Development of the British Blues and Rhythm
--- show 19 --- 11-26-2014
Cream
BakerlooChampion Jack Dupree & Tony McPhee
Jack was a Glaswegian – for some reason I
am infatuated with the sound of that word, but it just means he was from
Glasgow, Scotland. He attended the
Scottish Academy of Music for a short while, but left because they didn’t
appreciate what he was into and he felt that what they wished for him to learn
would not fit into his goals. He then
took on gigs as the opportunities arose, eventually leading him to London. It was during his intermission at a Cambridge
May Ball in 1961 when he was playing upstairs with a Trad Jazz band that Jack
heard a Modern Jazz sound featuring Dick Heckstall-Smith and Ginger Baker emanating
from the cellar. “It was an incredible
sound and I thought I’ve got to play with them, you know, ‘cos up until then I
didn’t know if I was any good. I’d
played with bands and I kept getting the sack because I was a bit too
experimental.” He asked to sit in and
Dick said to come back later, but when he returned on his next break was told
no because they were doing arrangements. But Jack persisted and when given the chance bowled
them over as he handled a few numbers that grew increasingly more
difficult. After the set Jack just left
the stage, but by spending some time searching him out, Dick was able to take
Jack to Alexis Korner and get him a job with Blues Incorporated.
Jack wasn’t there too long before Charlie
Watts, recognizing he was not yet up to the caliber of the rest of the band,
stepped aside to make room for Baker, a generous move that actually turned out
rather well for all concerned. Blues
harpist Cyril Davies was with the band then but disapproved of the Jazz
emphasis and left, being replaced by vocalist / alto saxist Graham Bond. Bond then convinced Korner to allow the
rhythm section of Baker and Bruce to back him as an organ trio during the full
band’s intermissions. The audience
response convinced Bond that his own small combo could be more financially
rewarding and, without consulting Baker or Bruce, told Korner they were leaving
to put together the Graham Bond Trio.
Heckstall-Smith was invited to join but
stayed with Alexis so guitarist John MacLaughlin put in some time with the
Graham Bond Quartet, but Baker terminated him because he was a ”whiner and a
miserable moaner”. Bruce would suffer a
similar fate when he upset Baker but Jack insisted the band was as much his and
continued showing up at gigs until Ginger pulled out a knife and convinced him that
would no longer be a good idea. In the
meantime, Heckstall-Smith had joined the Graham Bond ORGANization and the
foursome made some recordings for Decca before their two Columbia albums The Sound
of ’65 and There’s a Bond Between us.
Once away from Bond, Bruce spent about six
weeks in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
Manfred Mann was a neighbor of Mayall’s and was reluctant to poach Bruce
from the Bluesbreakers, but at the insistence of his band mates did so. Mayall was so outraged that his song Double
Crossing Time was written to make his feelings toward Mann perfectly clear. Bruce would stay with Manfred for about seven
months until he received the offer that would bring the spotlight directly upon
himself and two others.
When Ginger Baker approached Eric Clapton
to form a new band, Eric convinced Baker to overlook past differences and go
with Bruce on bass. As Jack put it,
“(Clapton) dug my playing. In fact I
hadn’t really dug his playing because at that time he was with the Yardbirds …I
was on a more rhythm and blues gig, but when I saw him playing with Mayall I
saw why everyone dug him so much”. The
Bond ensembles were among the most popular outfits in the U.K. with about three
hundred gigs a year so it was no wonder Cream was considered a super group even
though two thirds of its players were unfamiliar to American audiences.
Bruce had sung a couple of tunes on each
of the Bond albums and occasionally sang with Paul Jones on stage while with
Manfred Mann, but it was Clapton’s lack of confidence in his own vocals that
essentially forced him to produce what would prove to be the powerful voice of
Cream. “There is an aggressive quality
about the Cream’s music. Basically I’m a
quiet singer but on stage the actual volume of the instruments meant I had to
shout to be heard.” There was conjecture
that the financial backers of the band had in mind Eric Clapton backed by a
rhythm section, but once Jack opened his mouth the extraordinary musical
talents of both he and Baker could only
be considered equal to that of Clapton.
Jack also played harmonica in the studio but in the live trio format his
bass was usually a necessary constant. I
was at Winterland for one of the shows that created the live disc from Wheels
of Fire (it was sub-labeled Live at the Fillmore and I believe recorded over
two weekends) and I am trying to reconstruct in my mind how the ending went
down. As I recall, Clapton left the
stage to allow Bruce to play harmonica backed only by Baker for Train Time, a
tune he had previously recorded with Graham Bond. Clapton then rejoined them for the start of
Toad (a tune the other two had previously recorded with Graham Bond in a much
shorter version) but about three minutes into Baker’s drum solo both Jack and
Eric departed the stage for about twelve minutes, returning for the ending
which was followed up by Clapton’s longtime signature song Steppin’ Out, an
instrumental he first recorded for the Bluesbreakers and later for Eric Clapton
and the Powerhouse (found on Elektra’s multi-artist album What’s
Shakin’). “Every night we went on stage,
instead of being out to prove ourselves to the audience, we had to prove
ourselves first to each other.”
When it came to the band’s repertoire, it
was hoped that each of the players would provide songs equally, but in the
beginning “nobody had written any songs specifically for the group … so the
basic thing was standard Blues… I think just one original”. The problem persisted. “We’d be on the road for months and then we
would have five days to make an album.”
When the time came to put together Disraeli Gears, “I had about ten
songs and Ginger had two songs and Eric had one…. I regretted that at the time,
‘cos I wanted to play the others’ music as much as my own”.
At one point, Ginger Baker brought around
the beat poet Peter Brown who co-wrote Wrapping Paper and I Feel Free with Jack
to begin a songwriting partnership from the band’s earliest recordings that
would last for decades. Jack’s wife
Janet Godfrey also helped him on Sleepy Time Time and even co-wrote Sweet Wine
with Baker. For Disraeli Gears, their
producer Felix Pappalardi and Gail Collins wrote World of Pain and assisted
Clapton in writing Strange Brew while Mike Taylor joined Baker in the scripting
of three songs for Wheels of Fire. Clapton
was also aided by Mike Sharpe on a handful of songs. Pappalardi became the producer beginning with
Disraeli Gears and also provided additional instrumentation on several tunes
while in the studio. He later went on to
become the bassist for Mountain. For
contractual reasons, guitarist George Harrison appeared on the Goodbye album as
L’Angelo Misterioso on Badge, the song he co-wrote with Clapton.
Sunshine of Your Love was a collaboration
of Clapton, Bruce and Brown and would become the anthem for a generation. “I was watchin’ the telly the other night and
Blood, Sweat and Tears came on and they did two bars from “Sunshine” and then
went into something else. Wait a minute. I jumped up, that’s my riff, yeah, and there
was no creditin’ being done. My
masterpiece, that riff. I have to take
responsibility for everyone who plays it.”
“I really think we began to want to go our
different ways on the first American tour, which lasted for four and a half
months…. We would have broken up then, but people reminded us that there were
thousands and thousands who hadn’t seen us on stage and we really owed it to
them and there was a lot of bread to be made so we kept on going.” After four albums (with sales totaling 35
million including the first ever platinum LP, the double disc Wheels of Fire)
and multiple American tours over a two and a half year span, the band did fall
apart. I remember speculation that
Stevie Winwood would become the fourth member of the band and that did kinda
happen when he joined the lineup of Blind Faith, where Bruce was replaced by
bass player Rick Grech. This revised
supergroup pretty much flopped after putting up an extremely disappointing
album although, to be fair, I find some things on it better listening now than
I did then.
Even before Cream’s final concert at the
Royal Albert Hall late in November, Bruce set up recording sessions in August
of 1968 with a couple of his cohorts from the Bond days, John McLaughlin and
Dick Heckstall-Smith, and Dick’s drummer from Colosseum, Jon Hiseman. The culmination of four days of recording his
own compositions finally came out in 1970 as Things We Like. In the meantime, between April and June 1969,
Jack gathered Dick and Jon together again to record an album consisting only of
his own music with lyrics by Pete Brown titled Songs for a Tailor. With exceptions for George Harrison, Felix
Pappalardi and even Jack himself, all the guitar work was handled by Chris
Spedding. On three songs, trumpeters
Henry Lowther and Harry Beckett and saxophonist Art Themen joined
Heckstall-Smith for a full horn section.
Once again, Felix was in the producer’s chair and added occasional his
own vocal and instrumental embellishments. The album climbed to #6 in its nine
week stay on the Brit charts.
“I wanted to tour almost immediately with
that album, but for some reason, the management didn’t get it together. It wasn’t until nearly six months after its
release that I finally toured with Larry Coryell on guitar, Mike Mandel and
Mitch Mitchell on drums.” Jack would run
into old friends Hiseman and Heckstall-Smith when this lineup, going as Jack
Bruce and Friends, shared billing with Colosseum on their first gig January 24th
1970. The band then meandered through the
states on a tour beginning January 30th at New York’s Filllmore East
(playing with Mountain, whose lineup included two future members of [Leslie]
West, Bruce and [Corky] Laing) and closing at our own Fillmore West March 1st.
Jack tells us that before that first New
York gig, “John McLaughlin came backstage and told me that Tony Williams was
out front. Tony was a drummer that I had
admired so much. His album that he
recorded with Eric Dolphy when he was eighteen was very inspirational to me; he
was only seventeen when he played with Miles Davis! Tony came backstage and Jimi Hendrix was
there too and Tony invited me to join his band, Lifetime! I remember that Jimi Hendrix laid out this
huge line of cocaine for us when I said I was interested! I finished the tour and then went for an
audition. I went to a rehearsal room and
Tony put up some really difficult sheet music on a music stand in front of me
and I sight read it and it was amazing”.
Jack took part in the album Turn It Over, but apparently didn’t play on
all the songs. The lineup of Bruce,
Williams, McLaughlin and organist Larry Young toured the US between April and
September, then crossing the pond to play in the UK from October 2nd to
December 5th, 1970. “Playing
with Lifetime was probably the most rewarding musical experience I’ve had. It bothers me that Lifetime never got the
recognition it deserved, as musically we were only doing what Cream did
before. It was a very difficult thing to
go on the road with a band featuring two black guys and two white guys, the
powers that be couldn’t get a handle on it.
Lifetime really was a high spot”.
The band split up shortly after that
British tour Jack had organized, in part because, “we never cracked the
USA. John McLaughlin got approached to
do his own thing and the Mahavishnu Orchestra which he formed was almost
entirely lifted from Lifetime in its concept and was like a sanitized version
of the band”.
This takes us a little past Jack’s time
with Cream, so it seems like a good breaking point for this show’s entry. I have much of his material up to 1972 and
will surely be putting it to use in another show, although it continues to take
him further away from the Blues which is the subject of our study but never
really were his roots and therefore will be much less thorough of a musical
survey. So R.I.P., Mr. Bruce, and thank
you for all the influence you gave the music world in general.
*************************
The band Bakerloo
was formed early in 1968 as the Bakerloo Blues Line with drummer John Hinch,
bassist Dave Mason soon to be replaced by Terry Poole, and guitarist David “Clem”
Clempson. As Clempson stated, “I suppose
you could say we do about thirty per cent traditional Blues in our repertoire;
the rest is a mixture of all sorts of things: Jazz, Rock and so on.”
The noteworthy part of the act would be Clemson, who
moved on to Colosseum at the end of the band’s short lifespan, He would also record four LPs with Humble Pie
in his tenure with them between 1972-1975,
For his early life history, he was born September 5th, 1949 in
Tamworth. He started learning piano at
age five and studied for ten years at the Royal School of Music in Birmingham, later
switching to guitar at the age of 17.
Bakerloo Blues Line was signed in October of 1968 to the
Henry Davidson Organization, which began a busy month for the band. They acquired a Tuesday residency at Henry’s
Blueshouse where they had attendants and sit-ins by Spencer Davis, Robert
Plant, Cozy Powell, John Bonham and Jeremy Spencer. On October 18th they appeared at the
Marquee debut of Led Zeppelin and put a showing in on the BBC’s Top Gear radio
show.
After a late November gig backing Jethro Tull at the
Marquee, Clempson declined an offer made to replace their departing guitarist, Mick
Abrahams. December 1968 began a series
of changes in drummers at a rate of about one a month (including former Spencer
Davis Group’s Pete York) until they settled on Keith Baker.
Somewhere around February, the band recorded their
only album and looked for the highest bidder.
Harvest Records put them under contract and in July released a single
from the album, Driving BacHwards backed by Once Upon a Time. The full album was put out later in the year,
and it wasn’t long after that the band went their separate ways with Clemson
joining Colosseum.
*************************
I figured we needed a change of pace from the
intensity of the other two bands in today’s presentation so I turned down the
electricity considerably with the inclusion of some solo and duet work recorded
by Champion Jack Dupree for the newly-formed
Blue Horizon label. We combined things
from the 1968 From New Orleans to Chicago album where the only accompaniment is
his piano (excepting our last entry where he plays drums instead) with the 1967
Dupree and MacPhee release, somewhat unique in the fact that Jack does not play
piano but is backed only by the acoustic guitar of Tony “T.S.” MacPhee, whom we
heard months ago backing John Lee Hooker and will be encountering again soon
when we look into his group the Groundhogs.
Although Jack already had an extensive recording career
in the U.S. between 1940 and 1959 when he arrived in Europe, he was a popular
performer on both the continent and the British Isles throughout all but the
earliest days of the country’s Blues Boom and therefore can be considered a
part of it. Besides, I just enjoy
listening to the man and that combination is sufficient reason for his
inclusion by my standards.
I have lots of material by Champion Jack Dupree and
most of them have quite a bit of biographical material so I could easily write
up his career in my own words, but by gathering together all the different
quotes from the different sources, his story almost tells itself, although he
often contradicts himself. I did get to
see him in the very early 90s and he was a great storyteller with a big sense
of humor, but apparently he was not all that interested in keeping the names or
dates in order.
Born William Thomas Dupree, his mother was Creole
(part Cherokee) and his father was from the Belgian Congo and they ran a
grocery store on the Irish Channel.
“They sold kerosene for oil lamps and one night one of the containers
exploded. We never did find out how it
happened.” Both his parents were killed
when the first floor collapsed. Jack
sometimes used to say it was done by the KKK.
One source said this occurred when he was seven but since he later said
he didn’t remember his mother, he was more likely two years old as another
source stated.
Jack often claimed his birthday to be July 4th
1910, perhaps because of the holiday or perhaps because Louis Armstrong also
claimed Independence Day as his birthday, but according to his passport it would
be July 23, 1909. There was even a time
when one of his managers was simultaneously handing out press releases stating
both July 4th and July 23rd 1908. “I don’t know which one. The last one I got is supposed to be from my
sister, saying 10th July.
When they made my passport they made an estimate and put 23rd
July. When I was born it was put in the
book (the Bible). No birth certificate. We didn’t have no birth certificate. When my mother and father was killed the
Bible went with it, so they don’t know anything.”
“I had two brothers and two sisters that I know
of. They’re all dead. George, called ‘Frenchy’, was in the police
in Chicago, Bernadette, Dora and Victor.
My younger sister used to sing in clubs.
Her name was Della.” So maybe three
sisters then.
After the fire, Jack was placed in the Colored Waifs’
Home for Boys, earlier the hme of Armstrong as well, where he learned basic
piano and vocalizing. He left in hopes
of his sister taking him in but wound up begging food and change on the street
and sleeping over warm grates. “When I
left the orphanage at 14, a kind woman named Olivia Gordon took me in. She was the only mother I ever knew. Even though she had eleven children of her
own, she did her best to give me a home.”
This security gave him confidence and he began to sing outside the clubs
around Franklin and Rampart Streets He
joined the Yellow Pocahontas (Mardi Gras Indian tribe) who called him Spy Boy.
“I spent a lot
of time in the streets and in the clubs.
One man took me under his wing.
His name was Drive ‘em Down, and he played piano in a barrelhouse place
where rough cats would hang out. They
served bootleg whiskey and home brew.
Drive ‘em Down would let me sit near him and watch him play. After a while he took to calling me his ‘son’
and he began to teach me how to play his style.
I never had any other teacher.
Drive ‘em Down died in 1930, and it was only then that I began to play
piano professionally. At first I stuck
pretty much to Drive ‘em Down’s material, like his versions of How Long,
Stack-O-Lee and other traditional Blues and ballads that I had heard him
perform”
“None of them was as good as Drive ‘em Down. There was a lot of them that could play good
music but Drive ‘em Down was about the best barrelhouse player they had.” Drive ‘em Down’s real name was Willie Hall,
and Jack said, “he was going with my sister”.
“The Depression
was very hard on musicians. There wasn’t
much work and we were paid very little.
I got paid $1.50 an hour when I played in a club and I was lucky to get
that, I guess. When things got very
slow, I took to boxing to make a living.
I fought off and on throughout the thirties and was fairly successful at
it. Incidentally, that’s how I came to
be called ‘Champion’ Jack Dupree. Boxing
took me up North, and in 1940 I fought my last match. I remember it was in Indianapolis and I
knocked out Battling Bozo in the tenth round.”
Contradicting Jack’s words, it is also reported that he lost his last
fight to Bob Montgomery and quit. All in
all, Jack fought 107 bouts, and indeed earned the right to be called Champion
by winning the State Championships and Golden Gloves and at one time in 1939
was the Indiana State Lightweight Champion.
He likely took on the moniker Jack out of respect for the first black
World Heavyweight Champion, Jack Johnson.
“In those days, we wasn’t getting so much for fights – six rounds for
thirty or forty dollars.”
“I never did stay in one place. It was like a disease, I been all over the
United States, hoboing. I didn’t enjoy staying in one place. I learned a lot by doing that.” “I started playing piano in Memphis one
time. I was hoboing through and went up
to a place, upstairs, where they had a whole crowd dancing, so I just sat down
and played. At this time I was always
moving. Didn’t matter where I went. Felt like stopping, I would. I used to carry spare shoes and socks in my
pocket.”
He tried staying with his Chicago policeman brother
George “I stayed about one year. I only
played one place. I used to go to Jack
Johnson’s place on Third Avenue, Indiana Avenue, Continental Club, at night,
sell bootleg whiskey and I played the piano there. He told me, ‘If I ever catch you in any of
them places I’ll put you in jail.’ I
said, ‘I’m used to going to jail for playing music.’ So I got tired of his bullshit. After I got enough money to go to Detroit, I
got on the bus. I was lucky, got a job
as porter.”
“I met Joe
Louis in Detroit. He said I could make
$10 if I worked out four rounds with the professionals. I was a left-hander. My first fights in New Orleans were Kid Blue,
Class Black and Tony Moret. Then I
fought in New York and Chicago. I was on
the card first time Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling (19 June 1936, New York).”
“In 1935 I went to Indianapolis where I met Leroy Carr
and Scrapper Blackwell. From there I was
taking trips to Elkhart and I married when I was 22. Her father had a gym and he was training
fighters. I got in and started
that. The first fellow I sparred with
was young Jack Thompson, the welter-weight champion. He bought everything for me to fight. I was fighting three rounds for $10. I made many a $10 because I had to live on
that.”
Wed since 1937 (although Jack just said when he was
22, which would be 1932 and well before he claims he went to Indianapolis) to
his wife Ruth, who was a dancer, the Duprees settled in Indianapolis’ Naptown
neighborhood and Ruth lived there until her death in 1942. Jack was able to keep steady gigs,
supplemented at times by working as a cook.
He met ex-boxer Kid Edwards, a record shop owner since 1928, who
introduced him to Sea Ferguson and other cabaret owners. Quoting Duncan Scheid from one of CJ’s liner
notes (Cabbage Greens): “This was the second floor of the Cotton Club, operated
by the powerful Negro theatrical booker, Sea Ferguson. It occupied an old four-story building in the
near downtown section, and represented the zenith of black-and-tan night life
in the Hoosier capital. On the top floor
was the high-ceilinged Trianon Ballroom.
In the year 1939, all attention was on the revue type of presentation.” He worked there in a few capacities, as a
musician, MC, dancer and comedian.
While hanging out in Chicago, Tampa Red helped get
Jack signed by Lester Melrose, who put him together with the Okeh label,
cutting 20 tracks in 1940 and 1941. Jack
stayed with Okeh until 1944; recording on June 13th 1940 with two
more sessions in January 1941 and another in November, the last with Jesse
Ellery who had traveled with him from Indianapolis.
World War II put a crimp in Jack’s recording career as
he found himself in the US Navy by the end of 1942 serving as a cook. He was captured and held in Japan for two
years during which time Ruth died so, with nothing tying him to Indianapolis,
he settled down in New York upon his discharge where he’d made some recordings
for Folkways while on leave.
Jack’s dealings with Melrose left a sour aftertaste
that would carry with him through most of his career.: “You sign the contract
and he give you $100. You say, ‘What’s
that for?’ and he says ‘That’s because you made the record and I paid
you.’ It didn’t say that we were selling
the rights of our things.” Concluding he
was not being treated fairly, like so many others, he and Brownie “used
different names ‘cause to make money.
They wasn’t paying enough nohow so we recorded for anybody we
could.” Jack took the money from many
labels and used almost as many names in the years that followed, including the
Joe Davis label, Celebrity, Alert as Willie Jordan & His Swinging Five,
Apollo, Abbey as Brother Blues & The Back Room Boys, both Gotham and Apex
as Meat Head Johnson, for Harlem as Lightnin’ Junior & The Empires, and Red
Robin, not to mention all the sessions he was backing others. He did stay with The King label quite a
while, recording 26 sides between April 1953 and November 1955. Jack was also on Little Willie John’s #5
R&B hit All Around the World from 1955.
For a while in Chicago: “I used to work for Al
Capone’s brother, Kay Capone. It used to
be the 1-1 club down on the Loop.
Georgia Tom and Blind John Davis worked there. What they show you in the movies was nothing
like Al Capone.” He signed with Joe
Davis and recorded 8 tracks on April 15, 1945 for his Beacon label, received
$100 but $54 went to join Local 802, the black musicians union. He was living at Brownie McGhee’s house and
working as a cook at Yeshiva University in Harlem: “I didn’t play. You couldn’t go no place. Just once in a while go on a job at night.
You couldn’t live off it. You had to
work.” “The only places you’d get a job
was like on Friday, Saturday and Sunday when nothing’s happening.” He gained a residency at the Celebrity Club
which he kept until leaving for England in 1959, cutting eight more tracks for
Joe Davis in August and September before his last session for the company in
March 1946.
“Meanwhile my
wife died and I came to New York, which has remained my home ever since. I made a lot of records right after the war
,,,.for a lot of different labels: Joe Davis, Celebrity, Solo, Apollo,
Continental (Sony: and its subsidiary, not a quote) Lennox and perhaps some
others. In 1949 I was signed by King
Records and I remained with them until last year.” On all of Jack’s recordings between 1946 and 1951,
Brownie McGhee was the one constant always in the band and sometimes contained
his brother Stick McGhee or Sonny Terry.
In 1948, Jack took Lucille Dalton as his bride and,
wiser now about the music business, began to assign writing credits for his
songs to her. They would have five
children before they divorced. Walking
the Blues became a hit for King Records, with whom Jack laid down 26 tracks
between 1953 and 1955, Lucille credited with many of them. The song’s success led to a couple gigs at
Apollo, tours with Little Willie John, George Smith, Count Basie and Jimmy
Rushing, B.B. King and Nipsey Russell.
In 1958, Jack cut what is considered to be the best LP
example of his work for Atlantic, Blues from the Gutter. A year later, Jack accepted an offer to go to
England for some work and, as one source tells me, he became the first American Bluesman to stay in
Europe; beginning in Paris followed by six years in Zurich, then Denmark, and finally
settling in Halifax England in 1971.
Jack had married a Yorkshire girl in 1960, but by 1977 laid down his roots
for good in Hannover Germany. Jack’s first
trip back was not until 1982 to New York City and then again to New Orleans for
the 1990 Jazz and Heritage Festival.
While there, he cut an album for Rounder Records and either stayed there
a while or made a return trip for a second session that produced his last two
albums. Aside from the Blues from the
Gutter LP that languished relatively unplayed in my collection, these three
discs were likely my first extended exposure to the man, and combined with seeing
him in person around the same time make them a very enjoyable set of music.
It is just my opinion, but what could make a true
Yankee Doodle proud American, so proud he wished to claim the national holiday
as his birthday, leave home and stay an ocean away? Like so many other Negros as far back as
World War I, they had proven themselves first class warriors in defense of
their country and its ideologies, only to come back home and find they were
still treated as second class citizens.
The respect they received abroad, especially the musicians, made it
possible for them to uproot themselves, and hopefully their families, to bask
in, not adulation, but merely fair, just and friendly treatment. Jack himself mentioned two reasons to stay “I
found more respect for my music in Europe and I’ll only go back to the States
when they build a bridge from London to New York.”, but just as truthfully, the
mode of transportation might have had a little to do with it. “I wasn’t intent to stay, I was to go back,
but when I came in that propeller plane and the damn motors was red hot, I said
that’s it. When I got to London I said I
don’t go back until they build a bridge.”
Jack died Tuesday January 21st, 1992, and I’d like to
end with a couple of final quotes. “If I
stand on a box and tell the people of all the wrong in the world, people
wouldn’t listen. But if I sing it on
records all around the world, everybody will know.” and “When you open up a
piano you see freedom. Nobody can play
the white keys and don’t play the black keys. You got to mix all these keys
together to make harmony. And that’s
what the world needs: Harmony.”
*************************
Oh yeah, lest I forget, tomorrow is our big national
T-day; one filled with turkey, tackling and the biggest day of the year for
travel, so I hope you all get your families together for a good old fashioned day
of festivity. Let me be a little sappy
as I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!
*************************
CrossroadsSweet Wine
Sleepy Time Time
Cream
Bring It On Home
Drivin’ BacHwardsThis Worried Feeling
Son of Moonshine
Bakerloo
Sunshine of Your Love
I’m So GladCream
Get Your Head Happy
Mr. Dupree BluesSee My Milk Cow
Who Was Here a While Ago
Black Snake Breakdown
Goin’ Down to the Blue Horizon
Baby Don’t You Put Me Out
Dead Cat on the Line
Gutbucket Blues
Talk All in My Sleep
Got My Ticket
My Baby Told Me
Papa Told Mama
Easy is the Way
Snow is on the Ground
Yellow Pocahontas
Champion Jack Dupree and Tony McPhee
Traintime
ToadSteppin’ Out
Cream
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