know I've turned a lot of people on to this pure art form, this roots thing of American culture. And a lot of black artists have benefited, so I feel good.

"The blues is comin' back," he says, " and comin' back pure--the basics, the truth. It's so real, it makes some people embarrassed. In today's age of super-technology when there's no feeling and very little thinking, the blues is a shot of pure energy."

He stops and gestures into the gathering waves of sound from Little Walter's harmonica. "That's so real, man. That's his heart you're listening to."

It's over. John Hammond, bluesman, heads back to the motel and then to his last night at the Medicine Show--still on the road, still paying his dues, still working and waiting.

*********

The irony of this 1970 article, of course, is that it could have been written yesterday or a year ago, because the language and ideas expressed (especially in this third part) are still pertinent over 35 years later. Though his hair is graying and he's recognized as a major founding figure of the post-Chicago blues scene, playing and singing for nearly 50 years now, John Hammond is still out there scuffling, shifting from label to label, cutting fine albums with tunes ranging from Robert Johnson to Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry to Tom Waits... and maybe still hoping to hit it big.

My Time After A While (Part 2)

Hammond's career took off when he got a rousing reception at the Newport Folk Festival. We resume there...

"I cut Big City Blues in the winter of '63. This guitar player named Billy Butler who'd played with Bill Doggett on 'Honky Tonk' got a band together for the date. After that, Vanguard booked me into the Village Gate. I had Eric Gale on guitar, Jimmy Lewis on bass, and Rob somebody on drums--we were the first electric band to play there other than jazz. This was January of 1964, when The Rolling Stones had first come over to this country. They came down to dig us at the Gate, and I got to know them, mainly Brian."

Hammond was gigging all over by then, including several jobs in Canada. "I met these guys called The Hawks," he goes on, "and sat in with them on a few jobs. I was playing with them as their group, only in a jamming capacity, but we got to be very good friends. The Hawks at that time looked super-straight--crewcuts, immaculate suits, all that. But they were actually totally wild, really far-out cats. Some of the things they used to do with girls at those ((early rockabilly singer Ronnie)) Hawkins parties I can't tell you!"

How do you feel about their different image and pre-eminent success as The Band? "I'm really happy for 'em," Hammond answers. "Those guys are so talented, they can play any kind of sound there is. What you hear on their two records is just one facet of what they can do. They're makin' real money now, and that's what they always wanted--to get into a position where they could call the shots. God knows they've earned it.

"Anyway, in the summer of 1964 I got together all these cats I'd known, including The Hawks. Bloomfield was on piano because Robbie was just so dynamic on guitar, and Michael was not playing like he is now. In fact, Michael learned some things from Robbie. I got them together--not too many people know that. But," he shrugs, "it's not important anyway.

"Vanguard got very uptight about the date because we looked so sloppy and they didn't know any of these guys, so we had to do it all in one session, and get it on the first or second take with no overdubbing. I really had to hustle to get Vanguard to release it at all ((his fine album So Many Roads))."

Hammond pauses to light another cigarette, then resumes: "I've really played with some fantastic cats--like, Johnny Littlejohn had a trio going in Chicago. Bloomfield introduced us in '64, and then we played some jobs together in the East for about two months. The whole problem was I had this duality thing going--I was soloing, but I was also trying to get a band together. I kept trying to make something happen between myself and The Hawks. So many near calls, but...

"Finally, I went over to England in the spring of '65. I played twenty dates or so over there with bands backing me up like Graham Bond's and then John Mayall in London. Listen, Clapton was playing, Spencer Davis, Winwood... I got to meet and play with all those cats. It was really fine."

When he returned to the U.S. in the summer, Hammond left Vanguard and signed with Leiber-Stoller and a label of theirs called Red Bird. "I got Robbie for the session and Jimmy Lewis; and Leiber-Stoller knew Charles Otis who'd been playing all over. Then I got Bill Wyman for a couple of numbers. Brian Jones was there too, begging me to let him play hamonica on the date, but I told him the harp was all mine. Dylan showed up at the session too--Bob and I had been friends since 1961, and I'd introduced him to The Hawks.

"We cut two singles and some other numbers. The deal supposedly was to be this unbelievable promotion by Red Bird--magazines, TV shows, the whole shot. But then the owner of Red Bird just decided it wasn't going to happen. Man, I was zapped. Just when were getting things together and everything looked so rosy, bang!

"That was it. I sold everything I owned and left the country. I said I was never going back." Hammond split for Europe and spent half of 1966 wandering across the continent, finally winding up in Turkey for some months. He underwent a particularly painful experience there--one which he refuses to talk about, but which persuaded him to return to the U.S. after all. "I came back at the end of summer with my tail between my legs," he says.

After a trip to the Orient with a friend, he wound up in San Francisco for a few days, where he went to see a flashy new band called Jefferson Airplane (in the pre-Grace era). "I looked up on stage and there was this cat on guitar I'd known at college, Jorma Kaukonen. He invited me up on stage to play with them. It was really strange--I was just off the plane and was completely straight. I was wearing a suit and tie, had this San Francisco Giants baseball cap on my head, and was smoking a cigar. But we did it, and the audience went wild."

The occasion convinced Hammond to go back to New York and get his own band together, this one called The Blue Flames. "I met this guy named Jimmy James who was playing stuff off my So Many Roads--he was playing Robbie's parts, but better! I said, 'Wow! I got to get him into the band.' And we also had Randy Wolfe, who calls himself Randy California now. ((of the band Spirit)) And Jimmy James, of course, was in reality Jimi Hendrix.

"We played the A Go-Go and had celebrities digging us every night. Again it was going to happen. But then Jimmy was offered this job in England behind The Animals. He asked me about it, and I told him it sounded like a good thing."

He adds somewhat ruefully, "The next thing I knew it was The Jimi Hendrix Experience!"

((A good place to pause again. Hammond was snakebit for luck way too many times. Next time, he reflects on that and tells us about drummer Charles Otis--oh yeah, and an obscure slide guitarist named Duane Allman.))

John Hammond, Bluesman (Part 1)

Once there was a fine Boston-based rock-and-politics magazine called Fusion. It survived for several years in the late Sixties and early Seventies as a solid rival to Rolling Stone. Among those writing for it were Robert Somma (Editor), Michael Lydon, Paul Williams, Robert Christgau, Lenny Kaye, Sandy Pearlman, Nick Tosches, Jonathan Demme, Robert Gordon, John Gabree, and William Kunstler. The magazine even published Peter Guralnick's first book.

As far as I know, Fusion has vanished into rock history now, but I published a few decent pieces in it, and I intend to resurrect a couple of them over the months ahead, starting with my portrait of white bluesman John Hammond, Jr. (not really Junior since his middle name Paul was not also his dad's, but usually identified that way)--still going strong today though not much more financially successful now than he was back then. The article's title was "Songs of the Road."

John Hammond, Sr. is one of the few giant figures in the recording industry. His efforts in discovering, recording, and monitoring neglected or future musical talents has long been legendary in a business short on memory. As an executive of Columbia Records and as the man best known to the rock generation for having signed up Bob Dylan, John Sr. is, in the words of his son, a "spectacular" man, one whose grace and tact are as obvious as his concern and intelligence.

So how does it feel to be John Hammond, Jr. when the year is 1970, when the really big brass rings are mostly gone and it isn't 1960 and there aren't any clubs or people left who haven't heard about Chicago Blues or Joan Baez or civil rights? Where do you go when all the months and years have slipped by and the lives of friends are measured in words like career and culture hero...

The club has character, atmosphere, as they say. No perpendicular sign outside announces its presence, only the word "Tavern" and a couple of beer ads in the dingy front window. But a chain just inside the door (due to the cover charge) suggests that this is no working man's beer-parlor; and once you dig that, you got it all. Band sound and crowd drone; ceiling looming down over parallel layers of spilled Oly, wall-to-wall bodies, and cigarette/pot haze as thick as catatonia; walls and supports decked out with such jagged addenda as mammoth deer antlers, a copy of Goya's Naked Maja, bare and glaring red lights, a vast, ragged U.S. flag, and posters proclaiming the very man now performing on the non-stage over at the left.

Clearly, the word has gone out: John Hammond's in town for three nights, and the Medicine Show Tavern in once again the place to be. (Concert halls and discotheques may control live rock these days, but the Medicine Hall is trying to make it--in backwater Seattle!--by booking in blues people: Lightnin' Hopkins and Son House in recent months, and now white practitioner John Hammond.)

Hammond's Blues Band--blacks Harry Holt, bass, and Charles Otis, drums, plus the man himself on vocals and small electric Gibson--is into the second set of the evening. All three musicians wear suits and ties, but there's no mistaking them for businessmen. Holt's bulging natural and sly smile peer around the neck of his bass, while Otis hides behind his shades and flickering sticks and his well-earned reputation as one of the best r&b drummers around. Hammond's looks are more complex: a bit of the Jagger leer framed in long dark hair, but an angular and gawky body like a high school basketball star--and the sounds issuing from his guitar and throat are flat-out black.

At 27, John Hammond has been scrabbling and scuffling on the road for over eight years. Aside from maybe Dave Van Ronk, he was the first white blues performer to get on record (in the rock era at least), both as country acoustic and then later as big-city electric; and his eight albums have even featured members of The Band and The Stones on occasion. But the chart sales have always managed to elude his grasp. So, although Hammond's deep involvement with black blues has served as the model for many young whites, performers and listeners alike, widespread popular recognition has not been his.

The audience at the Medicine Show at least voices approval--a couple of hundred hip kids, whooping and whistling and cheering wildly. The set opens with Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," all bottleneck strains and machine-gun drums, then moves into John Lee Hooker's "Sugar Mama," with Holt's bass heavily pronounced and Hammond getting into some wah-wah. He's really working out now, really going through changes: arching his body around, shaking the hair and sweat streamers back from his eyes, attacking the mike with his slack-jawed, explosive vocal delivery, as thick and slurred and black as two-days-old coffee.

Close your eyes and it's a South Side Chicago bar. There's "Mojo" and "Forty Days" and a "Cross Cut Saw" that stutters and booms with harsh guitar--and then "Spoonful," creeping in slow and evil and deadly, with Hammond outdoing even the Wolf, adding his own gutty and gritty inflection to those famous opening words: "Could be a spoonful o' coffee, Could be a spoonful o' tea..."

When fatigue and an increasingly erratic sound system finally bring the set to an end, the John Hammond Blues Band exits through cascading applause. Once into the tavern's combination storeroom-office-sound booth, Otis and Holt wander off to quench their thirst, but Hammond settles down to demonstrate acoustic bottlenecking techniques to a pair of inquisitive fans. he seems tired but pleased with the band's performance; and he agrees to do an interview the next afternoon.

********

At that time, Hammond arrives resplendent in jeans and a pythonskin jacket ("I'm not up to the pants yet"), armed with a mug of coffee and a pack of Camels, apologetic for his slight hoarseness, the result of having sung every night for over six weeks. With a disc of Magic Sam playing in the background, Hammond launches into a near monologue on gigs and people and dues:

"Robert Johnson was where I started. When I was 16, my father ((see intro above)) played me a record of Johnson's 'Terraplane Blues.' Something clicked in my head. That's when I became a blues singer."

Lightnin' Hopkins was another formative influence, but Hammond was playing only for himself and for friends--in the Village and during one wasted year at Antioch College--until early '62. "I had a job at a hotel in Florida, busman, roomkeeper, maintenance man, and in the off-time I was practicing guitar. I'd go into this little town, Boca Grande, and stand on the street corners playing for the black people in town. I met this cat Albert McCall who encouraged me and showed me some stuff on harmonica--I'm sure he's still playing there at the Phosphate."

That spring he began playing the club circuit in L.A.--the Satire, the Insomniac, the Troubador, the Ash Grove. After a stop in San Francisco, he moved on to Chicago in the fall. "I met up there again with John Koerner and Dave Ray, and we drove up to Minneapolis in this old hotrod V-8 Ford I had. Got a job playing with Koerner at Matty's Bar in Minneapolis. We had this duet thing going--two guitars, two harmonicas. I got to know those guys very well."

Then on to Gerde's Folk City in New York, where he attracted enough attention to get a contract from Vanguard Records. Hammond cut an album that winter, but Vanguard didn't get around to releasing it until the following September. Meanwhile he was playing dates up and down the East Coast; remember those innocent days when a white kid playing black music was still something remarkable?

Hammond continues, "Then I was asked to the Newport Folk Festival. I went over well and made some friends." He's being modest. His performance was actually an astounding success; just listen to the black artists cheering Hammond on in the background of "No Money Down" (on the first Blues at Newport album)....

((I'm splitting the article there for now, but with one bit of added info: Hammond's father was the man who staged the famous Spirituals to Swing concerts in 1938 and '39; and he tried to track down Robert Johnson to bring him up to NYC for the first one, but Johnson had been murdered by then. Younger John's connection with tragic bluesman Robert was in a way made back in 1938! Next time: The Band, Mike Bloomfield, Duane Allman, and a certain Jimmy James...))

Preachin' the Blues

By the early Sixties, thanks to the widespread late-Fifties popularity of the Kingston Trio and Harry Belafonte and, a few years later, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Folk Music scene was thriving--and the real folk musicmakers like Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley were getting discovered or rediscovered, and even listened to. Cambridge and Greenwich Village were in a happy ferment that mixed new songsters like Dylan (see the previous posting), old hands like Pete Seeger, and old new-handers or new old-timers or some such like half-brother Mike Seeger's New Lost City Ramblers.

And an amazing sidelight of this search for the real roots of American Music was the explosion of interest in the Blues. Seemed as though the entire East Coast was in a mad dash to track down old Country Blues performers like Son House, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt. Some of this was helped along by the Newport Folk Festival, which soon began showcasing rediscovered Bluesmen, and anyone else who played like them!

One album I bought around 1964 included a rousing performance by John Hammond (Jr., that is, son of the famous talent searcher and record producer), with John singing in a strangled voice and rippling his guitar masterfully and the elder true Bluesmen cheering him on from the wings. I thought, Yeah! White guys can play the Blues.

Which freed (presumptuous word) me too; I felt I'd been given the go-ahead for my own mad dash. But I was living in Seattle, so rather than searching for mysterious missing performers, I was searching for new albums in record stores (those astonishing RBF and OJL reissues), and old 45s and 78s in thrift stores and junk shops. (As you might imagine, the number of Country Blues 78s in the Pacific Northwest was limited. But I did assemble a small collection, spiced by Chicago Blues 45s, that I later sold to Bob "The Bear" Hite, lead singer of Canned Heat.)

Meanwhile I was reading every book, magazine article, and passing word that I could find about the Blues. There weren't many sources available then, back in the mid-Sixties--no comprehensive histories yet, no bios of big names published; just the groundbreaking books by Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, and one or two specialty mags from England, led by the great Blues Unlimited. (Even Rolling Stone was still a few years away.)

Somehow I got it in my head that I should write a film about Robert Johnson, whose reissue album on Columbia had stunned people everywhere, from Dylan and the young Allmans to Clapton and the Rolling Stones. I knew the few meagre bits of info available about his life, and I thought that he might be the perfect tragic embodiment of the rural Bluesman's life in the Twenties and Thirties.

I immersed myself in articles that mentioned Johnson (Pete Welding interviews with Howlin' Wolf and Honeyboy Edwards, for example), album liner notes for Johnny Shines, Johnson's own LP, and more, plus Oliver's astonishing book and accompanying record called Conversation with the Blues--even Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man helped me imagine Robert's world. I also studied Les Blank's Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb documentaries (got to know Les a little) and went to see every Country Blues performer that passed through the region; Son House and Bukka White were standouts.

And it was a help, I thought, that my mother's family had been farmers in Georgia and that I'd lived in Virginia and Alabama; I felt I had a broader perspective as a child of both North and South, son of a USAF officer, which meant I had been raised in the un-segregated world of the military. (The base teen functions back in the late Fifties were always racially mixed. Heck, I had a major crush on one beautiful black girl, me still too young and dumb to know it was a dangerous, racially fraught role for a white boy.)

Anyway, by 1969 I was ready to write, and over the next year and more I did just that: wrote, threw out, started over, revised, put away, kept thinking, rewrote again, until by 1971 I had a screenplay, Hellhound on My Trail, good enough, I was sure, to sweep Hollywood off its feet. I copyrighted it with the U.S. Government, then packed up and headed off to L.A. to sell it (and me as writer-producer). And thanks to filmmaker Blank, who owed me one and who was off filming somewhere, I had his bungalow to crash in...

(the rest of the story next time)