Tampa Red: Guitar Wizard , RCA AXM2-5501
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Tampa Red: Guitar Wizard , RCA AXM2-5501 Liner notes by Jim O'Neal (1974-75) Few figures have been as important in blues history as Tampa Red; yet no bluesman of such stature has been so ignored or misunderstood by today's blues audience. As composer, recording artist, musical trendsetter and one of the premier urban blues guitarists of his day, Tampa Red remained popular with black record buyers for more than 20 years and exerted considerable influence on many post-World War II blues stars who earned greater acclaim for playing Tampa's songs than Tampa himself often did. But more than two decades have passed since Tampa played an active role on the Chicago blues scene. Personal tragedies and a desire to stay in a somewhat secluded retirement have long kept him out of sight. To the general music public, he's a forgotten man. Several magazines and newspapers have reported him dead, and many of the musicians who knew him also assume he's either dead or hopelessly insane. Only a few of his closest friends, like pianists Sunnyland Slim, Blind John Davis and Little Brother Montgomery, have stayed in touch with him over the years. They still know him as the quiet, polite, easy-going little man he always was. But because he was at times in a mental hospital and because of other musicians' stories of Tampa jumping out of a window, threatening to leap from a rooftop and setting fire to his bed, a distorted image of Tampa as a mindlessly belligerent hermit has emerged. To top it off, the most widely circulated description of Tampa during his playing days— Brother John Sellers' assertion that Tampa was "ready to fight...he used to be a mess in his day" published in Paul Oliver's Conversation with the Blues book and again in Mike Rowe's Chicago Breakdown— seems completely at odds with all recent statements by Tampa's other musical associates. Blind John Davis, pianist on many of Tampa's recording sessions in the '30s and '40s, admits that when it came to music, "Tampa was a very temperamental person. Whatever he wanted done, it had to be done just like he did it or else you didn't work with Tampa. And I could do anything he wanted, and we got along." Tampa had to be particular about his musical accompaniment, Davis says, because "at that time Tampa Red wrote the most difficult stuff of those blues players." But personally, he says, "he was a great person. And I love him today." Far from being "ready to fight," according to Mississippi guitarist Big Joe Williams, Tampa "was about the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. No argument he didn't believe in nothin' like that. He used to keep the peace all the time." In fact, Big Joe is convinced to this day that he would have murdered Big Bill Broonzy during an argument in Chicago in the 1940s had not Tampa interceded. "Couldn't nobody stop me but Tampa," he recalls. "I never would have stopped. Couldn't nobody talk to me but him." "Tampa was a very quiet man," agrees drummer Odie Payne, Jr., who recorded on all of Tampa's last sessions. "He didn't raise his voice." Letha Jones*, widow of Tampa's last pianist, Johnnie Jones, adds, "Tampa was always a nice, sweet person. Always was nice to everybody. He was devoted to his wife. He never did like to see people argue or fight, you know. He was a good-goin' fellow." Tampa's original piano-playing partner, Thomas Dorsey (Georgia Tom), reiterates, "He was a good-hearted fellow. Never was in any trouble as I know of.... He was very calm at all times.... He never fought about money." In his autobiography Big Bill Blues, Bill Broonzy described Tampa in much the same way. As for Tampa himself, he is succinct as usual when questioned: "No, I didn't like to see all the arguin' and fightin'." Tampa's mental problems, his friends agree, were brought on mainly by the death of his wife Frances some 19 years ago.** Frances—or "Mrs. Tampa" as many knew her—played a much larger part in Tampa's life and musical career than outsiders realize, and when she died and left him with no one the loss was too much for Tampa to handle. Today, however Tampa lives quietly with his 81-year-old companion Effie Tolbert on Chicago's South Side, and seems as calm and gracious as he apparently has been for most of his life. Still, music is a thing of the past to him. He enjoys hearing his old records, but his memory is vague when it comes to specific details of his career and events of the past 20 years or so literally mean almost nothing to him. Gradually he has told bits and pieces of his story, and his friends have helped fill in the rest. Tampa Red, whose real name was Hudson Woodbridge, was born in Smithville, Georgia, but his exact age is uncertain as he has given at least four different birth dates at various times: Dec. 25,1900; Jan. 8, 1903 and 1904; and his present claim of Dec. 25,1908. Birth records were not kept during those years in Georgia's Lee County, either, but Georgia Tom Dorsey, who was born in 1899 and knew Tampa long before most musicians did, believes Tampa to be about five years his junior. Tampa's parents, John and Elizabeth Woodbridge, died when he was young, and he was raised mainly in Tampa Florida, with his grandmother's family, the Whittakers. He has used the name Hudson Whittaker ever since, but was already known as Tampa Red well before his recording debut in 1928. Some of his early musical inspiration came from his older brother Eddie, who kept a guitar around the house, and a local musician named Piccolo Pete, but Tampa says he learned and developed his own style by himself. Hawaiian steel guitar music was in vogue then, and by using the neck of a bottle to fret the strings, he came up with his own clean, clear ringing blues sound, which later earned him the title "The Guitar Wizard." "Eddie didn't play the type that I play, "Tampa recalls. "He played fingerwork, just straight guitar. He played Spanish style, just natural chords." Tampa injured his foot in a boyhood bicycling accident, and still complains about his foot today. But that apparently didn't hamper his travels much, as various bluesmen have recalled seeing him in St. Augustine, Florida, Mobile, Alabama, Clarksdale, Mississippi; Forrest City, Arkansas; East St. Louis, Illinois, and other towns during the '20s and '30s. Arriving in Chicago in his early teens, Tampa met Georgia Tom around 1925, and a few years later they had become one of the most popular black recording teams of that era. They traveled the old Theater Owners Booking Association theater circuit, Tom remembers: "We played Memphis, I think Louisville, down to Nashville; we was down in Tennessee, or in Mississippi just across the line. We recorded in Memphis at the Peabody Hotel (in 1929), and I left him down in Memphis and he got another week's play at the Palace Theater there. They liked him so well they hired him there with just he and the guitar." The T.O.B.A. shows and the other places they played weren't "big time," however, according to Tom. They often played around Chicago for just two, three or four dollars a night. "We played just anywhere," Tom says. "Party, theater, dance hall, juke joint. All black. See, we wasn't high-powered enough. Other fellows who were in the high music echelon got those jobs with the whites. The money was bigger up there." Tampa also enjoyed playing on the streets for spare change, but Dorsey, as a pianist wanted nothing to do with that. Tampa worked the streets by himself with his famed National steel guitar, occasionally joined by other street musicians like Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, who hoboed in and out of Chicago on the freight trains. Tampa had an electric guitar early in the game, too, as Estes remembers: "Me and Hammie were goin' down the street here at 51st & State, and we were drunk, and we hadn't been used to no electric guitar then. And he opened that thing up!" Tampa's electric blues sound was something new at the time, but Hammie adds, "He played blues and he played some kind of love songs, too." Tampa in fact could play many types of music, as his records demonstrated over the years from the "Hokum Jug Band" style of his early days with Vocalion Records to the pop, ballad and jive tunes he later waxed for Bluebird, in addition to numerous blues numbers, most of which he wrote himself. "I could play church songs, too," Tampa says, "I could do that now. But I never did no recordings of church songs, because I was playing the blues and that's what the companies wanted. I can play some piano, you know—ragtime, a little blues. But guitar was my main thing, playin' Tight Like That and Sell My Monkey. I could do more with the guitar than I could with the piano because there was plenty of piano players, you know what I mean, who could really play the thing." Tampa and Georgia Tom began recording for Vocalion in 1928, under the direction of J.