Yazoo Blues makes History with Raw Emotion, Sound and Talent

Yazoo Blues makes History 

with Raw Emotion, Sound and Talent 

By Jamie Patterson - Yazoo Herald - February 21, 2015

Jimmy "Duck" Holmes is pictured outside his family
business, the historic Blue Front Cafe in Bentonia. The
blues artists groomed within Yazoo are
not only a part of black history but music history. 

The sound of the blues seems to dance and travel on the winds that sweep through rural Yazoo County.

Her faint, haunting melody serves as a reminder of her rich history along the Yazoo clay hills and amidst her Delta flatlands. 

From Bentonia Blues to Delta blues to hill country blues, the music is a part of Yazoo's black history. It's history, point blank. 

One could get lost in the mountain of literature, old recordings and modern pieces of the Yazoo blues. But there are a few names that stick out within the local movement that changed and influenced the music world.

And most stories begin with a young black man and his guitar on a small farm or rural community, deep within Yazoo County.

Nehemiah "Skip" James

Nehemiah "Skip" James is hailed as one of the greats when it comes to blues music. His dark, finger-picking technique would influence several generations of future blues musicians from blues legend Robert Johnson to modern blues king Eric Clapton.

And his story begins on June 9, 1902 on the Woodbine Plantation in the Bentonia community. He was born the son of a preacher who converted from bootlegging. 

Music struck a cord with him at an early age, being around local musicians Henry Stuckey and others. It wasn't long before the organ was James' outlet.

During the early 1920s, James worked along levees and other road construction projects. His earliest song Illinois Blues is believed to have been written surrounding his early labor days. 

James was beginning to make a name for himself with his dark lyrics, intense vocals and complex playing.

Nancy Apple Brings Unique`Cadillac Cowgirl' Show to Blues Alley

Nancy Apple Brings Unique`Cadillac Cowgirl' Show to Blues Alley

By Panny Mayfield - Clarksdale Press Register, May 12, 1999

Memphis entertainer, songwriter, and actress Nancy Apple brings her band to Clarksdale for a Blues Alley May concert. 

If the weather repeats its stella [sic] performance from last Friday's Blues Alley concert and bugs continue to no-show, expect standing ovations for Nancy Apple's Cadillac Cowgirl show this week [May 12, 1999]. The Memphis entertainer whose "rock-a-billy" style defies categorization will star in the second Friday night in May show. The vocalist, composer and band leader has a major CD, High on the Hog featuring numbers predicted by the Memphis Flyer to become "white trash country classics." Apple, who has toured internationally and lives next door to Keith Sykes, is featured in a movie with Harvey Keitel and Bridget Fonda [Finding Graceland]. "I got to cast the band and most are my regular band mates," says Apple. Apple says her band is the only group from Memphis and surrounding area to be invited to play at St. Louis' TwangFest June 10. Apple has strong ties to the Delta including designing the Delta Blues Museum's Muddywood T-shirt for ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons. She's also performed at Hopson Commissary. However, this will be her first gig in town. Included in her group is guitar player Jay Harrington from Marks. 

The Memphis Flyer reviewed her first major CD, High on the Hog as "a fine debut with some outstanding tunes." Highlights include Mattie and Jessie, a brooding gothic rocker with menacing fiddle; Gun Shy, some primo bluesy pop co-written with Keith Sykes; and the infectious high honky-tonk of Truck Drivers Woman, “sure to become a white trash country classic." 

The album contains ten original tunes including country and western-drenched boogie-woogie, rock n' roll, blues and R&B. A former art director for The Memphis Flyer, Apple has been a longtime supporter of Memphis music through her hosting of Newby's Tuesday night musician jam. She also is one of the publishers of Memphis Musician. Asked to describe her new CD, Apple replies, "it's got so many different things in it, I just have to say, '1 think it sounds good.'" She says one of the strong points of the CD is the all-star band of local musicians. Apple is partial to old cars and especially Cadillacs. She also favors cowboy hats and boots. Although her real name is Apple, she did make up her nickname, “The Cadillac Cowgirl." 

This Navy brat was born in San Diego, however, and she grew up humming and writing poems. She says in the third grade she combined poetry and humming and became a songwriter. She says her first song was about a fictitious dog named Candy. "Then I went through my early high school and junior high school phase when I was a big Alice Cooper freak," she admits. "I would write these really dark operatic metal type things." Later she switched to Carly Simon before trading Simon and Cooper for country music shortly after moving to Memphis in 1975. "When I first moved here everybody thought I really talked funny and I sounded like a valley girl or something," she revealed in an article for The Commercial Appeal. "Over the years, I've acquired this Southern thing unconsciously with my voice. No matter what I sing now, no matter how pop the music is, it sounds country.”

She also began playing drums and says she got "really good at it for a while and played drums with Willie Cobb,” of Greenwood. Although her schedule is busy with performances, Apple spends a great deal of time composing. "I've learned that a lot of your greatest songwriters may not necessarily be the most perfect musicians or vocalist. It's just a matter of creating something universal and applying it to your instrument.” Memphis magazine selected Apple in its Top 40 Musicians in Memphis in 1996 and 1997. She has toured extensively with her band performing USO shows in Southeast Asia.

[Left Photo: MZMF director Skip Henderson gets ready to accept the "Keeping the Blues Alive" Award with Nancy Apple, Hopson's James Butler, Cheryl Bader, and Gayle Dean Wardlow.]

For an update on her music since this time, visit Nancy Apple

Website  Facebook - Twitter

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