CeDell Davis, 91, Dies Sep 27, 2017

CeDell Davis, 91, Dies Sep 27, 2017
Jon Pareles - The New York Times

CeDell Davis, a Delta bluesman from Arkansas who used a knife for a guitar slide, died on Wednesday. 

He was 91.

His Facebook page confirmed the death. He had been hospitalized since Sept. 24 after a heart attack.

Mr. Davis spent decades performing around the South at juke joints and house parties before a broader audience got a chance to hear his electrified rural blues in the 1980s.

His voice was a grainy moan as he sang about woman troubles and hard luck; his guitar could drive dancers with boogie and shuffle beats or play leads that were lean and gnarled, gliding smoothly and then coiling into a dissonant sting.

After childhood polio constricted his hands, he developed his own technique of using a knife along the fretboard of his guitar. The New York Times critic Robert Palmer called it “a guitar style that is utterly unique, in or out of the blues."

 Mr. Davis was born Ellis CeDell Davis in Helena, Ark., on June 9, 1926, though some sources say it was 1927. His mother was known as a faith healer, and his father ran a juke joint. Although his mother thought the blues was devil’s music, he took to the style early, starting on diddley-bow, a one-stringed instrument made by nailing a wire to a wall. He moved on to harmonica and guitar, often sneaking into juke joints to listen to music.

He contracted polio when he was 10, leaving him with partly paralyzed arms and legs and requiring crutches to walk. But he was determined to stay with music. He told Mr. Palmer: “I was right-handed, but I couldn’t use my right hand, so I had to turn my guitar around. I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kind of swiped one of them."

He reinvented his playing using the handle of a table knife. “Almost everything that you could do with your hands, I could do it with the knife,” he told David Ramsey this year in the magazine The Oxford American. “It’s all in the way you handle it. Drag, slide, push it up and down."

As a teenager, Mr. Davis played street corners and juke joints around Helena, which at the time was a bustling Mississippi River port, “wide open” with gamblers, bootleggers and honky-tonks, Mr. Davis recalled in the 1984 documentary Blues Back Home.

There he met some of the era’s leading blues musicians and started appearing on two live blues radio shows on KFFA in Helena: “King Biscuit Time” with Sonny Boy Williamson and “Bright Star Flour” with Robert Nighthawk, a fellow slide guitarist. From 1953 to 1963, he and Mr. Nighthawk performed together, and they moved for a time to St. Louis.

Mr. Davis was further disabled in 1957 when he was trampled after a brandished gun led to a stampede at an East St. Louis bar where he and Mr. Nighthawk were performing. Multiple leg fractures left him using a wheelchair.

In “Blues Back Home,” Mr. Davis said, “Whether I could walk or not, I had to make my place in this world, and find my own way, and I found it.”

He continued to work the juke-joint circuit. In the early 1960s he moved to Pine Bluff, Ark., where he would live for decades until moving to a nursing home in Hot Springs, Ark. He made his first recordings in 1976 for the journalist and folklorist Louis Guida; they appeared on the 1983 collection Keep It to Yourself: Arkansas Blues Volume 1, Solo Performances.

Those recordings reached Mr. Palmer, who went to hear Mr. Davis at Delta juke joints in the early 1980s. In The Times in 1981, Mr. Palmer wrote about a juke-joint gig in Little Rock, calling Mr. Davis “a virtuoso with the table knife.”

He continued, “The scraping of the knife along the strings of his bright yellow electric guitar makes a kind of metallic gnashing sound that conspires with his patched-together guitar amplifier and his utterly original playing technique to produce some of the grittiest music imaginable.”

Mr. Palmer befriended and championed Mr. Davis, drawing attention to him. Soon Mr. Davis was working the national and international blues circuit. Some listeners complained that he was out of tune, but Mr. Palmer observed that Mr. Davis played in a consistent, precise “alternate tuning system.”

Mr. Palmer eventually brought Mr. Davis to the Mississippi label Fat Possum and produced his 1994 debut album, “Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong.”

Mick Jagger and Yoko Ono attended Mr. Davis’s first gigs in New York City, in 1982. Other musicians became admirers and collaborators. The guitarist Peter Buck, from R.E.M., and the drummer Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees were in Mr. Davis’s studio band for his 2002 album, “When Lightnin’ Struck the Pine.”

Mr. Davis had a stroke in 2005, after which he could no longer play guitar. But he continued to sing, and though he was already living in a nursing home, he returned to performing in 2009. He released two more albums, Last Man Standing in 2015 and Even the Devil Gets the Blues in 2016, recorded in Seattle with Mr. Martin producing and a band that included Mike McCready from Pearl Jam.

Mr. Davis told The Oxford American that he had been married twice, had two children and had helped raise stepchildren. He said he had lost touch with the children. He was scheduled to perform on Oct. 6 at the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena.

“I play the blues the way it is,” Mr. Davis said in Blues Back Home. “It tells it all.”

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."