Missy Lane’s Assembly Room. Where is it anyhow? Must be in Memphis or probably Atlanta. Maybe in one of the ideologically unencumbered districts of Washington D.C. As it turns out, Missy Lane’s is located in Durham, North Carolina, and once it was announced that Georgia blues Wunderkind Jontavious Willis was going to be playing there, well, any self-respecting music writer would have to make a pilgrimage to this intimate, windowless room in an historic building on downtown Durham’s Northside.
Missy’s is the brainchild of Cicely Mitchell of the Art of Cool Music Fest, who has designed it as a coffee house by day and cocktail and jazz lounge by night, bringing to the Bull City upcoming soul and funk artists besides jazz players. Jontavious Willis was booked courtesy of one Tess Magnum, “the daughter of a musician and step-daughter of a carpenter,” of Sonic Pie Productions, who wrote for a grant from the Durham Arts Council. As she announced Willis to the stage, she issued an invitation for patrons to lose their downtown cool, “This is not blues for sittin’ still. You’re welcome to get up and dance.”
“I can’t believe,” Willis barked from the stage, appearing by himself at first, “that this is the last show of my tour, but we’re not going home tonight.” His show was publicized as a tight 75-minute set, but Willis wound up playing for 2 ½ memorable hours, taking the audience on an oral and musical train through the history of the blues. There’s some validity to the academic approach, when a young black blues musician who cut his teeth at the feet of giants like Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ is the one doing the teaching in his countrified style. The audience did much more than tolerate his quirky tales of the old masters as long as he aced the songs.
What we’re really talking about here is the human impulse to be playful above the seriousness, good listening when it manifests itself in a music venue. Only certain artists have the gift of gab, and Willis is certainly one of those. At times, though, he would push the envelope in an aw-shucks manner, showing a tiny spark of what the Tibetans call “crazy wisdom,” a sense in which he assumes the archetypal role of the jester. Now, the fact that Willis may have been a little tipsy towards the end when he downed another shot and used his whiskey glass to play slide guitar on the old Willy Trice blues ‘Poor Boy’ is irrelevant. He introduced the song by stating “I got no track playing behind me, and I’m drinkin’ and still playin’. So, cheers!” then proceeded to lead his trio down an eight-minute triumphant rendition (my bucket got a hold in it don’t hold no gin). It’s one that blues giants from John Fahey to Michael Bloomfield to R.L. Burnside have recorded seriously good versions of in their day, and Willis threw his hat in that ring of honour.
It’s important to note that Willis’ tomfoolery was not lacking for country profundity. It may have been eccentrically playful but can be recognized as philosophically serious when talking about the birth of the blues and the misconception of the blues as “slave music”. Scholars will give you the eye-roll of silent movie proportions should you give credence to that proposition, but Willis backs his position up with music and the knowledge of his elders passed along through the decades.
And he makes it all fun, too, exhorting the crowd to pull an imaginary whistle cord and shout “whoop whoop” during ‘Train Song’ as he coaxes his guitar into sounding like a train chugging down the tracks. It’s an old Piedmont blues by Hillsborough, NC ‘s John D. Holeman, who taught Willis fingerpicking. To fully appreciate Willis you have to understand the difference between that which is lighthearted from what is merely lightweight. He cajoles his guitar into imitating a conversation between lovers, getting a bit risqué during Casey Bill Weldon’s ‘We Gonna Move (To the Outskirts of Town)’. “When I play a country blues,” Willis noted. “I like to doctor up the recipe ‘til it tastes good and make it my own.”
He lights up like a candle with a new wick when talking about the old bluesman from Durham, Blind Boy Fuller. “I learned ‘Blues Around My Bed’ listening to Mr. George Henry’s version from the 60s. He was from a small Georgia town where my dad grew up, and I got to meet him before he passed.”
The last song he played solo before beckoning the rest of the trio to come on stage was his first original, ‘Ghost Woman’ from his new album, “West Georgia Blues.” He played it slow and sweet, with a burn that smouldered like a genuine Cuban cigar. Well, that rising river sho look good to me, and I wonder…should it set me free? You recognized the song from his record but marvelled at the inventiveness in a live setting.
Ethan Leinwand dazzled the audience with a good six minutes of St. Louie barrelhouse piano, working up the zeal to embark on the old Hambone Willie Newbern blues, ‘Rollin and Tumblin,’ the trio hardly missing a beat before churning out the ragtime-based ‘Long-Winded Woman’ from Willis’ “Spectacular Class” album, with sharp punctuations on the snare from drummer Chuck Pinckney. The first line of the song just came to him one day as he was playing another blues, “and I just kept adding a line, adding a line, adding and adding until I had a whole song.”
Willis proposed giving the crowd respite with ‘After Hours.’ “It looks like we’ll be here for a while longer than they told me to play,” he announced, soaking up the jovial camaraderie he felt in the room. But before the first note, he set down the guitar and turned serious.
“I see y’all out there, everybody, and there are more black people than usual come to my shows. That’s alright. Young black people like rhythm & blues and rap. It was the British Invasion that introduced the blues to white people. Black people didn’t think about grandma stories; she always be there. They took these stories for granted. So, they don’t know some of the slavery stories, like what happened with the inbred slaves. They couldn’t bring a good price, so they were sold by the dozen. ‘Dirty Dozen,’ which is an old blues by Speckled Red, was the song. Slip you in the dozen, your pappy is your cousin, Let your mama do the lordy-lord.
Next came ‘Little Red Hen,’ a blues by his mentor Taj Mahal – people cried mercy, don’t know what mercy means. Then he had something to say about the Jake Paul – Mike Tyson pay TV fight. “When Jake stepped on ‘ol Mike’s foot, then slapped the shit out of him. That was some crazy …. well, I’m going to play ‘Crazy Blues,’ which Mamie Smith sang acapella back in 1924 in New Orleans.”
Willis was getting all wound up and hankering to tell another story, this one about his small hometown in Georgia. “It was 1923 when Georgia opened the first recording studio outside of Chicago or New York. The country blues resonated with folks down there like my great grandpa and grandma. She had 13 kids and each one of them had 13 kids of their own. Now you can do the math in a town of 800 people, a whole lot of them came from my grandma. She told my mama to take us kids to church every Sunday – I mean every Sunday. Just like there’s a difference between black people music and white people music, it’s the same with church music. Sometimes black people music gets nasty.” This led to the raunchy Lucille Bogan blues ‘Shave ‘em Dry,’ with lyrics I can’t quote in a family publication, segueing into ‘Big Bird Blues.’
Someone from the audience asked if he’d play ‘Linda Lu,’ and Willis claimed he’d played it earlier in the evening, didn’t I, which brought a shouted chorus of “No!” So, he played the famous Ray Parker hit: Well they call my baby Patty, but her real name is Linda Lu. Then Charles Davenport’s 1930’s boogie-woogie, twelve exhilarating minutes of ‘Cow Cow Blues,’ and it was finally time to wrap festivities up for the night. His choice was from the new album, one that hit #4 on the Billboard Blues charts. “In the hip-hop world, you have to sell hundreds of thousands of songs,” he said with a wink, “but you only got to sell a few hundred to get up to the top in the blues world.” The song is about leaving your worries behind whether you lost a job or a man or a woman, anything, the solution is to ‘Keep Your Worries on the Dance Floor.’
“One more and I’m gone,” said Willis, who was planning on partying after the show and drive back to Georgia the next day. His choice for a finale was from Tommy Dorsey, the bluesman not the bandleader. Dorsey’s hymn, ’If You See My Savior’ is by some accounts responsible for the birth of gospel music. In 1931, a gospel choir was formed by Dorsey at the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago. Willis turned in an outstanding delivery of the number – It’s a journey we all must take, tell him I’m on my way is its vital line. Jontavious Willis is on a journey every one of us must take in our own way. His path is through the blues.
