Cedell Davis Offering Delta Blues Tradition

Cedell Davis Offering Delta Blues Tradition

By Stephen Holden - May 28, 1982

 

Although the history of the generation of guitarists of the Mississippi Delta who brought the blues north to Chicago in the 1940's has often been told, many of the musicians who stayed in the South to carry on the blues tradition are only now being discovered by historians and blues aficionados. CeDell Davis, the singer-guitarist who will make his New York debut tonight at Tramps, 125 East 15th Street, is a perfect case in point.

Mr. Davis, who taught himself to play the slide guitar with a table knife after a crippling attack of polio, has been earning a precarious living playing the juke-joint circuit of the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta since the 40's. But he has only recently been discovered by blues anthologists, and even now the only commercially available recording of his playing is in anthologies issued by an obscure German label, L & R.

Yet Mr. Davis, who has lived in Pine Bluff, Ark., since the early 60's, plays with a special verve and style that is attracting increased attention and has begun to appear outside the Delta. His large repertory includes many blues standards by Joe Turner, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and B.B. King as well as original songs, many of them never written down.

Born in Helena, Ark., in 1927, CeDell Davis taught himself to play the guitar at the age of 7, when his family sent him to live with his cousin, the future ''Dr. Ross, the Harmonica Boss.'' At the house where Mr. Davis stayed, the family had rigged up a ''diddey-bow,'' a one-stringed instrument made from a strand of wire attached to the side of a house. Stretched taut by means of a block of wood at one end, it became a one-string slide guitar played with a bottle. From Diddey-Bow to Guitar

Elmore James, Albert King and many other celebrated musicians taught themselves the rudiments of guitar using a diddey-bow. When he went back home, Mr. Davis made a diddey-bow for himself, and from there he graduated to a real guitar.

''We also had windup Graphophones back then,'' Mr. Davis recalled in a recent interview, ''and I learned to play from listening to old records by guys like Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson.''

At the age of 10, Mr. Davis was stricken by polio and hospitalized in Little Rock for more than two years. With his hands and legs partly paralyzed, he found he had to teach himself to play the guitar all over again.

''When I got out of the hospital, I couldn't use my hands as good, so I had to turn the guitar around and play left-handed,'' he said. ''My mother had some knives. I thought I'd feel one of those knives out, and I learned to play with it, bar-style, with the left hand over the top of the neck, not under like people use a slide.'' Plays With Butter Knives

Mr. Davis has played the guitar with butter knives ever since. And his mastery over his disability has helped determine a singularly rhythmic style in which he does an amazing job of keeping a steady rhythm on the bass strings and playing leads on the treble strings all at once.

For 10 years, on and off, in the 50's and 60's, Mr. Davis worked with Robert Nighthawk, an important slide guitarist who influenced Muddy Waters. And he was also a frequent guest on the fabled King Biscuit Time radio show in the South, playing behind Sonny Boy Williamson. In the late 50's, Mr. Davis worked in St. Louis with Bobby Brown.

It was in East St. Louis in 1958 that Mr. Davis suffered a second physical setback when his legs were broken in a bar brawl. Before that, he had been able to walk a mile or two on crutches. Today, his mobility is considerably more restricted.

Mr. Davis returned to Arkansas in 1962 to play with Mr. Nighthawk at a club called The Jack Rabbit, and he has lived in Pine Bluff ever since. But work has not always been easy to find. Leverage, Then a Job

''Bobby and I used to go around to the clubs, and if they were crowded, the owners would say they didn't need no band,'' Mr. Davis recalls. ''So we'd offer to play four or five numbers for free, and the owners would say O.K.

''After we'd gotten everyone out onto the dance floor,'' he continued, ''we'd just stop right in the middle of the scene, take down our stuff and be moving out the door. And the people would say, 'Isn't there gonna be no band?' And then they'd start leaving. Then the owner would stop us and ask what we'd charge to play, and that's how we'd get the job.''

Mr. Davis's name began to circulate outside the Delta only recently. He is in demand as one of the last Delta blues musicians playing in a pure rural style.

CeDell Davis's blues is dance music. He plays shuffles, boogies and stomps with a furious rock beat, hammering out bass lines and playing stinging treble-string leads with his knife on a canary-yellow electric guitar. He is also an utterly original stylist who transforms even familiar blues standards by Jimmy Reed or Joe Turner into down-home stomps. And his vital expressive singing is part Joe Turner shout, part Delta moan.

At Tramps, where he will be performing on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the next two weekends, he will be accompanied by a two-man horn section and drums. Show times are 9 and 11:30 P.M. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 8:30 and 11 on Sundays. There is a $6 cover charge. For reservations, call 777-5077.

Cedell Davis in 1982

Combo is Strange Trio
Mattoon, Illinois Gazette - August 30, 1982

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (UPI) - The unorthodox guitar player with a Southern accent in his song and the bespectacled New Yorker with the clarinet at first seemed on opposite ends of the musical spectrum. But, when CeDell Davis and Robert Palmer mixed in a trumpet player from Pocohontas, Ark., the result was a perfect blend of back-country blues. 

Who would have thought Davis, the blues guitarist, and Palmer, the pop music critic for the NeW York Times, could pull it off? "It's an exception to what a lot of other people do," Davis said, "but it works real good. We make it sound right." What sounds right to Davis is the blues. "I play blues and rhythm and blues and a little old-time rock," - he said.

"You know, stuff like Fats Domino used to do. I don't play hard rock. I just stick with the blues." They don't play a lot of blues in New York, so Palmer heads home to the South. The journalist-clarinetist took a vacation recently to return to Arkansas, visit his family and play a few club dates with Davis, whom he met a few years back in a small club in Clarksdale, Miss. Trumpeter Gary Gazaway, from Pocohontas, rounds out the trio. 

Davis' mini-tour included a stop at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis, the city where W.C. Handy, the father of Southern blues music, got the inspiration for his string of standards. Although blues musicians like B.B. King, Albert King and John Lee Hooker have been commercially successful, the notion lingers that genuine blues has been lost. "It had died down in the United States, but it was goin' good in Europe," Davis said. "Now It's picking up back here. I plan to work on it.

Juke Joints: Home of American Music

Cedell Davis Offers Blues

Cedell Davis Dies at 91

The Graveside Speech of Miles Floyd

  

The Graveside Speech of Miles Floyd

At the Dedication of his Grandfather’s Headstone

July 29, 2017

Nitta Yuma Cemetery - Nitta Yuma, Mississippi

"I’m not going to be long, but I had to write this down today, because I knew this was going to be an emotional day for me, especially when they were playing “Corinne Corrina.”

So y’all bear with me on this okay. My name is Miles Floyd, and I’m the step-grandson of Bo Carter. I’m sad to say that during Bo’s lifetime I didn’t get a chance to meet him in person, but I was fortunate enough to meet his son, Ezell Chatmon.

Ezell played an important role in my life, as a youngster coming up. He always said to me—I can remember back in the sixties and seventies—finish school and make something out of myself. Well, I finished school but I’m still working on making something of myself [pause for laughter].

I can remember as though it were yesterday, that they always talked to me about his father and his music. And he always he always told me that once he retired, we were going to set out, take a trip and find out more about Bo and his music. But after Mr. E retired, that didn’t happen.

My mother became disabled and Mr. E spent the rest of his life taking care of my mother, until 1991, and that’s when he got in bad health. What this day means to me, just by me saying thank you was not good enough, I’m going to give you the reason why today is so special to me.

It was the day after Christmas 1991. Mr. E was lying in the bed in the hospital, and that afternoon he opened his eyes and looked at me and beckoned—and that was a happy moment for me—because he was, as they said, unconscious. But anyway he beckoned for me to come his bed, and he looked up at me, and he asked, "Where was my mother?"

I told him she was sitting in the corner, right by your bedside. So, he was speaking in a soft tone. [You see] my mother worries a lot, but what Ezell said to me made my day become sad too. Because he looked up at me and said he wanted me to do three things for him. He knew he wasn’t going to walk out of that hospital. And I didn’t want to hear that but he kept saying, “Just listen.” And I want to share those three things with you today.

I don’t know if it’s appropriate or not, but it’s something I have been carrying with me for a long time. His first request of me was to find his mom’s grave and bury him beside it. His second request was to me to take care of Roberta, which is my mother. I took care of her until 2012 when she passed away. The request is because of you here today. I have been working on this for twenty years. I didn’t know which way to go other than looking at the internet."

Miles Floyd during his speech
Photo: Bill Steber

Click HERE to read more about the dedication of Bo Carter's Marker

"But today I want to thank in this order, and this is the way it happened to me, a young man by the name of Patrick Leblanc, [who organized the Crossroads Blues Festival dedicated to Johnny Shines in Greenwood in the early 1990s] who now resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, came to me and my family in 2004, and since that time Pat educated me about Bo. His music his life, everything that a person would need to know. So I thank Patrick Leblanc for that, but he is not here with us today.
 

The second person I would like to thank is Barry Shrum. That’s him standing right there, he and his wife, from Nashville, Tennessee. Barry is something I call my legal advisor, but Barry I will say this to you today. I’m thankful for meeting you. We’ve been acquainted with each other for going on now two years. I know when you get off the phone with me sometimes, you feel like beating your head up against a wall. But it’s not nothing intentionally okay. Now, the third thanks goes to all of you. I got to give credit to you.

That third wish that Ezell asked me to find out about his daddy, today, you guys fulfilled that third wish for me, my heart is heavy, and I really do thank each of you for making this day possible.

And I told my family when I got here that I didn’t want to make a fool out of myself, get up there and get ready to make a speech, but when your heart tells you to say something, say it anyway. So I’m speaking from my heart. DeWayne, the Mt. Zion organization, all the people who supported this today, I appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.

Last but not least, my family there. I know it’s been hard living with me these past few years because of my frustrations, but thanks to each and every person who was here today, those frustrations have lightened up. Because I wanted to fulfill Mr. E’s three wishes. 

As I stand here, Bo, I’m proud to be your grandson, very proud, and I can’t wait to get back to Bolton, Mississippi and stand beside your son’s grave, and say your three wishes have been fulfilled. Thank you."

Beavers Digs in Deep

The above track is track 7 on the last album. He has a new album in the can, but this short review refers to his last album and his general comportment. A review of the new album is coming]

"Everyday starts with the crow," hollered out James C. Taylor at the 1970 Delta Rock Festival. Dale Beavers was not yet six years old, but it was already hard to tell that he had once been deemed the best looking baby in Chicot County, Arkansas. Since 1970, he decided to pick up a guitar in the same vein as his early life hero, Donnie Brown, of the Candy Shoestring, which held a reunion a couple years back. This journeyman axeman came up in the same way as Bo Carter: he got an early taste for "dirty" songs and others relegated him to the bass guitar. Over the years, moreover, he has become somewhat of an "All Around Man," cutting wood and making bread for his distressed spirit as well as making his own way through the crowd. Now he stands out front on his own record.

If someone asked random asshole #3 for a review of Dale Beavers' music, that fella might say it was blunt, straight-forward, unadorned. A self absorbed Nashville music critic, when not sitting at a bar obliviously enraging “blues assholes,” might say that Beavers was the “real deal,” particularly due to the fact that Beavers maintains a strong animus for such polyvalent terms. Beavers might very well dust off the overhand right on the music scene in Nashville, but the assessment would still prove accurate for some whether the object of his ire was out cold on the floor or not.

Dale Beavers on the Jeff Norwood Memorial
Stage at the 2016 Deep Blues Festival
Photo: Bill Steber 

The first time this author slipped the compact disc out of the package and into the small slit in my vehicle’s dashboard, it stayed right there spinning around and around for at least a few days. The first time it started over and began playing the first song, I realized for a second time that it I didn’t want to hit the stop button. It starts off innocent enough—with Beavers, I assume, strumming a single chord up and down at a steady pace, and then the drummer comes in with the classic snare-kick-snare, which brings a bass guitar not-quite-thundering into the mix with the accompaniment of keys, beating hard and straight down onto the ivory, steady, rocking, and true to the rhythm 

It takes a full thirty seconds before the engineer is required to slide up another fader and allow the vocals to inform us of the problem that consumes the mind of Dale Beavers. Not a terribly complicated man, not a man who covets intellectual pursuits in the ivory tower, Beavers has the same type of attitude and concerns as one might expect to find in a host of red-blooded Americans testing the limits of their historically uninhibited freedoms. The sound and tone gives off a fun aesthetic that makes you want to crack a beer and smile at the girl sitting at the end of the bar. It makes you want to dance with her, and it also lets you know that Beavers understands how you feel after getting shot the hell down and squirming back inside that brewskie.

You will not get a whole lot of answers to the big questions this world has to offer, but you will feel good enough about yourself that you will smile at the other woman, who sits at the other end. Or you might even go after the first woman’s short-haired friend. What I’m trying to impart in the short review is that the music is good; it’s not anymore real that the songs on another record. Every asshole in the room will tell you something different if pressed to define the term “real” or “authentic.” So I know why Beavers does not like such terms. He does not bullshit, period. He may not know what the hell is going on, but he will let you know that he's lost. The songs he plays are not meant to be “real” or “authentic,” which makes the record so damn fun to hear more than once. I’m going to put the record back on right now. Do yourself a favor and do the same.

Dale Beavers (guitar) performs with esteemed Columbian 
attorney Portuondo Guapado, (drums) the fifth 
cousin once removed from folklorist Tary Owens.

Photo: Bill Steber

Beavers music is reflective of the blues traditions and artists for whom he worked over the years, but it should be stressed that now as a solo artist, who has stepped out from behind these purveyors of tradition, that he has managed to take on elements of different styles and build a conglomeration that on his record comes across squarely his own. He achieves this sound, in part, by embracing the stripped-bare tone of the mid-Delta from which he came, refusing to dress it up too much, and roundly rejecting the modulation and adulterating digital devices that came to plague so many children of the eighties.  If you see him performing, tell him he's still the prettiest baby from Chicot County. Then you may need to duck and cover. He is Dale Beavers, American, and these colors don't run.  

- T. DeWayne Moore

[The below track is track 1 on the album--described at the top]