Raleigh News & Observer
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2001

By DAVID MENCONI, Staff Writer

DURHAM - The honor was overdue. Seven decades overdue, if you go back to the time when Durham was a prime spot for the blues. But last weekend, the men who put Durham on the map long before the Blue Devils or Durham Bulls finally did get their due.

"Blind Gary Davis, guitar and banjo ... John Henry Garner, guitar ... Jesse Pratt, piano ... Washboard Sam, washboard ... William Trice, guitar ..."

A roll call of names famous and obscure was read as Chuck Davis' African American Dance Ensemble vamped. Algia Mae Hinton picked her guitar, the Gospel Jubilators conjured their vocal magic -- and a historic marker designating the "Bull City Blues" became a properly dedicated monument at the corner of Fayetteville and Simmons streets.

A marker might not seem like all that much. But it's a physical presence that Durham blues has lacked for decades. It's also the latest sign that Durham's historic Hayti district may reclaim its blues legacy -- that Blind Boy Fuller and the Rev. Gary Davis may again be names as familiar in their hometown as they are now in Europe and Australia.

It's high time. Glenn Hinson, chairman of the folklore curriculum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recounts a recent conversation he had with someone from Durham's Historic Preservation Society about the walking tours the organization is planning. When Hinson asked whether the tour would acknowledge the city's blues past, he got a tediously familiar response.

"He knew absolutely nothing about blues in the city," Hinson says. "He thought, no surprise, that it was all in Mississippi. There's a sense of surprise when folks hear about the rich legacy of Durham. 'What rich legacy?' they'll ask. I'll tell them about Blind Boy Fuller or Reverend Gary Davis. And then it's, 'Who are they?' I get this all the time."

In a way, it's not hard to understand how and why this happened. Durham's prime period as a blues center was 70 years ago, and it was an almost underground phenomenon -- primarily played and listened to by working-class African-Americans in tobacco warehouses or on the street. Almost none of the physical structures where it happened are still standing.

The social structure is very different, too. In black communities, blues was once the musical cutting edge. Today, the music is seen as a relic of segregation. The audience for blues is growing older and whiter, and few young African-Americans seem to listen to it anymore.

"When it comes to blues, a lot of the younger folks go, 'That was back then!' " says Marc Lee, who hosts radio station WNCU's "Blue Monday" show. "They don't want to acknowledge the relevance and importance of the blues to what they're listening to now."

Despite the obstacles, plenty of people and organizations are doing their best to preserve and acknowledge the blues in Durham. The Hayti Heritage Center still beats the drum with its annual Bull Durham Blues Festival. The 15th edition starts this week, and this year's program includes a panel discussion on "The State of the Blues"; a screening of the movie "Deep Blues"; an acoustic program of Piedmont blues players including Etta Baker and George Higgs; and a photo exhibition.

Besides the festival, blues acts have a new place to perform: Hayti's newly refurbished St. Joseph's Performance Hall. And a few miles away in Brightleaf Square, Yancey's Jazz & Blues Cafe is scheduled to open sometime this fall.

The state marker dedication follows the unveiling of a city marker honoring Blind Boy Fuller back in June. Last weekend's Bull City Blues marker festivities took place on Simmons Street, next to the S.L. Warren Library. Durham's best-known surviving bluesman, John Dee Holeman, couldn't make it because he was recovering from a stroke suffered earlier in the week. So Algia Mae Hinton filled in with a few songs in the time-honored Piedmont blues style, including "When You Kill the Chicken Save Me the Head" and the standard "Step It Up and Go."

Fuller's presence was keenly felt. Darrell Stover, Hayti's programs director, read a poem he wrote in the bluesman's honor, a rhythmic verse called "Stepped It Up and Gone On": "Spiderman on the strings, Lookin' like my grandaddy up from the Carolinas, Fulton him mack daddy, slick dapper dan genius ... Hayti Hayti, handed down."

And perhaps the most notable person in attendance was Howard Allen, son of Blind Boy Fuller (real name Fulton Allen). Allen was just 4 when his father died in 1941, but he says he remembers him.

"He was a nice guy," Allen said. "Not hard to get along with, until I did something I shouldn't have."

And what would Blind Boy Fuller think of getting an official marker after all these years?

"Oh, he'd be grateful, glad and overjoyed," Allen replied, giggling a bit.

Black and white together

The blues are mostly associated with places like Chicago, Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. But from the 1920s through World War II, Durham was among the most important blues cities in America.

Durham was a thriving center for acoustic Piedmont blues, a rhythmic, almost clattery style of fingerpicking with similarities in structure, tempo and feel to ragtime and bluegrass. Along with Fuller, the most important Durham blues musicians were Rev. Gary Davis (then known as Blind Gary Davis) and Sonny Terry.

"If you called yourself 'playing the blues,' then you had to come to Durham because that's where the music really was," bluesman Peg Leg Sam (Sam Jackson) said at the time.

There were good economic reasons for Durham's prominence: the tobacco warehouses downtown. Farmers would bring in their crops to sell during the harvesting season, and walk away with money to spend. So bootleggers and blues musicians set up shop around the warehouses to tempt the farmers into spending some of their tobacco money.

These warehouses were one of the few places in the Jim Crow South where white musicians could regularly hear and interact with black musicians. One white musician paying very close attention back then was Sam Pridgen, "Starvin' Sam," who played with swing bands in the late 1930s and '40s.

"Starvin' Sam used to talk about going to the warehouses, where he said he 'followed Blind Gary like a puppy dog,' " Hinson says. "He sought Gary Davis out so he could watch the chords he made, which he retranslated into his playing with swing-influenced string bands. And he became one of the local masters of jazz chording. Ask him where that came from and he quickly attributed it to Blind Gary: 'I never knew anyone who could make chords like Gary could.' So that was translated across racial as well as musical lines."

Years later, after Gary Davis had left Durham for New York City, he was "rediscovered" during the 1950s folk revival. Until his death in 1972, Davis became a mentor to numerous white rock musicians who sought him out for guitar lessons, including Ry Cooder, David Bromberg and Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen.

Back in Durham, the other places where you heard blues during the city's golden blues age was on street corners and at house parties. That presents a major challenge in preserving the music's history, the lack of buildings you can point to today as places where it happened. Much of Durham's old Hayti district was torn down in urban renewal projects and to make way for the Durham Freeway in the late 1960s.

Given that, the location of the Bull City Blues state historical marker is quite fitting. It stands right outside S.L. Warren Library -- and across the street from what used to be a barbecue joint where Davis, Fuller and other blues players used to busk on weekends.

Except it wasn't really even a "joint." It was an empty space where a guy would set up a canopy to sell barbecue to factory workers getting off their shifts. The lot (where Simmons Street dead-ends into Fayetteville) is now occupied by a parking lot and two houses, one of which holds a clothing boutique.

"Blues was very much part of the community, just not in any sort of 'showcase' venue," says Hayti's Stover. "Musicians would play at the tobacco warehouses or rent parties in the '30s and '40s. Not in clubs or bars or even juke joints; more like on a porch at a fish fry. You didn't have to seek blues out back then, it was just something that was there. And as went the community, so went the music."

"A tradition of survival"

Another obstacle in preserving and acknowledging blues history in African-American neighborhoods is the audience for the music. Go to most blues concerts, and there will probably be far more middle-age whites than young blacks in attendance. At last weekend's Bull City Blues marker dedication, the youngest musical performer was white -- 17-year-old Daniel Ballinger, who played a song with the 72-year-old Hinton.

"I wouldn't dispute that perception," Stover says when asked whether whites are more interested in blues.

One could ask why it's important that young blacks listen to blues. After all, you never hear anyone insisting that young whites need to listen to old-time folk music or bluegrass. Stover says the reasons go beyond matters of style and taste.

"Understand that blues is itself part of the community, something people grew up with," Stover explains. "The music and what it represents is tied to the oral tradition, and to a tradition of survival. For 400 years, our culture was bred, beaten and bought out of us.

"Blues needs to be valid music to the eyes and ears of young people. It's part of this whole notion of self-esteem, identity, cultural heritage. And it's roots music -- a forerunner to rap, which is also very much part of this oral storytelling tradition."

Given the cycles of popular taste, it's inevitable that there would be resistance to blues from succeeding generations. Hinson points out that when the music began to fade in the black community in the 1950s and '60s, young people came to view blues in the same way that blues people had viewed the music that came before it.

"Blind Boy Fuller actively rejected reels as something 'old folks' listened to," Hinson says. "The same thing happened to the blues. The generation playing and listening to it got older, and it became cast in the world of stereotype as 'old-time Jim Crow music.' Just like bluesmen used to call reels 'old-time slavery music.' "

In all probability, something similar will eventually happen to hip-hop. And blues does have more parallels than you'd think to hip-hop -- similar groundings in the oral storytelling tradition, and similar mythologies. Hinson cites Blind Boy Fuller as a prime example.

"Here's a blind man who couldn't get work because there was precious little work for African-American men in the Jim Crow South, let alone disabled ones," Hinson says. "And he transcends his circumstances to find a national audience with his music. That's a story worth hearing, and it's so much the dream of today's hip-hop artists, too. They look out there and say, 'All these people who are stars now, where'd they start out? In the projects like us.' From social conditions that say 'no future,' they made one."

The Hayti Heritage Center is doing what it can to reconnect younger generations of African-Americans with their blues heritage. This summer, the center sponsored a blues camp. More than 30 kids attended, from ages 6 to 15. They learned how to play, sing and dance to the blues, and even make instruments.

"The coolest thing I learned was resourceful thinking in making blues instruments," says Lamar Lewis, 11. "Like you can make a washtub into a bass that's used for blues. Hubcaps, you can use those, too."

The camp also included history lessons about the origins of the music.

"We learned about slavery, how the blues started from spirituals during slavery," Lamar says. "And we visited a slave plantation. That was really powerful."

Of course, Lamar still likes Destiny's Child, Usher and R. Kelly. But he came out of the camp also liking Fuller and blues singer Koko Taylor.

Lamar's mother, Toya Chinfloo, taught the dance portion of the blues camp program, and she reports that it went well. All the instructors had to do was show the kids the connection between blues and today's hip-hop and R&B.

"Surprisingly, it wasn't that difficult to get everybody interested," Chinfloo says. "Once we showed them the way the bass lines worked and how everything is connected to the blues -- even hip-hop and the other music they enjoy today -- they really got into it. The culminating event was a musical, and their parents were surprised and delighted to see how much their kids had absorbed and enjoyed. They all knew Koko Taylor's music by heart, played washtub bass, washboard. They were not just mimicking but enjoying.

"My son still plays his harmonica," Chinfloo concludes. "So it didn't just leave his mind afterward."

Staff writer David Menconi can be reached at 829-4759 or dmenconi@newsobserver.com
© Copyright 2001, The News & Observer