July, 1992

The hands on the keyboard above these words belonged to ``Champion'' Jack
Dupree, a native of New Orleans who improved his life by living almost half of
it outside the United States.

Even in World War II, when he was taken prisoner by the Japanese, he lived a
pretty good life on Java because the Japanese didn't care if he was black or
white, they just wanted to eat well.

``I cooked for the (Japanese) officers, so I had to eat what they ate, so it wouldn't be poisoned,'' Dupree told me last year by phone from his home in Germany. ``I had help and everything, a nice room, a
bottle of cognac a month, cigars, cigarettes -- it was just like working in a
hotel, but with no place to go.''

But when he got out of the Marines Corps, he was back in the United States, where during the war even German prisoners of war had more freedom on American
military bases than did black American soldiers. Where his parents had been
murdered by the Ku Klux Klan when he was only a year old, and where he'd seen
drunken white men kill black men in the streets of New Orleans just for sport.

He tried living in New York for a while, where race was less an issue, but
was chased out by Dizzy Gillespie and bee-bop jazz, which made it hard for
a barrelhouse blues player to make a living.

So he moved to Europe.

He wasn't here for the bombing in Selma, the speechs by Martin Luther King
Jr., the busing fights, the marches on the Capitol.

``There's race haters all over the world,'' Dupree told me. ``But I don't
find that many over here (in Europe), because I'm a special guest here, and
everything that goes on (musically) I'm a part of it. ``I'm treated like a man here.''

In America there was a burst of interest in blues music during the '60s, but
during the deadly disco '70s, when even B.B. King was reduced to playing in Las
Vegas lounges, Dupree remained a star in Europe, recording more than 280 albums
and enjoying the Europeans' consistent love of the blues -- a music born in
America.

A couple of years ago, when he learned he had cancer, he decided to revisit his native land. On the first visit he found his long-lost son, whom he had thought was dead. On the second trip he toured, including a brief visit to the Bay Area, where he'd last performed in the 1930s or '40s.

``I was in the Mason Lodge in Oakland ... I was with Count Basie, on the show
with them. I was part of the package that toured around with them in '34,
something like that, when the vaudevilles was doing ... maybe it was in the
'40s.''

On May 18, 1991, Champion Jack sat backstage at JJ's Mountain View and
laughed about how I had quoted his German shepherd dog, Queenie, in a newspaper story (``Arooo, uhrrrah, errrrgh''). And he reveled, again, in his heritage -- his father was a sailor from the Belgian Congo, his mother was part Cherokee Indian -- explaining his Indian story garb.

And he and John Lee Hooker, another
veteran of the blues, sat and cracked jokes with each other.

And he played piano for us, and made us a part of his world as he sang, between sips of cool white wine.

One of the tunes he played he'd written extemporaneously during his first
trip back, in a recording studio in New Orleans. He'd noticed some changes in
his native land.

You know, Martin Luther King started something,

But nobody ever thought one day everybody would be free ...

Colored folk, black people was beggin' to be free, looking for freedom;

Seemed like it was a crime to some people ...

But the day has come.

Martin Luther King said it would be here one day, and it's here!

Coming stronger all the time.

Dupree died in January 1992, just as the second album he'd recorded during his
return to New Orleans was being released.

On it, in the song ``They Gave Me
Away,'' he explains the blues.

You know there's a lot of people don't know what blues is about. If you have a good woman you love and she leave you for somebody else, it make you feel bad. And that's what the blues is about. And when she come back, you feel the same, so it didn't make no difference, you know? (Laughs.)
You still have the blues, you see. And so, I'm gonna play a little of it.

Top photograph, and above, "Champion" Jack Dupree performs at J.J.'s Blues in Mountain View, California in May, 1991.

"Champion" Jack Dupree arrives at, then signs autographs, at the New Orleans by th Bay Festival at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, California, in May, 1991. Helping him out of the golf cart is his sax player, Samuel Burkhart, of Switzerland.