Bukka White - Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues
The first half of the 1960s saw a spectacular rebirth of rediscovered country bluesmen previously only known to serious collectors through the faded labels gracing their prized pre-war 78s. Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Skip James, Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon, Rev. Robert Wilkins, and Son House were treated like conquering heroes by the folk-blues community as they reappeared one after another, as though emerging from a blues version of Field of Dreams. Their previously unrecorded peers Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Robert Pete Williams received the same sort of adoration from their newly acquired demographic.
For sheer gruff vocal intensity and a percussive, slide-laced guitar attack, few of them could beat Bukka White. His 1963 rediscovery was the stuff of which legends were made. John Fahey and Ed Denson, two young students at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote a fan letter to the long-lost guitarist, simply addressing it to “Bukka White, Old Blues Singer, c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi.” Thanks to one of White’s relatives that worked in Aberdeen’s post office, their hopeful missive was forwarded to White in his adopted hometown of Memphis.
A month or so later, White answered that he was interested in recording again, so the young duo immediately journeyed to Memphis and recorded Bukka’s debut album on portable equipment in his rooming house. They subsequently issued the 10 songs they captured on tape that day, along with Bukka’s spoken “Remembrance Of Charley Patton,” on their Takoma label under the title of Mississippi Blues Vol. 1.
An extremely innovative solo acoustic guitarist in his own right later credited with inventing the musical sub-genre American Primitive Guitar, Fahey wasn’t altogether a novice in the recording business. He’d launched Takoma (named after his hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland) in 1959 by pressing 100 copies of his debut LP, Blind Joe Death (issued in plain white jackets with his own name stamped on one side and the pseudonymous Death’s on the other). His methods of promotion were highly unorthodox. Fahey went so far as sneaking copies of his mysterious debut LP into the bins at nearby thrift stores and record emporiums.
No such legerdemain was necessary with Bukka’s album, however. It blew the doors open wide to a comeback campaign that was far too long in taking shape. Born Booker T. Washington White (after the great African American educator and author, a hero to countless blacks at the turn of the century) on a farm outside of Houston, Mississippi on November 12, 1906, White learned his way around a guitar at age nine from his father, railroad worker John White, and he took up piano a couple of years later. Naturally, young Booker sang with his family in church (his grandfather, Punk Davisson, was a preacher). At 14, he went to live with an uncle in Grenada, Miss.
Even as a youth, White was a rambler. He made it all the way up to St. Louis in his teens and played for a bit there before returning to Clarksdale. His uncle didn’t approve of Bukka’s blues-playing ways one bit; the old man smashed his guitar at one point to show his disdain. Nonetheless, White gamely stuck with his musical activities. He met and heard the great Mississippi bluesman Charley Patton (the legendary entertainer gave the lad a spoonful of whiskey) and decided to follow in his footsteps.
Bukka’s first break came in May of 1930, when local talent scout Ralph Lembo picked him up by the railroad tracks in Swan Lake, Miss. and brought him to Memphis to record for Victor. White wasn’t the only newcomer riding in Lembo’s car that day; his eager discoveries also included blues singer/guitarist Napoleon Hairston as well as a preacher and a couple of white artists.
White and Hairston recorded extensively as a duo under Lembo’s supervision on May 26, mostly concentrating on blues (Hairston’s lone Victor release with Bukka coupled “The New ‘Frisco Train” and “The Panama Limited”). But they also waxed four sacred titles. Two of them, “The Promise True And Grand” and “I Am In The Heavenly Way,” were the only sides Victor chose to release on Bukka under the name of Washington White. It would be seven long years before White got another chance to enter a recording studio.
Bukka returned to farming, marrying and moving to West Point, Miss. He played for a time with his wife’s uncle, bluesman George “Bullet” Williams, before relocating again to Aberdeen. He was a rambling man in the truest sense, riding the rails far and wide and pursuing some athletic avenues as well. The well-built White reportedly pitched for the Birmingham Black Cats in the Negro Leagues and boxed in Chicago.
Trouble subsequently found him outside Aberdeen in 1937 in a hamlet called Prairie. A jealous boyfriend of one of Bukka’s many lady friends stirred up some of the local roughnecks, and White happened to be packing a .38 Colt automatic. He shot one of the threatening thugs in the leg, apparently in self-defense, but a judge didn’t see it that way. He sentenced Bukka to two years at Parchman Farm, also known as Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Just before he began serving his sentence (legend has it he was out on bond), Bukka traveled up to Chicago in 1937 at the invitation of prolific A&R man Lester Melrose, who had the entire town sewn up when it came to recording blues (his legion of artists included Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Big Bill Broonzy). Bukka only cut two songs for Vocalion that September 2, just enough for his first blues 78 under the handle of Bukka White. “Pinebluff Arkansas” was coupled with the insistent “Shake ‘Em On Down,” the latter becoming a hit for the incarcerated bluesman and enduring as a signature song for him in decades to come.
Often described as a brutal, oppressive penal institution, Parchman Farm was comparatively easy on White, leaving him plenty of time to play his guitar and sing the blues. Musicologist Alan Lomax was able to gain entry on May 23, 1939 and record two songs by Bukka on his portable disc recorder for the Library of Congress, “Sic ‘Em Dogs On” and “Po’ Boy” (Lomax labeled him “Washington [Barrelhouse] White”).
Once he was done with his prison sentence and out on the streets once more, White headed back to Chicago in 1940 for another round of recording under Melrose’s supervision. But the material that he brought along with him was judged too derivative and altogether less than acceptable by Melrose, who gave him a meal ticket, a hotel room, and a deadline of just two days to come up with something considerably better if he wanted to record.
White responded by writing no less than a dozen fresh gems that he laid down over two days (March 7 and 8) for Vocalion and OKeh, with only his own guitar and Washboard Sam for accompaniment. Among those classics were the autobiographical “Parchman Farm Blues,” “When Can I Change My Clothes,” and “Aberdeen Mississippi Blues;” a topical “District Attorney Blues;” the rail-riding odes “Special Streamline” and “Black Train Blues;” a high-stepping “Bukka’s Jitterbug Swing,” and the deeply moving “High Fever Blues” and “Fixin’ To Die Blues,” the latter memorably revived by Bob Dylan on his 1962 debut album for Columbia. Old Lester got so excited by what he’d heard that day that he kissed Bukka right on the mouth!
Unfortunately, the country’s focus was shifting away from rural blues as the decade turned and its citizens prepared for World War II. Bukka did his patriotic part, serving in the Navy from 1942 to ‘44. He settled in Memphis when his Naval hitch was up, toiling as a laborer while occasionally moonlighting in local juke joints. When young Riley B. King hightailed it up to Memphis from Mississippi in the wake of a tractor accident in 1945, the first man he looked for was his older, far more experienced cousin Bukka. White got the future B.B. King a job where he worked at the Newberry Equipment Company, gave him somewhere to lay his head, and acted as a mentor to the budding young musician during his first stay in the Bluff City. King never was able to copy Bukka’s slashing slide style, so he emulated it as best he could with his ringing trills instead and invented his own singular approach to the guitar.
There was another brush with the law for Bukka in 1952, when he found himself an inmate at the Shelby County Penal Farm. Memphis remained his primary stomping grounds otherwise, a rented room serving as his homebase unless he was off rambling somewhere with his guitar his primary companion. That’s where Fahey and Denson recorded him that auspicious day in 1963, White revisiting some of his old classics (“Aberdeen Mississippi Blues,” “I Am In The Heavenly Way,” “Parchman Farm Blues,” “Shake ‘Em On Down,” and “Poor Boy Long Way From Home,” which was “Po’ Boy” from the Lomax session at Parchman Farm) and unveiling a handful of additional titles, including his rendition of Big Joe Williams’ “Baby Please Don’t Go.” For “Drunk Man Blues,” Bukka switched over to piano.
Mississippi Blues Vol. 1 officially marked the beginning of Bukka’s second musical career. Takoma didn’t have an exclusive on his services; before the end of 1963, he was in Berkeley recording for Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label. Takoma released a White single cut in 1964 pairing “World Boogie” and “Midnight Blue” with Jimmy Rainey his drummer that was also waxed in Berkeley (“Old Man Walking Blues” stems from that session as well).
Once the world was aware of his presence, “Big Daddy,” as White was known to his many friends, hit the touring circuit. He starred at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles in 1963, a folk concert at the University of California the following year, and another gala folk presentation at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall in ‘65. Canada’s CBC-TV presented him performing in 1966 when he was in Toronto, the same year White appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and cut four songs live for Verve/Folkways at the Café Au Go Go in Manhattan.
Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau booked Bukka as one of the stars of the 1967 edition of the American Folk Blues Festival, which barnstormed prestigious concert halls all over Europe, and they brought him back again in 1970. The University of Chicago Folk Festival welcomed White to its stage in 1968. He was a regular attraction at the annual Memphis Blues Festival from 1966 to 1969.
There were a few more recording opportunities for White during the next decade, notably 1974’s Big Daddy on Biograph. The following year, a White concert that had been recorded in the auditorium of the OPD (Oberpostdirektion) in Bremen, Germany on March 11, 1975 was subsequently released on vinyl by the German Sparkasse imprint as Sparkasse in Concert: Country Blues. That live album is reprised on the second disc of this collection. White performed a few of his old favorites over the course of his set in Bremen—“New Orleans Streamline” and “Poor Boy” among them—and unleashed a few surprises as well, even delving into the postwar warhorse “Every Day I Have The Blues.” He was still in fine voice and wicked as ever on his guitar at age 68.
It wasn’t long after that impressive concert that ill health forced the eternally dapper Big Daddy to bring his cantankerous touring days to a close. Cancer killed White on February 26, 1977 in Memphis, but his mighty influence can be heard in the more recent music of Jeff Buckley and the North Mississippi Allstars, to name but two. This compilation brings together a lot of his best latter-day work, which might never have happened without the competency of the United States Postal Service and the efforts of two young blues fans that recognized brilliance when they heard it and did all they could to bring a lost blues master back into the spotlight.
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King, by B.B. King with David Ritz (New York: Avon Books, 1996)
Blues Who’s Who, by Sheldon Harris (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991)
Blues & Gospel Records 1902-1943, by Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich (Essex, England: Storyville Pubs., 1982)
Blues Records 1943-1970, Volume Two L to Z, by Mike Leadbitter, Leslie Fancourt and Paul Pelletier (London: Record Information Services, 1994)
Discogs website: https://www.discogs.com/artist/150530-Bukka-White
The Legacy of the Blues, by Samuel Charters (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977)