Algia Mae Hinton, one of the last surviving old-style Piedmont blues players, has died at age 88. She died Feb 8, 2018, Thursday afternoon at her home in Middlesex. “It was expected,” said her daughter, Minnie Hinton Wilma. “She just shut down."
Here is an article from last year.
A Hard Life of Bad Luck and Trouble
By David Menconi - April 2017
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| Algia Mae Hinton, one of the last surviving members of her generation of Piedmont blues players, is still playing the blues at age 87. Hinton used to perform for festivals with crowds in the thousands - even once at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Now as one of the last surviving Piedmont blues players from the old days, she performs mostly for family and friends. Juli Leonard |
“The reason I can’t walk, I danced so much and told so
many stories, I wore out my legs,” she says and laughs. “But I’m gonna walk
again, dance again. Ain’t giving up.”
A recent Sunday afternoon found the 87-year-old Hinton
holding court in the living room of her modest country house, decked out to
entertain visitors. She wore black-velvet finery with jewelry to accent bright
red nails, her eyes hidden behind rock-star shades.
Hinton used to perform for festivals with crowds in the
thousands – even once at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Now as one of the last
surviving Piedmont blues players from the old days, she performs mostly for
family and friends.
But even without a guitar in hand, she still draws a
crowd of those near and dear to her. A steady stream of relatives passed
through – grown children, younger grandchildren, younger-still
great-grandchildren – to give a hug and a kiss and hear a story or a song.
Every adult man got the same treatment: Hinton looking at
them askance and clucking in mock-disapproval, “He got so many women.” It
brought down the house every time.
Among the visitors was one of Hinton’s longtime music
friends, Mike “Lightnin’ ” Wells, who sat on her couch picking Piedmont blues
on a guitar. Hinton swayed to the music, doing a little soft-shoe dance in her
wheelchair – a version of the thunderous, full-body buck-dancing she used to do
in her prime.
“Algia Mae,” Wells finally spoke up in mild exasperation,
“you gonna sing or not? I’m here playin’!”
Hinton smiled, muttered about Wells’ “many women” and
began to sing.
I’m goin’ down this road feelin’ bad
Lost the best friend I ever had…
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Algia Mae Hinton in Middlesex, NC, around 1996.
Courtesy of Timothy Duffy
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A lot of the songs Hinton sings are the traditional blues,
folk and gospel tunes she learned growing up on her family’s farm in the 1930s
and ’40s. But this is one she wrote herself, inspired by harsh real-life
circumstances – the night in 1984 when her house burned down.
“Lost everything I had,” she said matter-of-factly, then
paused. “Lost a lot of things in this life.”
A working life
In 1996, Wells produced an album for Hinton called “Honey
Babe: Blues, Folk Tunes and Gospel From North Carolina.” The title track was
the first song Hinton ever learned, and the serial number they gave the album
was 82929 – Hinton’s birth date of Aug. 29, 1929.
Born to a farming family, Hinton came along at the end of
her parents’ 14 children. They had her out working in the fields almost as soon
as she could walk.
“I have done some work in my day,” Hinton said. “In the
field picking cotton, cucumbers, tobacco. Housework and schoolwork, too.
Cutting wood for the woodstove, did that, too.”
As she spoke, her son Williette Hinton sat nearby. At 61
years old, he is the eldest of Algia Mae’s four children who are still living.
“The snow was this deep, and mama’d go out there in it to
get wood to keep us warm,” Williette said of his mother. “We were old enough to
go out and do that, but she wouldn’t let us. She felt like we might get sick,
and she could handle it better than us. That woman taught me how to work,
that’s for sure.”
Algia Mae has always been been self-sufficient, and
that’s fortunate because she had to fend for herself as a single parent after
her husband died more than 50 years ago. In her telling, the circumstances of
his death were more than a little sordid.
“I got married in 1950 and my husband was killed in
1965,” she said. “Murdered. Got killed in New York, over that rock dope. He
died and he had so many women! I tell you what, I did ask the Lord to forgive
him. He come back here, I was gonna bust a cap in him. But I’m glad I didn’t do
it.
“I don’t even know where he’s buried at,” Hinton added,
with a shrug. “Never married another man. One was enough. Married a family,
that’s what I did.”
From good luck to bad
Hinton started learning music at age 9, primarily taught
by her mother (an expert finger-picking guitarist). She learned to dance, too,
and that came from her father. Show-off tricks like playing guitar behind her
back while dancing, she figured out pretty much on her own.
By her teenage years, Hinton was an accomplished
12-string guitarist playing Piedmont blues – an uptempo, clattery style of
acoustic music with elements of bluegrass and ragtime. The best-known
first-wave women players of North Carolina Piedmont blues were Elizabeth Cotten
(author of the enduring genre classic “Freight Train”) and guitar virtuoso Etta
Baker, who have both been gone for more than a decade. Hinton ranks behind
Baker and Cotten, and she’s pretty much the last survivor of the generation
after theirs.
It’s actually hard to fathom how Hinton found the time or
energy for music over the years, given the mammoth amounts of labor involved in
tending to seven kids. But she never stopped playing, dancing, performing.
“I played at camps, jailhouses, rest homes, lotta
places,” Hinton said. “In jail, people in there killed somebody. They’d tell
me, ‘C’mere, you.’ No, uh uh!”
For most of Hinton’s first four decades, playing music
was almost strictly for family and friends. That changed in 1978. Glenn Hinson,
a folklorist from UNC-Chapel Hill, was putting together an album to accompany a
museum exhibit about 19th-century African-Americans in North Carolina, and he’d
heard about a hotshot female guitarist in the vicinity of Zebulon.
Asking around took him to Hinton’s front door, but she
was deeply suspicious of a white stranger coming around to ask about her
guitar-playing. Complicating things further, she’d just been playing at a house
party where someone had been stabbed.
“She was sure I was the law, there to get her in
trouble,” Hinson said. “As I learned later, when she saw me through the door,
she ripped the strings off her guitar. Then she showed it to me: ‘See, no
strings. I clearly haven’t played in a long while.’ ”
Eventually, he earned Hinton’s trust by mailing her a new
set of guitar strings. After recording her for the museum project, Hinson
helped get her booked into festivals.
On the festival circuit, Hinton’s dazzling guitar,
irrepressible spirit and wry kitchen-table wisdom (“When You Kill The Chicken
Save Me The Head” is just one of the culinary songs in her repertoire) made her
an instant hit. For good measure, she was a killer dancer as she played tunes
like the old Rev. Gary Davis number “Buck Dance.”
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Algia Mae Hinton, center, in 2015. Hinton still enjoys playing
for family and friends. Courtesy of Timothy Duffy
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While music would never amount to a full-time career, it
earned Hinton acclaim and honors including a North Carolina Folk Heritage
Award. In 1983, the noted folklorist Alan Lomax came to North Carolina and
filmed Hinton, Durham bluesman John Dee Holeman and friends on a porch, playing
and doing “Flat-Foot” tap-dancing.
A year later, in 1984, Hinton played Carnegie Hall in New
York City. It was the gig of a lifetime, but the good feelings would be
short-lived.
“Literally the night she returned from that, her house
burned down,” Hinson said. “The night before, she’d been sleeping in New York
City. Then we brought her back, dropped her off at home, it was a cold night
and the wood heater caught the front room on fire. It just went up, and she had
nothing. That’s very much been her life, a very hard one in every dimension –
occupational, family, you name it. She’s had a hard life of ‘bad luck and
trouble,’ as she’d say.”
A survivor
Back in Hinton’s living room, Wells was still playing and
she was still singing. Occasionally, she’d tap out a beat on an old drumhead
bearing autographs of some of the many people she’s played with – fiddler Joe
Thompson, folklorist Mike Seeger and former Carolina Chocolate Drop Dom
Flemons.
Thompson and Seeger are both gone now. So is most of the
rest of Hinton’s musical generation, whose numbers are dwindling.
“Algia Mae,” Wells said between songs, “you and John Dee
are about the last two old original Piedmont blues players still out there.”
Seemingly lost in thought, Hinton didn’t answer. She has
survived not just musical peers but all 13 of her siblings, and even three of
her seven children. One of the hardest losses was Hinton’s youngest daughter,
Elgia Mae Hinton, who died of heart troubles in 2008 at age 46.
“There aren’t but a handful like Algia Mae left,” said
Tim Duffy of Music Maker Relief Foundation, which gives financial support to
elderly blues players in need (including Hinton). “But what a life she’s had.
Billionaires haven’t had a life as rich as hers. She’s funny. Kind of a genius,
even. At first, she might seem like this kind of obtuse old lady. But she’s got
a very sharp wit, and she’s one of the funniest songwriters. ‘Cook cornbread
for your husband and biscuits for your outside man’ – who comes up with poetry
like that?”
Nobody except Hinton. But she seems at least as proud of
her family as her music.
“I raised my kids up, salt and pepper and switch,” she
said. “I bet you whip yours, too. Right? You’ve got to. If you don’t, there’ll
be trouble.”
At that moment, she realized that her son Williette was
grinning broadly as he listened. She paused, gave him a stare and a dramatic
shake of the head.
“He got,” she pronounced solemnly, “so many women.”
