The unrivalled bluesman

Oct 23 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

The quest of an academic from Merseyside to learn more of a black songster from Georgia has resulted in an amazing biography. David Charters reports

THEY didn’t sing the blues in Birkenhead, when the blue-eyed man in the hat was a pale boy with his satchel stuffed with homework and his head stuffed with hope.

Then the drizzle swept in from the river, men raised the collars on their fawn macs, and the chimneys coughed into the fog, while the big wirelesses wheezed behind their mesh speakers in the parlours of terraced houses.

At about that time, another man, who dressed like a dandy, though he had never seen the sun’s smile, suffered a stroke. It was such a bad one that they thought he had lost his mind.

A writ of lunacy was prepared for this man, so that he could enter the Milledgeville State Hospital, Georgia, in the deep south of the USA, where he died a few days later, before dawn on August 19, 1959.

One of the finest guitarists and singers in America’s folk-history was gone. But still the seats swung in the humming heat on verandas hung with bougainvillaea.

Young Michael Gray, son of a Mersey river pilot, was at Birkenhead School at the time. But nobody behind those stones of learning mentioned the death of Blind Willie McTell, for nobody knew who he was, even if they could quote from Homer and Virgil.

But another man, a little older than Michael, and living in Hibbing, Minnesota, up by the Canadian border, knew all about Willie. His name was Robert Allen Zimmerman, though he changed his name about then to something more fitting a hobo minstrel.

And many years later, as Bob Dylan, he would write, “No-one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell”.

A strange web draws these three men together. The influence of Willie is very obvious in the early style of Dylan, whose 1983 song in tribute to the old bluesman carries the verse: “See them big plantations burning, hear the cracking of the whips, smell that sweet magnolia blooming and see the ghosts of slavery ships, I can hear them tribes a-moaning, I can hear the undertaker's bell, yeah, nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.”

Michael, 60, wrote Song and Dance Man, a masterful appraisal of Dylan which in 1999 appeared in a greatly extended third edition, Song and Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan.

Last year, his 750,000-word Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia was published in London and New York.

Now, Michael returns with “Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell”. In this magnificent work, he combines research of sand-sifting detail with long passages of writing so ripe with poetic imagery that you can almost taste the slow, sweet soak of the home-distilled whisky, so favoured by the blind man himself.

More than that, you can sense Michael’s true devotion to his subject and you find yourself reading his words in a Dixie accent, as the pictures of the old south appear in your mind, elegant and gracious.

But then you have the lynchings, that Strange Fruit hanging from the poplar trees told in the poem by the Jewish writer Lewis Allan, which was made into a song and most famously recorded by Billie Holliday.

Before that there had been the American Civil War with its appalling slaughter.

Michael discovered that one of the Southern boys who went out to fight the Yankees was Reddick McTyeir, who had been given a slave girl by his father.

When that girl, called Essey, was old enough, she had a son with Reddick. They called the boy Elbert. He was Willie McTell’s grandfather, adding a drop of white blood into the mix.

By comparison, Michael’s background was rather humdrum.

He was brought up in the Rock Ferry area of Birkenhead. After leaving school, he studied history and English literature at York University.

From an early age he had enjoyed rock and roll, and this interest matured into an appreciation of the blues. He taught for a while, but the success of Song and Dance Man enabled him to become a full-time writer. He is married to the cookery writer Sarah Beattie with whom he has a son, Gabriel, and daughter, Magdalena. They live in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire.

Blind Willie was born in the Happy Valley area to the south of Thomson, Georgia, a town which had also been called Hickory Level, Frog Pond and The Slashes.

Unable to see from birth, he found his way around by instinct, his survival and calm nature in themselves little miracles.

Researching the family was a huge task for Michael because, in line with the routine race discrimination, the lives of black people were not recorded with the same accuracy or regularity.

“I visited the area five or six times from 1998,” says Michael. “I was slow coming to Willie McTell, having been brought up on rock and roll. In the early 1980s, Bob Dylan recorded his song about him and that began it.”

In his Dylan Encyclopaedia, Michael wrote of Blind Willie: “He is a songster of wide repertoire and as fine a 12-string guitarist as ever lived. The interplay between voice and guitar also brought into the equation McTell’s intelligence and wit.”

* HAND Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, by Michael Gray, is published by Bloomsbury, at £25.

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk

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