Dr. Barry Lee Pearson

Perhaps the region’s single most dedicated advocate and blues documentarian is Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland. Sometimes he swam against the tide of fellow musicologists who tried to marginalize and even dismiss the Piedmont blues, and he stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene. To a large part, whatever legitimacy, recognition and respect the local African American music scene has garnered internationally, much of it is owed to Dr. Pearson’s work.

He understood that there was a special, but largely ignored blues scene within the African American community in the Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., region. His life’s work over the last forty years has included countless articles in blues magazines, such as Living Blues. His body of work includes four books and over one hundred other publications, including articles, reviews, program and recording liner notes, and sound recordings dealing with African American traditional music. His books are the most important testimony of the Piedmont blues on record. Sounds So Good to Me: The Bluesman’s Storygives voice to blues musicians, as chronicled in interviews with Dr. Pearson, and lets the musicians unfold their own stories and anecdotes. In Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Bluesmen he chronicles the life and times of bluesmen John Cephas and Archie Edwards, in what stands as the most extensive biographies of these musicians, as told in their own words. In Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Storytellers he has also collected the stories and anecdotes of prominent blues musicians. He co-authored a historiography of blues icon Robert Johnson with William McCulloch entitled Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, produced nine CDs for the Smithsonian Folkways, and in 1993 was nominated for a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, Roots of Rhythm and Blues: A Tribute to the Robert Johnson Era. He has also worked extensively with other regional cultural organizations engaged in presenting traditional American music, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the National Council for the Traditional Arts, the nation’s oldest folk arts organization.

As a performing musician, he has toured for the Arts America Program visiting Africa, South and Central America with Cephas & Wiggins.

In his own words,

“The English department at the University of Maryland had a long history of having a folksong person in the department. Prior to teaching here, I taught a course at George Washington University, in conjunction with the 1976 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. So, my first experiences locally had to do with the Folklife Festival scene and the musicians I talked to and hung out with were all festival participants. …I was asked to run a stage at the Maryland Folklife Festival – this would have been also in ‘76 or ‘77. There I encountered Mother Scott and that crew, which included Archie Edwards. I was impressed with Archie probably more so as a person than as a musician because I didn’t have experience with the Piedmont tradition– I had been with electric music for quite a bit in Chicago, and the Delta Blues would have been my basis of reference. The more that I heard Archie, the fonder I got. I remember telling him the first time that I met him that I was surprised that he was only playing a couple of songs with Mother Scott, and that he should have been booked on his own and had an entire set. We became friends from that point on. Shortly afterwards John Jackson had a party – and I didn’t know him either, but some friends of mine in the folklore field knew him. I went out and got to meet him and talked to him and played some music, probably in 1977. I met John Cephas and Phil at Glen Echo the next year. I had made a name for myself at that point as a musician by playing mainly parties that we folklorists threw for ourselves back then. I played acoustic versions of Chicago blues and Delta blues, like what Eddie Taylor played. That’s the music that I mastered. I also had a friend, Craig Jones, who had been with me in a band in Indiana, and he moved out here and we started to play together as the Ducktones in some venues. We played some of the D.C. Blues Society shows once we got that started up, but we also played at McGuire’s, which was a Capitol Hill tavern. Archie played there too and at that time he was playing at Food for Thought and two or three other places. He was well into retirement, but not yet going to Europe. McGuire’s was a pass-the-hat club and he was just glad to have a couple of places to play, and he would play at his barbershop. I didn’t get out to the barbershop until a little bit later, when I still lived in the District, so it must have been 1978. Dick Spottswood introduced us, so it may have been prior to that. The Glen Echo folk song people thought I was a purist, and it would usually wind up with Archie Edwards, John Cephas, John Jackson and myself, and Craig Jones the bass player. At that time, I was stuck up, and considered them to be the more traditional blues artists in the region. So that was from my folklore background more than anything else, trying to get the people I thought represented the traditions to work with. It really didn’t make any difference, because I don’t think anybody got paid – it was just everybody having fun. …Archie’s Barbershop wasn’t necessarily acoustic music. It was core acoustic, but people would show up with amps but nobody could blast anybody out, so it was people who just happened to have electric guitars like NJ Warren and Theorin O’Neil and some of those guys. I know the Gaines Brothers would go there. I never got to meet them, Willie and LeRoy Gaines. There’s a section in my Virginia Piedmont Blues book where Archie talks about them. They seem to have been two of the strongest musicians locally. John Hurt would also come with Archie and company – and people that you really never had heard of before would come and show up. Uncle Joe Watson – he only knew one song but he loved to play it. He was a great storyteller. NJ Warren. He had like four licks, but they were the baddest licks ever. All the guys who came to the barbershop were intriguing and they all had qualities. Some played and didn’t sing and a couple of people were better singers, like NJ, than players. We do have a tradition here of people who do play and never learn to be singers as well – like Etta Baker and Cora Philips and a lot of the Piedmont women players.

As time went on, I think I played perhaps a little bit less until John Cephas called me up one day and asked if I wanted to go with him and Phil Wiggins on tour. That’s because Sandy Rouse and Don Rouse knew me from the National Council for Traditional Arts and knew that I had several credentials that they were looking for. They wanted somebody who could be a workshop leader, a semi-road manager and who could also play without completely destroying the sound of John and Phil.  I was hired on – mainly in a managerial capacity. They wanted us to do workshops overseas, so we traveled between 1982 and ‘84 – and we played a little bit together up until ‘85; then we did the California tour. By that time, I had stopped performing with them on stage, but I would still handle some of the introductions and workshops.

We did things locally like the Poetry of the Blues at the Folger Shakespeare Library –  I think I played there, and that was broadcast on NPR. So we were getting into some interesting places. I don’t know that people were making a good deal of money at it, but mostly it was the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress Folklife Center, the National Council for the Traditional Arts who sponsored us. We had a concert very early on at George Washington University when I was teaching a course there. I think it might have just been the George Washington Student Association who put it on. The Foggy Bottom Country Blues Festival, “April 23rd with Bowling Green John Cephas and Harmonica Phil Wiggins.” They were still using those names – John Jackson, Flora and Archie Edwards – and the Ducktones played and others. But they were the headliners – April 23rd. And my memory is that that may have been ‘85 or ‘86. I taught a course there for a friend of mine in 1986 called America’s Folksong Heritage, and I had a budget so I could bring in musicians, and I think I brought in about three or four over the course of the semester. We also did a Blues House Party at the Renwick Art Gallery right across from the White House, and it was Cephas & Wiggins and John Jackson. I remember writing the liner notes. That would have been another Smithsonian event. The Smithsonian had its festivals, but they also had other events, some produced by Bernice Reagon. These were major concerts, and she almost invariably hired John and Phil among other artists – B.B. King, you name it. The Poetry of the Blues one was with J. Otis Williams, and that’s another guy that was very important, because he ran the Nyumburu Cultural Center, which was an African American Students Center at the University of Maryland. He was from Mississippi and deeply interested in blues. He considered himself to be a blues artist and his poetry was blues poetry. John and Phil recorded several of his poems, in fact, Voodoo Womenand Sweet Bitter Blues, the title of your book. Otis Williams called himself a griot. He played some guitar, or at least he liked to have pictures taken of himself with the guitar, but he was better with a blues soundtrack. He was a spoken-word artist. His stories were just amazing. He did so much for the campus out of the Nyumburu Center. He taught classes in blues and invariably would have a semester full of visiting artists.

John Cephas was more famous nationwide, but in our local community it seemed like Archie Edwards was the one that kept everybody informed on what everybody else was doing. He was like the clearinghouse for what was going on in this community more so than any of the others. John Cephas was much more worldly and social and traveled a lot. He was just used to it. He had a wider range or scope. Archie was much more local. I think people appreciated that over the years, so that when he passed he was dearly missed as somebody who was the cement that held things together. He wasn’t flashy, but he commanded a certain loyalty, and students certainly loved him. He came to my class every single semester I ever taught. He would show up, and it was always the students’ most favorite day.

Well, everybody I think that was involved at that point in time began to work up this attitude toward tradition. John and Phil were doing all these workshops at different places. People took on multiple roles, but a lot of it revolved around the concept of keeping the music alive and just finding value in the local tradition, playing it for enjoyment, but not necessarily to become a big star. It was something that was here for all of us to use. I don’t think there ever was a whole lot of racism that you’d encounter where people would say to you, “Well, you have no right to play – this isn’t your tradition.” That may have happened more so within the electric community. I think there was some bitterness, especially for people who were making a lot of money. But in our community, nobody was making any money. Everybody was doing it for pleasure, but there was also a real strong sense of tradition – Archie always wanted to say the name of the person whose song he did before he did it, and you know keep them alive. Keep the knowledge alive.

We had a lot of jam sessions. This crossed genre boundaries, which we continued to do more so than I think other places in the country. This goes all the way back to the Appalachian and the Piedmont roots being a shared musical tradition, where both blacks and whites would play blues and many times go to each other’s events and even play in the same bands. Then you had the record collectors. There’s a whole interesting set of people that inter mixed in this community – record collectors in abundance, and sometimes people like Dick Spottswood, they would have been on the board of the NCTA, they were writing books. They had radio shows. We’ve had pretty good radio coverage – not just the acoustic tradition generally – in fact, that’s one of the places where we saw some difference in people’s approach to blues. Nap Turner and the Bama Jerry Washington and several others were radio personalities, with a much broader rhythm and blues, jazz and black music approach. Then there were people on radio like Mary Cliff who were out of the folk music scene and they were more likely to play the down-home traditional Blind Boy Fuller thing than the others, but I have to say you know Jerry Washington loved to play John and Phil.

One of the reasons Archie was so successful attracting followers over the years is that he was dedicated to his music and he wanted other people to be as dedicated as he was. There wasn’t anything that he wouldn’t do for the tradition. He told his father he was going to carry it on; he told John Hurt. The proof of that was the fact that so many people have been carrying it on and they attribute it directly to Archie as their mentor. Musically I’m not sure that he taught anybody much of anything, but as a role model, as somebody who valued music. He was not very good at playing along with people. He was a loner. But John Cephas was a social musician. He liked to play music with other people and he liked the interaction, he would play off other people. Archie liked to be with other people and play music; but, as far as playing, it was something he had done on his own, and he had done it against a lot of odds. He convinced himself that what he was doing was good and it should be carried on by others. John Cephas did that too, but at the same time John Cephas loved to party as a musician. Playing music was part of the party. John Jackson a completely different person – I think he was much more like John Cephas – I think he just enjoyed playing. John Jackson, you would constantly hear him laughing on any recording he did – and the same with John Cephas. He could not keep it to himself. He could not hide his emotions when he got into it. Archie was a little more sedate but wonderfully engaging. Archie was pretty conservative, but also, he was quirky. He was a little guy with a big attitude. He was in the military police and in positions of authority, but he was never officious. By that I mean he never bossed people around, but he didn’t let people run wild either. He had his very strong opinions and he even wrote songs about them, about the riots, and told stories about how he stopped driving the cab because people were killing the cab drivers like they were something fit to eat.

John Jackson, John Cephas, Archie Edwards, there was a spirit of competition between them but the attitude about their music was, no matter who you were, no matter what level of musicianship you had, you were welcome to join in, to learn. When I would play at the barbershop, people would go around a circle and play. There wasn’t much playing together. But I was an outsider because I played Delta and Chicago blues and didn’t know as much of the local tradition. The same with John Jackson. People would play along with him and I could play along if I wanted to with some of his stuff, but I wanted to play my thing. At that point in time I wasn’t converted, you see? By the time I got with John Cephas and Phil, I noted that John and I played actually so similarly in some respects that it was a definite negative. In other words, I was essentially doubling him. It was weird because at times it sounded terrible, like an echo effect because we weren’t exactly on the same time. We seemed to work it out slowly but surely, but never completely. That’s why we were never really a trio musically. On a few songs we could do it, I think, if they were in my bailiwick – Running and Hiding, for example. There were a few moments in which we could get together and I could just look at John Cephas and I could see how happy he was – it was just right, the tension was there – everything was there to make it fuller. Other times, you know, I was definitely a third wheel. But I think working with John and Phil, I felt much more comfortable with them. When I worked with Craig Jones, I enjoyed that too, or the band setting, that was fine, although it was more competitive. Once again, I don’t know how relaxed I was as a musician compared to John or Phil or any of them. Archie was funny that way. He’d say, “Well, I don’t see why people are nervous getting up on stage playing. You’re not nervous when you go to buy a house.” It was like the easiest thing in the world that anyone has ever done, as far as he was concerned, sitting up there and picking a bit, playing a little bit on the guitar.

Phil, he can play with anybody and doesn’t always have to be the best but every now and then lets you know that he is. It’s easier for him to do it. John could play all kinds of stuff and he enjoyed it across the board. It didn’t make any difference really. He obviously had a great ear for music and thought about it a lot. But he was extremely tolerant, and it didn’t take very much to push him over the edge and enjoy himself playing a song, whether it was country and western, or whether it was blues – jug band, anything, but he hated hip-hop. But I can’t think of any other type of music that he did not like. There was nothing he rejected across the board.

What I saw happen with John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, and maybe less so with Archie and John Jackson, in relation to the African American response to blues, was there was always this back-porch tradition that people in the black community were familiar with, but blues was perhaps not their favorite music. There was never a time on the Mall in Washington when I did not see a two-thirds or three-fourths black audience totally respond to John and Phil’s music, because here were two good-looking guys having a great time playing the hell out of something that reminded these folks of the good-time music they used to hear at some point in their lives that they had not heard in a long time. They were letting their hair down, and all of the clichés that you can imagine – you throw away blues and you reject it, but then when you really hear it and you have a drink then you’re back into it. That’s what I saw. I think John Cephas and Phil Wiggins helped more than anything to reclaim the blues for the black community locally. Now, this is a strange community in some regards, because if we look at the Bluebird Blues Festival, where these guys have been a mainstay, in Largo, Maryland, Prince George’s County, this is economically the richest black community in the world probably – definitely in America, and highly educated folks. They come from the same regional background with the house party tradition. People have been using this music similarly for a long time, and there’s a distinction between what John and Phil were playing and what Duke Ellington was playing – you don’t have to dress up to hear John and Phil – although you can if you hear them at the White House. What we’ve done at the Bluebird to attract a black audience and maintain them and that has been nothing short of miraculous according to some people. But it’s the simplest thing in the world – we’re just giving them the music they want to hear in a context that they’re comfortable in, and they don’t have to worry about the fact that there’s all these white kids and rock-n-rollers hanging around making them feel like they’re imposing.

I think this whole idea of how music builds community or congregation is something we’ve been able to keep at the forefront here in D.C. At the same time, it’s not necessarily a commercial commodity or a product to be exploited by the entrepreneurs that are out there looking to do that. In that sense, we’ve prevented it from being commodified in the same way that it has in other places where there is often opportunity for resentment, because if you’re a commodity and you’re being sold to somebody you’re going to have to make them happy and maybe not make yourself happy. In other words, you’re not playing music for fun; you’re playing music to show these folks whatever it is they’re looking for.”