(Marion Washington)
(5CD)
BIOGRAPHY
The family lived upstairs, and the building sat just a stone's
throw from railroad tracks, across the street from Albert Collins's home,
not far from Joe Hughes's house and down the lane from the second location
of Shady's Playhouse, a major piece of legend in Houston blues lore.
Basically Marion was born into a literal crossroads of Houston blues.
Music surrounded him, "like the humidity," says Roger.
When Marion was a young boy, his uncle attempted to teach him the piano,
and Marion took lessons from a woman down the street, but he preferred to
teach himself. While still in grade school he would hear the sound of the
Yates High School marching band rehearsing nearby. Following the beat of
the band, Marion would practice keeping rhythm on anything that didn't
move.
A man named Vernon Jackson ran Shady's, which moved to the corner of
Beulah and Sauer from the corner of Elgin and Ennis sometime in the late
1950s. The gritty, come-as-you-are club with its red-and-white-checked
tablecloths became Marion's classroom. After dropping out of Yates High
School in the ninth grade (where he played trumpet in the marching band),
he began to play and hang out there before he was old enough to be allowed
in. His first professional gig was drumming for Albert Collins, his
neighbor. At around the same time, Joe Hughes started dating Marion's
cousin, Willie Mae. Marion, who quickly discovered taking down the drums
after a gig left him with little time to go after the girls, started
playing the guitar, just like Joe Hughes.
"I had just started making a little name for myself," remembers Joe
Hughes, a soft-spoken gentleman who still kisses young women on the hand
when they are introduced to him. "And he was always smaller, so we just
started calling him Little Joe. And it stuck."
He grew up in the Third Ward blues scene and played with the established
Texas legends: Albert Collins, Lightnin' Hopkins, Joe Hughes, T-Bone
Walker, Johnny Copeland. Second, that he has lived much of the past 20
years as a marginally homeless man in a shell of a house and an abandoned
car. Third, that there are several people in the African-American Houston
blues scene who are tired of Little Joe and his signature habit of darting
into blues clubs, playing for 20 minutes, passing his hat for money and
then darting out again. And finally, you should know that there are people
who love Little Joe so much that they have scored him this regular gig at
the Continental and have even given him a place to live upstairs.
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