Alabama Bluesman is Last of Line

Alabama Bluesman is Last of Line

By Henry Willett - The Montgomery Advertiser - 1978

Near Tuscaloosa in the town of Holt, Alabama, lives Johnny Shines, a man who represents what seems to be a disappearing generation of traditional bluesmen. Born in Memphis, Tenn. in 1915, Johnny Shines were brought up in a musical family. His mother's family were all church people, and he remembers there always being music and musical instruments around the house. "There were tambourines, a fiddle, a bass, bones, all kinds of instruments; but we being the youngest of six kids, all the instruments were gone from the house by the time I got old enough to do anything with them."

"When I was nine years old I decided I didn't like home, so I left and headed South `til I found myself working in a groundhog sawmill in Louisiana. That was the hardest work I've done in my life." It was in Louisiana that Johnny Shines received his earliest exposure to downhome Mississippi Delta blues.

At the age of sixteen he bought his first guitar." It was a six dollar Black Regal. It took me about two months to buy it." He pretty much taught himself to play. "I learned from a lot of people ...Charlie Patton, Son House, my half-brother Willie Reed... Robert Johnson was my biggest influence. One time in Arkansas I was watching Howlin' Wolf play. He stopped playing to go shoot dice and I took that guitar and started playing. Soon I had that whole place howlin'. They started calling me 'Little Wolf.' But Howlin' Wolf said that was the last time he'd leave his guitar' laying where somebody could get ahold of it."

At the age of sixteen, Johnny Shines got married and settled in Memphis. "I was directing the church choir, and one day I said, `You'll just have to find yourself a new director, because I'm going back to the blues."'

In 1934 he met Robert Johnson, and they traveled together for a number of years." Those was rough times. I remember sleeping in corn-cribs... playing in clubs for a dollar a night and all you could drink. You didn't just play for a few hours. You played until they quit dancing. Sometimes we'd play on the street for nickels and dimes."

And he remembers tales of his travelling with Robert Johnson. "Once we were near Decatur, Ill. There were only two black people in the town and no one hardly ever saw them, so we were a curiosity. They charged 25 cents for people to just come in and look at us. Robert Johnson died in 1938 in Mississippi. Some people said he'd been voodooed or mojoed or poisoned by a woman. I suspect he died from a stomach ailment. He was an awful heavy drinker."

Shines moved to Holt in 1969. In a sense, it was a returning home to Alabama. His ancestors were from near Tuscumbia, and he remembers his grandmother telling him stories of slavery days in that area.  

Johnny Shines supposes he'll be singing the blues until his dying day.

For more on Shines, click HERE

Longtime Blues Preservation Organization Garners Prestigious Oakley Award

Mt. Zion Memorial Fund wins the Oakley Award 

from the Association for Gravestone Studies

The MZMF erected the marker for Charley Patton in 1991

The award winning work of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund continues through the July 29 dedication of a memorial to eminent recording artist Armenter Chatmon (aka Bo Carter), of the Mississippi Sheiks, at the abandoned Nitta Yuma Cemetery in Nitta Yuma, Mississippi - To learn more and support this, please click HERE or GoFundMe

We are also currently working with St. John MB Church in Camden, MS to erect a memorial to Belton Sutherland, who folklorist Worth Long and Alan Lomax featured in the film The Land Where the Blues Began. To learn more, please click HERE or GoFundMe

Ruth and Moore first collaborated on the discovery of
the military marker of Son Simms in 2014, but Ruth's
coimetromania extends much farther back and connects
to his love for older photographic processes.

The Board of Trustees of the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS) has unanimously approved the nomination to award Euphus Ruth a Fred Oakley Award both for your dedicated photographic investigation of the rural and abandoned graveyards throughout the Mississippi Delta. In addition, to your creative work, T. DeWayne Moore, who nominated you, convinced the board that your work with the Mount Zion Memorial Fund extends the necessity of this award. There you have provided important research, identification and preservation of prominent African American musicians' graves. The unearthed and restored markers and newly identified graves have helped to renew several African American burial grounds in your area. Indeed, you are an inspiration! 

We thank you for your work for and on such important historic and fragile cemeteries. Your award will be presented at the annual conference of the AGS at the University of Alabama this spring. 

With kind regards, 

Anne Tait Chair Awards Committee

Roosevelt T. Williams: The "Grey Ghost" Walks Again

Roosevelt T. Williams: The "Grey Ghost" Walks Again

By George Papajohn - 1989

Nobody knows you, yes, when

you're down and out

In your pocket, not one penny

And your friends, you have not any

Roosevelt T. Williams, Texas' 85-year-old "Grey Ghost," knows these words to be true. He knows them the way he once knew the freight trains of the Southwest that carried him from one show to the next, the way he knows how to walk onto a stage, or into a club, or a houseparty or a roller rink, sit down at an unfamiliar piano and in no time have the place jumpin', the tips jar janglin'.

On this sultry San Antonio Sun-day, the piano is an electric Yamaha—not the acoustic one that had been promised—and Ghost's manager and friend, Tary Owens, the architect of the Ghost's unlikely late-life comeback, is a little nervous. The Ghost, though, is taking it in stride as he heads into the sunshine for the Bowie Street Blues festival stage.

"That's okay," he said. "I'll do the best I can. If they don't like it, they can put some cotton in their ears." That isn't necessary. By the time the Ghost plays "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"—one of his favorites among the 300 or so songs in a repertoire the piano professor has built in more than 60 years of study—the early-afternoon crowd of 300 gathered on a grassy incline is his.

There's no tips jar, but after Ghost's one-hour stint as opening act, Owens sells all eight copies of Grey Ghost records he has on hand, and the newly won fans are lining up for Ghost's autograph. Not bad for a man who didn't have a record re-leased until he was 83, who saw national fame pass him by four decades before, who only three years ago was not only down and out but believed by many to be gone for good, a true ghost at last.

"People are treating me like I'm 28 or 29," be said, painstakingly scrawling his given name and his nickname on a record jacket. "Here I am been half ready for the grave., But I ain't goin' yet." Tary Owens was not the first white man, or even the first Owens, to try to bring the Ghost to a larger audience.

In 1940, folklorist William Owens discovered the Ghost playing at a roller rink in Navasota, Tex., recorded some of his songs, including an original called "Hitler Blues" and wrote about his find. Other publications, including Time, followed up, and Alistair Cook used "Hitler Blues", in a BBC report on the impact of the war on American music.

"We had made permanent the work of 4 genuine folk poet and musician," Owens, who is not related to Tary, wrote in 1983 in his book, "Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song."

Piano men: Lavada Durst, Grey Ghost, Erbie Bowser. Photo by Clay Shorkey.

But his attempts to promote the Ghost were unsuccessful. "He was a black blues singer and there was not much of an audience for a black blue& singer, I was told at radio stations," Owens wrote. "The waste of imagination? Of talent? No one cared the to give him a chance."

He Lived and Died the Blues: Jackson's Sonny Boy

He Lived and Died the Blues:

Jackson's Sonny Boy took his Music to the Top

By Mary S. Reed - Jackson (TN) Sun - 1990

Part of the blues died one June 1948 night when Jackson's Sonny Boy Williamson was beaten to death on a Chicago street. A friend said it was because of 50 cents in the famous musician's pocket: A woman had given Sonny Boy the money to play the blues for her. Then her man beat it out of Sonny Boy when he wouldn't give the money back.

It would have been like Sonny Boy to sing about that 50 cents the next day. For Sonny Boy Williamson could wail his blues on a two-bit harp like no one before him. By the time the violence and poverty of his world caught up with him that night, the harmonica — and the blues — would never be the same.

"He was the single most influential blues harmonica player of his day and possibly of all time," said David Evans, Memphis State University blues expert. Few in his hometown of Jackson remember Sonny Boy or know of his fame, said T.W. Utley, Sonny Boy's younger brother, who lives within a few miles of the musician's birthplace and grave.

Sonny Boy's 25-cent harmonica and down-and-out songs became his ticket out of Madison County's cotton fields in the 1920s. But in the end, he couldn't escape the South's poverty. His body lies in a rural Madison County grave marked only by a rusting, metal marker — the kind the funeral homes stick in the ground until money buys a grave-stone.

A faded piece of paper stuck behind dirty glass on that marker gives his name: John Lee Williamson. His age: 34. The day he died: June 1, 1948. "Now, I want to bury my body, way down in Jackson, Tennessee," Sonny Boy would sing while his feet shuffled the two-step and his right hand cupped the harmonica to his mouth.

The handsome Sonny Boy — always friendly, smiling and setting up the whiskey-loving house with drinks — could hold an audience like any good preacher offering hope from everyday troubles.

Sonny Boy turned the harmonica into a lead instrument when others were using it for background music. He went from singing to playing so effortlessly that it was hard to tell where his voice stopped and the harmonica began.

"He inspired so many imitators, he was like the Michael Jackson of his day in the blues community,- said Jim O'Neal, founder of Living Blues Magazine. 

In taverns and tourist-filled clubs where they still sing the increasingly popular blues, Sonny Boy's influence is felt whenever a harmonica is played or a singer pulls out one of Sonny Boy's songs from his bag of tricks, said Bob Shatkin, who teaches the harmonica in Brooklyn and has been playing it for 35 years.

“He’s a hero.”

The more he plays, Shatkin said, the more he appreciates Sonny Boy's skills.

"Every harp (harmonica) player owes him a debt. He's a hero. Even 41 years after his death, he's still thought of by musicians in Chicago as wonderful." Sonny Boy was born March 30, 1914, near Britton Lane in south-west Madison County, with the blues in his blood and a need to go places.