Big Road Blues Show 6/10/12: Dedicated To My Friends – Thomas Shaw & Pals

Show Notes:

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Thomas Shaw came to the attention of the blues world in the late 1960’s when he walked into Lou Curtis’ Folk Arts Rare Records shop in San Diego looking for guitar strings. Shaw was from Brennam, Texas and had learned to play guitar in the late 1920’s from Blind Lemon Jefferson. He was a walking library of Texas blues, having played with Ramblin’ Thomas, J.T. “Funny Papa” Smith, Texas Alexander, and Willie “Little Brother” Lane. He also played some with a very young Mance Lipscomb. In the early 70’s Curtis wrote articles about Shaw for Living Blues and Blues Unlimited magazines and Shaw’s discovery garnered interest from record companies. Frank Scott came down and recorded Shaw for Advent Records in the backroom of Curtis’ store. The same year saw the release of the, now long out-of-print, record on the Blue Goose label with a final record cut in 1973 for the Blue Beacon label in Holland when Shaw toured Europe. A few scattered sides appeared on anthologies before his passing in 1977. Today’s show not only spotlights a batch of great sides by Shaw, but we also spin sides from many of the great Texas bluesman that he knew and played with like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Funny Papa Smith, Blind Willie Johnson, Smokey Hogg, Mance Lipscomb, Willie Lane and Ramblin’ Thomas.

Thomas Shaw only spent five years on the Texas house party circuit, leaving for San Diego in 1934, yet met an astonishing number of Texas blues legends. He was born in Brenham, Texas in 1908, a farming community between Austin and Houston. His was a musical family; his father played harmonica, guitar and accordion and Shaw learned acapella versions of spirituals on his father’s knee. His uncle Fred Rogers headed up a family string band and his cousins, Willie and Bertie, were first rate blues guitarists. His older brother Leon played piano and his brother Louis played harmonica. “They played old time blues music, what you call the root of the music. ‘Ella Speed’, ‘Take Mew Back Baby’, ‘See See Rider’. ‘Alabama Bound’, all of them songs was popular then.”

Shaw first played harmonica before picking up guitar in the early 20’s. The first song he mastered was “Out And Down”, a ragtime song that was played locally by his brother Louis and later recorded as “One Dime Blues” by Blind Lemon Jefferson. Shaw had already been enthralled by Jefferson’s early recordings of “Long Lonesome Blues” and “Matchbox Blues” when he met Jefferson on the town square of Waco in 1926 or 1927. “I followed all around that evening there, and then I started talkin’ to him, and naturally me being a kid he’s askin’ me different things: ‘You like the way I play this guitar?’ I told him ‘I love it!’ …Say: ‘How would you lie to do it?’ I say: ‘I sure wish I could do it!’ He says: ‘Well you can.’ I say: ‘I don’t know.’ He says: ‘Yes, you can …go and find you a guitar.’ .’..When you hear (of) me in town, you come where I am.’ At Blind Jefferson’s urging he bought himself a guitar and learned Jefferson’s “Long Lonesome Blues”. He learned many of Jefferson’s song from a combination of listening to the records and hearing him in person.

In 1925 Blind Lemon Jefferson was discovered by a Paramount recording scout and taken to Chicago to make his first records either in December 1925 or January 1926. Though he was not the first country blues singer/guitarist, or the first to make commercial recordings, Jefferson was the first to attain a national audience. Jefferson’s first session produced “I Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heart” b/w “All I Want Is That Pure Religion” using the name Deacon L.J. Bates. It was the second session, however, that made Jefferson a star. “Got The Blues” b/w “Long Lonesome Blues” hadn’t been on sale long in the spring of 1926 when Paramount asked him to record it again because of the huge demand for the record. This was unheard of for a male blues artist. Prior to Jefferson the blues had been recorded primarily by women backed by piano or bands. Tony Russell describes Jefferson’s impact: “Jefferson offered instead blues sung by a man playing guitar – playing it, moreover, with a busyness and variety that showed up many of those pianists and bands as turgid and ordinary. The discovery that there was an audience for Jefferson’s type of blues revolutionized the music business: within a few years female singers were out of favor and virtually all the trading in the ‘race’ market (jazz aside) was in men with guitars.”

In the towns of Moody and nearby Temple, Shaw met Blind Willie Johnson whom he learned “Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying.” ” My father and Blind Willie Johnson used to work together, they both composed songs. My daddy would write ’em and make ’em into ballets and they’d sell ’em for fifteen cents a copy.”  After spending a year in his mother’s home of Brenham in the late 20’s, Shaw began traveling as an itinerant cotton picker. It was in 1929 that he started playing for parties on the weekends. On one of these trips in the town of Vernon he ran into Ramblin’ Thomas at a party where the two were goaded into a guitar contest which Shaw claims to have won. “The people went wild, I guess, ’cause I was a kid …what they really went wild over, me bein’ able to play some of Blind Lemon Jefferson”s stuff …” Most Texas bluesman, he said, nvere played Jeffereson’s songs. While living in Fort Worth in 1929 he played again with Thomas and met Willie Lane (who he knew only as Little Brother) at a house party.

Willard “Ramblin” Thomas was born around 1900, probably in Texas but possibly in Louisiana. Very little is known about him except that he recorded eighteen tracks for Paramount and Victor between 1928 and 1932. Willie Lane was a Texas blues guitarist who recorded five sides in 1949 and displays the influences of Ramblin’ Thomas and J.T. “Funny Papa” Smith respectively on “Prowlin’ Ground Hog” and “Howling Wolf Blues.” In fact, he had accompanied Smith during a 1935 recording session for Vocalion, the results never being released, under the moniker “Little Brother.”

Around 1930 Shaw met J.T. “Funny Papa” Smith. Shaw and Smith went on to play weekend house parties, each devising second guitar parts behind the others’ vocal and leads. Smith promised to include Shaw in on of his recording sessions in 1931 but Smith was hauled off to face a murder charge and never returned to the area. Smith was a minstrel who wandered about the panhandle region, performing at fairs, fish fries, dances and other community events (often in the company of figures including Tom Shaw, Texas Alexander and Bernice Edwards.Between 1930 and 1931 he had recorded some twenty issued sides. Evidently Smith’s commercial billing as “Funny Paper Smith” was a gaffe on the part of record company officials. When Texas bluesman Thomas Shaw met him in Wickoffs, Oklahoma, the name “Funny Papa Smith” was plainly stitched on his stovepipe hat and the work-overalls he customarily wore as the overseer of a local plantation. He was better known simply as Howling Wolf”, the title of his debut recording. “That’s the one that made him famous,” Shaw said of the song.

Shaw’s belated debut was recorded in 1969 or 70 and issued in 1972 on the Blue Goose label, titled Blind Lemon’s Buddy. Subsequent albums included Born In Texas issued in 1972 on Advent then later on Testament, and Do Lord Remember Me released in 1973 on the Blues Beacon label (recorded in a Holland studio with one cut recorded live at Bajes Blues Club in Amsterdam). Tow other cuts appeared on the compilation San Diego Blues Jam issued in 1974 on Advent then later on Testament and four cuts that appear on the Ultimate Blues Collection Volume 3 on Ziggy Christmann’s Ornament label. As Shaw noted of his recording career, it should have happened forty years earlier: “I was a guitar player then, brother …didn’t nobody run into me-wanna mess with me. No sir …But I just can’t play now.” He remains proudest of his ability to recreate the sound of Blind Lemon, saying of the style “ I went through hell and high water to get it.”

Sources:

-Liner notes to Blind Lemon’s Buddy by Stephen Calt

–From The Vaults… Thomas Shaw Interview by Guido van Rijn (Blues & Rhythm #193, October 2004)