***The Blues Is Dues –With Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy In Mind

FromThe Pen Of Frank Jackman

Johnny Prescott privately daydreamed his way through the music he was listening to just then, the forbidden blues music, the devil’s music in some quarters but colored music,( nigra music from his Southern- born father, nigra being kinder that the n----r that he had come North with and which Mother Prescott banned from the household under penalty, well, it was not clear what penalty since no Prescott, young or old, was willing to chance what that hellish thing might be in Johnny’s growing up 1950s household). He was listening to that sacred music just then on the little transistor that Ma Prescott, Martha to adults, had given him for Christmas after he has taken a fit when she quite reasonable suggested that a new set of ties to go with his new white long-sleeved shirts might be a better gift, a better Christmas gift and more practical too, for a sixteen year old boy. No, he screamed he wanted a radio, a transistor radio, batteries included, of his own so that he could listen to whatever he liked up in his room, or wherever he was, and didn’t have to, understand, didn’t have to listen to some Vaughn Monroe, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, or Harry James 1940s war drum thing, sentimental journey thing, until the boys come home thing, on the huge immobile radio downstairs in the Prescott living room. That music and that monstrosity declared, Johnny declared, strictly squaresville, cubed.

This blues thing, this roots music had been a recent acquisition as Johnny one night, one Sunday night, got a late night blues station with a big range out of Chicago. Previously he had been entirely happy, innocently happy, to listen to, say, Shangra-la by The Four Coins that a few months back he had been crazy for. Or that Banana Boatsong by The Tarriers that everybody was singing but which upon a recent listen had made him think for a moment as it started its dreary trip through his ears that he was not so sure that those ties wouldn’t have been a better deal, and more practical too, if that was all the radio could produce. Yah, that so-called be-bop Boston rock station, WAPX, had sold out to, well, sold out to somebody, because except for late at night, midnight late at night, one could not hear the likes of Jerry Lee, Carl, Little Richard, Fats, and the new, now that Elvis was gone, killer rocker, Chuck Berry who had proclaimed loud and clear that Mr. Beethoven had better move alone, and said Mr. Beethoven best tell one and all of his confederates, including Mr. Tchaikovsky, that rock ‘n’ roll was the new sheriff in town.

The bitter end came one Sunday afternoon as Rainbow (where the hell do they get these creepy songs from he thought) by Russ Hamilton blared on and on and he was then ready to throw in the towel with vanilla music. (Johnny would not get hipped to the roots, to the distinctions between that vanilla music being spoon-fed to he and his white brethren and black-etched blues until much later when he headed south during the early 1960s for the civil rights struggle and learned very quickly the distinctions. Just then thought vanilla was just a feeling not a cultural statement.) Desperately, later that same night, Johnny fingered the dial looking for some other station when he heard this crazy piano riff starting to breeze through the night air, the heated night air, and all of a sudden Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 blasted the airwaves. But funny it didn’t sound like the whinny Ike’s voice that he knew from some Ike and Tina stuff so he listened for a little longer, and as he later found out from the DJ it was actually a James Cotton Blues Band cover. After that performance was finished, fish-tailing right after that one, no commercial breaks, was a huge harmonica intro and what could only be mad-hatter Junior Wells doing When My Baby Left Me splashed through. There was no need to turn the dial further now because what Johnny Prescott had found in the crazy night air, radio beams bouncing every which way, direct from Chicago, and maybe right off those hard-hearted Maxwell streets, was Be-Bop Benny’s Chicago Blues Radio Hour. Be-Bop Benny who started Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino on their careers, or helped.

Now Johnny, like every young high-schooler, every "with it" high schooler in the USA, had heard of this show, because even though everybody was crazy for rock and roll, just then like he said before, the airwaves sounded like, well, sounded like music your parents would dance to, no, sit to at a dance, and some kids still craved high rock. So this show was known mainly through the teenage grapevine but Johnny had never listened to it because, no way, no way in hell was his punk little mother bought Radio Shack transistor radio with two dinky batteries going to even have the strength to pick up Be-Bop Benny’s live show out in Chicago. So Johnny, and maybe rightly so, took this turn of events for a sign. And so when he heard that distinctive tinkle of the Otis Spann piano warming up to Spann’s Stompand finished up with his Someday he was hooked.

And you know, as he listened to song after song for several weeks, toes tapping, fingers popping, he started to see what Billy, Billy Bradley, from over in Adamsville, meant when one night at a school dance where he had been performing with his band, Billy and the Jets, mentioned in an intro to a cover of Elmore James’ rendition of Dust My Broom that if you wanted to get rock and roll back you had better listen to blues, and if you wanted to listen to blues, blues that rocked then you had very definitely better get in touch with the Chicago blues as they came north from Mississippi and places like that.

Johnny who have never been too much south of Gloversville, or west of Albany, and didn’t know too many people who had, couldn’t understand why that beat, that da, da, da, Chicago beat sounded like something out of the womb in his head. Sounded like some ten thousand years of human existence seeking to wail, wail in the night. But when he heard Big Walter Horton wailing on that harmonica on Rockin’ My Boogie he knew it had to be embedded somewhere in his own genes.