Episode 1 The Foundation of My Blues Education

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Episode 1 of Brown Shoes Blues describes my background of growing up in McComb, Mississippi.  I discuss many events and people who were instrumental in laying the foundation of my 60+ years of writing, playing, recording, touring, and performing the blues.

The titles of my releases the songs are taken from in this episode include Too Raw for Radio, Muddy Springs Road, and Big Delta on my label Big Guitar Music.

 The musicians featured in the tracks on this episode are Bruce Jones, Gary Primich, Gerry “Phareaux” Felton, Grady “Fats” Jackson, George Rains, Mark Hallman, Nico Leophonte, Richie Price, Roscoe Beck, Terry Bozzio, and Wes Starr.  I am on vocals and guitar.

 Omar’s Picks for Episode One: read my book The Life and Times of a Poor and Almost Famous Blues Man,available on Amazon and at Antones Record Shop in Austin, Texas.

Visit my website for more info  www.omarandthehowlers.com 

 Thank you to Matthew Garza (Upwork.com) for his work mastering this podcast.

Transcript

EPISODE 1 FOUNDATION OF MY BLUES EDUCATION

Omar Dykes: Welcome to Brown Shoes Blues. Thank you for tuning in. 

My foundation in the blues and my education in it involved where I was born, It involved my parents supporting me, which they really did, my curiosity and love of music, other artists and musicians that I crossed paths with and played with, my travels were a big deal because I wound up traveling until I retired. I guess I'm retired, I'm not sure. 

I was born in Magnolia, Mississippi in 1950. We moved to McComb until I got up grown and left, but McComb, Mississippi is also the home of Bo Diddley, one of my big heroes. And at the time I was growing up, I didn't know that Bo Diddley was from there. I got to be a fan of his before I knew he was actually from there. One time we went to look for him, and I found his aunt. His aunt's name was Miss Gussie. They call her Miss Gussie McDaniel, and we found her house. She said, " What do you boys want with Bo? He's been gone from here." He moved to Chicago and Washington DC. I think he was living in Florida by then, but we didn't know.

I grew up in the South. It was a racial powder keg at the time. The deep South was, and I was really too young to understand that was going on, which I think is a good thing that I didn't know. We're going to talk more about that in just a little bit.

Right now, I want to play a song from my release Too Raw for Radio. This is called You Can't Judge a Book by its Cover.

All right, that was written by Willie Dixon and one of Bo Diddley's biggest hits. One of my favorite songs. That's why we included it on this.

 I love to talk about Chrystine and Henry. I had great parents. McComb was a wonderful town to grow up in. My mother was a seamstress. She sewed all day long. She made the most beautiful gowns and dresses for people. They would come to the house and tell her what they wanted.

She would sew, and when she was sewing, she always listened to mostly records, but sometimes the radio. She loved all kind of music. She loved classical music, blues, rock and roll, country music. I listened to it all through her. Jimmie Rodgers, The Singing Brakeman, was my first exposure to country blues. She listened to him, Hank Williams, Fats Domino Roy Acuff.

When I got up a little older, she listened to my Otis Redding record. She loved Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay. She listened to my Beatles record and my Animals record. I had a record called the Best of the Animals and it had a Sam Cooke song on it called Bring it on Home to Me. She would play that song over and over. She had it by Sam Cooke too, but she liked the Animals version of it, so whoop there went that album. Once she borrowed them and liked them, they had become part of her collection, which was all right with me. I loved my mama. 

When I was still very young, we decided we'd try to write a song. My first song that I ever wrote I wrote with my mom. The Day I Lost My Mind was a pretty good little country song. I'm still gonna try to record it someday. That was a little bit about my mama.

I got to talk about Henry, my dad, Henry was somebody you didn't fool with. He was a big old man. He was a mechanic and a carpenter. He was a mechanic by trade, but he would come home after work and pick me up. We'd go some places and work we'd tear down houses and I would clean bricks and cement blocks.

I had to work. It wasn't negotiable It wasn't, " Would you like to clean bricks today, son? Nah, it's, "See them bricks over there? They need to be cleaned." And that meant me, which was alright, it was good for me to work that hard. He loved music a lot. He especially loved the blues. A lot of his friends were mechanics all over McComb and some of them played blues, and it rubbed off on him. 

My parents gave me my first guitar when I was seven years old, and I didn't want anything to do with it. I was into playing ball and I was not into music yet. It hadn't hit me. I was lucky cause he bought me a Gibson guitar and a Gibson amp. I started off with a good outfit and didn't even know it. I picked it up maybe three times and rapped on it and then put it down. I just wasn't interested. So, he sold that guitar, which I always regretted. I always wanted that guitar back, but, too late gone with the wind. 

 He'd go pick up my mom's prescriptions at Causey Sanders Drugstore, and they had a record rack in there. Every time Dad would go in there to get my mom's prescriptions, he would buy me a record. He brought me Jerry Lee Lewis The Greatest Show on Earth, a live album. Love that record. A little later on, he brought me The Best of John Lee Hooker. That was on Vee Jay Records. A little later after that, he brought me a More of the Best of Jimmy Reed, and that was on Vee Jay Records, too. And that's where I got my song that was on my record called Down in Mississippi. That was brewing my whole childhood and life before I recorded it. 

My dad was still pushing music on me, and I was starting to get into it. I started asking for another guitar at about 11. I said, " I want a guitar."

 My parents both said, " You had a guitar. You wouldn't even touch it."

 For Christmas, they gave me a acoustic guitar. I was 12 years old. They gave me a guitar, and I never put it down from then on. I played the guitar or tried to, and my dad was just ecstatic because he always wanted to play music. He took me to his friend's houses to jam. Some of them played blues, some of them played country, but all bands shared repertoires back then.

I was in teen bands that played some of the same songs as country bands, as blues bands. Everybody played that old song, Haunted House. I just moved in my new house today. Everybody played that. I played surf music because of my junior high friends, I guess we rocked a little bit, and also played blues because I was fooling with that.

 Maybe in 10th or 11th grade, my dad built me a PA system. He built me a light show. He took an old fan and made a strobe light out of it. I don't think my parents particularly thought I would play music for a living. It wasn't that far advanced yet, but they were supportive of it as long as it was my true hobby. That's how it started.

 When I was 10 years old in 1960, my mom let me go downtown after school because they were having a parade for the governor who had just won, Ross Barnett. He was going to be in a parade with his wife. They were sitting on back of Cadillacs, convertibles, waving at everybody. I heard my high school band come by playing Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends or something like that. I was laughing but I heard a beat coming from down the street. The high schools were segregated back then. The drumbeat I heard was from the all black Burglund High School band and just wonderful. I said, "What is that?" I didn't know it was the Bo Diddley beat. I hadn't discovered Bo yet. This is an example for the Bo Diddley beat. My friend, Nico Leophonte, he's playing this beat so you can kind of hear what I heard.

When I listened to that, I said, "I want to play that, but I want to play it on the guitar," I couldn't play it on the guitar cause I didn't have a guitar yet. I had yet to get that guitar for Christmas. Here's an example of Bo Diddley beat on guitar from a song I wrote called Hoo Doo Ball on my release from Muddy Springs Road.

That was the Bo Diddley beat on the guitar.

We went to a funeral in Tyler Town, Mississippi, which was about 30 miles away from McComb I was antsy at the funeral home, twitching like a young person does. Daddy's cousin's wife came and she said, " Why don't you let that boy go with Douglas? Douglas was a senior in high school and he had a band called the Countdowns. His mother said, " Take Kent with you, and let him listen to your band."

So I went with my cousin, and my cousin played drums. He had a red set of sparkle drums. I'm surprised I didn't want to switch to drums, but I hung with the guitar. I listened to them practice and that made me want to be in a band. 

 I got that guitar when I was 12. We talked about that. I got it for Christmas, and it was just an acoustic guitar, not electric. My friend Dan Tyler that I went to junior high with in the eighth grade, I brought a mic from him. He sold me a mic for five bucks. Another one of my friends had a pickup for an acoustic guitar, and he wanted five dollars. I bought a five-dollar pickup and put it on my guitar. My dad had found a half of a mic stand and it was out in his tool shed. I got that half of a mic stand and I took a broom handle and carved threads in it so the mic would fit on it. Then I shoved it down in the mic stand and there I was. I had a pickup on my guitar. I had a mic. I'd made me a mic stand, and my Sunday school teacher, Mr. Robinson had a portable PA for events at his store. He let me use the PA. I was in business. Yep, I've got it all. I've got a guitar with a pickup on it. I got a microphone. I got a microphone stand. Off to the races.

After I got the guitar for Christmas, I fooled with it, but I went to Gibson's Discount Center which was a variety store that sold everything. They had an electronics department with radios and TVs, and they sold a few discount versions of electric guitars with discount amps. When there was nobody there, he would pick up the guitar and try to drum up some business. I watched him play Memphis. Johnny Rivers had a hit with Memphis, Tennessee. I memorized where he placed his fingers. That's how bad I wanted to play. I went home and put my fingers where he put his and it wasn't just right, but I could tell I was forming the song, and I was real happy about that, I could memorize where he put his fingers. 

I started sneaking out of my parents’ house. My bedroom was the front bedroom of big giant wood frame house, and I had my own door. I started sneaking out and going a good many blocks, but not too bad. I would walk and go across highway 98 and go into Beartown and listen to blues and the black blues joints. I didn't really know what blues was. I just knew they had electric guitars and were singing loud, so I loved it. Some of those guys took a liking to me and started teaching me how to play authentic blues. 

One of them was Wakefield Coney. He showed me a lot. My dad had taken me to Wakefield's house and dropped me off because Wakefield tried to show me some stuff. 

Sonny Boy Williamson, the harp player that I'll talk about all of my career in different forms. I never heard anybody over in Beartown call Sonny "Sonny Boy Williamson". Everybody said Sonny Boy Williams. So, I thought it was Sonny Boy Williams. Then I found out you got to put a S. O. N. on there to find his record. Sonny Boy had gone to England. They had got the Yardbirds to play his tour with him in England. And he said, "They wanted to play the blues so bad, and that's just what they did. They played the blues so bad." He said this, and this applied to my early playing. He was talking about the Yardbirds, but see Sonny Boy recognized that they had talent, and he appreciated their enthusiasm. That is exactly where I was hanging out in Beartown with all the blues players. I wasn't any good. They didn't need me, but they laughed, and they appreciated my enthusiasm. And I hung with it. I said, "I might not play nothing now, but one day I'll be able to." I think they knew that was true. They put up with a lot from me, and what an education it was for me. 

This is another song I wrote. This is from Too Raw for Radio, and it's called Angel Child. 

I played at a used car sale in Crystal Springs, Mississippi. You're not supposed to drive from McComb to Crystal Springs when you're 14, but nobody had written that in the rule book yet. I went to Crystal Springs and played at a car sale. The guy hired me. I was supposed to play by myself and then Houston Stackhouse and I believe Joe Willie Wilkins, who I later knew all about, but it took years for me to know, they were supposed to play blues. I was doing like Hank Williams songs and singing real loud with just my guitar and me through the little PA. Then they were supposed to play, but the guy said, " Y'all mind if the kid here sits in with you? Anyway, I made those guys play Walk Don't Run. They were playing blues and stuff, and I got up and thought, 'let me show y'all something!' . It's a good thing they got me, because I got it covered. I didn't know nothing, but, it was several years longer before I figured out I didn't know anything. I thought that they needed me. I didn't know that these were great blues masters of their own until way later. What a treat to get to play with those guys. When I make them play Walk Don't Run by the Ventures Surf Music, you know, Do do do do do do do do do, and they laughed. They went right along with it. 

 Growing up in McComb, that's all I had because I'd never been anywhere else. I didn't have anything to compare it to. I loved McComb. Many historical facts and events from the 50s and 60s had a huge influence on my career. The Civil Rights Movement was huge in McComb because I didn't know that it was a Civil Rights Center because the ShopRite Grocery was the place they signed up black people to vote. One time we were at the ShopRite, and my dad said, “That's Joan Baez." Joan Baez of Bob Dylan fame. She was there in town to sign up people to vote. Rose and G. T. Vacarilla, brother and sister, owned the ShopRite, and they used the ShopRite as a place to sign up voters. I didn't understand all of it at the time, but things were starting to get bad in McComb. I heard a church blow up one night.

The guys that I was playing with at the time said, " You can't come over here anymore because we can't watch out after you." They knew my daddy was a mechanic. Wakefield Coney, the guy who had taught me stuff said, "Does your daddy know you over here?" I said , "No, he don't know I'm over here. He'd tear my behind up if he knew I'd snuck out and was playing music." I had to quit going over, and it broke my heart because I was having so much fun playing with those guys.

McComb was founded in 1872 When Henry Simpson McComb who worked with the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad moved the maintenance and repair yards of the Illinois Central out of New Orleans to McComb. The Illinois Central Railroad, the Main Line in Mid America is very important to blues. A lot of people call McComb 'Little Chicago' because the black residents would leave and go to Memphis and St. Louis, and a lot of times up to Chicago. They'd leave town with an acoustic guitar, and then they would come back three years later with an electric guitar playing Chicago style blues, which really influenced me. 

From 1910 until the 70s, they say about 6 million black people moved from the south to northern and western states to escape discrimination and to look for work. It was called the Great Migration. It was the largest movement of people in American history. The Great Migration is so important because blues artists left Mississippi on the Illinois Central Railroad moving to New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago. 

I even wrote a song about a railroad station. It's called Down to the Station. We're fixin' to play it.

That was Down to the Station on Too Raw for Radio. 

The Chitlin' Circuit was definitely happening. It was a route of safe venues where black performers could work and play their music. Even comedians would be on the Chitlin' Circuit. Redd Foxx doing stand-up comedy, musicians of all kind, especially blues. The route went right through McComb, one of the places I hung out. They let me hang out on the porch at a place called Brock's Mocombo, on Summit Street in Burglund Town. They wouldn't let me in, but why should they let me in? I was 14 years old. I didn't have any money. They let me stand up on the porch and it was still segregated. So. I didn't have any business going up in there, but they were nice and they let me hang out and listen to the music. I heard Little Milton for certain, and I think I either heard B. B. King or Bobby Bland. My friend Val Deer who's from McComb, I'm older than him. By the time he came up, and was frequenting places and trying to find the blues, they would let him in. So, he would get to go in and hear the stuff. At the time I went, that wasn't happening.

The only club I ever played on Summit Street in Burglund Town was the Blue Flame Cafe one time with Wakefield Coney. The other time I played was in front of Stringer's Grocery Store. Mr. Stringer hired me and my band, the Throw and Go Band, I called it back then. He hired us to play out in front of the grocery. There actually is a Mississippi Blues Trail marker on Summit Street. It has my name on it, with Wakefield Coney and lots of other people who were famous in McComb at different times. I'm proud to be in company. I never dreamed I'd receive such a great honor. Thank you.

 My first band was at 14. Later on, we called it the Throw and Go Band. We never had a name when we were actually playing. Sleepy, we thought he was an elderly African American man, played drums. He might not have been but 35 years old. We didn't know. When you're 14, everybody seems like they're ancient. We had another guy, Rusty that played the bass. The only reason I think he was in the band is he had a bass.

We played at a place called the Courts of Lulu, which had been a motel that charged by the hour, and a kind of a juke joint. Motel part of it shut down and they turned it into a laundromat. By the time I played there, it was the laundromat. They had a guy selling beer there. They had another guy selling turkey legs, and then Lulu ran it. She would come in and put ten dollars in the tip jar to get everybody else started. Sometimes we'd make thirty or forty dollars if we were lucky.

I used to play the Bo Diddley beat. Just the chord. It'd go down, down, down, down, down, down. And I didn't know any lyrics. So, I just played it. Just the chord. No lead, no lyrics, nothing. All the ladies there who had on pink pedal pushers and gold and silver slippers would get the iron garden chairs. They would pull those right up in front of my microphone and do the hand jive where you rotate your hands. It scared me. I didn't know what was happening. Years later I found out about Johnny Otis and the hand jive. They were into it. They were laughing and having a ball, but they were so enthusiastic that it was scary to me.

Sleepy wanted a cymbal. He said, "I need a cymbal." He had some kind of little tiny cymbal he put on a stand on the bass drum. But I found a garbage can lid in my dad's tool shed once again, and I put rivets in it. I gave it to Sleepy and he found some kind of rod or something to mount it on. He just loved it. He played on that garbage can lid and you know what? I think it sounded pretty good. He had mirrors, broken mirrors glued to his drums. He had some reflectors on there. I had found some old saddlebags somebody had thrown them away. I found them in the trash, and it had all kind of reflectors on it, and jewels, fake jewels and stuff. I gave it to Sleepy. He was just ecstatic, just happy as he could be. The next time we played the Courts of Lulu, he had glued all those fake jewels and those reflectors on his drums. He already had reflectors in the mirrors, but he had them really fixed up. He would never let us touch his drums.

I was playing stuff off the radio like Louie Louie. I was playing Gloria. I played Gloria wrong. It goes da da da da da da da, and I went da da da da da da da. I played it backwards. I didn't know any difference, neither did they. I didn't have any clue what the words to Louie Louie were, so I just made my own up. That didn't matter either. I always tried to play whatever I thought people would like. I knew that Bo Diddley beat went over good. Just about everything we did went over pretty good. 

Too Raw for Radio was recorded in 1981 in Rome, Georgia at Midtown Music Store that was owned by Carlton 'Hot Rod' Crowder and Ray Myers. Carlton was the engineer. He had built that studio mostly to record local gospel bands. It was a very special studio because the sound board was an analog soundboard tube board from the legendary Muscle Shoals Studio B. Ampeg analog tubes produced a unique sound. I can tell you that.

Richie Price was playing harmonica, percussion, and alto and tenor sax. Bruce Jones was playing bass and on background vocals, and Wes Starr was playing drums and percussion. When Midtown closed, Wes bought the soundboard and sold it to Jimmy Buffett. 

We were having a ball recording Too Raw for Radio because we had Grady 'Fats" Jackson from Atlanta with us, playing saxophone tenor and alto. Sometimes he played both. He wasn't really in the band, but he was our guest on the record. We had met him with Robert Jr. Lockwood when we played in Atlanta. He was playing live dates with us, and then we went in the studio in Rome. Sometimes Grady would play the tenor and the alto sax at the same time. It was amazing to watch that.

We had played the Downtown Cafe with Fats a few times and we had like an eight-piece band because we had lots of guests. We had friends in Atlanta. Preston Hubbard, who wound up being in the Thunderbirds, was playing in a band called the Alleycats. He would come out and play acoustic bass. Bruce Jones, my bass player, would play electric bass. We had Richie and Fats on saxophones. We had a friend called Larry Dixon, who was a great singer and played chromatic harp and regular harmonica. We had a friend called Richard. He was a friend of Wes's. He played the trombone, and I was playing guitar and harmonica. We would raise the roof on that place playing. 

One of the songs we played back then on Too Raw for Radio was You Can't Sit Down. Here's You Can't Sit Down with Grady Fats Jackson.

That was Grady Fats Jackson playing our version of Can't Sit Down.

This release got its name because we had been rejected by large labels who said the music was 'too raw for radio'. So that became the title from then on, Too Raw for Radio. 

 We learned a lot more as we knew Fats over the years. He used to tell stories when he played with Little Walter. He played with Robert Jr. Lockwood, one of my favorite guitar players. He played with Elmore James. He played with Sonny Boy Williamson two Rice Miller. They all floated in and out of the same band and little Walter was a partier. He would always stay and drink after the gig. Robert Jr. Lockwood and Grady would leave in one car, and about daylight, they'd be going to wherever else they were playing next. Robert would say, "Here comes Little Walter." And Little Walter would go around them going a hundred miles an hour.

 Traveling is an education of its own. I went to every state in the union except I never played Hawaii. It wasn't just like I went to Chicago once or Detroit once. I went to those places over and over and over. Some of the places I played in the United States I only played there one time, but I traveled the United States extensively for pretty much 35 40 years. 

The original Howlers broke up, and I asked if I could keep the name. I kept the name and added Omar with it and became Omar and the Howlers. We pretty well had stuck around Austin and Texas. Once I formed Omar and the Howlers, we took off up and down the east coast. Mostly for several years, we played with the Nighthawks. Their manager's name was Tom Carrico. He took us under his wing, and we started playing the East Coast without stopping for two or three years. We branched out and went to the West Coast and played for a while. That led to going to the Midwest. So, we started playing everywhere in the United States. Wherever there was a job, we'd get to it and play it. 

In 1984, I got an offer from a record label in Helsinki, Finland named Polarvox. They wanted to know if we wanted to come to Finland to play a short tour. I went, "I think I do. I don't know where Finland is." I got out my atlas and looked and went, "Oh yeah, we studied that in junior high school." We went to Finland. It was like I might as well have landed a hovercraft down. It was so different, especially in 1984. Now it's very Americanized. There's a Gap jeans and McDonald's and Burger King and everything that we have.

 I wound up playing in 23 countries, a lot of times on 4, 6, 8-week tours. I did that for decades. I learned something everywhere I went from different experiences, cultures. One time we played in Italy at the Karl Marx Auditorium. That was like surrealistic. The bodyguards and bouncers of the club were all these women with shaved heads, and they weren't women that you thought you might want to fight. They looked like they could take you out in about two punches. They stood up in front of the stage with their arms crossed to make sure there was no trouble of any kind and there wasn't. 

I was backstage before the show, and I heard my friend Barrence Whitfield's voice. They had Barrence's new album and they were playing it loud and gaudy and crazy, and they were going nuts just to the records. Then we came out, we were opening up for the Fabulous Thunderbirds. We came out and played. They really liked us, and they loved the Thunderbirds, too. What an experience that was.

Then I was in Berlin. I played Berlin three times before the Wall came down. You'd go down the corridor and they'd stop you at Checkpoint Charlie they called it. One night we came through Checkpoint Charlie in the middle of the night. I was in my bunk in the bus. I was asleep. I felt somebody pushing on my back and I looked around. It was a big Russian man with a four-sided hat on. He said, "Passport," And just about scared me to death.

I got up in my underwear and gave him my passport. Everybody did. He said, "Photograph." He didn't want to take our picture. He wanted a picture of the band, so I figured that out and gave him a picture of the band. We were all standing up in the aisle in our underwear signing a photograph for the Russian guard. He was just as happy as he could be to have that photograph. I don't know why. He didn't know us from a sack of okra.

 We went into Berlin down the corridor and played before the East opened up, and a lot of my songs that night, I played at a club called the Latin Quarter, and it was quite popular in Berlin. I played East Side Blues, one of my songs. I played Wall of Pride, one of my songs, and I played Border Girl, one of my songs. People were coming up going, "I can't believe you play all the songs about us." And I was going, "What?" Songs that I had written and played, they all looked at it as me singing what they were living. About the fourth time we went back, the Wall had come down and as soon as the Wall came down they sent us over to all the places that opened up in Berlin.

Then I got booked at the Talon Blues Festival in Estonia. Estonia had just become free too, but nobody told the Russians that it was free yet. My friend, Jack, was there who always helped me out. He was from Estonia. He helped me to get around and navigate there. 

I said hello to the Russian guard with a machine gun. And he said, "Don't talk to that guy. He'll shoot you!" I said, "I thought y'all were free." And he said," We are, but nobody's told those guys yet." They didn't get the memo. They're still walking around. There was a beach down from the hotel. I said, "I'm going to throw my stuff up in my room and go down on that beach."

 He said, "No, you can't go down there. They'll shoot you." I didn't get it. Their independence was so new that it hadn't taken yet, and the Russian guards were still walking around with machine guns. 

Toward the end of my career, we played in Lithuania. We played the Karl Marx  Library. It was a very tall stage, and they had tables pushed up right to the stage. I had that song Monkey Land. At the end of it, I would beat my chest, and jump up and down, and beat my guitar, and act like a monkey and go, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. I did all that, and it scared the dickens out of them. They were stunned. They didn't know what to think. They were backing up when I was beating my chest and stuff.

 After we played it, that was the last song. We played an encore. Everybody came up and they wanted to buy CDs. "Do you have the Monkey Land?" "Yes, I do. I got a couple of boxes of them." They bought every one of the Monkey Lands and loved it.

All of my travels influenced my career in some way or the other. Those are just some kind of special stories that came to mind. 

It's been a ball talking to you! We talk about the blues and that's some of my early influences you just heard there. I'm going to sign off for right now. I've  got things to do, places to go, and more blues to listen to. I'll be back and tell you about some more people next time. Thank you, and bye bye.