Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Dick Waterman

DickWaterman Interview I was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, which is, of course, home of Plymouth Rock and which has the nickname of “America’s Hometown.” I was born in 1935 and went to school there. I graduated in ’53 and then went to college for several years. Then I was in the army for three years. I was a cryptographer, which sort of accounts for my ability to remember numbers over the years. I have a very bad memory for names and faces, but if I ever called you, I remember your phone number or your area code or your zip code or something like that. I have a good memory for numbers. After I got out of school, I was a newspaperman in Connecticut, in Miami, and then I moved back to the Cambridge area in ’63. I fell into the Cambridge folk music scene, which was Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Tim Harden, Phil Ochs, New Lost City Ramblers, Eric Anderson—people like that. And at that point I had seen Reverend Gary Davis, of course. I had seen Brownie [McGhee] Dick Waterman at Ground Zero blues club, June 2012. Photo courtesy of Madge Marley Howell. 70 dick waterman and Sonny [Terry], and a San Francisco folk bluesman named Jesse Fuller. And he had a song called “San Francisco Bay Blues,” which Peter, Paul, and Mary covered for a big hit. Then I had the opportunity to promote a concert with the newly rediscovered Mississippi John Hurt in early ’64. And I did a week of shows with John Hurt at a little club called the Café Yana. Then a few months later I promoted Bukka White. While Bukka was in town he stayed with Alan Wilson and Phil Spiro, who roomed together. Phil did a radio show at the MIT radio station. Alan and David Evans were interviewing Bukka, and they were running through a list of other prewar bluesmen they thought Bukka may have known. When David mentioned Son House, Bukka said, “Oh, I just saw him coming out of a movie theater.” So this was really an electrifying move, because Son House had recorded once in 1930 and then for Alan Lomax in the early forties. So having had somebody say they had just seen Son House at a movie theater was pretty exciting stuff. Had there been much clamor among the white enthusiasts about the possibility that Son House was still alive? Had anybody heard about that? Or was this the first evidence that anybody had come up with? Well, really, there was nothing. There was a label called Origin Jazz Library which had an album, and I think it was called Really! The Country Blues, and there was some Son House on there. And then they had taken his Lomax recordings and issued half an album on Folkways. It was called The Son House/J. D. Short Album—Son House on one side of an LP and J. D. Short on the other. This was music that was recorded by Lomax by the Library of Congress and was never supposed to be commercially released. So the only Son House available was on Origin Jazz Library and on half an album on Folkways. But, no, there had been no rumors of sightings or anything like that. So Phil Spiro, who was a computer programmer, and Nick Perls, who was a college dropout who would later go on to found Yazoo Records—the three of us got in a red Volkswagen Bug and we drove from Cambridge through New York down to the Mississippi Delta. And June of ’64 was the summer of “Mississippi Burning,” and it was not a very hospitable time to be down there. So we were there about three or four weeks in June, and it’s really a long, complicated story. We met an old man whose son had once been married to Son House’s stepdaughter. So we spoke to the son and we said, “You were once married to a woman and Son House was her stepfather.” And he said yes. So then we got her phone number in Detroit and called her. And we said, “Your mother was married to the blues singer Son House.” And she said yes. We knew his first name started with E. So we had mistakenly thought it was Eugene. Actually it was Eddie. So on June 21 of 1964, we spoke to a man who went and got Son House and brought...