A Blues Life (review)

A Blues Life. By Henry Townsend and Bill Greensmith. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. [xiv, 145 p. ISBN 0-252-02526-1. $24.95.]

Henry Townsend, born in 1909, is an African American blues singer and guitarist who has been active as a musician in St. Louis for three-quarters of a century. Recording his first sides for Columbia Records in 1929, he made his most recent recording, The 88 Blues, for Blueberry Hill Records in 1997 (BBH-032), playing piano as well as playing guitar and singing. Though he recorded in every decade between the twenties and the nineties, his most productive period by far was the thirties. In recent years, he has continued to garner recognition: in 1985 he was the recipient of a National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, in 1986 he was featured in a PBS documentary (That's the Way I Do It), and a recent plaque honoring him on the St. Louis Walk of Fame (a photograph of which appears in the book) calls him "the patriarch of St. Louis Blues."

In A Blues Life, Bill Greensmith--photographer, record producer, coeditor of Blues Unlimited, and host of a blues radio program in St. Louis--has edited Henry Townsend's reminiscences, which he tape-recorded in over thirty hours of interviews. The resulting life-story narrative, in Townsend's voice throughout, resembles in its manner of presentation that of Pleasant "Cousin Joe" Joseph, described by editor Harriet J. Ottenheimer as "an edited presentation which strives for some measure of coherence and which is intended for a general reading public" (Cousin Joe: Blues from New Orleans, ed. Harriet J. Ottenheimer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 226). Townsend's life story was compiled over a shorter period of time than Cousin Joe's and is less detailed, but Greensmith has supplemented it with a number of photographs, some taken by Greensmith himself; endnotes providing further information about people, places, events, and recordings mentioned by Townsend; and a discography listing Townsend's recordings, both as featured artist and accompanist.

Townsend's narrative deals first of all with his parents and childhood, during which he moved with his family an astonishing number of times (from Mississippi, via Memphis and Missouri, to the Cairo area in southern Illinois) before running away from home when he was nine years old. Then in St. Louis, he was on his own for a while, shining shoes for a man who had an "alcohol and water joint--a speakeasy, they call it" (p. 9); scouting, finding, and selling bottles to bootleggers; and in 1927, working briefly for a refining and rubber plant, although Townsend states that he had "got halfway slick by then: I knew how to live without doing too much of anything" (p. 22). Later in life, Townsend's various occupations outside music included driving a cab, managing a black hotel in which he engaged in various under-the-table schemes, and working in sales.

Townsend recalls that he first heard a guitar when his father, who played the accordion, was playing with a friend, and "that really tore my mind up for the guitar. The sound of that guitar just went through me, just penetrated me like a bullet. That was my first real inspiration. I knew then that I wanted to play a guitar" (p. 5). Still, the first instrument he learned was a blues harp that he bought for about a quarter in a ten-cent store; he did some entertaining on it with his brother Charley. Later, a girlfriend bought him his first guitar, although he "tore it up" when he wasn't able to get it to respond the way he wanted. In telling his story, Townsend provides important information about the early blues scene, mentioning many musicians he worked with through the years and others who worked in or passed through St. Louis. Among those he mentions are Lonnie Johnson (one of the people who made...