Nap Turner: Don’t Forget the Blues

 Born in an unincorporated mining town in rural West Virginia, Nap Turner grew up hearing country blues and downhome string band music. Moving to Washington in 1942, he found himself immersed in a generous music culture which included transplanted downhome blues, gospel quartets, rhythm and blues and jazz. Keenly interested in music and the musician’s lifestyle, he made a homemade string bass and was soon working with a little group on the streets. He played bass with dance bands and jazz combos and later began to sing blues. His first love however was jazz — Charley Parker, Slim and Slam, Duke Ellington — but as he grew musically he began to see blues as the key to most forms of American music. Eventually embracing blues as his heritage, he became a spokesperson for the art form and for more than twenty-three years was the area’s best known blues celebrity.

His first radio show which began 23 years ago was titled “Don’t Forget the Blues,” a saying which became his mantra encapsulating his mission in the Nation’s Capital where he admonished his myriad D.C. listeners to remember their cultural heritage. Over two decades he used his skills as musician, vocalist, actor, emcee and radio and T.V. personality to promote blues in all of its multiple manifestations scorning the labels the recording industry put on the music he loved. Later in life, he took over his friend Jerry “Bama” Washington’s radio program “The Bama Hour,” keeping the name both in honor of his friend and to assert his own gently militant commitment to what he once looked down on as “Bama” music. These programs reflected his own eclectic taste which ranged from Billie Holiday to Lightning Hopkins. A teacher and blues preacher, he taught by spinning Little Esther’s records, reading Langston Hughes yarns, quoting Percy Mayfield’s lyrics or reading the late J. Otis Williams blues poetry.

His own life reads like a blues novel, country boy comes to the big town and puts on big city ways. Which in his case meant dressing the part and being an active participant in the rhythm and blues, jazz night life which included the drugs that went with that scene in the 1950s.  He also paid his dues spending time in jail where he learned about the blues healing power. After kicking his habit, he eventually began working to help others. For all this we thank him. He was in the best sense of the term a dedicated cultural worker as well as a true gentleman whose friends will miss him but they won’t forget the blues.

Napoleon “Nap” Turner in his own words:

“I was born in a little West Virginia mining town called Tamms. It was a very small town, you know what I mean, in Raleigh County. Probably the biggest city was Beckley, the county seat, and they had some other little small towns around. I left out of that area when I was about twelve or thirteen, years old. Prior to that, it was like just living in a very small place, right? Tamms was a company town. A company owned the town and the mines and all that. They owned the big store, the company store, and they sold everything in there, clothing, tools, food, whatever. They even had their own money, they used to call it scrip. And those company towns, they had little houses constructed like I think our little house might of had a kitchen and three rooms. The chimney was almost in the middle of the house and they had fireplaces and in the winter time you burn coal and that kind of stuff. And the kitchen had a big old coal stove in there. It was really nice. I mean we had chickens out in the back yard, had a chicken coop and shit like that and my father also had some hogs that he kept in pens on the outskirts of the town.

My father was a Methodist and my mother was a Baptist and my mother sang in the choir. My father was evidently involved with some kind of lodge or something because when he used to clean up his church, they had this room upstairs where they had all of these, I guess they were costumes and they would have lodge meetings. So I was either with my father or my mother. Most of the time I was with my mom. And I learned about music in the church but then on the radio, they had jazz. I can remember some of the first big bands that I ever heard, I heard it on the radio and minstrel shows used to come through, little carnivals and that kind of thing. I saw a minstrel show, it was called Silas Green of New Orleans and they had minstrels playing music so I saw a couple of those. So it was a nice kind of childhood.

I can remember when I was a kid back in West Virginia, seeing guys come through with guitars and harmonicas and I suppose those were some of the people who spread the blues because you could carry a guitar or you could put a harmonica in your pocket but you can ‘t put no bass in your pocket. I remember my mother and father taking me to where they would have dances on Saturday night and they would have people with guitars and drums. But, that music was for dancing. It was almost as if we had music to serve different purposes in our life. I can remember going to baseball games and seeing people with horns and stuff back in West Virginia. I can remember seeing the blacks and whites playing together. The blacks would have guitars and some of the white people would have violins or horns and they would be down on the ball diamond playing music. And I associated that with playing ball and the community coming together and the Fourth of July. But, my earliest memories were, I guess, late at night when it was dark and I could hear the radio. And you would hear jazz, big band music on the radio from hotels in other parts of the country. And my family would be listening to that. I just liked it.

It’s always been in my life.

But then my mother and father split up and we moved to another place in, West Virginia, a place called Cooktown. It was a very small town, an unincorporated town, between two towns that were like mining communities. Companies owned these other towns, but they didn’t own this little town. So it was like a center for all kinds of things happening. People could have different kinds of businesses and all that and there were restaurants, beer gardens, we called them beer gardens, right? They had them kind of joints that sold food and liquor or whatever, and occasionally you would hear bands in there. I remember most of the music that you heard was hillbilly music. And down in Cooktown they had a joint, I thought it was a church but evidently it was more than that. They had all kinds of stuff going on in there. They would have the guys come in with them guitars and stuff and harmonicas and kazoos and all kind of shit and they’d be carrying on in there. And we couldn’t go in there but again, it was before the time of air conditioning and all of that. So the windows would be open and we’d be standing back out there in the dark trying to see what’s going on, hearing music, just curious about everything.

I can remember hearing hoedown music and more traditional blues music and all kinds of stuff. And it’s just in later years when I hear things, it brought it back, like they flash back to me. So it’s like “Damn. I’ve been hearing that all my life.” And my whole history is hooked up in that area, my early history anyway. My mother had grown up there, well, she was a teenager when they came there. So my great grandfather and great grandmother all the way back to that generation, a lot of them were buried there. And in fact, in April, I was down there. What had happened, I had went back to West Virginia just to see where I came from, right? Looked at the little town and man the town had hardly changed at all. A lot of the stuff had fallen down and what not, but the basic shit was there. And Iran in to this lady who somehow had met this historian, and she hooked me up with her. And come to find out, her mother had been one of my playmates when I was a little kid. So I got a chance to interview her and all of that. And last April, the American Legion, well this historian found this graveyard and my great-grandfather and his wife were buried there and he had fought in the civil war, right? And then they didn’t have no blacks in the American Legion cemetery in Beckley. So somehow they wound up, like doing timber because like the graveyard had timber growing up in it. So they was up there cutting timber and desecrating the graves. And this old lady, her name was Pauline Hager, she got the American Legion, she got everybody involved. Made them stop that shit. And they wound up moving my great grandfather and my great grandmother’s graves to this nice site in Beckley, where it was being taken care of, you know. They had a big old ceremony, gave me the flag and all that. It was really nice man.

And the peculiar thing is, I don’t know maybe it’s not peculiar because a lot of people do that, but I came out of West Virginia in 1941 or 1942, something like that, yet I still think of that as home. And I guess it has something to do with the connection to the land and all of that. I have since found out that mv great grandfather, before he died, had become a property owner. Now that blows my mind man, you know I say, “Well damn, how could that be?” And then they had nine sons, and the youngest one took care of his mother and father. And he was always writing back and forth to the government to get benefits for his father. And he made them pay him. He was getting the money. He was getting that government money and what not. And he was a thirty-third degree mason, a preacher, a bootlegger, a shoemaker and an entrepreneur.

They ran his ass out of there, though.

Now the real scene for me was when I got to Washington because music was everywhere, live music you know. I had never been to a big city, well, I did spend a little time in Charleston. Charleston was the first time I ever lived in a big city and I didn’t stay there long. It might have been a couple of years, a year or two before we came to Washington. My uncle had a shoe repair shop here in D.C. and he was responsible for bringing me and my mother here. He was like really my great uncle because he was my grandfather’s brother and he had raised my mother and a couple of other of his brother’s children. He was really like the patriarch, I guess, of our family. He was the one that was responsible for all of us coming in to Washington. He came to Washington in the 1930s. And then when the war started, the second world war, there was work up here. There wasn’t nothing happening in West Virginia too tough. Well the mines were still working in 1941, 1942. And my mother and I came to Washington I think it must have been 1943 because I enrolled in Shaw Junior High School. And I got out of Shaw in 1946 and went to Armstrong. That was like, people was living on top of one another. That was the first thing I had to get used to. Paved streets and sidewalks and street lights and all that, first happened in Charleston, but when I got to Washington, it was a much bigger city. I can remember not really liking it. the lifestyle. Kids taking advantage of one another in the school system and bullies, all that kind of shit. And I was like, I wasn’t for that.

You know I was never athletic or anything like that. In fact I think I was scared to death most of my life and so I gravitated towards other types of things. I couldn’t play ball because I’m uncoordinated. And I used to think something was wrong with me because I was not like a lot of the other kids. I wasn’t in to that. I used to play cowboys. I had a broomstick and had it all fixed up and I’d be running thought the alleys with my stick between my legs, have my six shooters on, you know what I mean?

But I soon grew out of that. And it got to the point that I found the Smithsonian Institute so I used to spend most of my Sundays somewhere down around those museums. And then I found out the girls weren’t supposed to be pushed around because I didn’t like girls. I didn’t want to be around no girls when I was like ten or eleven, twelve, thirteen years old. But then when I got to be about fourteen I said, “Oh Yeah.” And ever since then I been trying to keep them around. But I can remember in the 1940s they used to have places right here in Washington where you would have guitar players and harmonica players and sometimes saxophone players or whatever, and they would be playing coon can in the back and selling food and whiskey. And it’s very interesting a lot of blues songs talk about hanging out on Saturday night and going to church on Sunday morning. I mean you know, you might be up all night long Saturday night, but you was expected to be in church come Sunday. And I know I was like twenty-four, twenty-five years old before I defied that rule in my house. But it was impossible on Sunday morning to walk through my community and not hear religious music. Every Sunday they would have the “Wings Over Jordan” on in every house. They didn’t have no air conditioner, so people would have their doors open and they’d have their windows up.

When I came to Washington I first lived at Fifth Street between Q and R. And in my neighborhood, on Sunday morning it was just something about the day because early in the morning the church bells used to ring. You don’t hear that no more. But they used to ring church bells in the morning and you would hear that music, coming out of them houses and what not. You heard the blues too now, but I mean predominantly on Sunday, you heard religious music in the black community. On Saturday you heard the blues.

I remember being fourteen and fifteen years old I discovered the Howard Theater and then night clubs and all that music, man. My mother used to tell me, you got to be in the bed by ten o’clock, right? I’d go up and go in my room and I’d take me some pillows or some coats or something and make it look like I was in the bed. And I’d go out my back window, down across the roof and jump the fence, and I would be hanging out around Seventh and T Streets. Standing back in the shadows, climbing up fire escapes to look in and see those women dancing. I was just fascinated. The whole lifestyle, the way people dressed, the way they walked, the way they talked. There’s something very, very beautiful about my people.

I would cut school just to go hang out over by the Howard Theater and try to get them to let me help them carry the drums into the theater so I could get a chance to see and to hear people practicing. One of the greatest thrills I had was to see Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Howard Theater when Sonny Grier was the drummer. And I had never seen nobody with so much equipment. It used to take him a half a day to set up his equipment because he had gongs, he had tympani, he had all kinds of drums and bells. All kinds of stuff and I was fascinated by that.

When we would go to the Howard Theater you might have, like the Delta Rhythm Boys who were a gospel or spiritual type of quartet. They were singing spiritual kinds of music. Now on that same show you might have Deke Watson and the Brown Dots who were singing popular kinds of tunes and then you would either have the house band or you might have a big band. Now the music sounds, well all of it doesn’t sound alike, but what I’m saying is, the source and the basis of most of that music springs from our heritage, from our culture, from that kind of thing and the music is adapted to certain rituals certain situations or circumstances.

On T Street between Seventh and Eighth, on the north side of the street was a little club that we used to call it “The Bucket of Blood”. And you’d find all them guys who had guitars and harmonicas and stuff like that would be in joints like that playing. There was also another club down at Fourth and K Streets, Northwest that was called “The Mohawk Grill”. Now you could hear that kind of stuff in there. There was another one called “The American Grill” that was at Seventh and P Streets, Northwest and you would hear a lot of that kind of rural kind of blues in there. Now if you went down around Six and a half Street, which was in the Northwest section of town, I think it ran from down around L Street up to about N. I think it was, two blocks, a couple of blocks. And a lot of people from the Carolinas, places like that, lived down there. And you got a chance to hear that good rural kind of blues sound, you know because people had guitars, pianos, in some of the houses, guitars, basses, stuff like that and they would be playing that music. In the summertime people would be barbecuing out on the sidewalk and you would see them guitar players and they would be playing them rural blues. And you could walk up, go another block and you’d be hearing what would later be called rhythm and blues.

But then I wasn’t really interested in that. That was something that wasn’t hip. Those people, they were like farmers as far as I was concerned. You know they wore overalls, what they call dungarees they wore work boots. I was more inclined toward Hickey Freeman suits, Ballys and Edmond Clapp shoes and stuff like that, you know how it is when you’re a youngster. I just didn’t care for that. I mean I knew it was pan of the culture. I knew all of that. But it didn’t project what I wanted to do. It wasn’t slick, to my way of perceiving. It wasn’t slick. It was like a put down in many respects as far as I was concerned during those days, when I looked at it.

And then around the Howard Theater, that area was alive with music it’s unbelievable. They had the theater, and they wound up building a place right across Wiltberger Street right across from the Howard Theater with a hotel upstairs and they had live music in there. They had live music on the comer of 7thStreet in a club called Clore’s. Next door was a bakery. Next door was another club called the Little Harlem, and next door to that was a club called “The Off Beat” and they had a place called the Old Rose Social Club and across the street on the west side of the street, they used to have a lot of after hours joints in Washington at the time.

There were some guys that played in the streets and smaller clubs and things like that and one of them had a bass that was made form a big old, I guess it must have been a five gallon syrup can. You take the top off it and put a hole in the center of the bottom of the can, take a piece of rope, real thick rope like clothesline rope, put a knot in the bottom of it, put the other end through the hole and get a long stick, take the string and nail it to the top of the stick and when you tighten the tension holds the stick against the bottom of the can, And when you change the tension of the line it changes the sound of the rope.

So I said, “Oh look at it.” So that wasn’t hard to do. All I had to do was go to the drugstore and get one of them cans and get a piece of rope and a piece of flooring or whatever and I had me an instrument. Once I got that can, that stick and the piece of rope I wanted a real instrument.

People played on the streets but most of the time I played in joints even when I first started. I knew kids who did do that. But my mother wouldn’t let me do that. I’d better not do nothing like that. Playing on the street! Like one time I had a shoe shine box and I was up there around Seventh and P I think, shining shoes. My mother came out from the market or somewhere and saw me down there man, on my knees and shining somebody’s shoes, she beat the shit out of me. Broke my shoeshine box up, threw my polish and shit in the trash. Told me: “Boy you better not embarrass me on the street.” Yeah man.

But that’s where I learned to play tub bass. I had a bass with one string on it and a stick and a tub and I learned to play that, and I guess I must have been about sixteen or seventeen. I was seventeen because I had just got me a real bass, right. I got a real bass fiddle man, and I was like crazy. My uncle had a shoe repair shop. He loaned me the money to get my first real bass. He would threaten me he’d take the bas back, you know, because after I got that bass I was totally unreliable as far as working in the shop was concerned. Because I’d be out all night long just about. You know how it is with a youngster. I was like seventeen, eighteen, and I was a wild person, man. And once he found out that I was using drugs and all the rest of that, oh man, it devastated my whole family. See, I was hooked by the time I was in the twelfth grade. And I lost a year so I didn’t graduate from high school until 1950. So I just decided I was going to try to get it the same way everybody else seemed to be getting it, and that was to join a band and just spend that time that I should have been in school. I was around the theaters and night clubs and record stores and that kind of stuff. I just went clean off. Because with that bass I could get into all those clubs. They wouldn’t sell me any liquor or anything like that, but I was learning from the other musicians.

But I would be hanging out and not where they figured I was supposed to be because I’d be hanging with the guys and we’d be going downtown playing music. They, my family, didn’t like that too much but they didn’t see too much wrong with it either. But I hung out in after hours clubs from the time I was about seventeen years old and once I got that fiddle it was no sweat. I would go in those joints with my fiddle, I used to wear a big hat pull it down on the side of my head and turn my coat collar up and have my fiddle hanging on my arm and used to get in there with the rest of the musicians. When they go in, I got in too. And when the club owner found out I was doing that and I was in there the only rule was that I couldn’t drink alcoholic beverages in there. I’d go out in the alley. I’d have me a bottle stashed in the alley somewhere. I’d play in the jam sessions with all kinds of people, professional people and that’s how I learned to play. The first thing I learned to play was the blues. So that was my early training. But another way I learned, I had a friend that worked at Waxie Maxie record store on Seventh Street Northwest, and when the new records came in, he would let us come in and in those days you could go, they had listening booths in the record stores. So we would come in, we’d take the new records back and listen to them in the booth and everybody would try to remember their part. Then we would run across the street to a little bar called Little Harlem and run up the steps and try to play it. That was basically how I learned to do it.

So that’s been the way I learn by hanging around because I was hanging around the theater, hanging around the musicians and constantly pestering people. “Hey, how you doing? Can I touch your bass? Would you let me carry it for you?” Stuff like that. And people just started, they started to teach me.

Before that it was just, I guess it was just a natural thing. I could just hear the music and I could somehow translate it to the bass without any training really. But of course I did start to find out about it by that time I was in high school and I was taking all the regular little high school classes, music classes and I just loved it. I’m a ham.

I don’t think I’m any different than a lot of people in the sense that you see something happening and you say I believe I can do that, or I would like to learn how to do that. How do they do that? And so what happened with me, is that I start to watch people, hanging around, and asking questions because I’ve always been the kind of guy that would ask questions. Oh, it might be a stupid question to you, but it was something I wanted to know and I would ask. And most people would answer, give me a good answer. Some of the first scales and things I learned how to play, the parts of the instruments, I learned from professional musicians.

See I made a conscious decision when I was eighteen or nineteen years old not to go to college because in those days they didn’t have jazz studies and I wasn’t interested in Beethoven. I just plainly wasn’t interested in that and I didn’t see what that had to do with playing jazz and couldn’t nobody tell me at that point in my life that it had something to do with it because I didn’t believe that. Why would I want to go to a university where if they caught you playing the blues or jazz in the practice rooms, they might put you out of school. That’s what was happening at Howard University back in the late 1940s and the early 1950s. They used to have a band called the Howard Swingmasters. It was one of the bad big bands, eighteen or twenty pieces. They wouldn’t even let them rehearse in the music rooms. You couldn’t rehearse on campus. It was sad.

Now I sort of hacked in to the blues. I sort of backed into that because when I was a youngster in high school when I started to really get interested in music and decided I was going to be a musician, I didn’t want to hear no blues. I didn’t want to hear that. Right? But then I discovered if I wanted to work and I wanted to make some money, I’d have to go out on the road with the rhythm and blues bands. And I did that. I was working with the Griffin Brother and they had me running across the stage, they used to tell me to straddle my instrument and run across the stage or stand up and spin it around while you’re playing it and all that kind of thing, and I would do that because I had to live and I was trying to be a musician. I was working with the Griffin Brothers in 1950, 1951 a few months off and on. They had a bad band. One of the brothers was partially blind and they used to call him Buddy and he was the piano player. And the other brother played trombone and his name was Jimmy. Gene Barge and I worked with the Griffin Brothers at the same time. Yeah, he’s a Norfolk boy and so were the Griffin Brothers. I worked with other rhythm and blues bands but only for a short time. Roy Brown, Amos Milburn who else? I also worked with Gene Ammons. I worked Little Harlem with Leo Parker playing baritone and Sir Charles Thompson was the piano player. And they were basically jazz guys. I preferred to play jazz but I wouldn’t make no money.

I was working different rhythm and blues bands but soon as I got to a town where they had some jazz happening, usually I would quit. Usually I would wind up quitting and get stranded in the town. Jesus, I sometimes think about how many times I called home to my mother to send me a ticket so I could get back home. And looked like as soon as the ticket would get there, I’d get a gig so I wouldn’t go home.

We played little gigs like down in Pomonkey, Maryland, there used to be a place called the Bluebird Inn down there off of Route One in Virginia and I remember once I was working with a band on the road and they tied my fiddle on top of the car and you talk about having your heart broken. The rope that we had broke and I happened to look out the back window and saw my fiddle skipping down the highway and the neck and stuff broke all off. Man that was a horrible thing.

And it used to be that every club had a piano in it and then all of a sudden, there wasn’t no more pianos in clubs. Every club had those big old B-3 organs, so bass players were out of work. I mean it was hard to get a gig, you know playing bass, so that was when I started to really trying to sing. And I guess I must have did that until the babies started coming. You know one of the sad things about when you’re a musician, you’re almost like a nomad so you’re ripping and running around the road all the time. And inevitably you’re gonna find a young lady and you gonna fall in love and when you fall in love you gonna start doing the things that you do and then babies going to start to coming. And when them babies start to coming they get to telling you about you got to have a real job. That baby got to have some shoes. That baby got to have some diapers. So you got to make some other kind of living.

But you know it’s really crazy because in my teens I was like hooked on Charlie Parker and the Be Bop and all of the rest of that, and was trying to play that. Bought me a fiddle and I used to think that the blues was like “Bama” music, you know. I’d say, “I don’t want to play that. What is that?” You know what I mean, but then my experience was that I found out everybody played the blues. Charlie Parker, my idol, played the blues. Lester Young playedthe blues, Louis Armstrong. Everybody plays the blues. But when I was younger I can remember the first time somebody told me, said, well, I was talking about Charlie Parker and this, that and other so forth. And somebody said, “Well now Charlie Parker plays the blues.” I said. “What?He does?” Andthat sort of seeded the point. And that’s when I really started to study. But when I was younger I didn’t want to hear nothing about no Lightning Hopkins or nobody like that. I didn’t want to hear that. I’d rather hear Billy Eckstine sing “Jelly Jelly” or hear Louis Jordan. It was just a different kind of experience for me. And it wasn’t until I became a mature adult that I really started to appreciate and to become really curious about that music and what it was about.

I started working with Mary Jefferson it must have been around late 1947 or early 1948. Her husband Mark was a drummer and I was a bass player and we used to work together quite a bit. Mary had been a chorus girl too. She could dance and sing all of that. During the early 1950s she was in jail and I was too and that process lasted up until about, for me in to the 1960s and but Mary, after she went to jail the first time back in the 1950s, she didn’t go back no more. Mary and I went to Italy together. We went to five different cities in Northern Italy, Milan, we had a ball. Let me tell you a quick story. Mary, I and some other people got a chance to go to Italy on a tour. So it was 21 of us and they took us to San Remo. So when we get there my stomach was all upset and what not and I was feeling kind of sick and they carried us to this big casino with all of these one-armed bandits in there, right?

So Mary (I’m out there sick) so I say, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Mary said, “Lord, Nap I know Jesus didn’t bring me all the way over here and put me in this gambling joint and ain’t gonna let me win no money.”

So I went to the bathroom, regurgitated and came back. Mary was standing down the hall.

I said, “What happened Mary?”

She say, “I don’t even want to talk about it because these people took my money.”

But she is my buddy, and. and her husband and I were very good friends.

I’ve been with WPFW about twenty-four years and I’ve been on the air about twenty-two, twenty-three years. My show was named “Don’t Forget the Blues” from the beginning. I started doing the Langston Hughes readings , the Jesse Semple stories after I was with WPFW.. And I did some Percy Mayfield stuff. See Living Bluesdid an in-depth interview with Percy Mayfield and I got a lot of material from that. I used to sing some of his stuff. I discovered Percy Mayfield I guess around the 1950s and I liked his songs and one thing led to another and the next thing you know I was doing Percy Mayfield things because he tells beautiful stories. He’s got a song that says,

“It’s so nice to take a stroll in the country.

Through the woods or down a shady land.

Through the fields or across a grassy meadow. And to listen to a robin sing.”

Now that’s a beautiful thought. It tells a wonderful story. It’s nothing sad about that it’s really taking about relaxing and being able to vent. That’s one of the things the music does for me.

And it’s been that way with the acting, it was the same thing. In fact, a fellow came to me said, “Nap they got a play that’s coming down to the Studio Theater and it’s called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and it’s got a part in there for a bass player and you’d be perfect for that part. So why don’t you go down there and read?”

I said, “Man, you’re crazy. I’m not going. Read for a play?” said, “Yeah.”

I said, “I can’t do that. I ain’t no actor.”

He said, “Yes you are. You been acting all your life. You can act. Go on down there and read.” So my girlfriend at the time said. “Nap at least if you go down there you’ll get a professional critique about your reading.”

So I said, “OK.”

And I went down there and I read. They called me back the next day then about three or four days later they called me back again. Then they asked me if I could make rehearsals and I said yeah. I thought I was gonna be like an understudy. Now I had not been exposed to professional theater really at this level before. And when they told me that they was gonna give me the part, I said, “What?” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “ I can’t do that. I can’t remember all that.”

And they had a director he said, “Yes you can.” Said, “I’m gonna show you how to do it right.” So I went ahead and did it. I got hooked up with the Homicide show basically through Mary. Mary was the one that got me into the union, AFTRA and SAG, told me about the union and about agents and all of that. She was in two or three episodes of Homicide and she was in some major movies also. And also through those agents I’ve done all kind of stuff all kind of commercials like, in fact I got another Virginia Lottery commercial that I’m supposed to shoot next week. And I’ve been in the Maryland Lottery commercials, done them for Virginia Lottery, been in all kind of stuff been in a couple of movies, a made for television movie called “Cupid and Cates.” And I was an extra in a whole lot of movies I was in one with Jack Lemmon.

It wasn’t until I guess in the early 1950s when I wound up in the Penitentiary, that I started to understand what the blues were really about. Because before that I didn’t have many bad experiences or anything. I didn’t have any reason to want to sing anything like that. I just wasn’t relating to it even though my family had blues records. But then I spent a lot of years using heavy drugs, going in and out of institutions, penitentiaries, jails, mental institutions, all of that. And I guess I was forty or fifty years old before I really gained a good healthy respect for blues music. Because it is the connector of a lot of our culture and society. And since I staffed to read, I found that black blues musicians, white rockabilly or whatever you want to call it, you know I have problems with all those labels too. I don’t see why we have to call it this kind ofblues or that kind of blues or this kind of jazz or that kind. I mean there’s a close relationship, I think, between what I call hillbilly music and the blues. I don’t see where that shouldn’t be expected because of whether people want to accept it or not black and white people gonna be in this country together. They’ve been in this country together and you can’t help from influencing one another.

One thing that you have to understand, the delineation in black music is a product of marketing. I mean every time the people with the money and the people that do the recording and things decide that this is a different sound, this group got a different sound from that group, right, so this must be something else; or even, if it’s not anything else. If I can put a label on this, right, then it will sell. Basically all of our music is the same thing or comes from the same source. Our religious music expresses the religious and spiritual sides of our lives and the jazz and the blues speaks to the secular side of our lives.

It’s sad to say but the blues, at a commercial level is supported more by whites than blacks. I should say, not all of them because I’m still black, you understand, and I don’t feel like that. But at any rate, it’s a natural resource that we don’t realize the significance and the value of. I think part of it has to do with what I said about myself. I think that a lot of us even today, a lot of us and even our most educated, and some of them in particular, some of our most educated blacks look down on the blues. They don’t want to hear it. But when I play parties for them people, when we play those parties you wait until around eleven o’clock at night and two or three drinks, and we start in playing the blues they get to kicking off their shoes and hooting and hollering and throwing their hands up and popping their fingers and all kinds of stuff. So I think it’s all attitude.

Let’s look at the sixties, let’s look at James Brown, “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.” It’s a bluesman. You can look at the history of this country and if you go to library or other places where you can get materials, you can see that after every war there has been a recession or damn near a depression, there has been a migration of blacks from one part of the country to the other. Every time blacks move up the ladder, you can see that musically and sociologically. You can look at the second world war. During the second world war there was a revolution in music and they started coming along with be-bop. People used to play real melodically when they played horns, real lyrical. The music was really lyrical then all of a sudden just before the sixties came along, when you started listening to black musicians in particular, they came up with what they called the avant-garde and the music was crazy man. I mean horns were screaming and honking and the drummers sounded like they were going crazy. I mean with the whole thing. But when you looked at the sociological side of that you could see the same thing happening. Martin Luther King came along. All the rest of that came along, the music changed. And you can go all the way back and you can see that. And you can hear that. And it’s just in my later life that I began to see that and make those kinds of connections.

Our music. It’s that thing that has helped us to survive. Had it not been for our religious music, had it not been for the kind of music and the kind of thinking that went in to the spirituals and religious music, I doubt if we would have been able to really weather the suffering of that kind of thing.

A lot of young people say, “I don’t want to hear no blues.” because they think that’s the only thing it’s about is sadness, but it’s not. The blues talks about everyday living. Things that happen every day. Like they got an old blues song the dude say his woman has left him and he say he’s gonna go and lay his head down on the railroad track, but the kicking line is “but when I hear that train coming, I’m gonna snatch my head back.” So even in that there’s a kind of hope and a kind of surviving in that, see what I’m saying? I mean they got all kinds of tunes, lyrics, about different life situations. But the amazing thing is how we were able to survive with that. You know there was a time when black people didn’t have no psychiatrists and psychologists, therapists and all that. We didn’t have none of that. Wasn’t no going nowhere and sitting down on no couch. You had to sing the blues or go to church or something like that or get you a rabbit foot, so that you could survive. To me that’s part of the beauty of the blues.”

Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland 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.