Big Road Blues Show 1/28/18: Tappin’ That Thing – Yank Rachell & Pals

Show Notes:

As Paul Oliver Wrote: “They say that ‘you know a man by the company he keeps.’ If that is so then Yank Rachel (or Rachell) comes off pretty well. He is a musician who has played with some of the most outstanding blues singers and musicians of the ‘thirties, and won the respect of all who have known him. Somehow he has been poorly served by the blues historians, overshadowed perhaps by such figures as Sleepy John Estes or Sonny Boy Williamson who depended so much on the kind of support that he provided. He was one of the rather select group of blues musicians who played mandolin, which should have been enough to single him out from the crowd, but blues enthusiasms being both fickle and conservative the obsession with the guitar has been to his disadvantage. He played guitar too, of course, but his preferred instrument was always the mandolin and its ringing sounds imparts a special quality to the recordings on which he appeared.”

Rachell was born in rural Tennessee, outside of Brownsville, on March 16, 1910, where he grew up working with his family in managing their farm. It was in Brownsville, Tennessee, that Rachell met Hambone Willie Newbern (who penned Rollin’ and Tumblin’ in 1929). Newbern took him under his wing, mentoring him in the music and in the business. The Brownsville scene was teeming with great musicians, and in time, Rachell met Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, and the trio worked the area as a jug band.

Later, Rachell migrated to Memphis to work in the Beale Street scene, where he joined company with Estes and Jab Jones as the Three J’s Jug Band where they recorded for Victor in 1929 and 1930. After the Three J’s broke up, Rachell decided to try his hand at farming and also worked for the L&N Railroad. During a stopover in New York Rachell teamed up with guitarist Dan Smith and laid down 25 titles for ARC in just three-day Shortly before the ARC date, Rachell had discovered a kid harmonica player that he believed had real talent, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. They worked together at the Blue Flame Club in Jackson, Tennessee starting in 1933. In 1934 Williamson went north to Chicago. With the success of Williamson’s first Bluebird dates of 1937, Rachell decided to join Sonny Boy in Chicago for sessions in March and June of 1938. Yank Rachell also contributed four sides of his own to each session, and then 16 more in 1941 with Sonny Boy backing him up. After Sonny Boy Williamson’s murder in 1948, Rachell drifted away from music and relied solely on straight jobs to make his living, settling permanently in Indianapolis in 1958. His wife passed away in 1961, and afterward he began to resume performing. In 1962, Rachell was re-united with Nixon and Estes, and the three of them began playing college and coffeehouse circuit, recording for Delmark as Yank Rachell’s Tennessee Jug Busters. They played Newport in 1964 and toured Europe as part of the 1966 American Folk Blues Festival. Estes died in 1977, and from that time Rachell worked mainly as a solo act. In the 80’s he worked a bit with Howard Armstong, appearing in the film Louie Bluie. He kept recording right until his last years.

James Rachell (he pronounced it Ray-shell) was born east of Brownsville, TN on March 16, 1910, the middle child of Lula Taylor and George Rachell. He had brothers, Leslie and A.B., either side of him but both died young, A.B. from an infected Ieg wound and Leslie poisoned by fumes he inhaled while spraying a peach orchard. His grandmother, Rose Taylor, called him ‘Yank’ but he never knew why. He worked in the fields for ten years from the age of seven and that was one year before his first encounter with music. One morning he came upon a neighbor, Augie Rawls, sitting on his porch playing a ‘tater-bug mandolin. The story got mythologized over the years but basically for the lack five dollars,Yank exchanged his piglet for the mandolin, narrowly avoiding a whopping with a willow branch.

Rachell was the primary exponent of blues mandolin, although he also played guitar, violin, harp and sang expertly well. Born on a farm outside Brownsville, Tennessee, Yank Rachell picked up the mandolin at the age of eight, mainly teaching himself; an early encounter with “Hambone” Willie Newbern early on helped him as well. Rachell and his brothers also learned guitar from an uncle, Dan Taylor,and their cousin Henry Taylor but mandolin remained Yank’s obsession. One day, Willie Newbern, equally adept on both instruments, came by and Yank got some basic tuition in the mandolin’s function. “I don’t know where he was from,” he told Richard Congress, “but he’d come through Brownsville and hang around. I didn’t have no way of tuning the mandolin aright till Willie Newbern come through there and he showed me how to tune it. I learn a lot of tune(s) from him (including Texas Tommy).” Music became an earner for him; he started playing for country suppers and for the white folks. Rachell began to work dances with singer and guitarist Sleepy John Estes in the early ’20s. In early 1929, he co-formed the Three J’s Jug Band with Estes and pianist Jab Jones. The Three J’s Jug Band were an instant hit and managed to work the dances during the lucrative jug-band craze in Memphis and traveled often to Paducah, Kentucky. The group recorded 14 sides credited jointly to Estes and Rachell for Victor for 1929 and 1930.

From left to right: Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, Yank Rachell, Banjo Ikey Robinson, Ted Bogan and Tom Armstrong.

After the record business was flattened by the depression, the Three J’s broke up. Estes and harmonica player Hammie Nixon went on to Chicago to seek their fortune in the nightclubs, but Yank Rachell decided to try his hand at farming and also worked for the L&N Railroad. Ironically, it was Rachell who was next to record — during a stopover in New York Rachell teamed up with guitarist Dan Smith and laid down 25 titles for ARC in 1934 in just three days, though only six of them were issued.

Shortly before the ARC date, Yank Rachell had discovered a kid harmonica player that he believed had real talent, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. They worked together at the Blue Flame Club in Jackson, Tennessee starting in 1933. In 1934 Williamson went north to Chicago. With the success of Williamson’s first Bluebird dates of 1937, Rachell decided to join Sonny Boy in Chicago for sessions in March and June of 1938. Yank Rachell also contributed four sides of his own to each session, and then 16 more in 1941 with Sonny Boy backing him up. Some of the 1941 tracks are among his best: “It Seem Like a Dream,” “Biscuit Baking Woman,” and “Lake Michigan Blues” were all successes for both Rachell and Bluebird.

in 1938, while working in St. Louis with Peetie Wheatstraw, Yank Rachell had married and started to raise a family. During the peak of his musical career, Rachell kept his day job and did not lead “the life,” at least not the same one that claimed his friend Sonny Boy Williamson on June 1, 1948. After Williamson’s murder, Rachell drifted away from music and relied solely on straight jobs to make his living, settling permanently in Indianapolis in 1958. The first musicians Yank Rachell met in Indianapolis were guitarists Shirley Griffith, J.T. Adams and Pete Franklin, all of whom he outlasted. After making Mando/in Blues for Bob Koester’s Delmark in 1964, he was taken up by young Chicago musicians like Mike Bloomfield and Charlie Musselwhite. He also traveled to California with Sleepy John, where Taj Mahal Iooked after them. Mahal would Iater record She Caught The Katie, for which Rachell received writer’s royalties. “The first cheque l got was $10,000 and 1 got that for three months. And then 1 started getting $5,000 every three months,$3,000. So 1 decided to buy me another house. The cheque came at the right time.”

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After his wife passed away in 1961, and afterward he began to resume performing. In 1962, Rachell was re-united with Nixon and Estes, and the three of them began tearing up the college and coffeehouse circuit, recording for Delmark as Yank Rachell’s Tennessee Jug Busters. Estes died in 1977, and from that time Rachell worked mainly as a solo act. In his later years,Yank became a hero at The Slippery Noodle, an Indianapolis club, and gathered a number of young musicians around him. “Look like everybody like to play with me, so I try to help ’em the best l can. All them different ones, I set down with ’em and try to teach ’em what l know. And they want me to go with ’em to play places. They enjoy me going with ’em.” But his kidney trouble and the need for regular dialyses is curbed his traveling. He also met John Sebastian, who recorded him,took him top play at the 1996 W.C.Handy Awards in Memphis and paid for his room at the Peabody Hotel. Nonetheless, he was working on a new album when he died at age 87.