This blues mural from 2009 on a porch on Fourth Street in Richmond, Indiana, is three blocks away from where country blues legends Blind Lemon Jefferson, far left, and Charley Patton, far right, recorded in 1929 at Gennett Records. At Patton’s recording date, he debuted his classic “Spoonful Blues.” In the 1960s, as guitarist with British rock trio The Cream, Eric Clapton, center mural, recorded “Spoonful” (a version modified by Willie Dixon in the 1950s). Three months after Jefferson recorded in Richmond, he died in a Chicago snowstorm.
Unknown to the public, Scotty Anderson has a global following with guitarists, thanks largely to sound and video downloads on the Web. The late Chet Atkins once quipped, “Scotty plays Chet Atkins better than I do.” For 30 years, Scotty’s blistering country-rock technique has drawn the praises of such guitarists as Brian Setzer, Eric Johnson, John5, Lonnie Mack, James Burton, and the late Danny Gatton. A Kentucky boy who grew up in a family of mountain pickers, Scotty shies away from touring opportunities, but attracts the faithful where he’s most at home - in small bars and outdoor venues around Cincinnati, Ohio.
The Comet is a tiny, century-old bar in Cincinnati’s eclectic neighborhood of Northside where every December since 2002 local keyboardist Steve Schmidt holds his “Christmas Extravaganza.” For decades, Schmidt has been a Cincinnati jazz fixture on the piano, but for this event, he puts his C-3 Hammond organ in the Christmas spirit. Most years, Chicago saxophonist Scott Burns and drummer Mark Wolfley (both pictured) have joined the packed festivities. The annual extravaganza has its origins with Schmidt’s CD “Merry Christmas Baby.”
Lonnie Mack is one of the great roadhouse warriors of early rock’n’roll, and considered a father of blues-rock guitar. A small-town Hoosier native, Mack made his break in the early 1960s with the guitar solo recording “Memphis,” and his first album “The Wham of That Memphis Man!” He has inspired legions of guitarists, from Duane Allman to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Illuminated by a single lamp in the back of a Cincinnati club, Mack holds his 1958 Gibson Flying V guitar, the seventh off the production line, and his principal ax all of these years.
You don’t see this every day: Legendary blues-rock guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan without his trademark, black bolero hat. Among the most distinctive guitarists in blues history, Vaughan pulled off his hat and winked at the ecstatic crowd at Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 24, 1990. His sweet gesture to say goodbye proved to be a final farewell. Two months later, the 36-year-old Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin. Even though the Texas native was a major music act for only seven years, he left a breathtaking body of recorded work that grows in stature – a legacy much like his guitar idol Jimi Hendrix.
Flamboyant blues singer H-Bomb Ferguson was a mainstay in Cincinnati bars for decades until succumbing to emphysema in 2006. His act included grass skirts or an assortment of wigs, or he wrestled with a boa constrictor on stage, and played a mean piano with his nine fingers. A record deal in the late 1950s with Cincinnati’s King Records led H-Bomb to the Queen City, where he eventually settled.
From rural Lee’s Summit, Missouri, guitarist Pat Metheny burst onto the jazz scene in the mid-1970s with a fresh new sound, and has been a leading voice in the music ever since. Also consistent over the years are his trademark striped shirt and the unwieldy hair, captured shimmering in the lights at the Victory Theater, Dayton, Ohio. Metheny is one of the most commercial viable and prolific jazz artists today.
Country-rock fiddler Charlie Daniels held court with area radio stations and newspapers in a 4-H building at the Darke County, Ohio, fairgrounds. Note the vintage cassette recorders and microphones.
Perhaps Jaco Pastorius is the most influential electric bass player ever. Here, he played with the jazz group Weather Report at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He died in 1987 from injuries sustained during an altercation with a bouncer at a Fort Lauderdale nightclub. He was 35.
For years, when fans took vaudeville-style singer Leon Redbone’s photo during shows, he’d react by snapping Polaroid pictures of his audience. During a backstage encounter at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, Ohio, Redbone consented to this portrait with a stipulation: “Just one picture.” Immediately afterwards, he sought details about the camera.
On a 1982 tour with drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Mirslav Vitous, jazz pianist Chick Corea arrived at Gilly’s Nightclub in Dayton, Ohio, in no mood to be interviewed or photographed. Before the show in the empty club, he practiced classical pieces on the piano while the photo was taken.
Since 1972, Jerry Gillotti has reigned as the “godfather of jazz” in Dayton, Ohio, as owner of the venerable Gilly’s Nightclub. “I do it for the love,” he says. The Dexter Gordon and Hank Crawford posters behind him at the club’s entrance help to date the photo for you.
Bassist Andy Simpkins was a driving force in jazz for four decades with everyone from Gene Harris to George Shearing to Carmen McRae. Before dying of cancer in Los Angeles in 1999, he toured for several years with Sarah Vaughan. Andy is captured in his hometown of Richmond, Indiana, for a benefit concert at Earlham College.
West Coast pianist Dave Brubeck was wildly popular in the 1950s, especially with college students. His quartet’s 1959 album of songs in unusual time signatures, “Time Out,” which featured the ubiquitous song in 5/4, “Take Five” is among jazz’s most beloved records. Here, Brubeck is now 65 years old and backstage at the Victory Theater in Dayton, Ohio. A tall man with unusually long fingers, he laughed while comparing the length of his fingers with anyone willing to press their hands against his. He’s still playing splendidly into his late 80s.
The 78-rpm shellac disc “The Pearls” by Jelly Roll Morton is among the earliest solo piano records in jazz – waxed in Richmond, Indiana, in 1924. It’s on a spring-wound Victrola of similar vintage, manufactured by the Victor Talking Machine Company. The photo was used for the book cover of Jelly Roll, Bix & Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recording Jazz.
In the 1920s, Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana, a division of Starr Piano Company, recorded pioneer jazz, blues, and rural music in an unlikely place. The Gennett family ran Starr Piano in a secluded glacial gorge along the Whitewater River (an area locals called “Starr Valley”) with their primitive recording studio in the back. After they debuted jazz icons King Oliver, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, and blues singer Charley Patton, the Great Depression killed the record label, and Starr Piano later closed in 1952. The studio is long gone, but some of the Starr factory survived. The photo, from the 1990s, is Starr Valley at the height of its neglect. Richmond’s Starr Gennett Foundation has since preserved the area.
“Bluegrass” as an American music genre is derived from Bill Monroe’s band, The Blue Grass Boys, formed in 1939. For almost 30 years, Monroe hosted the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival on his property in rural southern Indiana. Despite Monroe’s death in 1996, the festival continues. The festival has a casual, camping-style atmosphere, but when Monroe was host, the father of bluegrass always dressed in his finest Grand Ole Opry duds for music sets in the woods.
This is the last photo of The McCoys, a Hoosier garage band that topped the charts in 1965 with “Hang On Sloppy.” The occasion – a Labor Day rock benefit in 1981 in their hometown of tiny Union City, Indiana. Left to right: Randy Zehringer was out of music, brother Rick Zehringer (aka Rick Derringer) was vying for a comeback after his last hit, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” in 1973, Randy Hobbs played area bars, and Ronnie Brandon was living nearby. Derringer arrived by private jet and electrified the crowd on his guitar, playing on a flatbed truck. The other McCoys watched. Backstage, the four chatted briefly, the photo was snapped, and they went their separate ways. Hobbs died of heart failure in 1993 at age 45.
