an interview with Dr. Barry Lee Pearson
I was born in Salem, Virginia, in 1924 but we moved from Virginia when I was between five and six years old and the rest of the time I was raised in West Virginia. But I’m a big Eastman by birth. But nobody wanted to claim me until the people liked my music then everybody wanted me. The people called from Roanoke and told Charleston: “You claim him? Reese was born in Salem, Virginia.” Then the people from Charleston called me, said: “You were raised here. Which one do you claim, West Virginia or Virginia?” They put me in the middle then. I said: “Listen, I claim them both.” I had to get out of that bind. I love both states.
My mother came from Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, and my father was born in Birmingham. And how I got to music, I guess I was born in to it. My mother played accordion, well years ago they called them concertinas. She played all gospel music like:
“Life is like a mountain railroad
With an engineer that’s brave
He will make the run successful
From the cradle to the grave
Watch the curves that’s in the tunnel
Never falter, never fail
Keep your hand upon the throttle
And your eye upon the rail.”
And my dad played guitar and he played two styles. He played the style of blues and gospel that they played in Alabama. And then when he moved this way, I’m talking about in Virginia’s heading toward West Virginia, he picked up the Piedmont style of picking, which at the time I didn’t really realize that it was Piedmont style. But he used to play the old Virginia, North Carolina and Alabama songs like “Chicken, Chicken you Don’ Roost too High for Me.” He learned me to play that plus a number of other songs. He picked with all five fingers.
So I learned from watching him when I could get him to play and a lot of things he showed me he didn’t get a chance to show it to me only about two or three times. I mean he had to work. When he come in he went to sleep. When he got up he went back to work. But anyhow, for some reason he kind of drifted away from playing music and just buckled down to raising his family.
When I was about four years old, we had an old RCA Victor crank phonograph. And I used to climb up in the chair and crank it and then put the record on, one of them 78 records. That’s the first thick ones they used to have: Yeah by Gene Austin and Molly and Me and Baby Makes Three. We hurry to my Blue Heaven.” Yeah, I wrote that thing out.
But anyway we were living in Salem, Virginia, on Water Street across a little river from a sanitarium. I could stand on the back porch and look across the field and the river and the sanitarium was on the other side, you know it was a hospital. We owned a cow that they named Daisy and she was a Jersey cow and she gave terrible amounts of milk. And I grew up roly poly like. I was fat the biggest of my life. And I didn’t lose that weight until I got about sixteen or seventeen.
My dad moved us from Virginia to West Virginia in 19 and 29 – almost ’30. And he got a job on the Virginia Railroad and that’s where he retired from. He prepared the engines for to go out and pull cars of coal. And you had to knock the fire down and take all the ashes out and all that stuff and wash the ashes out and engineers and firemen, all of them knew my dad because he had to fix the engine. That’s how they made their living too. My dad worked all the time night and day and they didn’t make much money back then in West Virginia. It was better than picking cotton, but you didn’t get rich overnight. He was making two dollars and sixty-four cents a day for eight hours and then he wouldn’t get that time and a half for overtime. You just got that straight time on through. He worked there almost thirty years for the same company before he retired. They almost had to retire him. In fact they gave him a choice “you either retire or we’ll retire you.”
I don’t know. God blessed him well or whatever the supreme being was, blessed him well, because he lasted. When they looked at the book, the family Bible, where he was born in Birmingham and counted up when he died he was a hundred and seventeen years old. And two weeks before he died, he was one mile from a grocery store and he walked to that grocery store and got him a bag of groceries, him and his cane, he called it his stick and walked back home.
I grew up in coal camps and railroad camps. See, what people got to realize, years ago, coal people and coal field people and railroad P, they wasn’t in towns. They went by camps not cities. It would be nineteen or twenty houses on this side of the track and three or four on that side of the track. But that was a camp of its own. And you go about two hundred, three hundred yards down the railroad track it would be another camp. And some of them was numbered and sometimes they were named. In Gary, in McDowell County they were numbered; number eight, number nine, number ten, and all of that. But down in Wyoming County they had places they called Black Bottom, Corrive and Iman Hill. That was the difference between the two counties was in the names of the camps. The biggest of them was in Wyoming County, but there was a little spread on this side, that went over into McDowell. You know how these mountains are in a coalfield, cross the ridge and you’re over in another county.
So anyhow, in the coal fields the recreation for the men because they wanted them to be close where they could go to work on a Monday morning. They didn’t care what they done long as they got back there to go to work on Monday morning.
So they would buy suits for the quartets to sing in the churches and every coal camp had a quartet, a baseball team and a choir and churches they have more churches than they did coal miners almost. Well, that’s what I was raised up in because the mothers and fathers came from the Bible belt down through Mississippi and Alabama and Tennessee through there. The companies would buy instruments, they would buy balls, bats, gloves and some of them bought uniforms for the men and let them play ball. Get a bulldozer to push a slate dump off and flatten it where they could play ball. And all the kids, as you grow up, all the children wanted to be baseball players and railroad workers and miners.
And going to church was the next thing because the roots of our parents, the biggest of them, they came to West Virginia from the South, the deepest South hunting for that almighty dollar. For years and years in the South they didn’t make but seventy-five cents. That’s all they cleared at the end of a year, because the man that owned the cotton field, that they was working on, he owned the store. He let them have commodities and groceries and stuff and he would charge them what he wanted to charge them and at the end of the year, you ain’t got but seventy-five cents left. And they done worked twelve, or thirteen months you know. So a lot of the left there walking looking for better places to go to work, the ones that could leave, because the law kept a lot of them from leaving. They say, “You can’t leave until you pay off the man that you working for.” They had to stay until they paid off their debt. That was down in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.
So from there they came u to Virginia, Pulaski, Richmond and all them kind of places they moved to from the South. And then from there they moved to West Virginia. And then some people came to West Virginia from Harlow, Kentucky years ago when the moonshiners used to shoot up the Feds. It was so many people in the camp, that were my dad’s friends that he worked on the railroad with, that were musicians and they were ball players and they would every Thursday evening or Friday evening the quartets would get together at one of the members homes and they would sing gospel music and then down the street they had a little choir with eight or nine people together and they sung and played shape note music. And the kids would sit on the railroad tracks or sit on the steps of the porches and listen to the quartets and choirs.
When I was a young man, and that was a long time ago, when you worked in the mines or the railroad that was a way of life. That’s different from any other style of existence. And at that time the people worked under the ground in the mines, or on the railroad in all types of weather. They didn’t pay them a lot but it was more in some places, the people was paying for labor, than in other places.
We didn’t have a lot of cards like they have now. And if you got a ride somewhere you had to be back Sunday night to go to work Monday morning. Anyhow, a lot of those places was little beer joints and beer gardens and dinner houses around the coalmine up the side of the hill or down near the river bottom. And they had places like above Mullens. They had places they called Corrine, Black Eagle, Cookstown and Allen Junction. And those places had dinner houses. At six o’clock in the evening on Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday the men had to have some way to spend their money and they would drink this homemade home brew they called it. And some of you heard of what they called good old mountain dew. That’s moonshine whiskey and it’s kind of potent. And after a little bit of it, then you go in one of those houses and buy you a plate of food and it could be hog intestines. They call them “chittlins.” After a couple of drinks that moonshine, those things taste pretty good. I’m telling you about it well what happened on those Fridays and Saturday evenings and nights. There was always someone in the camp that their husbands got killed in the mines or on the railroad. And they didn’t have pensions back then that they gave people when they lost one of their spouses. They would let the lady, the woman that was left with the children – there was always some children left just about all the time – the company would tell them: “You can have dinners” – ham, fish dinners and chitterling dinners and pork chop and brown beans and whatever and home brew and that’s about it. They couldn’t tell them they could sell moonshine, but they did. You know that went on during the Prohibition time back then. But anyhow those houses that sold these dinners, it would be some of the guys, musicians, Blind Charlie and a lot of the guitar blues players from Alabama and Mississippi would catch freight trains and ride through the state of West Virginia and stop in the coal camps. And they would go to one of those houses and say “Can I play here Friday and Saturday? I’ll play for fifth cents or a dollar and a place to stay, a pallet on the floor.” And something to eat, some food. And that’s the way they would play. And I heard the blues picked first at one of them chitterling places, one of them fish dinners, house dinners, dance houses. The houses was built right near the ground and the kids, you could peep through the window. They didn’t allow us to get close there because the dancing that they did, well they called it “belly rubbing.” Well they called it “dirty dancing” when they brought I tout in the movie. And they act like it was the first time that anybody had seen that and I told my wife I said: “I was raised with that.” I don’t know why they call it that. That ain’t new.” Yeah, they would have those dances and the guys come by and play. Blind Charlie and Charlie Wade and about four or five old musicians that played Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Sometimes they’d all get together and all of them play the same night for the same place. Sometimes black and white play together but mostly the white guys that came down, they didn’t play no music. They just come down to dance to the music of the colored people, Blind Charlie and the rest of them. It was so many people played it would be hard for one man to know them all. But I was a young man then. I was very small. Well a lot of the places, those houses had the upright piano in them. And some of them had the roll piano that you crank it or somebody work the pedals and it would play on the roll. And the woman would give them a dinner and some home brew so he’d sit there and push them pedals all evening to keep that piano going. So they could play the rolls that they would put in there. And the old organ. That was the first time I heard an organ playing blues. Was at one of those moonshine houses and homebrew houses they call them. And I would sit and peep through the window until my mother would catch me and I got more whippings peeping through them windows than you can shake a stick at. And it wore me out. I had all kind of skin whipped off my rear end peeping in the window watching them guys. I don’t know it was something about the blues music it was so touching and close to gospel and spirituals. It had a feeling to it that no other music has. If you got a soul, it touches it. I don’t care where you come from or where you’re going. It will move you. It will make you pat your foot or flood your eyes or something.
Gospel and blues was so close together and the swing, the beat. I love that beat. And then it told a story. I like that. Country music and gospel, spirituals and gospel I put them all in the same bag. Country and blues and spirituals all tell stories and I think that’s gonna make it last. Those three’s gonna last until the end of the earth because they’re always educational. It’s a sad story sometimes, when the wife leaves the man, or the man leaves the woman, or the child gets killed, or something happens to somebody but it tells a story.
They had people that worked in the logging industry. Old man Ritter was a lumber man and he would buy acres, hundreds of acres of land., but the timber off of it. And he would hire guys to cut the trees out, hire another group to cut the limbs off, cut it short enough to put it on railroad cars and then pull it out down in these mountains and pull it up towards Virginia. And a lot of it they sold overseas. They carried it overseas on ships.
They would gamble. One group didn’t do nothing but make moonshine and home brew. Another group raised cows and hogs to sell. It was people to do all different projects. The railroad people and the mining people they had to eat. The man that raised the cows they sell beef to them and pork to them. And my dad used to raise four and five hogs a year. Reason I know is because I had to feed them every day, twice a day. And I used to help him to scald them, pull their hair off. This was down in the coal field. Yeah I’ve helped butcher many a hog, many a cow. We raised all our food. The only thing you had to buy mostly was flour and we had gardens upside of the hills. And the hills was so steep until you could stand up straight and hoe the corn and didn’t have to bend over. And them ears of corn be this long, a foot long and then you let it get hard, carry it to a mill and the guy ground it up and give you your cornmeal. So a man was self-sufficient if he halfway have the right thing in his mind to raise a family.
Back then everything was sectioned off. It was a colored section here, white section over there and Italian section over there. Then they all worked together. What it was, we worked in the mines together. Sometimes when one didn’t have a lunch, then he’d eat out of the other one’s bucket. Either one, both ways. Because you load for thirty-five cents a ton and have to move three and a half ton of rock and don’t get nothing for it to get nine, ten, eleven ton of coal, who’s making the money? The man that owns the mine. Because he’s working you a half a day for nothing. And the white and colored would work together to do that, move the rock out of the way. And they would gamble together, they would rink whiskey together, they’d play music, play cards, drink moonshine. White guys would play music with black guys. They did everything but go to church together and that’s where it was needed most. They had what they call mini carnivals. You heard of “Silas Green”? They used to come to Mullens all the time. They came down for ten years straight as I recall because my dad used to take me to each one of them.
In this part of the country on a coal camp it was like the wild west and this is the truth. People carried forty-fours, Smith and Wessons, Thirty-Eights, pistols. And if you called a man a liar and couldn’t prove it and you didn’t beg his pardon fast enough somebody died. Somebody died.
It was a guy they call him William Duff and he was from Pulaski, Virginia, and he got angry with a man named Ollie Martin and he was from Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma– all out West and Kansas City and cowboying for years. William Duff got mad with Ollie Martin. They fell out over William’s wife. I was nine and a half years old. We lived on the right-hand side of the railroad tracks and William Duff and them lived on the left-hand side of the tracks. It’s always somebody carrying gossip and they cause people to get killed. They’re dangerous. People that carries messages and stuff like that, I think are the most dangerous peoples that lived in the world, because they don’t carry the right message and they’ll add something to it or take something away and cause someone to get in a fight or kill somebody or something.
Anyhow, this happened on a Saturday evening. It was about the latter part of June when you see the sun late. We lived in a place down between the mountains where you didn’t see the sun until after twelve or one o’clock in the day, because the mountain was so steep up above you. By the time the sun got up in the top it was twelve thirty or one o’clock. Mostly we were in the shade. So late that evening when the sun on the lower end the mountain was kind of low, well when the sun went down it was seven thirty or eight o’clock.
And he went in there long about three thirty or four o’clock in the evening. Ollie Martin came out of a friend’s house and William Duff said something about somebody, said that he didn’t treat his wife right. Here I am nine and a half years old looking at two men and one got a forty-five Smith and Wesson pistol and the other one had a forty-four and a thirty-eight and now they bracing off against one another one in this track, railroad track, and one in the same track about eighteen or twenty feet down from him. So they decided they didn’t want to talk no more. William Duff shot Ollie Martin first hit him in the neck Ollie Martin staggered put his hand in his shirt and I seen the button jump off of that man’s shirt just broke it off getting that pistol out and he put the Smith across his arm like this and shot the first time the guy jumped that high off the ground come back down and he put the pistol down again and shot him in the shoulder. Ollie was falling to the ground. Here he come out again with that thirty-eight and throwed it across his arm and shot that much of that man’s heart off so the doctor said. They shot one another after they lay down on the ground. After they fell from being shot. And me, just think a kid nine and a half years old I wasn’t even ten. That was almost to me like it was a western you know. Man brought a railroad card down the railroad track put both of them on the flat car and rolled them up a half a mile to the highway and then put them in an ambulance. The Ferguson ambulance company just get them to the hospital and one died and the other one didn’t. Ollie Martin is still, last year he was still living. He was a true cowboy. He ride anything that had four legs. But Ollie was like that but he was one of the nicest men you ever seen in your life. But they disagreed over gossip. One telling other people in the streets that one man don’t treat his wife right I think. It doesn’t make sense.
My wife had a friend named Gussina Parham and she had a friend they call him Lightning Slim. He used to jump on his woman and beat her. Every weekend he beat her. And she said she wasn’t gonna take no more beating. She went and got her great big pot and filled it half way full of beans and boiled the beans and made soup out of it. Good pot of beans. Then she poured lye in it. Mix the lye with water and then poured it in and stirred it up. And then she poured molasses in it. And when he jumped on her and slapped her she got up and staggered in the kitchen and got that big pot of beans and poured the whole thing all over his head. And he hollered and started scratching his face and where he scratched it the skin came off down to the bone. The molasses would stick to it and he died. Her name was Gussina. She ran away to the next county. They never did catch her. They didn’t really pay too much mind to that. The deputy never chased her. She was a good friend to my wife. One of the guys that worked with my dad on the Virginia Railroad named Lloyd Doughton, he had a tipple guitar and he had a regular six-string guitar. I asked him would he learn me how to make music. At that time that’s what I called it, making music. Because my dad, I don’t know what happened to the guitar, it got away from him. And he never got another one for a long time because at two dollars and sixty-four cents a day, three kids to raise, four people counting my mother and the kids, I don’t care how much money you make two dollars and something cents you can’t stretch it but so far.
But anyhow Lloyd Doughton told me that your fingers is small. Son, you ought to get you a ukulele. You get one of them and I’ll show you how to play it. I still think he was trying to get rid of me. I think I was worrying him more or less. I got me a ob. I got my sister to write to the Chicago Defender newspaper. And I signed up to deliver papers. And I had about sixty to seventy customers every week. And then at the same time she wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier, the colored paper. And I delivered both of them. Of course you didn’t make but a half a cent a paper or something like that but I made enough to get me a collar and twenty-five cent ukulele from Montgomery Wards. And it had catgut, nylon strings on there. But Lloyd Doughton finally came over and he said, “Well, since I made the deal with you, I’m gonna keep my end. I been kind of slackin.’” And he started playing chords. Then my dad showed me some chords on it and that’s when he said, “Well, I’m gonna see if I can buy you a tipple and he got a tipple and got it on time where I didn’t have to pay but I think fifty cents a month, a quarter a month – something like that. A tipple has ten strings on it but the way they were grouped up on the instrument you’d have two, three, three and two. But you used the same chords as on the ukulele. And that was the most beautiful sounding instrument that you ever heard in your life. And I started singing gospel music and playing it and for some reason it eased over to blues. And the next thing I know I was playing the same thing that them blues players from Alabama and Mississippi would play at the home brew houses. I was playing them that next week on that tipple. And I said I got it made giving airs to myself.
So my dad decided he’d move thirty some miles from Wyoming County to Princeton, West Virginia over in a place they call Mercer County. And I’d go and sweep and mow lawns and clip flowers around people’s houses you know, thirty-five or forty cents a day. And I’ve worked rows of corn where it took a half a day to get from one row to the other end and then at twelve o’clock you start back to end up where you started that morning to six at night when the sun went down. And you ask a kid around now days to work a row of corn for ten cents now you talking about getting killed in a hurry. People and my mother she was pretty good with stick people and I put clothes on them then put a face on them and some hands and did pretty good for some reason. I don’t know something that maybe come through birth I guess. And I made one of the guys, a friend of my dad’s on the railroad, got him to get me three small brushes and the guys that paint the railroad cars and put the numbers on them and write Virginia on them and like that you know. The company’s name. He gave me one used one and three new ones that they had. Old man Elmo, I never will forget that old man. He was a nice fella and I started watching him lettering the engines. I said I can do that. And I started taking old paint cups and buckets there’s always a little paint left in the bottom. I put kerosene or something down in it to dilute it and thin it down and I’d take them brushes and I painted everything that I could see. Trees, houses, people’s toilets, everybody’s toilets had flowers on them. My dad told me he said well if you want to paint like that why don’t you go to won, go in and ask for the manager and tell him that you’d like a job painting the window, sales on the window. So I went to Piggly Wiggly. I never will forget it. And he asked me can you draw a hog’s head. I said, ”Yeah.” “Yes, sir.” Because that’s what you did back then. Your parents didn’t allow you, it don’t care what color you was, you had to respect adults. So I painted a hog head for him and he said well come down here at six o’clock Friday morning and I’ll be here or somebody will be here to let you in and we’ll put pork chops and beans and pig feet and all that on the windows. I did that. Then the A and P store seen me doing it and called me over say, “Would you do some for us?” And I told them “Yes, sure” and I had about eight stores and I wasn’t but seventeen years old. And I’d go get up and go down the street with my little satchel bag on my shoulders. And when I went down the street I would strut man, I was making money. Wasn’t making but twenty-five or thirty cents at each store but that was better than nothing.
After the first week painting for the A and P I went in, they wanted me. Piggly Wiggly wanted me Thursday, Friday and Saturday, but A and P wanted me every day from one day to the next this day to tomorrow. I think I charged them eight cents a letter or something like that. But anyhow I had about seven dollars coming and that was pretty good money. And I went down and he wrote me out a check. I took it and thanked him and went out the door and I opened it up and looked at it and it had the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and I said, “They trying to gyp me.” Laughs. I turned around and went back said “Okay the joke’s over. Now you can write me my check.”
He said “That’s good. You can stop by the bank ask anybody say that’s good.” See I never heard nobody call it by that name. A and P was all I ever heard. But I went back and it took them about a half an hour to get me to understand before I would believe it that they weren’t gypping me. Because I didn’t want all that long mess up there. A and P was all they had to put on there you know. But it was funny. Boy them people laughed. They had one of the darndest laughs on me about that. Afterwards I said well I learned one thing. Investigate before you go and say a person’s wrong. Ask some questions somewhere. And don’t let too many people know what you doing because you’ll be the laughingstock if you ain’t careful.
The first piece I ever played out in public was at a white high school in Mullins, West Virginia, down below Beckley. I played “Corrina, Corrina” and “The Saint Louis Blues.” That was my break out for the world. And then one of the guys that belonged to a quartet got killed. Being pretty close to twelve years old my voice had liked to change a little and I could sing the high register. I sung tenor or either alto or baritone or whatever, and the guys begged my father. My dad told them, said: “Look, I’ll let him sing gospel with you all in church but all of you are gonna be responsible for my son. And if you don’t, says you all can look up, you ain’t gonna never rest until the day you die because I’m gonna be sitting on your porch every day until you find my son. Don’t lose my boy anywhere.” But I should have been the one watching them.
So I started going with the grown guys singing tenor. And at that time you know I was a showcase. A young boy singing with grown men. And I had a strong voice and up until a few years ago I had a pretty strong voice. It was still kind of strong. And I sung with them and learned the quartet style of four-part harmony. And I started traveling with them and then the people would come and ask me: “Will you come up play at the church?” Then I sung for churches all through Charleston and Beckley and all over West Virginia. I sung for white churches and colored churches. I bet you I sung for more white churches than the average colored has ever been through West Virginia. And I really enjoyed the music. I was playing at the church on Sundays and at the bars on Fridays and at the colleges and things on Saturdays and Sundays at the church. I was really busy. Wasn’t making a lot of money but I was busy. But anyhow after I got to be fourteen or fifteen years old, I started singing with a younger bunch of men and we used to broadcast over WJLS over in Beckley and WNNR in Beckley then WLOH where I live at now over in Bluefield. And WHIS over in Bluefield, West Virginia. And then I started going with a little five-piece band-dance band that played New Orleans style music like “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Sweet Sue,” “Exactly Like You,” “Sunny Side of the Street,” and all those pieces like that. They call that jazz and swing back then. I was the youngest one in the band. The rest of them was twenty some years old but I picked up on everything they were playing, jazz and blues, and swing. But they weren’t playing the old country blues. The blues they were playing was like the blues that Count Basie played which was upbeat swing blues.
Then later on I played at lots of festivals and met other musicians. Howard Armstrong – we played music together. He was an artist and sign painter too. I been overseas with Howard Armstrong. John Jackson, me and him, Cephas & Wiggins. I was on one trip with them. Acoustic blues unplugged that’s right it was unplugged. They didn’t know Virginia and West Virginia was two different states. They thought Virginia and West Virginia was all Virginia. And they’ll bet you money that it’s the same state. Until you get them a map and show them. I played for a lot of house parties. I played for “Chittlin” – what they call “Chittlin Struts,” “Fish Fries.,” Pork chop Dinners,” “Chicken and Potato Salad Plates,” “Home Brew Parties,” “Moonshine Parties,” “Bonded Whiskey Parties.” Party, you name it, if it was there, I done played for it. And then it ain’t too much more of my life but the onliest part about it that’s really left out is trying to shape myself, prepare myself for this life out here. When I went to my dad and told him I wanted to go to college – I wanted to be a doctor. I don’t know how that hit me. And he says, “Well, just settle for getting a good education but you gonna have to help me because two dollars and sixty-four cents won’t send you to college.” Now this happened a few years back. Not ancient times but close to it when we were up at Cookstown up at Allan Junction. A man killed a man over a nickel. We were in a place they call Big Mom’s and on the second floor it was five or us playing poker, and there are people would take a drink of moonshine or a drink of home brew or homemade wine, and all of it was potent. It will make you change your mind, whatever you have in it. You might start out to go for a walk, after a couple of drinks you’d run if you could.
Anyhow, we were all gathered around the table and this fellow, one of the players had run out of money and he owed one of the players five cents, a nickel. As we call ‘em five pennies. And they got in an argument over it. And I’m just sitting there and I was doing pretty good. I think I won about sixty or seventy dollars, which is pretty good at that time. And this fellow said, “Don’t call me a liar.” The other one said, “Oh, yes I will.” He said, “Don’t do that.” He called him a liar again. He pulled out a pistol and shot the man dead. And he got up went around the table, grabbed him, pulled him over in the corner and set him up in the corner. Come back and sat down at the table and looked around at the other three guys and me and he said, “What do you all say?” So we told him, “We say whatever he wanted us to say.” At that point we wasn’t going to discourage him or encourage him to be any more dangerous than what he was. That was where I learned this joke: I left Cookstown running, and run through the whole week. They say you run over Monday, cripple Tuesday, put Wednesday in the hospital and inform Thursday to tell Friday that they was gonna bury Saturday on Sunday. And that is fast. If you can find anything any faster than that, give me a call.
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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.