Axel Küstner

It’s ironic that the American blues was often more appreciated in Europe than in the country that gave it birth. Much has been said and written about the “British Invasion,” an odd cultural phenomena when UK rock-n-roll bands reintroduced blues-based music to American audiences, selling back to the American counterculture their own roots music. Blues had been here all along, but in the early 1960s most white Americans were unfamiliar with it, in part due to musical segregation, in part because interest in the blues had waned with the African American community. Black folks were listening to mainstream jazz, soul and R&B, while the country blues was mostly out of favor, and just being “discovered” by a small audience of bohemians and folk music fans. By the 1970s the folk & blues-revival was fully underway and interest in the old blues was ignited. Many of the old country blues players saw a second career and musicians like Johnny Shines, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and many others were popular among the college audience. The acoustic blues scene in Washington, D.C., was active and thriving, but still largely under the radar of the growing international blues fan base.

In the meantime, interest in the blues was in full swing in Europe, in part spurred on by strong interest among English and German youths. One catalyst was the American Folk Blues Festival, which brought rotating ensembles of American blues players to tour Europe as an annual event beginning in 1962. Two young German promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, brought the musicians to Europe after having established a relationship with Chess Records bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon. The first festival was held in 1962 and continued until 1972. After an eight-year break the concerts were revived in 1980 and ran until 1985. The tour brought some of the best American blues players to France, West Germany, Scandinavia, England, even bringing the blues to Eastern Europe behind the “Iron Curtain.” Between 1962 and 1970, the American Folk Blues Festivalconcerts were televised by Südwestfunk, a major German broadcast network, exposing the music to broad audiences. Europeans were treated to an amazing array of musicians: Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Eddie Boyd, Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton, Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Otis Spann, and many more.

The tours were hugely successful as interest in the blues was peaking in Europe, and the touring musicians were treated as musical royalty, celebrated, respected and adored often more so than at home in America. As Lippmann and Rau embarked on the second leg of the AFBF series in 1980, they also founded a record label, L+R Records, in 1979. It was around that time that Lippmann was approached by the German two blues fans: promoter and sound engineer Siegfried A. Christmann and photographer/researcher Axel Küstner. They sought to find previously unknown country blues musicians and collect “field recordings,” musicians in their natural surroundings, much like Alan Lomax, George Mitchell, David Evans or Chris Strachwitz had done a generation earlier, and they suggested funding for a field trip to the USA. The pair packed up an Audiorecord Mobile Unit with Sennheiser microphones and over ten weeks they traveled 10,000 miles all over the States to record some old time blues. The duo reported using 180,000 feet of audio tape, which culminated in issuing 14 LPs under the series Original Field Recordings- Living Country Blues USA. Photographer Axel Küstner took hundreds of photos and they interviewed many dozens of musicians. In 1980 they came up to Washington, D.C., where they recorded Flora Molton and her Truth Band, Archie Edwards, and John Cephas & Phil Wiggins.

These young guys made an indelible and powerful mark on the country blues, not just with these important sound recordings, but with the photographs that documented the era and put the spotlight on deserving musicians, some of whom had been previously underserved by the American blues. Their “field trip” documented an important part of the American country blues, and the Washington, D.C., blues scene in particular, and they were among the first to recognize the importance of the local blues scene.

Photographer and chronicler Axel Küstner in his own words:

I grew up in the small town of Bad Gandersheim, Germany, where I finished my associate’s degree (Abitur) in 1976. During the late 1960s I listened to rock music. One of my favorite bands was The Who, and I was especially impressed with the drummer Keith Moon, and then the usual stuff – Cream, Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Bee Gees. Actually the Bee Gees were the first live show I ever saw in March 1968 at the Stadthalle Braunschweig. The first time I ever saw real blues was one afternoon in a TV program called Swing In. They had a show in October of 1968 of the American Folk Blues Festivaltouring in Germany, and a studio session at a TV station with T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Eddie Taylor, a bluesman with Walter Horton and Jimmy Reed, Curtis Jones, a piano player from Texas, who was already living in Paris that time, and Big Joe Williams. That was the first real blues I ever saw. That same year for my birthday present I got a tape machine, so I taped part of that show off the TV. I was really impressed. As a 12-year-old I saw this old man there, playing a wild guitar – I couldn’t believe it. It was Big Joe Williams. I was really impressed with him.

The first blues live show I ever saw was in 1972 – it was the American Folk Blues Festival, in Bremen, Germany, on March 15, 1972. The lineup was Memphis Slim, T‑Bone Walker, Robert Pete Williams, Big Joe Williams and Big Mama Thornton. So I already knew Big Joe Williams’ records, and he was a big favorite of mine, so I could see him live at that particular show. At that time my father had a portable tape machine that I carried to the show. Things were so innocent at that time. I was sitting in the audience, holding up a microphone and taping the whole show. After the concert, I went to the dressing room to get the poster signed, Big Joe saw the tape machine and grabbed the microphone and told me to switch it on, and he sung an a capella version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s See That My Grave Is Kept Clean. I was totally blown away. These guys were my heroes and I could just go up and talk to them. The first time I went to the States, I went to California when I was 16 years old, for summer vacation in July and August 1972. I had already made contacts and started corresponding with different blues fans and researchers and I found a few addresses in an old blues magazine. I wrote to the blues artists K.C. Douglas, George Harmonica Smith and L.C. Good Rockin’ Robinson, and they all responded and invited me over – especially K.C. Douglas. While I was over there at 16 you weren’t allowed to go into the drinking clubs and it was hard to get around without your own transportation. I did manage on that trip to actually meet David Evans, the blues researcher who happened to live in the same town where I stayed outside of Los Angeles. In L.A. there was a famous folk club, the Ash Grove, where I saw Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee. In the San Francisco Bay area, I visited K.C. Douglas and L.C. Good Rockin’ Robinson in their homes, and also managed to meet Chris Strachwitz, the owner and producer of Arhoolie Records. That was my first “field recording” made of K.C. Douglas, who played for me and talked about his life in his kitchen.

It was one of my big ambitions to travel to the States and get the firsthand experience, like I had done with K.C. Douglas in 1972. I got to know Big Joe Williams on different German tours. Another guy I knew quite well was Juke Boy Bonner, a great blues poet from Texas. So I had already met a bunch of players, and by listening to obscure records and corresponding with people, I was trying to locate and visit as many blues players as possible. I worked at a post office for six months to make enough money to finance the trip, and then I took off from there in April 1978 and stayed for six months traveling all over the place looking for well-known blues musicians whom I had already met, like Big Joe Williams, and a few ones that I was aware of, with the hope of finding obscure musicians as well.

How I got the connection to Washington, D.C., that’s a funny story. Right before I was planning on going to the States in the beginning of April, I went to Hamburg, Germany, to watch a blues show. That was on February 14, 1978, and it was the Mississippi Delta Blues Band. The African American promoter Tom Boyd from Palo Alto, California, lined up different musicians and built the Mississippi Delta Blues Band. In that particular show it was Yank Rachell, the mandolin blues player from Brownsville, Tennessee, who had already recorded in the ’20s, and also a harmonica player called Tennessee Lee Crisp, who is quite obscure. When I got to the club in Hamburg, Tom Boyd had a few albums with him that he was selling at the show. On one of the albums was called the Mississippi Delta Blues Band in Europe, and on the back cover was a lady playing a resonator guitar with a slide and a young African American with a big afro sitting right next to her playing harmonica. I was really interested to know who this was. Would you believe it, when I got to New Orleans right at the beginning of my trip in April of 1978, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I met this same lady I saw in the photograph just six weeks earlier in Germany on the record cover. She was in New Orleans performing. That was totally amazing to me. It was Flora Molton and her Truth Band, Flora and two young African American men – one played harmonica, Larry Wise, and the other one on electric guitar, Tim Lewis. Flora was singing and playing slide guitar and sometimes a little tambourine. She was shaking or tapping with her feet rhythmically. They weren’t booked for the festival in New Orleans. They just drove down there, introduced themselves to the promoters, and the promoters actually put them in the show– that’s something that would never happen these days anymore. So that was a really funny coincidence of me having seen this photo of Flora on the album cover and wondering who could that lady be and actually coming across her a couple of weeks later in New Orleans. They told me they were from Washington, D.C., and since I didn’t have a precise traveling schedule, I decided to travel up to Washington, D.C. They told me about Archie and the Traveling Blues Workshop and about John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. I was quite amazed that they mentioned a few other traditional blues artists that were living in Washington, D.C., which I was totally unaware of at that time. Of course I knew John Jackson who I had seen a few times in Germany, so I knew he lived somewhere outside Washington, D.C. From New Orleans I went to Baton Rouge, then to Chicago and to Cincinnati, Ohio. Then I went to Morristown, New Jersey to stay with a cousin. That’s where I bought a car, you know, all the other traveling I had done so far with a Greyhound bus. I bought a Volkswagen squareback station wagon and I took off and went straight to Washington, D.C.  I got there on July 5th, 1978. That same afternoon we went to Flora’s house while her band did a rehearsal. It was Larry Wise on harmonica, Tim Lewis on guitar, and Ed Morris who played guitar with Flora, who I didn’t know before. It was the first time I met him that afternoon, and Ed turned out to be a good friend. He was an excellent guitar player who had played with Flora since the early 1960s.

Then, I stayed with Tim Lewis, who actually was not a full-time musician. He played a little guitar, but he was a film student. He lived in Washington, D.C., in a little brick house in the garden right behind the main building where Ralph Rinzler lived.

I was totally unaware of who he was, and I had no clue. Only years later I discovered that Rinzler was responsible for locating Doc Watson and that he was also the manager of Bill Monroe, who I also didn’t know anything about.

On July 6th, 1978, Tim took me to meet John Cephas. At that time John was not a full-time musician. He was a carpenter working for the National Guard Armory. We went to the Armory building, to his woodworking workshop in the basement, and that’s where we sat down and talked for a few hours. I took some photographs, made some recordings of him, and interviewed him. That was right after I got to D.C., on the second day. John was still in his work clothes. We talked about all kinds of things. That was my first time meeting with John Cephas. I got a little about his history on tape– that he had recorded for the Library of Congress and he was talking about the Travellin’ Blues Workshop. On Saturday, July 8th, Tim took me to meet Archie Edwards, who was part of the Travellin’ Blues Workshop as well. We went to Archie’s barbershop – there was nobody in there. The Gaines Brothers were not there that night, as Archie says in the book. It was just Archie, Tim Lewis and myself. I set up the tape machine and he gave me his life history and he played some great music. Archie, I thought, was a very outstanding, creative artist within that traditional framework of East Coast acoustic blues. I Had a Little Girl– was one of his original songs. He played some Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt and told me all about the history of meeting John Hurt. Then he did another original, Saturday Night Hop. Then he did some more traditionals – Will You Remember Me?andSitting On Top Of The World. He did his original, The Road is Rough and Rocky about meeting John Hurt, and then he played Three Times Seven Bluesabout during the riots when he saw a little boy break into a liquor store and drink a fifth of whiskey. That was a very original song. I was very impressed with that one.

I still have the whole tape. When I did the album two years later for the L+R Record Company, the liner notes for the Archie Edwards album was just based on that interview.

I stayed in D.C. altogether two weeks and remember meeting Phil Wiggins. We went to the Childe Harold club where Phil played with his band that night. Tim Lewis knew another musician called Willie Lee Baron, and we did some tape recordings, but he was really rusty. I think he was originally from Florida.

I forgot that after we interviewed and met Archie at the barbershop, Archie took us over to meet LeRoy Gaines, one of his buddies. We went over to LeRoy’s home that evening and did some recordings. It was some instrumental piece. I especially remember that I had a camera, a 35mm with a flash attached to it, and he was under the impression that he would be on TV from what I did for taking his photograph and the tape recording. The only time I ever met him was that evening for a brief time– maybe an hour or so

After D.C., I went to Mississippi and different places. Originally I wanted to go to Houston, Texas, to meet up with Juke Boy Bonner, who I knew quite well from the time, but Juke Boy suddenly died when I was over there, so I didn’t make it to Texas. I spent a much longer time than I had planned to with Big Joe Williams, who I knew really well. So off and on I stayed for two months with Big Joe in Mississippi. I went on different trips up to Brownsville, Tennessee, to meet with Hammie Nixon and to Memphis and different places. Joe and me went to Laurel, Mississippi, to meet with this harmonica player, Lee Tennessee Crisp, whom I had seen in February touring in Germany. I returned to Germany that October in 1978 and I went back to work at the post office just to make more money so I could travel some more.

It turned out right at that time that Horst Lippmann, the famous promoter who with partner Fritz Rau produced the American Folk Blue Tours – started his own record label, L+R Records. The first album he put out was by Louisiana Red, who I knew very well. I have a good friend in Koblenz, Germany, Ziggy Christmann, who was operating a booking agency in Germany, and he brought over a lot of these guys like Juke Boy Bonner, Louisiana Red and Big Joe Williams. At that time Ziggy was operating the only German blues label, Ornament Records. I wanted Ziggy Christmann to put a Big Joe Williams record out on his Ornament label, so we started working together on the Big Joe Williams album with all the tapes I had made. I played him some of the tapes I had made of Archie, Flora and John Cephas and different other people I met in the States. So we came up with the idea that it would be great to travel to America and record all these guys I had met in 1978 in professional conditions. Ziggy was a good, self-taught sound engineer who did most of the recordings for his Ornament label. I had first met Horst Lippmann in 1978 at the home of Willie Dixon. So early in the spring of 1980, Ziggy and I arranged a meeting with Horst Lippmann. He was quite impressed with my work and the people I had found. Right at the first meeting he said, “Well, figure out how much money you need for a project like that and you guys can go ahead and do it.” Lippmann was in a very unique position as a fan of the music; and he was financially very well off, so he could afford to finance a project like that. Originally we planned to record 10 LP albums. That’s how the albums of Flora and John Cephas and Archie came about. I thought those three in Washington, D.C., were very exciting. I was very impressed and they were all really nice people – very friendly. Flora was an exceptionally nice lady, and Archie was very nice. I was a young German 22-year-old blues fan – I mean, it was totally great for me.

In 1976, I enrolled at the University at Dortmund to study photographic design. For a number of reasons it didn’t work out for me too well, and so I quit after one semester. So basically I’m a totally self-taught photographer. I was aware of a few photographers in reading some of the British blues magazines – like Valerie Wilmer who took a lot of photos of blues artists. I remember one photo I was totally blown away with – it was one of the Alan Lomax 1959 field recordings – on one of the Atlantic albums- I think it’s called the Blues Roll On, a color shot of Mississippi Fred McDowell on the cover, and on the back it said photo Lee Friedlander. So even before I got really deep into photography, the name Lee Friedlander was familiar to me. I remember the photograph that Walker Evans took in Mississippi at a railway station in the 1930s, as seen on one of my first blues albums Ramblin On My Mind.

We had a very tight budget for 10 albums, travel expenses and all. I think we offered the artists in D.C. $500 for each album. I don’t know what we paid Larry and Phil, but I remember we paid Archie $500. We said, “Archie, you definitely deserve more money, and we have a tight budget, but that’s all we can afford. Either you go along with it or you don’t.” And he said “We all agreed – speaking about it with Flora and John – we all agreed to do this with you guys because nobody offered us anything before.” So he had a point there. Because we gave him the guarantee with all the material there would be albums one year later or so.

In 1980, Horst Lippmann had reactivated the American Folk Blues Festivals. He had stopped in 1972 for health reasons, so there was a gap of eight years. In 1980 he started again and on the next folk blues festival tour in March 1981 he booked John and Phil over to Europe. Without that connection, the albums we recorded, that would have never happened. Phil had lived in Germany – his father was in the Army. For John Cephas it was the first overseas trip to Europe as a musician. John, Phil and Archie also came over in 1982, as did James Son Thomas from Mississippi, whom we had recorded in 1980 on that trip in Leland, Mississippi. Horst Lippmann told us that Flora Molton was very disappointed that she could not be part of those particular tours at that time. All the others went but not her. But she managed to come to Europe through a German booking agency, Rolf Schubert in Cologne, who booked Flora on a tour in 1987. Eleanor Ellis had started playing acoustic guitar with her, and they both came over. Archie came along, and Charlie Musselwhite the great harmonica and guitar player was with them.

It’s really interesting that of all the records we issued, those of Flora, Archie and John Cephas with Phil, the bestseller was John and Phil, because they went on different solo tours as well. So those records were really selling. Some of the other records did not even sell 1,000 copies, maybe a couple of hundred only. Over a period of two years all these albums came out – 12 volumes and the double album. Two years later, in ’82, I remember Horst Lippmann telling me, “If you approached me today, I would not finance this sort of project any more.” So we hit him at the right time, at the right spot in a way, to do that project. Two years later it would have never happened.

Axel Küstner continues to be active as a blues expert in Germany, promoting blues artists who tour Germany, writing liner notes for a local record label, and as a 78 rpm record collector of various musical genres. His contribution, together with his friend Ziggy Christmann, to the Washington, D.C., blues scene  stands not just in the album series Original Field Recordings- Living Country Blues USA, but his photographs of the place and time are an invaluable documentaryand a cultural treasure.