Blue As Ever
5/14/2007
Chris Bynum - New Orleans Times Picayune
The 66-year-old bluesman, among the last of the gritty country blues originals, has known stress in many forms: rocky relationships with women, overdue bills "or when your car is broke and you need to get somewhere, and you can't. Or a family member don't treat you right," said King, who will open the Southern Comfort Blues Stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival today at 11:15 a.m.
Hurricane Katrina is his most recent muse, flooding his home and forcing him to live in another state.
The storm brought King loss and gain, that ebb and flow of life that adds a deeper raspiness to the throats of those who sing from personal experience.
On the Wednesday after the storm, as water flowed into the Central Business District, he and Alabama Slim (fellow bluesman Milton Frazier) left the Hotel Monteleone and headed to Texas. Since I been here, I like it," said King, talking by phone from Dallas. His current address, he says, is not New Orleans, the home King sought at the age of 14, hopping a train with just a flour sack of clothes in McComb, Miss., bound for the Crescent City.
Jazzfest is also home to King, who has performed at the annual festival for 37 of its 38 years, missing only once because of a scheduling error.
"The blues has been stronger since Katrina," said King, whose soulful songs ironically express much gratitude. "Most of it is about homesickness. Before Katrina, my biggest blues was about the different women I had."
King sees blessings where perhaps only a bluesman can find them. He survived being shot in the back by his wife, shot in the leg in a nightclub ruckus and stabbed in the leg during another barroom brawl.
"God has blessed me," said King, recounting his good fortune, which most recently arrived not in the form of violence survived, but through a church community in Dallas. After the Salvation Army and a Baptist church provided King with an apartment, the minister came by to check on the musician's needs. What King had was a floor and a pillow; he felt his needs had been met.
"The pastor looked around and said, 'We can make this better,' " King said. "Sure enough, I got a new mattress, a dining set, a living room set. They give me that. Bless their hearts." King hopes to bless some hearts with his gift of music. In August, he will move back to New Orleans, into a rental house designated for master musicians in residence at the Musicians Village in the Upper 9th Ward. The rental units, sponsored by New Orleans Habitat for Humanity and Shell, are provided for musicians to work in the planned Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.
Handing down blues to a younger generation can be difficult, King said. The title of his latest CD for Fat Possum Records, "You Don't Know What I Know," pretty much says why. But King is patient when it comes to his music. Blues, he reveals in his own life, is all about waiting. "Bus Station Blues," one of his early recordings, was about waiting for his wife to return on a Greyhound bus from visiting her sick sister.
"She said she would be coming in on Friday," King said. "The buses roll in, and she wasn't on the bus. So I go back home. And I just make a song."
Homemade instrument King, born Fread E. Martin, ached to make songs long before he could get his hands on a guitar. His sharecropper father, named after Jesse James, played with Muddy Waters.
"Every time he would go to work, I would pass by and see his guitar in the corner, and it would tempt me so good," said King, who one day succumbed to temptation and ended up breaking a string. "He whipped me good with his belt."
King laughs at the recollection, as if the crime was worth it, despite the punishment.
Shortly after that, the 6-year-old Fread spotted a discarded cigar box in a ditch. He saw a way to make his own guitar. He heated up tree resin and soot, and painted the box with the homemade black paint. The aspiring musician took pine boards for the neck, whittling them down with a piece of glass. King loves to tell the tale, especially the part where he plucked the hairs from an accommodating horse's tail for strings. The horse, King said, kicked a hole in his jaw.
The self-taught blues guitarist, who bought his first real guitar from Sears, Roebuck and Co., learned to play by listening to 45-rpm records slowed down to 33 1/3 rpm.
It's no secret that long drinks of corn liquor and even longer nights at juke joints, like the "Bucket of Blood" he immortalized in a song, infused his music with the down and dirty. He stopped drinking in the late '80s, but his music still recalls the life, like a blues hangover.
It was after King arrived in New Orleans that he began to see music as freedom. He hooked up with musicians Buddy Guy and Slim Harpo. And in the early 1960s, he changed his name to Little Freddie King after being compared to Texas-born blues guitarist Freddie King. He played his first gig with the original Freddie King in Marrero, but wouldn't leave his paying job to hit the road with his namesake, who died in 1976.
Hitting the road King worked long hours for 37 years rebuilding carburetors and electrical equipment, and stayed with the wife who inspired the song "Mean Little Woman" until she died in a nursing home several years ago.
Music, in good times and bad, took King places, physically and emotionally.
He performs all over Europe, and the vinyl LP he produced in 1970 with bandmate John S. "Harmonica" Williams now sells for $135 in Europe. In addition to his 2005 release, "You Don't Know What I Know," which produced a hit single in the UK, "Crackhead Joe," King's previous releases are "Swamp Boogie" (1997) and "Sing Sang Sung" (2000).
When King was married and had the opportunity to go to Europe on a gig, he never packed a suitcase like a normal guy. He would have endured too much grief from a wife who preferred him to stay at home.
So King would take a piece or two of clothing with him to work each day until he had enough clothes to pack his suitcase for the trip. He never said goodbye, " 'cause there would always be a fuss or a humbug," as the lyrics to "Mean Little Woman" go.
But life goes on for a bluesman. Today there's a new girlfriend, and she, too, has inspired a song: "My Little Baby-Face Baby" is about love's frustrations when two people try to share a life. "She's my little baby-face baby, and every time I ask her to do something right, she turn around and do something wrong," he spoke the lyrics, the consonants rolling seamlessly from one to the next. King has no teeth to bite spaces between the words, so the easy momentum in his voice flows like uninterrupted thoughts.
Before Katrina, King was always a fixture around the Quarter, riding his bike wherever he went. "Yeah, I have a new Cadillac," he said. "A 2007, red and silver with front shocks, disc brakes and rear shocks. I put two more shiny mirrors on the sides to make it look more like a Cadillac." When asked what model of Cadillac, King replied, "Twenty-one speed." Seems he's talking about his version of a two-wheel Cadillac -- his new bike.
The ever-pedaling King may have a few health issues: ulcers, glaucoma in his left eye and arthritis in his hip, a condition he says he got as a young man when he used his leg to cover a hole in a boxcar as the train rolled through Montana in the icy cold winter. He was on his way to San Francisco to play with John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley.
Aged to perfection
Sixty-six may still be young in musical lineage, but King says it's just the right amount of seasoning for a blues singer.
"It's better to sing the blues when you are older," he said. "There's a whole lot of things that you can't do that you used to. I used to get out there and work all day and play music all night, and I would be wide awake. Now sometime if I'm going out for a gig at midnight, I wonder if I can stay awake."
And there are those other prized things that age can take away, said King, who let another set of spoken lyrics roll off his tongue about "squeezing his baby": "Desire is there, but the body ain't quick. And sometimes arthritis hit me, and I reach for my walking stick."
What King hasn't lost is his penchant for a quirky style. For Jazzfest, he will deck out in a "reddish, pinkish" suit and his black-and-white shoes -- unless he decides on the green ones. But what spectators might miss, said King's drummer and agent, "Wacko" Wade Wright, is that the guitarist usually wears three pairs of pants and four shirts -- all at once.
"He says the warmness keeps him going," Wade said. "He ain't Britney Spears."
As one of the many musicians who was nurtured by the vibrant cultural environment in New Orleans, I cannot overstate the importance of the Musicians’ Village. Please lend your support for those artists eager to call New Orleans home again, and for those in future generations who will be the beneficiaries of their knowledge.- Branford Marsalis
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