Working The Blues Street Corners-With Blind Willie McTell In Mind

By Zack James

Seth Garth was always intrigued by what he called the “blinds,” not the old railroad jungle hobo, tramp, bum use of the term ‘riding the blinds” but his own personal shorthand way to describe the large number of old bluesmen, mainly country blues guys who made a living on the streets mostly on the towns down South who were blind. Blind Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Earl Avery, Blind Amos Morris, you get the point, get the picture. Get the picture too of guys hanging on the street corners, hat in hand or maybe in front of them on the sidewalk a guitar at the ready. Guys, and gals too, still do that today on urban streets and in subways although Seth never remembered any of them being blind, at least not really blind although he had run up against a couple of con artists working a grift faking that blind deal.

(Yeah, “Blind” Willie Sampson took him and many other unaware transit riders for a “ride” at the Park Street subway stop at the Boston Common where he held forth playing very good blues guitar although he had the look of a kid from the suburbs, a white bread kid, not from the best but maybe a town like Seth’s Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston where working class and lower middle class merged and created a fairly ordinary community except the “rich” section over on Abbotts Hill where the descendants of the various now closed textile mills that created the growth of the town lived. Sampson would “hustle” dough based on his singing almost like Taj Mahal the modern blues master but also because he was “blind”-that was/is social reality when a blind man or woman puts a basket or uses his or her guitar case to lap up the dough and seemingly is trying to earn daily bread rather than whatever the social welfare agencies wanted to distribute. With Sampson, real name Nicolas Drummond, Seth had been walking along Tremont Street when he saw a guy who looked familiar with a guitar heading to the Chinatown stop. The guy walking just like the sighted guy he was had been Sampson. Seth the next time he exited the Park Street subway stop mentioned that to Willie who looked pretty non-plussed about the matter. Seth read the “riot act” to him but also told him that he had connections at the Club Nana, a coffeehouse in Cambridge and gave him the manager’s name to get in touch with for an audition. A few weeks later Seth was in the audience at Nick Drummond’s first paying gig at the club.)            

He often wondered what it would have been like to pass them on some forlorn street, and wonder is all he could do since all those august names and others that he learned about on the way as part of his job as a music critic for various publications like Big Honey Small, Laddie Layne, and “Smokin’ Sam, all blind who did not put their condition in their moniker, had passed beyond well before he came of age. Before he became old enough to appreciate the blues tradition that he got hopped on as a kid after accidently hearing Blue Blaine’s Blues Hour out of Chicago one fugitive Sunday night when the airwaves were in just the right seventh house position. Or something like position that since even though a science wiz in high school, a guy who went on to be a weather man (not Weatherman like in the 1960s SDS split-off leftist action of whom he had known a few of them as well after a series of articles he did on the theme of music and politics using Bob Dylan’s phrase “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) tried to patiently explain that it was not some voodoo magic but had to do with airwaves and wind currents. Whatever had caused that intersession that hooked him for good even though he did not hear anything by any of the previously mentioned blues artists that night. That would come much later after he became an aficionado and became, maybe as a result of those fugitive airwaves, a folk music critic back in the day for several then thriving and authoritative alternative folk and blues publications.

According to ‘Bama Brown, the great harmonica player for legendary Johnny Boy Williams’ blues band who was the last living link to those “blinds” the reason that they were able to survive on the streets is because even in the Jim Crow South a blind black man posed no direct threat to Mister. ‘Bama was by his own description “blind as a bat” not from birth but after having been in some rumble with some others down in Clarksville in the Delta, the Mississippi Delta  and had lost his sight to some grievous thumb-gougings when things turned very drunkenly ugly. He had started on the streets of Mosley up river where he had kin and where Johnny Boy heard him one night outside a juke joint out in the backwoods around Mosley singing for hi supper and signed him up immediately. But when he, all two hundred and twenty tough pound of him and if sighted a brute that Mister would certainly not let on his streets, continued with his thoughts ‘Bama said they all  could walk the streets with their hats or little tin cups, maybe with some black sister to aid them (true in the cases of Blind Willie and Blind Blake), maybe sing harmony in an off-hand minute, maybe play a little tambourine to draw a crowd, to give the word since preaching on the white streets, the streets where the money was on say a drunken sot Saturday, by a black man was frowned upon. Whites had their own set of holy-rollers to patronize and did not need any blacks to draw away from their purses. That would get a black guy, blind or not, a swift kick back to Negro-town, to the cheap streets.     

That was ‘Bama’s story anyway and it sounded plausible, when Seth first heard it on his first trip down south to see who if anybody was left and he ran into ancient ‘Bama in Clarksville one of the old time Meccas  of the country blues and a place when king hell king Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil, all signed and sealed, in order to play the devil’s music better than anybody else and probably was as close to a reason that the blinds survived as any. Then, But later after some research, after listening to some precious oral histories provided to the Library of Congress by the Lomaxes, father and son, he started to question whether ‘Bama had the deal down pat as it seemed at the time (and as he had written about in an article about ‘Bama as the last living link to a lot of the old country blues singers, especially the Delta boys from where he had hailed before heading north to Chicago and fame with Johnny Boy).

Seth had been particularly struck by one oral interview given by Honey Boy James, a great slide guitarist in the mold of Mississippi Fred McDowell, who before he passed away in the late 1940s told Alan Lomax, the son, that the real reason that the “blinds’” were left alone was that in their heyday, the late 1920s and early 1930s before the Great Depression hit hard and nobody had spare change for records or for giving alms to anybody, even blind men, was that the record companies from New York and Chicago mainly would sent scouts out to the small towns of the South looking for talent. Looking for a sound for their ‘‘race” labels and in the process those agents would get word out that there was dough to be had if anybody, anybody okay, could find some talent. Obviously the roughnecks and hillbillies, the white breads, were as anxious to get dough as anybody else and the only way they could grab some was listening to the black guys on the streets, on Mister’s streets. And the only black guys allowed on Mister’s precious streets were the “blinds.”                

Seth found that piece of news interesting but he was more than a little pissed off that old ‘Bama whom Seth had given good cash to for his interview had “forgotten” to tell him about that possible explanation. Especially since ‘Bama at the time was with Johnny Boy when RCA came looking for a new black sound and the band had been scouted and recorded by Mac Duran, a well-known white record agent in Memphis at the time. Damn.