1 Texas Blues Guitar Mississippi may be ‘the home state of the blues’ in most minds, but Texas gives the Magnolia State a brisk run for the money in terms of the number of influential blues artists who have called it home. A sample roll call – Texas Alexander, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sippie Wallace, T-Bone Walker, Amos Milburn, Charles Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, Larry Davis, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson – serves to make the point. The four men seen and heard in this video exemplify different aspects and eras of Texas blues tradition: Mance Lipscomb is very near the work-song source, while Lightnin’ Hopkins delivers music evok- ing both country dances and a ‘street smart’ farm-to-ghetto sensibility. Freddie King took urban Texas blues into the funk era without missing a beat, and Albert Collins seemingly met him there. There is a stylistic diversity here which spans decades of development. Yet for all the dissimilarity of approach and purpose of these artists (Mance couldn’t be less of a showman, while Freddie King lived for the spot- light), there is one unifying element among all these performers: all ‘pick’ with the thumb and index finger, a characteristic so universal one might call it the Texas pinch.’ 2 Texans, of course, aren’t alone in playing that way but it’s notable that exceptions to this rule were so rare. Before look- ing for other regional similarities among these artists, the role of the guitar in the blues – and, for that matter, in Texas – must be considered. It seems ironic that the instruments most prominently identified with blues soloists – piano, harmonica, and guitar – were all of European origin, while the African- American banjo played little role in the music and quickly fell into disfavor as the popularity of the blues spread. The rise of this genre appears to have been simultaneous with the wide- spread dissemination of mass-produced guitars in late nine- teenth century America. However, guitars were no strangers in Texas, a state with a long-standing Hispanic history. We don’t know what ex- change (if any) existed between guitar-playing Hispanics and the African-American populace of Texas. When the new sound of the blues and the newly-available guitar came together, did Texans have an edge earned from familiarity with the in- strument? It’s tempting to speculate, but in truth we don’t know. What we do know is that a remarkably diverse group of Texas blues singer-guitarists etched their legacy onto 78s in the pre-Depression ‘golden age’ of country blues. For the most part, little is known of these men though some are figures of legend, and for good reason. Blind Lemon Jefferson (ca. 1897- 1929) wove rhythmically complex and stunningly inventive conversations between his voice and guitar. The success of his 1926 recording, “Long Lonesome Blues,” is said to have sparked the commercial recording industry’s interest in coun- try blues. Blind Willie Johnson (ca.1902 – ca.1947), a fero- cious sacred singer with a stylistic kinship to blues, was a bottleneck guitarist nonpareil. Henry ‘Ragtime’ Thomas (1874- 1930) played a simple strumming style which fit his innocently ebullient music. All these men were Texans and none sounded the least bit like the other. The state is vast and so were op- portunities to develop regional and individual ‘voices’ in an era when the influence of records on repertoire and style was nascent. Two decades after Jefferson’s recording debut, Texans con- tinued to be in the vanguard of guitar-centered blues. T-Bone Walker (1910-1975) single-handedly invented a jazz-tinged blues vocabulary for electric guitar, one which revolutionized the way a generation of players approached both the genre 3 and the instrument. An apparent reaction to Walker’s urbanity came from the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who experienced surprising success with spare and rough-hewn ‘downhome’ blues at a time when a West Coast -bred sophistication domi- nated black popular music. Hopkins and fellow Texans Lil Son Jackson, Smokey Hogg, and Frankie Lee Sims led a country blues revival which rallied in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when their recordings often made the rhythm & blues charts. By the mid-1950s the audience for Texas downhome blues had been usurped by the tougher band sound of Muddy Wa- ters, while Walker’s pervasive influence was absorbed into early rock ‘n roll via Chuck Berry. The rise of the Chess empire fo- cused much of the post-War blues business in Chicago and the dominance of Mississippi migrants in the Windy City un- derscores our stereotype of blues as Mississippian at root. Perhaps it is, but the influential strides made by Jefferson in the Twenties and Walker in the Forties are unexcelled in the history of blues guitar. And the Texas blues guitar tradition didn’t dead-end with T-Bone; it continues to deliver such rus- tic anachronisms as Henry Qualls as well as sundry young Stevie Ray wannabes, disciples of a man who cut his teeth absorbing the lessons of Freddie King. At its best, the Texas blues guitar tradition is, like the state itself, outsize and hard to corral, disarmingly diverse and, despite fits of legendary Lone Star bluster, beguilingly genuine. It is embodied by the four legendary Texans in this video. P h o to b y G e o rg e P ic k o w 4 Albert Collins (1932-1993) “A lot of people ask me what’s the difference between Chicago blues and Texas blues. We didn’t have harp players and slide guitar players out of Texas, so most of the blues guitars had a horn section. ...The bigger the band is, the better they like it in Texas.” Albert Collins, interviewed by Jas Obrecht, Guitar Player, July 1993 To illustrate Collins’ point, this video opens with a blazing example of ‘the master of the Telecaster’ in the company of the full fleet of his Icebreakers performing on Austin City Lim- its in 1991. Collins had been a presence on the Texas blues scene since the early 1950s, but it was only after moving to Los Angeles in the late 1960s that he began to be appreciated beyond the Southern ‘chitlin circuit.’ His 1978 Alligator label debut, Ice Pickin’, kicked his career into high gear and led to international tours, a Disney film cameo (Adventures in Babysitting), an appearance with Bruce Willis in a Seagram’s wine cooler television commercial , even a gig at a 1989 Inau- gural gala for George Bush. The critically-acclaimed 1985 Alli- gator album Showdown! earned Collins a Grammy for his play- ing with fellow Houstonian guitarslinger Johnny Copeland and a young man at whose high school prom he had once per- formed, Robert Cray. But perhaps the accolade which meant the most to Collins was the observance of Albert Collins Day in 1986 as part of Houston’s Juneteenth Festival. He played on his day before 50,000 of his old neighbors. Collins came to Houston when he was nine. Born in a log cabin on a farm near Leona, Texas, he heard the country blues sounds of his cousin, Lightnin’ Hopkins. “He practically raised me,” Collins told Larry Birnbaum (“Albert Collins: The Iceman Strummeth,” downbeat July 1984). “I used to just watch him play, mostly like at family reunions—they called `em associa- tions then. He’d be out on the big grounds they had, sittin’ there on a stool and playin’ guitar.” It was another cousin, Willow Young, who offered Collins his first real instruction and taught him his unorthodox guitar tuning. “He would lay the guitar in his lap and play it with a knife, like you do a steel guitar,” Collins told Birnbaum. Collins called Young’s tuning D-minor. In a May 1988 Guitar Player feature, Dan Forte detailed Collins’s tuning as follows: “From low to high, F, C, F, Ab, C, F. It’s an F minor triad, or a Dm7b5 without the root.” 5 P h o to b y T o m C o p i 6 John Lee Hooker’s 1949 hit, “Boogie Chillen,” was the first tune Collins learned to play. Later he would be influenced by T-Bone Walker and popular Houstonian Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, who convinced Collins to use a capo (or clamp as he called it) to change keys. By 1952 Collins was fronting an eight-piece band, the Rhythm Rockers, in Galveston. Never sure of himself as a singer, Collins generally left the vocal chores to someone else in his band. In 1954 he went on tour with singer Piney Brown, and a fogged car windowshield prompted a bass player to tell Collins, “Man, you better turn the defrost on!” The remark stuck with Collins, who began assigning ‘chilling’ titles to his instrumentals. 1958’s “Freeze” on the Houston-based Kangaroo label was his wax debut, fol- lowed by “Defrost“(1960, Great Scott) and “Frosty” (1963, Hall). 1961 was the year of Freddie King’s success with “Hide Away,” but Collins lacked King’s national label (King/Federal) support, and despite some regional success with “Frosty,” his instrumentals didn’t assuage the need to keep day jobs (truck driving, mixing car paint) to pay the rent. (Collins’ 1963-65 recordings appear on Truckin’ With Albert Collins, MCAD- 10423.) His fortunes improved when collector-performer Bob Hite of Canned Heat sought him out in Houston in 1967 when Canned Heat was appearing on a bill with Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lightnin’ took Hite to hear Collins at the Ponderosa Lounge where his act (complete with audience stroll assisted by hun- dred-foot guitar cord) so floored ‘the Bear’ that he urged Collins to move to California and work the then-burgeoning Fillmore circuit. Collins did just that, opening shows for the likes of Fleetwood Mac and cutting three albums for Imperial in 1968- 69 (reissued on CD as Albert Collins: The Complete Imperial Recordings, EMI CDP-7-96740-2). Signed by B.B. King's pro- ducer Bill Szymczyk to his fledgling Tumbleweed label in 1971, There’s Gotta Be a Change promised to be Collins’ career- making record (it even put a single, “Get Your Business Straight,’ into the national rhythm & blues chart). But the sud- den demise of Tumbleweed left Collins without a label, and for a number of years he worked West Coast clubs from San Diego to Seattle, often backed by Robert Cray’s band. When the opportunity to record for Alligator arose in 1978, Collins was employed as a mixer in a paint store. Twenty years after his recording debut, Collins was ready and eager for a break and made the most of it. Had cancer 7 not claimed him in 1993, Collins would no doubt still be making music as powerful as that heard in this video. “That tone,” ex- claimed Joe Ely’s guitarist David Grissom in the docu- mentary, Further On Down the Road. “There’s some- thing about that tone that just kills you. I like to think of it like a Louisville Slug- ger, a baseball bat. Some- body hitting a home-run and that bat crackin’. When Albert hits the strings, pi o that’s what it reminds me C m o of.” Robert Cray recalled, T by “Everyone who knew o ot Albert would say he had a h P big heart, a great person- ality...but when it came to playing the guitar, he had no mercy on anyone—the guitarslinger!” Collins told Alan Govenar (Meet- ing the Blues, Taylor Publishing Co., Dallas, TX.1988) : “I pick with my thumb and first fingers, almost like playing a bass. I never did play many chords. I always wanted to be a lead player...Blues is my music. It’s kind of hard for some people to relate when you say blues. Some people don’t want to hear it, but it’s reality.” 8 Freddie King (1934-1976) “I used to listen to Freddie King a lot then, and that drive he had in his early days stayed on my mind.” Albert Collins to Ellen Griffith, Guitar Player, August 1979 P h o to b y W a lt M . C a s e y Jr. The drive that so impressed Collins is amply evident in this 1972 performance from Sweden. King’s near-disco era appointments (platform shoes, bell bottoms and a shirt collar that looks like it could take flight) belie his small town Texas roots. Raised in Gilmer, Texas, King was surrounded by guitars in his youth. “We always kept two or three guitars around our house in Texas all the time,” King told Mike Leadbitter (“Madi- son Nite Owl,” Blues Unlimited October-November 1974). “They all played—my mother, my uncles...lots of guys played around there.” However, Chicago, where King’s maternal grand- mother lived, was where King began playing in earnest. His family moved there in December 1950, and Freddie soon found work in a steel mill. At night, he would sneak into blues clubs and absorb the sounds of the burgeoning Chicago blues scene. “I was playing like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters when I got to Chicago,” King told Leadbitter, “but Jimmy Rogers and Eddie Taylor were different. They really inspired me. I stayed around them all the time. Every time they look up, I’m com- ing. If I couldn’t catch one, I’d catch the other. They’d say, 9 `Don’t you ever sleep?’” King got his first electric guitar at age seventeen, and in 1956 he began accompanying harmonica player Earle Payton. In 1958 King quit his job at the steel mill and formed his own band, performing at such West Side clubs as the Casbah, the Squeeze Club, and one he immortalized, Mel’s Hideaway Lounge. King had tried without success to interest Chess in re- cording him. However, pianist/bandleader Sonny Thompson signed King to Federal in 1960 and his first session yielded three hits, “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” “See See Baby” and the instrumental “Hide Away.” 1961 was King’s year on the charts; he had six top 10 R&B hits, a remarkable run for a new artist. He appeared on package tours with the likes of Jimmy Reed and Gladys Knight. “I did fifty of those one-nighter tours at $250 a night,” King recalled. In 1963, he moved his family to Dallas. Even if he never reprised his 1961 chart success, King frequently returned to the Federal-King studios in Cincinnati to record. Between August 1960 and September 1966, King recorded 77 titles for King and Federal, 30 of which were in- strumentals. His friendship with King Curtis led to two late 1960s albums for Atlantic’s Cotillion label, but they didn’t of- fer King’s career the push it needed at a time when ‘the counter culture’ was discovering blues. That impetus came via an ap- pearance at 1969’s Texas Pop Festival, where King shared the bill with Led Zeppelin and Ten Years After, among others. “All of Led Zeppelin’s guys were standing there watching him with their mouths open,” recalls King’s longtime manager Jack Calmes. The Shelter label, formed jointly by Leon Russell and Joe Cocker’s producer, Denny Cordell, signed King in 1970 and offered his career a new lease on life. Getting Ready in- troduced “Going Down,” later covered by Jeff Beck, and King’s new ‘heavy’ blues sound took him from the Texas chitlin and frat party circuits to the Fillmore and rock arena circuit, open- ing for the likes of Creedence Clearwarer Revival and Grand Funk Railroad. The debt of England’s blues-based rockers to King was partly repaid when Eric Clapton’s RSO label signed him in 1974. King made two albums for RSO and appeared at such venues as London’s Crystal Palace Bowl alongside Clapton. He toured internationally while continuing to be a legend in Texas, where a mural of King appeared on the wall of Austin’s legendary Armadillo World Headquarters. Robust and always immensely 10