He's James Cotton talks |
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By John Orr Jan. 11, 2001 James Cotton's voice was truly a gift of God. Rich in timbre, a complex chord structure all its own -- compared to most singers it was deep-grain black walnut next to clear pine. Imagine Eddie ""Rochester'' Anderson singing with soul and rhythm and you'll have an idea what Cotton was like at his best. Cotton's star was hung on his mouth-harp playing, but his fans have always loved his voice as well. On one of his best albums, ''Mighty Long Time'' (1991), his vocals are the meat and the harp solos are the gravy (magnificent gravy, mind you). But, what the Lord giveth, the Lord can taketh away, and that's what's been going on with Cotton. ''I got a messed-up voice,'' he said by phone, a couple of days before the new millenium. ''I had cancer in the throat. I recollect at the time the doctor said it might get better and it might not.'' The doctors carved out some polyps from his vocal chords in 1994, and radiation treatment followed, but Cotton's voice never quite came back. No wonder, the way he uses it.
But when he sings on one of his albums from last year, ''Fire Down Under the Hill,'' his voice is so rough it sounds like blood must have splattered the microphone. But it also is full of the kind of soul that comes from having performed the blues for almost 60 years. So, Cotton, 65, only sings one or two songs per show these days, but that doesn't bother him too much. ''I'm a harp player!'' he exclaims emphatically from his Austin home. And he says he's really looking forward performing at Mark Hummell's Blues Harmonica Blowout 2001, which blows through Oakland on Friday and Saturday and into Santa Cruz on Sunday. ''All the good harp players, man, oh my God! I'm gonna be in harmonica heaven there.'' The good harp players, besides Cotton, will be Charlie Musselwhite, Steve Freund and R.J. Misho, as well as Hummell, whose Blues Survivors will back the show. On Sunday, Misho drops out and South Bay greats Gary Smith and Andy Santana join in. ''I just want everybody to have a good time,'' said Cotton, ''Because I'm goin' out to have a good time. I'm going to go have some fun.'' Cotton first picked up a harmonica sometime during World War II, when he was a little boy in Mississippi. He used it to mimic the sounds of trains and chickens. He was a prodigy. He remembers the first time he was paid for playing harmonica, at about the age of 7. ''I didn't see it as getting paid. I sat on the commisary porch, I was raised up on a farm of a sharecropper. And we got paid off that porch. And I played on that same porch where we got paid off at, and made $45. $46, to be exact.'' Then he heard Sonny Boy Williamson, and his whole world was changed. There was a lot more he could do with a harmonica, he learned, than imitate farm sounds. '''My uncle (Wiley Green), he takin' me to Sonny Boy. And I told him that he had an influence on me.'' Williamson took Cotton under his wing, and a few years later, when Williamson left Memphis, Cotton, at the ripe old age of 15, took over his band. His recording career began when Sam Philips put him in the studio with Howlin' Wolf and Willie Nix. In 1954, after Little Walter Jacobs left the Muddy Waters Blues Band, Waters asked Cotton to join with him, and thereby began a legendary partnership. The first few years, Waters expected Cotton to play, note for note, the same solos Little Walter had performed, which led to some fuss. ''Well, you couldn't blame him,'' Cotton explained, ''because that's what he got all his hit records with, and me not knowing it, just coming off the street. And he wanted to hear what was on his records. In one way of speaking, it was good for me that I did that for four years. It taught me, kind of, both sides of it, you know? And then finally I went down to him, I say, 'I'll never be Little Walter, but I can play your music.' You know? So he accepted me as that, which taken a big load off my shoulder, it made me free, where I could put in things I felt, you know?'' One of the benefits for Cotton was learning all those songs. Austin club owner and record producer Clifford Antone has said he thinks Cotton knows the words to more blues songs than anyone else he ever met. ''I probably do,'' Cotton said with a laugh. ''I know quite a few songs. Over the years, you know, like I studied ... like it was school, I guess. I found out that I can't play a sound unless I know the words. You got to know the words before you can play the song. ''I learned that good playing with Muddy Waters. When I went to play with Muddy I didn't know none of the words, and I was in a world of trouble there.'' He laughs again. ''But as the words come along, then the music came, you know?'' Cotton stayed with Waters for 12 years, then formed the James Cotton Blues Band in 1966, at the peak of what he says to this day was a great time for music. ''It was a good time for music period,'' he said. ''Because people, a lot of people, into all kinds of music. I played with some everybody -- Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton and Cream, Sam and Dave, Albert King, B. B. King, Paul Butterfield, you name name 'em. And it was good for everybody.''
But, Chicago has lost its charm to him. ''After my wife died, I still had the house and I didn't want to stay there no more. Cause I'd always had the memories, you know, every time I walked through the door. ... The whole city. So I come to Memphis.'' Memphis didn't work out the second time around, though. ''It just got too rough on me, you know, people breaking in next door, you know, there's a crack house down the street. No, I couldn't take that, I had to go.'' So about five months ago he and his second wife, Jacklyn, moved to Austin, where the welcome wagon included the Double Trouble guys, Chris Layton and Tommy Shannon, who dropped in to welcome the blues great to town. In Austin, Cotton says, he mostly stays around the house. He loves to cook, soul food especially, and he plays music. ''Since I left Chicago, I'm a lone wolf. I put on the record player and sit and try to play on the guitar. I've got five guitars here and can't play them, but I'm always whompin' around. Guitars, tenor saxophone ... and I cain't play none of that, but I mess around with it, you know? My fingers, they don't seem to want to go to the right places.'' Cotton's been trying, seriously, to play guitar, for ''for about 10 years, I guess. And I can play one tune, 'Boogie Chillun' by John Lee Hooker, and that's as far as it go. John Lee Hooker showed me that, about 20 years ago, and it finally came to me, what he was showing me.'' But, don't expect Cotton to pick up a guitar this weekend. He's a harp player. James Cotton recordings at CDNow |