Month: December 2022

  • Gateway To Freedom – Detroit, MI

    Gateway To Freedom – Detroit, MI

    Until Emancipation, Detroit and the Detroit River community served as the gateway to freedom for thousands of African American people escaping enslavement. Detroit was one of the largest terminals of the Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists aiding enslaved people seeking freedom. Detroit’s Underground Railroad code name was Midnight. At first, Michigan was a destination for freedom seekers, but Canada became a safer sanctuary after slavery was abolished there in 1834. With passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, many runaways left their homes in Detroit and crossed the river to Canada to remain free. Some returned after Emancipation in 1863.

    The successful operation of Detroit’s Underground Railroad was due to the effort and cooperation of diverse groups of people, including people of African descent, Whites, and North American Indians. This legacy of freedom is a vital part of Detroit and its history.

  • Carddock Terry Hotel – Lynchburg, VA

    Carddock Terry Hotel – Lynchburg, VA

    Somewhat of the beaten path this hotel in Lynchburg, VA provided this unique photo opportunity on day walking along a repurposed rail track running aside the James River. Lynchburg calls itself the City of Seven Hills for my time living there I could not find anyone who could name any of them.

  • Gaye Adegbalola – King Biscuit Blues Festival 2022.

    Gaye Adegbalola – King Biscuit Blues Festival 2022.

    Gaye Todd Adegbalola, a Blues Music Award winner, is best known musically as a founding member of Saffire – The Uppity Blues Women (1984 – 2009). The group recorded exclusively with Alligator Records. Additionally, she has 6 recordings on her own label, Hot Toddy Music (Todd is her family name).

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  • Jimmy “Duck” Holmes

    Jimmy “Duck” Holmes

    Jimmy “Duck” Holmes

    Jimmy “Duck” Holmes is the proprietor of one of the oldest juke joints in Mississippi, the Blue Front in Bentonia. In the mid-2000s he began performing blues actively after many years of performing casually, and has already garnered several awards and many accolades. He is a practitioner and conscious advocate of a distinctive blues style from his hometown whose most famous proponent was blues pioneer Skip James.

    Holmes was born to sharecroppers Carey and Mary Holmes in 1947, the year before they opened the Blue Front Café. He was one of ten children and his parents also raised four children of Mary’s deceased sister. The children all grew up partially at the Blue Front, which served hot meals, sold groceries, housed a barbershop, and sold bootleg corn liquor to both its African American customers and to whites who would buy it out of the café’s back door. With the money they earned from the café and harvesting cotton, the Holmes sent most of their children to college.

  • Blue Front Cafe – Bentonia Mississippi

    Blue Front Cafe – Bentonia Mississippi

    Mississippi Blues Trail Marker. During a trip from Gulfport, MS to Chicago in the spring of 2022 decided to track and photograph as many Mississippi Blues Marker as I could find. Pulled Ito Bentonia MS and found the Blue Front Cafe. It was a Sunday morning so knew the cafe wasn’t open but it was a good time to get a photo. As I was photographing the store front a older gentlemen asked if I would like to look inside, said he didn’t;t open the front door on Sunday mornings in difference to the Baptist Church across the tracks. Did get many good shots on the inside due to the lightening but will post those I did get later. There was two other people inside having their morning coffee when the one asked if I knew who the gentlemen was that invited me in, well low and behold if it wasn’t Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, the owner and the blues musician who had just the week before lost the grammy for traditional blues album to Bobby Rush. After finding out that I was from Chicago, Mr Holmes starting reminiscing about his time in the Windy City.

  • Bill Pickett

    Bill Pickett

    Bill Pickett The First Bulldogger

    Stockyards Fort Worth, Texas

    W.M. “Bill” Pickett (1870-1932) originated the rodeo event of bulldogging, known today as steer wrestling. Native Texan Pickett developed a unique style of bulldogging, which hade him world famous as a wild west show and rodeo performer. Bill would leap from the left side of his horse, catch the steer by the horns, twist the animal’s neck until he was able to reach over and sink his teeth into the steer’s lip. In 1908, Pickett appeared in the Coliseum
    during the Fort Worth Stock Show. It was one of several performances here. Bill died of injuries received when he was kicked in the head by a wild horse while working for the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch. Colonel Zack Miller wrote a poem to his memory, these last lines sum up the respect earned by this cowboy:

    like many men in the old-time West,
    on any job he did his best
    he left a blank that’s hard to fill
    for there’ll be never another bill.

    In 1972, Bill Pickett became the first black cowboy to be inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

  • Bobby Rush

    Bobby Rush

    Bobby Rush performing as the opening act of the 2022 King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansa on October 5th. This was the third time I had a chance to so Bobby. I consider him one of the last original Chicago Blues Men.

    Blues musician Emmett “Bobby Rush” Ellis, Jr. was born on November 10, 1933 in Haynesville, Louisiana to Mattie Spivey Ellis and Emmett Ellis, Sr. He attended public school in Haynesville until he was eleven years old, at which point he halted his education to help support his family. 

    Ellis received his first guitar at seven years old, and was taught to sing and play music by his father. He aspired to become a blues musician after hearing the music of Muddy Waters and other artists on the radio. After leaving school at eleven years old, Ellis began working at a cotton gin to help his family financially. In 1947, Ellis moved to Sherrill, Arkansas with his family and found work as a sharecropper. He continued playing guitar during this time, and started his professional music career in 1950, when he played with Elmore James at a club in Arkansas. When he was eighteen years old, he migrated to Chicago, Illinois, and formed the band Bobby Rush and the Four Jivers, which included Pinetop Perkins, Freddie King and Little Walter. He began recording blues music at Chess Records, but was denied work after the Chess brothers learned that he could read. In 1954, he integrated the Bourbon Street nightclub and his band became a regular act there. He recruited comedian Dick Gregory to perform at Bourbon Street. Ellis met Jimmy Reed at Vee-Jay Records, and opened for Reed at a major Chicago venue in 1957. During the course of his career, Ellis befriended other popular blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and B.B. King. In 2015, he played at King’s final show, and performed a harmonica tribute when King passed away shortly afterwards. 

    Ellis has been widely celebrated for his role in blues music history. In 2006 he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. The following year he became the first blues artist to perform in China, which earned him the unofficial title as the International Dean of the Blues. In 2015, he was the recipient of two Blues Music Awards in the categories of Soul Blues Male Artist and B.B. King Entertainer of the Year. The same year, he was inducted into the Official Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame. Ellis won a Blues Music Award and his first Grammy Award in 2017 for his album Porcupine Meat, and received an award for Historical Album of the Year for Chicken Heads: A 50 Year History of Bobby Rush. His green-studded suit depicted on the inside cover of Porcupine Meat was donated to the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of American History.