A Talk With Peg Leg Howell Leads to News of Blind Willie McTell

I wrote in a previous post about the youthful blues enthusiast Roger Brown’s discovery of a photograph of the bluesman Laughing Charley Lincoln in the later 1960s — obtained by convincing an Atlanta police detective to give him the mug shot of Charley Hicks on file at the police station off Decatur Street.  This was not the first time Roger had sought information on these nearly-forgotten musicians, however. Roger  and his high school buddy, George Mitchell, had visited Will Shade, Charlie Burse, Gus Cannon, Furry Lewis, and Bo Carter in Memphis in 1962, and they had found Sleepy John Estes in the country near Brownsville not long after.

Roger Brown & Furry Lewis, c. 1968

After these remarkable experiences, Roger and George had also sought out information on the whereabouts of the Atlanta bluesman Blind Willie McTell, whose fabulous recordings of the 1920s and 30s, such as “Statesboro Blues,” “Travelin’ Blues,” and “Broke-down Engine,” are among the treasures of the recorded blues canon.

And the boys came close to what they hoped would be a lead on McTell when they found the bluesman Peg Leg Howell, who lived in the Summerhill section of Atlanta. As I put it in Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide:

“In the Fall of 1962, Roger and George were freshmen at Emory University in Atlanta, but George had not stopped his blues activities at all. The fall of their freshman years the two of them were taking part in a fraternity rummage sale in Decatur, selling old clothes to poorer black people. The sale was set up in a vacant lot, and the patrons were blacks who were buying used clothes, not the middle classes, obviously. As they sold the clothes, the ever-alert George asked some of the people what they knew about local blues singers, and he was referred to a couple of guys Roger thinks were named Willie Roccomo and Clyde Upshaw, though he is unsure now.

“They went and spoke to Roccomo and Upshaw about singers who might still be around, and they told George that Peg Leg Howell, who had recorded a number of sessions from 1926 to 1930, was still alive. There was, again, the eighteen year-old’s disbelief that a person already mature in the 1920s could still live in the 1960s. With this information, however, Roger and George, with their friend Jack Boozer, went down to Decatur Street in the heart of the black section of the city and walked into an old Decatur Street institution, Shorty’s Barber Shop.

“When they went in, there were a couple of guys being served and a couple more waiting. One guy was having his hair straightened, another just a cut. They asked if anyone knew a musician named Peg Leg Howell, and a couple of them, a little guy and a big guy, immediately became animated, saying that they knew who he was. They had a discussion between each other — he’s over there on such-and-such a street by so-and-so’s house, right? — and they seemed to be thinking of a couple of different people. One of them finally said: ‘No, no — Peg, you know, Peg!’ and they seemed to come to an agreement.

“The two men led Roger and George over in Roger’s car, finally turning down an alley and coming to a shabby one-story house in the thick of the slums. They walked up and knocked on the door, and a thin, faint voice said to come in. They walked in to the dark and dirty house, and there sat Peg Leg Howell on a wheelchair, legless and looking mighty old. They’d been warned that he had no legs, but the general poverty and signs of ill health were over-whelming.”

Roger and George managed to spend time talking to Peg about his career and even to record an album of him playing and singing; and during their second meeting, Roger and George asked Peg if he had known Blind Willie McTell back in the old days – it never occurring to these young men that McTell could still be alive.

As they talked to Peg, a young guitarist from the neighborhood asked them, “That Blind Willie; did he play a 12 string guitar?”

Blind Willie McTell

“Yes,” they said.

The young man shook his head confidently. “He ain’t dead.”

The boys sat straight up when they heard that. “He’s not?!”

“He wasn’t the last time I saw him.”

“When was that?”

The young man considered. “Two years ago.”

And thus began a wild ride up a variety of blind alleys. Among other things, Roger and George discovered that McTell had frequented the Blue Lantern on Ponce de Leon Ave. in the late 1950s, about two miles from Roger’s house in Druid Hills; had they not been barely out of childhood then, he and George might have found McTell playing there for tips. The Blue Lantern also wasn’t far from a restaurant called the Pig & Whistle, where John Lomax  had had found McTell playing in 1940 and recorded the fabulous Library of Congress sessions in Lomax’s hotel room.

Blind Willie McTell, 1940

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before Roger and George discovered that McTell had been dead since 1959. They’d missed him – but only just. As Roger recently told me, “Our uncanny luck running down Shade and Burse and later Estes was more the exception than the rule.” They missed more musicians than they found. “Don’t get me wrong: I’ll never underestimate the blessing of our proximity to Buddy Moss and Robert Lockwood,” and Roger only wishes he had been born a few years earlier . . .

(Based on a phone interview with Roger Brown, 12/10/2011)

Roger Brown, the Detective, and Charley Lincoln’s Mugshot

A couple of the most famous Atlanta bluesmen of the 1920s and early 1930s are Barbecue Bob and Laughing Charley Lincoln. As anyone interested in old blues knows, Barbecue Bob and Laughing Charley were actually the brothers Charley and Robert Hicks, who were born in rural Georgia’s cotton country in 1900 and 1902, respectively. The boys learned to play guitar from bluesman Curley Weaver’s  mother and no doubt learned to sing in church, and they began playing music at parties and fish fries when they were still young men.

These two musicians began their brief recording careers in 1927 when a talent scout heard Bob singing at an Atlanta barbecue and recruited him to record such country blues standards as the wildly successful “Barbecue Blues” and “Mississippi Heavy Water Blues.”  Charley Lincoln soon recorded his own more modest – and melancholy — successes, “My Wife Drove Me from the Door” and “Hard Luck Blues.” Bob and Charley also recorded a couple of songs together called,  “It Won’t Be Long Now” in 1927 and “Darktown Gamblin’” in 1930. The 1930 session was Laughing Charley’s last and Barbecue Bob died in 1931. The two men receded from memory as the years past and musical tastes changed, though the old 78s of their recordings remained forgotten in closets all over the South for decades to come.

By the middle 1950s, something happened that would cause at least some people to take a new interest in musicians such as Bob and Charley. Atlantans Roger Brown and George Mitchell, for instance, had begun to move unwittingly across the lines of segregation as ten or twelve year-olds when they discovered rhythm-and-blues on the radio just spinning the dial after school. Ruth Brown and Little Richard made quite an impression on the boys, but they discovered something that made them drop R&B in amazement when they read Samuel Charters’ book The Country Blues (1959) as teenagers and listened to its fabulous accompanying LP on Folkways.

The scratchy and obscure old recordings on The Country Blues, including such classics as “Walk Right in” by Cannon’s Jug Stompers and “Fixin’ to Die” by Bukka White,  immediately hooked Roger and George with their powerful combination of folk rawness and incredible musicianship. The boys wanted to hear as much of the music as they could, but the problem was that it was very hard to locate any other country blues records to listen to in the early 1960s. Yet, when the boys realized that Samuel Charters had spoken to Will Shade and Gus Cannon in Memphis only a few years earlier, it occurred to them that it wasn’t out of the question that they could see their musical idols in person, as well.

I’ve written about Roger and George’s youthful blues-chasing and bluesman-seeking in my book Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide, including an interview with Samuel Charters in which he describes how he had hoped that The Country Blues would elicit just such a reaction in other researchers  who could help him to document the mostly-forgotten world of blues and jazz in the earlier part of the 20^th century.

Part of the fascination of blues for enthusiasts such as Roger and George was the search for more information about the men and women who played the music. When were they born, and where? What were their real names? How many records did they record? And, of course, what did they look like?

Pictures of Robert Hicks have been around for some time – especially notable is the promotional picture of Bob with his guitar standing by a pile of meat in his barbecue cook’s costume.

Bob’s brother Charley Hicks, however, was only a name and a voice in the 1960s, and fellow Atlantans Roger and George were intrigued by the possibility of finding out more about him. When George was in Chicago in 1963, he asked the bluesman Big Joe Williams (1903-1982) if he knew what had become of Charley Lincoln. George understood Joe to say that Charley Lincoln was in Carrollton, Georgia, and as soon as they were both in Atlanta, Roger and George  borrowed the Brown family’s ’61 Impala – cautiously removing the Goldwater for President bumper sticker placed there by Roger’s brother before entering black neighborhoods – and set out for Carrollton. Unfortunately, no one in Carrolton knew of Charley Hicks and the trail went cold.

It was a few years later that things picked back up. The Atlanta bluesman Buddy Moss (1914-1984) told Roger that Charley and Bob’s sister, Willie Mae Jackson, lived not far from him on Corley Avenue.  When Roger talked to Mrs. Jackson, he discovered that Charley Lincoln had died in the penitentiary at Cairo, Georgia, in 1963. Mrs. Jackson told Roger that Charley had been sent to prison in 1955 because he had murdered a stranger on the street after a Christmas Day argument; she also said that she had retained no picture of her black sheep brother. This was a disappointment, but from this information Roger hatched a new plan: if Charley had gone to prison, then maybe he could find his mug shot?

With this information in hand, Roger went to Atlanta’s police headquarters off Decatur Street and made his pitch to a detective about obtaining a copy of Charley’s mug shot. The detective, a gentlemanly sort of the old school, located Charley Hick’s file and laid it open on his desk. He shook his head and said, “He had a bad record.” Roger told the detective that he was interested in Hicks as a musician, and since Hicks was dead there should  be no harm in releasing the picture. The detective was reluctant, of course. Then Roger mentioned that he had interviewed Charley’s sister.

The detective asked, “What’s his sister’s name?”

Roger said, “Willie Mae Jackson.”

“Where does she live?”

“38 Corley Ave.”

The detective shrugged and and tossed the mug shot across his desk and told Roger not to spread it around. And that was how Laughing Charley Lincoln came to have a face:

(Based on a phone interview with Roger Brown, 12/10/2011)

Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide

This is the “Preface” to Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide, a book I have just published on Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing:

Blues Discovery is something of a forgotten project. I wrote this book about a dozen years ago as an extension of my old passion for the blues and the many wonderful hours I spent talking to my friend Roger Brown about his youthful discovery of blues and the bluesmen whose music he loved so much. I wrote Blues Discovery in my spare time when I was working in North Carolina and not long after I had completed an MA in Modern European Intellectual History at the University of Chicago. I had previously completed MAs in Humanities at the University of Minnesota and in Islamic History at Ohio State University, so I had some research and writing background on which to draw. Yet, when I took a job in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in 1999, the book got lost in the fray.

I lived in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and Cairo, Egypt, for twelve years. My children were born in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but I also traveled widely in Eastern and Western Europe and made trips to Turkey, Thailand, India, South Africa, Namibia and Bostwana. While we were overseas I also wrote and published a biography of  the British Museum Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge called Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Hardinge Simpole Publishers, 2011).

When I recently moved back to the States in the wake of Egypt’s Revolution and began to think about new projects my wife reminded me of the fun I’d had interviewing Roger Brown, Ray Flerlage, Bob Koester and Samuel Charters about fifteen years before and suggested that I publish Blues Discovery independently. When I finally located the three and a half inch floppy disks (on which the text had been stored) amidst the loads of stuff we had left in storage in 1999, I wasn’t even certain that my laptop would be able to read the text, which had been written on Word 95.

After some tech-savvy assistance from a colleague at work, however, I was able to salvage most of what I had written. The bibliography and discography were gone so I had to rework what I could remember of the books I had consulted; I wasn’t able to track down the various old Yahoo, Biograph and Library of Congress records I’d consulted during the writing because I just don’t have time. Those who know the music will be able to identify which albums I was listening to, anyway.

And as for the cassettes on which I had recorded the interviews . . . I have no idea what’s become of them, unfortunately.

I’ve re-read Blues Discovery, of course, and I am aware that the history sections are now out of date, but the interviews, and the stories based on those interviews, are the core of the book. Those for whom blues is a more casual interest will find the historical sections useful as an orientation; those whose interests are more scholarly will recognize the limitations and, I hope, enjoy the primary material. This is not only a story about the blues, however, but also a series of stories about young Americans in an age of segregation and desegregation reaching across the social and political divide to the musicians whose music was so important to them.

Since speaking to the informants whose stories are the center of the book, some things have changed. Roger Brown has retired from teaching German at the University of New Hampshire. Ray Flerlage, whom I enjoyed meeting so much, died in 2002 at the age of 87. Fred Mendelsohn died in 2000. Samuel Charters continues to write about jazz and blues. And as far as I know, Bob Koester is still running Delmark Records and Jazz Record Mart – and I can see him happily pricing the used records now . . .