f32 Nothing In Rambling
Jo Ann Kelly shunned commercial success, so the best folk blues singer Britain ever produced is nearly unknown to younger listeners. Jeanette Leech goes in search of Jo Ann’s story on the 25th anniversary of her death.
O
ne of the final gigs Jo Ann Kelly played was at a folk club, in Bristol, in 1989. Footage survives; she intro- duces Me And My Chauffeur
Blues in her cheerful, slightly London- inflected tones as “another Memphis Min- nie song” before going on to really tell it in a rendering that’s pure Jo. The voice lacks the youthful blare of her 1969 debut album, but there’s something else: an equally intense, less tangible, force at work. Here, in her mid-40s, Jo Ann Kelly surrounds the bawdy and proud lyrics with an even harder shell that, nevertheless, whispers of the heart underneath.
“She’s wearing a little beret because
she’s bald from chemotherapy,” says her husband, Pete Emery. This poignant detail – a beret that neither exploits nor dismisses her illness – says much to the spine of Jo Ann Kelly and her relationship to perform- ing. She could reproduce the blues incredi- bly faithfully, but that’s beside the point. She could bring her life story to her perfor- mance, but that too is beside the point. What she did was meld her emotion, her experience, to the songs; and so well that you couldn’t see the join. 25 years since her death, the work of this multi-layered artist is as relevant as ever.
“It was called the Wandle Delta,”
laughs Jo’s brother, Dave Kelly. “There were lots of us [blues artists] that came from within a five-mile radius of the river Wan- dle.” Jo, along with her parents and siblings (Susan was one year younger, Dave two), lived in Streatham, south-east London. The children were music mad, devouring rock’n’ roll and skiffle.
At the age of ten, Dave swapped his electric train set for a guitar. It turned out to be a tenor (four-string), and a local skiffle musician taught him the rudiments of the instrument. “Jo heard me,” Dave remem- bers, “and she decided to learn as well. I showed her three chords. And we went from there.” Spotting aptitude, the Kelly parents bought a six-string guitar for Dave and Jo to share. The kids developed a dou- ble act aping their favourites, The Everly Brothers. (“I was ten or eleven and my voice hadn’t broken,” says Dave. “I did Phil and she did Don”). The Streatham Everlys took to the stage during summer breaks at holi- day camps, and usually won. “It was quite cute, I suppose,” says Dave. “And we were bloody good.”
When Jo and Dave heard Muddy
Waters’ Live At Newport 60, its effect was immediate. “Wow,” Dave remembers. “[We asked] what is this stuff called blues?” This had the fire of rock’n’roll, the do-it-yourself freedom of skiffle, and a strong rural feel that was very new to them. They found more at their local record store, the Swing Shop, run by jazz drummer Dave Carey. Jo, speaking in 1978 to Guitar World, remem- bers the Swing Shop “playing Skip James, and I didn’t like it at first. But as I became more exposed to this kind of music, Snooks Eaglin and Robert Johnson became my favourites.”
Jo and Dave, harmonica player Steve Rye, and another guitarist they met at the shop, Tony McPhee, all from the Wandle Delta, used to elbow one another out of the way to get the best records. McPhee then taught the Kellys how to play slide guitar – a technique Jo had already seen at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, where the Rolling Stones had a Sunday afternoon resi- dency. Dave remembers Jo telling him about “this bloke with all this blond hair [who] puts this metal ring on his finger and slides it up the strings… and the band do some Muddy Waters stuff. You’ve got to come and see them!”
Suddenly, it seemed, British teenagers were identifying with older black American music and rejecting the values of pop. “It was both immensely sincere and immensely romantic,” remembers Pete Emery. “It had, for some, the quality of a mission.”
With her burgeoning interest in playing slide, Jo announced that she was quitting her boring job in the city to become a folk singer. Almost immediately, she gained a residency at Bunjies’ Folk Cellar, where she’d play a few blues numbers alongside folk and standards like Summertime. In fact, throughout her career, Jo never eschewed other genres.
Her repertoire evolved and one influ- ence stood out. “When I started I was defi- nitely trying to copy Memphis Minnie,” Jo said in 1978. “I’d sit at home trying to sing Nothing In Rambling exactly as she sang it. But I think you lose the definitive version you’ve copied as you play it more and more. It changes because you’re yourself, not the person you’ve copied.” At first, it was per- haps more readily apparent to her audience than to Jo herself that revival was not what this artist was about.
The teenagers who congregated in the Swing Shop were now hard-working musi- cians in their own right. Dave Kelly joined The John Dummer Band; Tony McPhee, The Groundhogs; and Jo released her first EP, Blues And Gospel. They became one cell of a wider British acoustic blues network, with others popping up in Reading, Bristol, York- shire, and the North East. Connections were made, everyone started playing at each other’s clubs, and the knowledge deepened. Jo was the first performer at Ian Anderson’s Folk Blues Bristol And West in its second, bigger venue; he remembers that “she unpacked her frightfully cheap guitar from a soft case, sat down, and immediately became an unholy mating between Mem- phis Minnie and Charley Patton.”
“Suddenly, boom, it exploded,” says Dave who, along with Jo and several oth- ers, played at the first National Blues Con- vention in September 1968. The artists started to get record deals; Jo was among them. She met Nick Perls, founder of reis- sue label Yazoo. Keen to preserve as much of her essence as possible, Nick recorded her on reel-to-reel in intimate settings. He played the fruits to CBS in America. Unusu- ally, they decided to release the tapes, unfettered, as an album.
Jo Ann Kelly came out in 1969 and fea- tured the material of her live repertoire: Louisiana Blues, Moon Going Down, Whiskey Head Woman. These recordings are testament to what a firebrand per- former she must have been at this point, but they also capture something else; it was the cusp of the new decade, with tension between a traditional female role and a woman’s liberation from it. Jo Ann Kelly channels the blues, at least partly, to explore what might be personally lost or gained in the process.
“Jo was a very brave and very princi- pled person,” remembers Pete. “She battled against the music industry being a boys’ club. She wanted to be taken seriously by the musicians she played with, was some- thing of a social pioneer, and saw the music as quite bound up with that.” Nothing illus- trates this more than her dealings with CBS. When the label flew her out to the US to play one of their showcases, John Ham- mond – the veteran talent scout and pro- ducer who had signed numerous stars from Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen – introduced her with compar- isons to Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson.
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