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looking for the blues for six months, living my dream in a way, of course Big Joe was the guy I wanted to go see. I had his sis- ter’s phone number so I called him up and asked if I could come and see him in a couple of weeks when I was travelling to Mississippi. He said ‘Yes, no problem, just bring your sleeping bag’. I wound up spending quite a bit of time with Big Joe in Mississippi. I stayed there, off and on, for about two months. That was an expe- rience for me, to see his whole living situ- ation and meet his family. He wasn’t mar- ried; he lived by himself and a little boy, Randy Logan, lived with him. Randy was about eight years old at that time, the son of some relatives.”
“W
“The first night I got into Crawford it was already dark. I was with Larry Wise, a friend of mine who was a harmonica player from Washington D.C., and we drove into Crawford and asked around. We found Joe parked at a grocery store. Randy, the little boy, jumped out of the car and said, ‘You looking for Joe Lee?’ and there he was sit- ting in the car. We went over to Joe’s trailer and I remember vividly that when I went into the trailer with Randy there was white powder sprinkled all over the place, on the refrigerator and on the floor. I asked Randy, ‘What is this stuff here?’ and he said ‘snake poison’. They were scared that some rattlesnake might crawl in through cracks in the floor.”
“Big Joe had stayed on the road for fifty or sixty years; he would ramble all over the country but would always return to Crawford. Around 1970, he decided to move back there. He bought this little piece of land and he had a camping caravan trail- er he lived in with that little boy… not even a mobile home, not even running water. They were really rough living conditions.”
“When I got there I still didn’t know the dynamics between Joe and me. I was twenty-two years old, hanging out with this old guy. It was incredibly hot down there in the summertime and at night, when it cooled down, I would sit in the back of my Volkswagen squareback with my tape machine, hook up the micro- phone and Joe would sit in front of the trailer and play for hours for me without asking for money. That was really amazing to me, because if he was touring Europe or even in the States, and somebody approached him and said, ‘OK Joe, I want to cut an album with you’, Joe would say, ‘OK, that’s twelve songs, forty-five min- utes’ work’, so they would negotiate two thousand or two-and-a-half thousand dol- lars, whatever… and he played all that stuff for me without asking for any money. I couldn’t have paid him anyway, I just did- n’t have the funding; there was no plan to make an album, but later we did release some of that material. Joe said, ‘OK, if you can find a record company, you can put it out and just send me a few hundred dol- lars and that’s OK’.”
“I didn’t really ask him to play specific songs, he just played whatever came across
hen, in 1978, I was planning my big trip to the United States travelling, researching and
his mind, stuff that I had never heard on records by him before. He loved to play a lot of gospel music. It’s part of the culture in the South to believe in the Lord and he always said ’The Lord is first’. One Sunday he would not play blues; he said, ‘No, today’s Sunday, I just play gospel’. He was relaxed, there was no pressure, he just played whenever he felt like playing and I kept the tapes rolling. Some nights he just sang a cappella. He beat his keys on an empty beer can for rhythm and other nights he played the nine-string guitar. Those recordings have a lot of atmosphere; you would hear the crickets, a car passing, and, in one session, you could hear a power saw going in the background.”
“One night when he was just singing a cappella he made up a song about his experience with a certain woman on the Sugar Hill where he lived in that part of Crawford. It was freely improvised, which is absolutely stunning, because if you’re playing guitar you can then think of the next verse, but you can’t do that when you’re singing a cappella, you don’t want a break in the lyrics, you just want a good a flow for the song. That was a really great number. He loved it so much listening to the playback, I had to write down the lyrics on a piece of paper for him. He couldn’t read them, but anyway.”
“It was great to be part of the whole scenery there; I was accepted by everybody and I felt no open discrimination. I met his sisters, his brothers and his auntie in Craw- ford. His sisters invited me to eat dinner and were really friendly. There were two sisters living at that time, and he had two brothers as well, John Colfer and the other one’s name was Coote. I remember an inci- dent when Joe drove off to his auntie’s house one day where his brother Coote was hanging out. I was sitting next to Joe and his old auntie was in the back seat and so Joe rolled his window down and indicat- ed to his brother, ‘Hey, come here, come here’. Coote walked up to the car and Big Joe pulled out a pistol, aimed it at Coote and said ‘Where’s my five dollars?’ I was kind of shocked. I had never seen anybody pull a pistol on someone before. His old auntie was sitting in the back seat yelling, ‘Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot him!’ Coote got really nervous, not knowing what to make of the situation. Later on, Big Joe said that the gun wasn’t loaded but his brother didn’t know that. Joe just laughed about it… ‘I didn’t want to shoot him, I just wanted him scared a little bit’.”
Axel Kustner
which is still nice to see in some of the pho- tographs. But then he could be a really raw, aggressive person. We went to see Johnny Shines together. He lived outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which was only nine- ty minutes away from where Joe lived in north-eastern Mississippi. They were talk- ing about the old days and Joe said, ‘When I was young, I was quick on the trigger, I wouldn’t take nothing. Somebody give me a bunch of bad stuff or whatever that’ll make me mad… Shit, I’d kill a man for less than that!’ He actually told me that he had killed a few men and I don’t doubt it. There’s no telling what he experienced in his lifetime, what he had to deal with in terms of racism and violence.”
“J
“Big Joe was an extremely tough char- acter and he got really aggressive under the influence of alcohol. Luckily, by the time I got to know him, he had left alcohol behind. He was suffering with sugar dia- betes, so he wasn’t allowed to drink any more. In his suitcase he had these insulin shots and had a shot every day. He was a chain smoker, heavy drinker, overweight and not eating the best of foods. His legs had given up on him and he couldn’t walk much any more, so he was just cruising around Crawford in his car all the time. He had to take pills for high blood pressure, and he always had a bottle of green rub- bing alcohol along with him. He had a pis- tol but he never kept it loaded, and had a little pillbox he put the bullets in, which he kept in a basket, and he kept the pistol under the diver’s seat when he was cruis- ing around.”
“Joe was well off by the standards of his community. In that wallet he kept in his back pocket he had forty brand-new hun- dred-dollar bills, four thousand dollars cash money. I think also he had an account at a bank in a little town near Crawford called Brooksville, where he had a couple of thousand dollars saved up. But he was tight with his money, which I can under- stand. He had lived from hand to mouth all his life. He always hustled and had a hard time surviving as a rambling musician.”
“I don’t think he had much contact with the blues scene in Mississippi after he moved down there, although he might have seen some other musicians at festi- vals. We went to see a guy called Lee Ten- nessee Crisp who belonged to the circle of Sleepy John Estes. He lived in Laurel, Mis- sissippi, so we took a trip down there. We also went out to Memphis, Tennessee to see Furry Lewis, but other than that, there were not really any musicians that Big Joe knew: most of them had died. Joe’s cousin, Short Stuff Macon, was a great, raw, acoustic blues singer who had died in ’73. So there were not really any other blues singers we went to see together.”
“He had his niece who was a very good
singer, Lydia Carter. One night, it was Sat- urday August 26th 1978, she was singing blues and gospel along with Big Joe. When you listen to it, it sounds like something straight out of the ’30s. On that same night
oe had a split character. He could be really easy-going, really friendly, helpful and charming. He had that boyish grin on him sometimes,
Photo: Dave Peabody
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