45 f
Big Joe at home in Crawford, Mississippi, September 1978
we did the recording at his auntie’s house, some of his family were there and also a woman who I didn’t know. A man came to pick up that woman, who was his girl- friend, and it turned out he was Lydia’s brother B.L. Logan, who sang in a local gospel group. He sat down and just sang one song with Big Joe – B.L. Logan singing and Big Joe playing guitar – and it’s abso- lutely one of the best recordings I ever did. It’s so intense with this really hoarse voice… and Big Joe. They didn’t practise any of it, they didn’t even say ‘what song are we going to do?’, he just started singing and Big Joe followed him on the nine-string with a bottleneck and the inter- play between them is perfect. It’s absolute- ly stunning how Big Joe would respond and how well he would be able to play gui- tar behind B.L. That’s a great recording.”
“I remember there was a white man working in one of the grocery stores where we’d do the shopping and I just asked the man, he must have been in his fifties, ‘How long have you known Joe?’. He said, ‘Oh, I’ve known him all my life’. The Mayor of Crawford, Buddy Harvey, ran a package store; he was a white man and he was friends with Joe in a way. I think he would see that Joe would be treated right by the record companies and whoever wrote to him about a festival appearance and stuff like that. Everybody knew that Big Joe was famous in his own way, he had cut records, he had toured the world over, he went to play in Japan and played big festivals all across the United States.”
“Being totally illiterate, he said, ‘I did-
n’t want to go to school shit! I had no interest in school, I wasn’t interested’. He couldn’t even write ‘Big Joe’. Big Joe came from the bottom of American society. Peo- ple were kept down on purpose; black
sharecroppers or field workers with no education, not much chance to break away. He made something out of himself, leaving Crawford, Mississippi to become famous, touring and cutting records. Baby Please Don’t Go was a very popular num- ber, and he played with some of the great- est blues artistes, like the first Sonny Boy on harmonica. Whereas a lot of his people just stayed on in Mississippi, he went out and made something of himself. He got exposed to a lot of stuff and met so many people along the way.”
“A
t the end, in a way, we kind of had a falling out. I knew Big Joe still had a large repertoire of songs he could play and I made
a list of songs he had not recorded two years before for me or for anybody else, so it would have been enough material for another full album. While we were doing that field trip for the Living Country Blues albums, we got in touch with Horst Lippmann while we were in the States and said, ‘Look, we can do another album with Big Joe, would you be interested?’ He said ‘Yes, definitely’, and he sent a thousand dollars over to pay Joe.”
“So I had this list of songs and I told Joe, ‘Look Joe, we’re off going to different places recording Son Thomas and other different guys in Mississippi but we’ll be back in two weeks’ time and we want to record these songs.’ On our return, when we had set up the recording equipment in his mobile home (he had got rid of the trailer and now lived in better conditions with a kitchen and a bathroom and all that stuff) we began the session and he started playing Mean Stepfather Blues, which he had recorded a bunch of times before. So we stopped the tape and said, ‘Joe, this is
not what we’re looking for. You did that so many times, we want these songs, like we told you.’ And it didn’t work out. Noth- ing happened after that. And it really upset Joe, I mean, he got mad at us. It was a thousand dollars that he couldn’t make.”
“After that I only saw him one more time, at the end of the trip. I went over there to say goodbye to him. I’ll never for- get it. He had a younger woman living with him. He was sitting in the car and she brought his pork chops and grits for din- ner. I said ‘Goodbye’ and Joe, who thought very highly of himself, thought he was a superstar, said, ‘Oh, you record all these other little talents’. He referred to most of the other guys as ‘little talents’. And that was the last time I ever saw him. He died on the December 17th 1982.”
“There are no characters like Big Joe out there any more. Joe would talk about musicians he had known, but he would also give you the whole spectrum of every- day life. He was smart enough; he said, ‘When everybody was going on in the fields, I was on the Greyhound bus with my guitar, I wanted no part of the work.’ You cannot possibly recreate those times. They’re all gone, all these wild guys, but as Charlie Musselwhite said, Big Joe was a character of a character. Charlie also told me, ‘These guys would know immediately if somebody was a bullshitter or if some- body was real’.”
“I guess Big Joe thought I was a real
guy. He sensed that I loved his music and he accepted me. Looking back at the time I knew him, when I was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, it’s amazing to me that I did all these things and hung out with him and got to know him so well. It was, and it is still is, fabulous when I think about it.”
F
Photo: Axel Kustner
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