Texas Blues Guitar

18 Pages·2003·3.77 MB·English

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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.’
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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
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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
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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.”
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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
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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,
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`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
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