Obituary: Van Zula Carter Hunt

Van Zula Carter Hunt (1901-95), singer and guitarist, moved from her hometown of Somerville to Memphis around the late 1910s and began her professional musical activity, traveling for several years with larger minstrel shows (such as Rabbit Foot, and Silas Green) as well as with her own show, Madame Hunt's Traveling Show. She played with local blues artists such as Sleepy John Estes, Frank Stokes, Gus Cannon, and Memphis Minnie, and the Memphis Jug Band. 

New Park Cemetery in Memphis, TN

She recorded some gospel sides as a chorus member with Rev. E.D. Campbell for Victor Records in 1927.  In 1930, she recorded the vocal "Selling That Jelly" with the Carolina Peanut Boys (Noah Lewis, John Estes, Ham Lewis, and others) for Victor Records. She reportedly made other recordings in the prewar era and recorded for Sun in the 1950s. Two songs were released on Adelphi LP 10105 Memphis Blues Again, Vol. 2 in 1970.  Hunt is backed on a number of tracks on the first volume of the Blues At Home Collection by pianist Mose Vinson, who was also recorded solo, as well as Hunt's daughter Sweet Charlene.

Steve LaVere, who learned of Hunt through washtub bass extraordinaire Dewey Corley, said of her, “She knows everything about everybody." In an obituary, Ed Tremewan stated that Hunt appeared locally in festivals from the "early 1960s and well into the 1980s, when declining health slowed her activities down. 

Obituary: Mose Vinson (1917-2002)

By Richard Allen Burns - 2002

Barrelhouse blues piano player Mose Vinson was born June 2, 1917 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He passed away on November 16, 2002 from complications from diabetes.  He was eighty-five. One of the last of his kind, Vinson approached music by mixing blues with jazz and gospel. A regular on Beale Street, he played with such greats as Booker T. Laury, Sunnyland Slim, and B.B. King.

Vinson learned to play piano from his mother in church, but this religious influence contrasts with that which his father provided. In a 1993 interview, when Vinson performed on the campus of Arkansas State University, he recalled that his mother attended a church near Memphis. He remembered: "They [his parents] used to send me around--well, you know--to sing a solo. Wasn't nobody in there. She'd take my finger and make me go over the song. My pa, he took me around to hear the people play. I listened to the people play a little bit though, come back, and in two or three days, I'd he playing their songs." But that same year, Vinson's father also took him to jook joints, and by the time he was a teenager, Vinson was playing jazz and blues. "I'd been playing since I was a little boy, five years old. When I got big enough (by 1932 I was fifteen years old), I was playing for nightclubs. They put me in a reform school for that, and 1 had to quit that!" he recalled. Tired of country life, his family moved to Memphis in 1932. There Vinson met Sunnyland Slim. By then he was playing in a style that was typical of the 1930s, and throughout the 1940s, Vinson continued playing in jook joints and at parties in and around Memphis. His friends called him "Boogie," reflecting the style he played best.

Blues scholar David Evans said of Vinson, "He was one of the last of the old-time solo piano players." He worked, as a studio caretaker at Sun Records and played piano between sets until Sun founder Sam Phillips heard him and recorded him in 1953. Though none of these initial recordings were released at the time, most of these can now be heard on the CD boxed set Sun Records: The Blues Years, 1950-1958. The year following his first recording with Sun, Vinson recorded on one of Sun's greatest singles, James Cotton's "Cotton Crop Blues." He also recorded on Sun with Walter Horton, Joe Hill Louis, and several other recording
artists.

During the last three decades of his life, Vinson played in festivals and at colleges and universities, including the Chicago Blues Festival, the University of Chicago Folk Festival and the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1992, he was featured on National Public Radio's program, Bluestage. During the 1980s and 1990s, Vinson could be heard playing at the Memphis Music and Heritage Festival and at the Center for Southern Folklore. The Center's director, Judy Peiser, co-produced Mose Vinson: Piano Man, Vinson's only album. The album features eighteen cuts of some of Vinson's finest piano playing that he had perfected over a span of seventy years. He was also featured, along with Booker T. Laury in Memphis Piano Blues Today, a collection of 1990s Memphis blues. In 1998, he appeared on the Junkyardmen's album, Scrapheap Full of Blues.

Evans told a reporter that like other musicians of his time, Vinson was "under-appreciated, more or less taken for granted here in Memphis . . . a real jewel." Peiser remembered him as quite personable, inspiring others, both young and old, to play along with him. When Peiser brought Vinson to perform at ASU, there was a standing-room-only crowd. Vinson invited audience members to join him onstage. Taking the hands of adults as well as children, he guided them across the keyboard in familiar tunes. An unsung hero on Beale Street, Mose Vinson will be missed throughout Memphis and the Mississippi Delta.

Two guys snuck into the cemetery in 2015.  Instead of asking former acquaintances and friends to help honor Mose Vinson properly, they laid a small footer in his plot at New Park Cemetery.

A Dark Collusion in a Mississippi Juke

A Dark Collusion in a Mississippi Juke

By Bughouse Pile - Dec 2017

The Year was 1979 and we had set out to find Sammy Myers, the Blues singer whose classic “Sleeping in the Ground” was a favorite anthem of British Blues collectors. [To read more about the Mississippi artist, please read this interview from 1980]  To experience a room full of slightly drunk young English punktards, grasping Brown Ale bottles and rocking back and forth on upright chairs to the rhythm of this tune was to be assured that all was well with our world. No matter how long it took, or to what lengths we had to go, or what energy we expended, we simply had to find this heroic singer and photograph him, for the lads back home were depending upon us! It wasn’t difficult, we were not very smart. We had his address and still had trouble. Bill interviewed him for Blues Unlimited, took the photos, and we left with an invitation to see him perform that night at the local juke joint. We hung out in downtown Jackson and then, as the sun removed its afternoon cap, we went and found Richard’s Playhouse, where Sammy had said he’d be. 

It was a long, low, dark, narrow and deafeningly noisy juke joint. You HAD to shout to be heard, thereby adding to the cacophony. Boy Scouts would have to have used semaphore to offer Bob-a-Job week services.[1] I don’t think they bothered. We took seats up front, near the shoebox-sized bandstand and watched the band set up. Bill recognized the guitarist King Edwards and introduced himself. We were joined by the tenor sax player, a guy called Cadillac Shorty, who immediately told us he’d been on every Little Richard record ever made. The drummer chimed in to inform us that his was the insistent beat we heard on Isaac Hayes' Shaft.

If they wanted big time bullshit, we were the guys to deliver...

When they kicked in, however, they were good and the place suddenly exploded as the tight little dance area in front of us quickly filled with a motley selection of interesting characters. A pot-bellied mid-life guy with a pork pie hat and a chomped cigar dancing with a woman twice his size. A tall, lanky solo dancer was doing Limbo moves without a pole, and getting deeply into it. We never saw him again. Two large and tightly clad women danced around each other, followed by many eyes linked directly to libidos. We sat, whitely, and observed.

Sammy came on stage and played a solid, very loud set of Blues. His voice was still good, his harmonica playing still sharp, the overall sound thick, woolly and chugging. I’d never been in a juke joint before; the pace was frantic, the noise deafening, the edge palpable. The owner, a tough -looking woman in the middle range of her life, tolerated neither trouble nor the seeds of it. Yanking one guy out the door with just one hand, for crimes we didn’t understand, she shot a glare across the room that indicated immediate rough justice for anyone else who might get above-station ideas. When the set had finished, I went to take a leak in the snug little men’s room behind the bandstand. As I was standing at the wall, Sammy Myers appeared at my side. His very limited vision and the dark that we stood in immediately colluded in his dampening my jeans and shoes. I came out shaking drops off my leg and squelching ever so slightly, explaining to Bill what had happened. “You lucky bitch”, he laughed, “you’ll dine out on that story more than once”.

Notes:
[1] Semaphore - an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms or flags)

Bob-a-Job week is when the boy scouts go round the village once a year doing jobs for a bob, which was the old name for a shilling, now 5 pence.

[2] Paul Vernon often goes by his nicknames, Garbage Pile or Bughouse Brister.

Walter Lee Hood - "Big Daddy"

Big Daddy is a big, gold amoeba sitting motionless on a chair. He wears a 24-karat satin shirt. He has little feet. Up floats a microphone and Big Daddy wiggles, gets hooked in the mouth like a giant goldfish. Out pops a voice, a vibrant, poignant tenor, the sound at first fragile. Then he puts his weight behind it. “Gone buy me a .22,” he croons; a white sweat towel snakes over his shoulder, “don’t...make me shoot the...hell out of you.” The evolution is complete; Big Daddy is now the highest life form of all in a Saturday night bar - a Blues Singer.

That he is, says his manager, Jesse Robinson. The first time he saw Big Daddy, Robinson was struck by more than the size of this quarter-ton man, known only to local blues fans as Big Daddy. “The first thing he had,” said Robinson, “was his voice. The way he could sing the blues. The main thing is a 500-pound man singing the blues. You just don’t find that.” Eleven years ago, you wouldn’t have found it. It has only been a decade since Big Daddy found his blues voice. 

Now, in Jackson, Prentiss, Laurel, Hattiesburg, Greenville, Oxford, Utica, Cleveland, Clarksdale or Canton, you can find him, at colleges or in restaurants and lounges that bill him as Big Daddy, “ 500 pounds of blues.” Which is 30 pounds of over-billing. “I weigh only about 470 pounds,” Big Daddy said. He didn’t sound disappointed. “Yeah,” grinned Robinson, “470 pounds of blues’ just don’t get it.” 

Big Daddy’s real name, Walter Lee Hood, probably wouldn’t get it either. His fans got rid of it. “ Everybody started calling me Big Daddy,” he said before a show at the Subway Lounge. “ They said they liked the name. I did too.”He also likes greens and black-eyed peas, he said. “ As long as it’s boiled, I eat it.” He has tried to lose weight, but it has proved impossible. He also has diabetes.

“I do what the doctors tell me. They stopped me from working in 1979. They said my blood pressure was too high. I was doing construction but I had to quit. I picked up this weight sitting down doing nothing.” Before the weight gain, Big Daddy liked to hunt. “Oh, yeah, this is the time of year. 

"I miss it,” he said. “I would hunt or stay in camp and cook. “I can cook just about anything you can name. I can cook, sew and clean. I can do it all. That’s why I don’t worry about a wife. I can do it all myself. Except have a baby...Saves money too.” Big Daddy sat with his back to a sign touting sardines, barbecued chicken, gumbo, sausage and chitterlings. He sipped on a can of fruit juice. “I have always loved music,” he said, as people crept down the stairs to the cool, dark lounge. “A lot of my people sang in church.”

(Jackson, MS) Clarion 
Ledger, Feb 19, 1988.

He comes out of northwest Alabama, near Lee Bend, he said, where he was born in the early ’30s, “ so far back in the woods, it was pitiful.” Not long after his birth, his family moved to Columbus, where he grew up singing gospel in the Mount Olive Baptist Church.

For years, he made a living with his hands, not his voice, earning money in Columbus, Jackson, Yazoo City and other Mississippi towns at jobs ranging from drugstore delivery man to farmhand. Wherever he went, he sang in church and people liked his voice. They thought he could make money at it. “ They kept asking me, ‘why don’t you sing the blues?’” he said. One day Big Daddy woke up with the blues and started singing them.

(Jackson, MS) Clarion 
Ledger, Oct 31, 1989.

“Blues is here to stay,” he said. “My belief is the blues is a way of life. You might not have something to eat. You might not have anything in your pockets. People are just starting to realize it.”

He looked over at a woman at a nearby table. “What’s happening, Big Daddy?” she said. A waitress hurrying up from the bar put another can of juice on Big Daddy’s table and a smile on his wide, brown face. “You gone make a bad man out of me,” he told her. “You’re already bad,” she said. “I’m a good man.” He picked up his glass. “ When I’m asleep.” Big Daddy. 500 pounds of coy.

Fans searching for Big Daddy this weekend can find him performing Saturday with the Jesse Robinson Revue and Fingers Taylor at Wellsfest ’87 at Lakeland Park, just east of Smith-Wills Stadium on Lakeland Drive. They are scheduled to go on together at 2:45 p.m. at Center Stage.

(Jackson, MS) Clarion Ledger, Sep 23, 1987.