Andy Cohen: Kent State to Memphis, Going Out of the Road, & Avalon to Nitta Yuma For Bo

Andy Cohen: Kent State to Memphis, Going Out on the Road, & Avalon to Nitta Yuma For Bo

Part 1 by Ted Joy - (Akron, OH) Beacon Journal - May 22, 1994.
Part 2 by T. DeWayne Moore, director of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund

It's the crack of dawn for folk singer Andy Cohen — a quarter past nine for the rest of us — and he's just crawled out of bed and groped his way to his second home, Brady's Cafe next to the Kent State University campus. He orders a plate of extra-greasy eggs and searches for his personal coffee mug, an ugly brown thing with "My Old Kentucky Home" inscribed on its side. He notes that he bought it for only a buck-and-a-half at Goodwill. 

After filling the cup with high-octane, steaming black coffee, he climbs the stairs to the balcony and settles into a creaky chair at a graffiti-covered table. He picks the eggs apart almost daintily, simultaneously lighting up the first of many cigarettes. Cohen is an interesting-looking guy. His eyes still twinkle and he grins disarmingly at unexpected moments. A little on the short side, he dresses with a sort of Salvation Army panache.

Read a John Dos Passos novel about the Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1920s and you could readily see him fitting right in. Read a Jack Kerouac novel about the beatniks of the 1950s and the same thing. Read about the hippies —well, you get the idea.

In short, Andy Cohen is the Eternal Hipster. In all of the good senses of the term and few of the bad.

"The clock's running out," he announces. "This fellow I know. Produced my last recording. Just a year or two older than me. He died last year. Cancer. Terrible. And other things too. I'm finally finishing my master's degree. Cultural anthropology. About the old blues singers of the Piedmont."

Cohen speaks in a soft voice, one you often have to strain to hear. It's both nasal and deep at the same time. Sometimes he talks in long, convoluted sentences that sound like a badly written article in an academic journal. Other times he talks like a slightly watered-down version of George Bush — a comparison that most likely would mortify his ultra-liberal sensibilities. Still, undeniably, there is a sort of charisma to Cohen when he talks. And, even more so, when he sings.

For the first time in seventeen years — since he first came to Kent — he wasn't at the annual Kent State Folk Festival. Instead, this February he was in Boston with musicians from all over the country for the National Folk Alliance. "Networking," he exclaims, "Trying to figure out how to make a living out of their music. I've been doing it (singing) for 25 years and I'm not doing it (making it pay off) yet. Neither is anyone else." Kent's folk festival has always been a subject near and dear to his heart. For three or four years in the mid and late-1980s he ran it. Since then, he's been a major behind-the-scenes influence. 

(Lansing, MI) State
Journal, Oct 27, 1994.

"I'm going back to being a musician full-time," Cohen insisted, "and I've got to make a living at it." Thus Boston, and after Boston--the road, specifically a tour for the better part of a month throughout the Midwest. Home for a couple of weeks. Back on tour in the South and the Southeast. Somewhere in between he planned to squeeze in enough time to record a couple of albums: one of children's songs he's written himself and the other of the music of the old-time bluesman, the Rev. Gary Davis. "I learned most of what I know from Rev. Gary," Cohen admitted, certainly "most of what I know about music" and also most of what I know "about life, too." 

According to Cohen, he grew up "a red diaper baby," the son of a labor lawyer in a small factory town in Massachusetts. Both his father and mother were supported the platform of Communist Party, but they stopped a bit short of official party membership.[1] 

"We always had music playing in the house. Jazz. Classical. That kind of stuff, too. By people like the Weavers. Of course, at the time I thought they were real folk singers. They weren't. They were interpreters. Like me." 

"Then I heard Gary (Davis) play. He was an old black country minister. And a number of things began to make sense to me. Really make sense. They slammed together in such a way that they haven't come apart yet. That was when I was in college. Out at the University of......If you saw the Rev. Gary Davis play and sing and preach the way he did, you could not help but reject any notion that imposed less than fully human status on black people. We are all of the same species. Different sizes and shapes and colors. But still the same underlying people." 

Reverend Gary Davis
(late 1950s)

Cohen stops to light another cigarette, to gulp some more coffee. 

"Rev. Gary's playing is the pinnacle of country blues and country dance music. It's black country music. Not white. It's highly elaborated. It's systematic. It should be treated as if it were classical music. That's what I try to do. I try to present clean, accurate readings of what I consider to be America's classic music." 

Cohen explains that he'll always be a re-creator — not a creator — of the blues. His status as a white, middle-class, college-educated male assures that distinction. 

"I can't have the blues. Because I'm one of those sustained by this society. Not broken down by it," he says. "My wife has a good job. I've never had one. Always menial work. Janitor. Dishwasher. Assistant junior copy boy at the Chicago Sun Times. I sharpened Mike Royko's pencils. And Roger Ebert's. The only job I've ever had to use my brains for was when I worked as a field archaeologist for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. We excavated the Gateway site in downtown Cleveland." 

From the Streets of Chicago to the Lights of the Stage

From the Streets of Chicago

To the Lights of the Stage

By Chuck House - Sheboygan Press - April 14, 1981

"They call me Liberty Bill

Never worked and never will

I ain't no lazy man

Work just don't seem to fit my hand" 

— Liberty Bill, by Jim Brewer

For about 30 years, day after good day, Jim Brewer would plug his guitar into some store along Maxwell Street and play the sidewalk blues, where traffic plays backup.

Black, blind, and eminently experienced at poverty, Brewer was born on a sharecropper's plantation in Brookhaven, Mississippi about 61 years ago. In his youth, despite his blindness, Brewer went on the road, playing and singing in churches, roadhouses, clubs, taverns and streets all over the South and Midwest.  Eventually, he landed in East St. Louis and Chicago, where he made an esoteric reputation — but not much money — playing professionally on the streets.

On April 15, 1981, he landed in Sheboygan for a performance at John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The show was organized by local musician and guitar-store owner Jim Ohlschmidt, of Ohlschmidt's Guitar Emporium.

“A nice Jewish boy from Boston," who also performed at the concert, took up with Brewer several years prior and tried to help expand his regional reputation. The Samaritan’s name was Andrew Cohen, and his motive was pure. Cohen held Brewer in high esteem, personally and professionally.  He decided to promote the music of Brewer, plainly, "because he's so good." Cohen further maintained:

"He's a flat-out excellent guitar player. He's a brilliant practitioner of what he does. When I saw him for the first time, I told myself that if I could get this guy working, I was going to do it. He's been at it [for] so long, his manner on stage is very charming. He's not out there selling the show. He sits up there and plays the music…It's not frenetic, at all. He doesn't try to cram a whole lot of notes in, and the craftsmanship is elegant."

Ernie Hawkins, 33, originally from Pittsburgh, played at the show as well, which inclusively, featured many styles of music, including the blues, ragtime, folk music, maybe jazz, maybe some cowboy music, maybe a little gospel and maybe some [other hybrid genres of the artist's invention.]

Hawkins and Cohen, both white, acknowledge an arm's length distance from pop music and rock 'n' roll — the money-making musical mainstream.

"Blues is sort of marginal within the industry," Hawkins said. "I don't anticipate ever being like Neil Diamond. Unless there was an act of God…Right now, I don't have many responsibilities. I'm pretty satisfied. It's a very nice thing to do."  Hawkins, who has a doctorate degree from the University of Dallas and a little cap that says "Vail" on it, plays blues in a variety of regional styles, and acknowledges a musical debt to just about everyone, good and bad. [He had an album coming out in the fall.]

Cohen said he plays traditional folk music, ragtime and blues for approximately the same reason. "I don't know how to do anything else," he said. "And there's nothing else I really want to do. I've been called a ‘folk revivalist.’ I didn't invite the term. Folk music was really never dead. But if that's what they want to call me, I'll wear it like a badge." [Cohen had two albums to his credit, including Shuffle Rag]

Brewer went on tour in the early 1970s and recorded an album, Jim Brewer, in 1974, on the Philo label. But he doesn't tour so much anymore. He gets a small stipend from the government because he is blind, Cohen said, and doesn't want to jeopardize it by taking in money away from home. Brewer has played at the No Exit Cafe in Chicago, weekly, for about the last 16 years.

Re-published here is the section titled "Appreciation" from the album's back cover:

Jim's repertoire is broad and stylistically varied. He knows folks songs, blues, play-party songs, country & western songs, religious songs and even a few Jimmie Rodgers numbers. Jim represents a cross section of the musical culture of several generations from Mississippi to Chicago. 

His talent has been smoothed and tempered by time and performance. He’s got a memory that songs and stories stick to and an imagination that generates more.  

Jim knows his job—entertaining people. In the time he has been singing professionally, he has sung to more than a million people. He can build and work a crowd as well as any patent medicine dealer. 

Jim has played music with lots of famous musicians, and many more who never got famous. Today, Jim is coming into his own. Here’s hoping that as be continues to grow, so will the respect that he has earned for himself and his music. 

Andrew Morris Cohen - February, 1974 

"Leeds Point Blues": The Charmed Life of Deak Harp

"Leeds Point Blues": The Charmed Life of Deak Harp 

By T. DeWayne Moore

An excerpt from Contemporary Lore and Legend (Forthcoming)

I was similar to the casual listener at one time. I never put much stock into any of the myths or crazy stories folks told about musicians and the blues. I had lived hard and fast, and I had found no supernatural demon outside of myself. To look at him is not much. Medium height. A nice enough demeanor. I know I was certainly not blown away by his greatness. Not yet anyway.

A heavy shot of fast-paced blues harmonica in front of over one hundred happy, young people at Rock Springs Nature Center was my introduction. There was only one man on stage, a harmonica virtuoso named Deak Harp who claimed to hail from Oakland, California. I would later learn of his origins on the opposite coast, but he managed to make it sound as if someone had flown in a full band from the Mississippi Delta. Playing his custom-built harmonicas, attached to a cradle around his neck, he strummed--what he called--one of his diddley-beast guitars. I later learned that he crafted all his own instruments with his own hands--the tough, worn hands of a carpenter, a vocation given up long ago for a life on the road.

The instrument was made from a cigar box and a broom handle with built-in electrical amplification. His flying feet worked a base drum setup and stamped rhythm on a wine crate with an internal microphone. The three-string diddley bow and the percussion provided a soaring, hard-driving backdrop to the harmonica, which he could play with astonishing speed and even turn into the sounds of a horn-blowing freight train, pounding across the prairie. "It's hard to explain, but when I play the blues, I feel good," Harp exclaimed, having been playing music for almost 40 years. "There's mechanical music, and there is music that comes from your soul. With the blues, you can really feel it." His audience certainly did, clapping along with his strumming and enjoying lyrics about everything from the agonies of musicians forced to live in their cars to the need to down a beverage at the local watering hole. Though he told his audience that the blues had its origins in the Jim Crow South at the turn of the century, his music was from somewhere else. After all, according to Willie Dixon "not everybody's blues is the same."

Deak Harp holding a MZMF rack card

Deak was born and raised in New Jersey, far from the bay area and the Mississippi Delta. At the tender age of twelve, a young Deak Harp had realized his life was meant for more than offered on the boardwalks of New Jersey. He spent most of the next several years learning, training, bleeding, giving his all to his musicianship craft. His biggest early inspiration came when his brother introduced him to the music of James "Superharp" Cotton, who Deak subsequently followed up and down the east coast for close to five years. Cotton eventually offered the young turk a job driving his van, but no matter how long and hard he practiced, the aspiring musician never quite felt the peak of human potential was reached.

Deak was correct. He was a bit depressed too, but he was willing to put all on the line to reach the pinnacle of dextrous perfection. On the advice of locals, he decided to visit the southern New Jersey town of Leeds Point, where a supernatural being had supposedly setup in the nearby Pine Barrens. Having been scorned by its mother and transformed into a blood-curdling creature, it was said to possess great powers. It led a charmed life, according to one story. Despite being hunted for years and shot several times with silver bullets, it roamed the forests and doled out dark favors to those who crossed its path.

Not long into his search, Deak came across a spot in the road that crossed a gas main easement, and he found himself face-to-face with the infamous Jersey Devil. Some folks claim it is often possible to see the infamous cryptid standing beside the soloist on stage, guiding his hand at a frenzied pace...

He never relayed anymore of the story, and I never asked about it either. Go down to his store--located at 13 3rd Street in Clarksdale, Mississippi--and watch him work sometime. Then attend one of his performances and close your eyes. It will sound as if more than one man is on the stage performing, and when it does, open your eyes and look behind him. You may learn that he is indeed not alone....

Below is an article that summarizes the lore surrounding 

the supernatural figure; "Jersey Boasts its Own Devil," 

The (Wilmington, DE) Morning News, April 25, 1976.

Belton Sutherland's Unmarked Grave

Copyright Gary Tennant

I have compiled all the previously unknown information about Belton Sutherland, who several musicians have lamented about not knowing any historical information on this fiercely iconoclastic blues artist.  For example:

Several members of WeenieCampbell.com have expressed their sadness over the lack of information available about Belton Sutherland.  One member, for example, states, "I wish there was more info out there on Belton Sutherland."  Another contributor admits, "He is filmed performing two fine songs in Canton, Mississippi, but nothing else is said about him. His songs are quite good. Wish there was more of him."  Yet another contends that he may have only “recorded three songs, but they were powerful."  Michael Cardenas asserts that the Land Where the Blues Began is a "Crucial DVD and Belton steals it."  One of the newer members of the site writes, "I don't know how 'obscure' this bluesman is, but...[h]e only recorded 3 songs with Alan Lomax & all 3 were very raw, incredibly powerful songs. He looks & sounds like a man who has lived the blues his entire life."

GoFundMe

An Unmarked Biography of Belton Sutherland

by T. DeWayne Moore

Belton Sutherland was born on February 14, 1911--the same year as Robert Johnson came into the world of Jim Crow, Mississippi.  His parents, William and Mattie Sutherland, already had eight children, and they would have four more after Belton, making a total of thirteen.  The Sutherland family worked as sharecroppers in the small hamlet of Camden, Mississippi, not too far from St. John M.B. Church.  In fact, Belton lost his mother shortly before his eighth birthday, and her grave is located behind the church.  His mother's grave was marked following her death with a modest, yet very respectful, headstone.  While he loses his mother before a census enumerator ever writes his name in the 1920 Census, he would grow up quick as a motherless child, get married to woman named Louise, and move to Holmes County by the time his name name is again put to parchment for the federal government in 1930.  

Clarion Ledger, March 10, 1937.

It remains unclear what events transpire over the next seven years, but in the late 1930s, Belton had moved back to Madison County, where he gets arrested for forging a $25 check.  The judge sentenced him to two years on the state prison farm at Parchman.  After serving only eight months, however, the remainder of his sentence got suspended by the governor.  Not yet thirty years-old but the future show-stealer already knew how it feels to be a motherless child and to get convicted of forgery despite one census enumerator noting that he never had the opportunity to pickup reading and writing, at least not in his young life.