Friday, March 27, 2020

Rochester Blues Artist: Joe Beard

Joe Beard
A club in Chicago. A jam session. It's 1967, maybe '68, and Joe Beard is playing a John Lee Hooker song, "Sallie Mae."


"There was a guy standing at the bottom of the stairs," Beard says. "He had one of his arms in a cast. Watching every note I hit. And after I'm done playing, he comes up and says to me, 'Where did you learn to play like that? You play that better than John Lee Hooker.' I said, 'I learned it from John Lee Hooker.'

"And he says to me, I am John Lee Hooker.'"

A lot of guitarists probably learned a few licks by listening to John Lee Hooker records, but Hooker didn't turn up at their shows. Beard is a cool blues star in that cosmos. The music, and the historic musicians who created it, have been drawn to his modest gravitational pull.

There was B. B. King, before Beard himself ever thought to pick up a guitar.

And Albert King. "Albert King liked nobody," Beard says. "Nobody could deal with Albert King. He and I were best of friends.''

And Little Milton, "he didn't socialize well with people," Beard says. Except Beard.

And, "Bobby 'Blue' Bland, every time he was in the area, I'm the guy he wanted to open the show for him."

And Buddy Guy. Beard toured with Guy and Junior Wells a lot. When Guy played Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre at last year's Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, Beard was hanging out backstage. Guy called him out, and they played Gambler's Blues together. "He wanted me to do more," Beard says. "But I didn't want to."



Joe Beard, a mild-mannered electrician from Rochester, says no to Buddy Guy, perhaps the biggest
name of living bluesmen. Duke Robillard, Ronnie Earl, Luther Allison - Beard knows those guys. Or sadly, in many cases, he knew them. A world of blues. How Beard got there, he confesses, "I really don't know myself how that happened."

Beard is Rochester's neighborhood blues legend, living right off Genesee Street. Maybe you'll see him eating breakfast with his brother Jim at the nearby Chili Family Diner, everyone there knows him. Or you'll see him getting his hair cut at Nels on Ball's Barber Shop, at Columbia and Jefferson avenues.

Beard joins the Rochester Music Hall of Fame on Sunday. He, classical composer Sam Adler, Gary Lewis of Gary Lewis & the Playboys, are the members of this sixth class of inductees to have lived to see it happen. DJ Roger McCall, Penny Arcade owner Greg Sullivan and Blood, Sweat & Tears trumpeter Lew Soloff are fine, fond memories.

They'll be serenaded at Sunday's celebratory concert at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre by, among others, Blood Sweat & Tears singer David Clayton-Thomas and Paul Shaffer, the former band director for David Letterman and a good friend of Soloff. Lewis will perform, so you get to hear "This Diamond Ring" from the source. And Beard plays as well, accompanied by two of his blues-guitar sons, Chris and Duane. They, and Beard's daughters Celestine and Lorie, were the counterweights that kept Beard's life in balance.

"I enjoy music more than anything in the world," Beard says. "But the kids came first." 

Beard learned this long before he ever picked up a guitar.

He was born in 1938 in Ashland, Mississippi. A start in life that's almost a blues cliche, but that was Depression-era America. Beard was the last of 11 kids, and by the time he was 6 years old his father was a widowed black sharecropper who drank hard. Beard's father didn't play guitar, but a lot of the guys who did came around at night. "They would come to get drunk and entertain themselves," Beard says.

That included Floyd Murphy, a few years older than Beard, and Floyd's brother Matt, who was Beard's age. Both guitarists. Floyd went on to play with many of the greats on the Memphis blues scene. Matt "Guitar" Murphy ended up in Chicago, joining with all of the big names there, although a lot of people remember him as playing Aretha Franklin's husband in the film The Blues Brothers. "Him and R.L. Burnside were best of friends," Beard says. So Burnside would show up as well, a young guy who decades later would emerge as an electric country bluesman whose career included opening a tour for The Beastie Boys.

And Nathan Beauregard, a blind guitarist and singer who no one paid much attention to at the time. "When I was a child, I used to lead him around to the house parties and fish fries," Beard says. "I was his eyes." Beauregard was one of those old bluesmen rediscovered in the 1960s by dogged music enthusiasts, and given a chance to perform and record the music before time ran out.

Beard grew up in this cauldron of the blues, but he never picked up a guitar himself. His mother had died of a heart attack, and with all of the booze around the house and erratic parenting he was getting passed around among his older siblings.

He was 11, in 1950, when he followed his brother Jim and sister Sarah to Memphis.

That didn't get him away from the blues, of course. Memphis is the blues.

Sarah started dating a young radio DJ and promising bluesman who was playing a regular gig at The Roosevelt Lake Club. The guy's name was Riley, but he went by B.B., and one day he treated Sarah and her young brother to dinner at a downtown Memphis rib restaurant. Beard broke a front tooth on a rib. "It didn't hurt until I was 20," he says. "It's the only tooth I've ever had pulled. I blame B.B. King for that."

Despite being around B.B. King and the Murphys, who leaped into that Memphis scene as well, Beard still wasn't playing guitar, although he was developing some opinions on the blues. "I really didn't care for his style that much," he confesses of King.

And something else was holding him hack. "I was a sickly kid," Beard admits. His legs swelled with no explanation. And he once dropped into a coma for about eight days. "To this day, no one has ever told me why," he says.

In 1956, the 17-year-old Beard, three of his brothers, and Sarah and her husband, moved to Rochester to open a franchise in the prefab-brick exterior company they'd been working for. Beard did make a quick return to Memphis after a few months to marry the girl who had lived next door to his sister, and brought Mary back to Rochester with him.

He was starting a family, and Rochester's hold on Beard solidified. Strong Hospital solved the mystery of the swelling in his legs: bad circulation.

Over time, Beard and his brothers went out on their own, Beard Construction. Joe was the electrician. Ishmael, the carpenter. Walter, the painter. Willie, the plumber. Jim, the mason. 

And it was only when he got to Rochester that Joe Beard started playing guitar. He picked it up naturally, having marinated through those early years in the sounds of the Mississippi Delta, and then Memphis with B.B. King.

Joe and Mary had settled in on Troupe Street in Corn Hill, a thriving community of black culture. Clubs and businesses lined both sides of Clarissa Street, including the local legend, The Pythodd Club. One night in 1965, Beard met a young soul singer and guitarist named John Ellison. Just another guy standing outside of a Clarissa Street liquor store who wanted to start a band. "He didn't want a job, he didn't want to work, he just wanted to play music," Beard says. So he bought a Gibson bass, and with drummer Lincoln Day they were a trio. Playing the clubs on Joseph Avenue, and the K&T Tavern and BK's Lounge with Bobby "Blue" Bland and Albert King.

"John was singing James Brown, all of this stuff," Beard says. "I enjoyed playing the music, but I really didn't like the music. I was into Lightin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, people like that." 

Nevertheless, they tested themselves in Chicago. Playing the clubs, and jam sessions with Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters. Yet one night at the 3030 Club, "they really wasn't into what John was doing," Beard says. "So he said to me, 'Why don't you do some of the Jimmy Reed stuff?'"

Jimmy Reed. An influential electric bluesman of the day. "It was like a brand-new audience," Beard says. "It was like they were waiting for it to happen."

From there, "I had opportunities," Beard says. "But with four kids .... "

He remained close to the blues, literally. By 1964, Beard and his wife had moved to the other side of Corn Hill, to Grieg Street. The old man with a bottle of wine sitting on the porch next door spotted Beard with a guitar one day and asked about it. Beard didn't know much about him, except he was also from Mississippi and had some stories about long-ago bluesmen like Charlie Patton. The old man turned out to be Son House. Like Nathan Beauregard, the white-blues fans tracked him down that year after decades of anonymity, and House's career enjoyed an exhilarating revival.

Beard was playing bass in 1971 with Friends of the Blues, a band that featured Rockin' Red Palmer on blues harp and vocals, and a teenage guitarist named John Mooney, who grew up in Honeoye Falls but dropped out of high school to play the blues. It was Beard who introduced Mooney to House, who became a blues Yoda to the kid. Today, Mooney might he the most Son House-sounding of modern bluesmen, with the big voice and twangy National Steel guitar. That's how the blues gets passed along.

Being self-employed, at least Beard could get away some. Chicago and New York City, mostly. He toured with Guy and Wells in the mid-'80s, including a show at Red Creek in Henrietta. Road veterans such as Luther Allison would book a show here on Saturday and stay around to join Beard at his regular Sunday-night gig at the House of Blues at Jefferson avenue and Clifton Street.

Bluesmen hanging out with Beard, that was a common-enough occurrence. Matt "Guitar" Murphy came to town and stayed a while. Albert King spent a week with Beard, hitting a club at Village Gate Square. No one recognized King, listening as a local band played King's "Crosscut Saw."

"Joe you hear that?" King exclaimed. They'd just butchered his song, he said. Except King phrased it in the more-colorful language of a bluesman.

There's a consistency in the 79-year-old Beard, he's grounded. This summer, he and Mary, the woman he brought back with him from Memphis, will celebrate their 61st anniversary.

"Everybody knew Albert King was a mean, evil guy," Beard says. With his relaxed persona, Beard was there to steady him. A Bluesman whisperer. That was his role among these often out-of-control souls. But there's only so much a man can do. There was the night at a club in Rhode Island, on the road with Guy and Wells.

"Junior was drunk," Beard says. "Instead of him doing what he's hired to do, he started talking about all of the expensive rugs on the stage. After the show, we go in the hack room to settle up. The club owner sets aside a pile of money for Buddy, and one for me. Then he says, 'Junior Wells? I ain't giving him a dime.' 

"I'm glad I never let myself go in that direction," Beard says. "I'll have a glass of wine. But a lot of the older guys believed if they didn't get drunk on liquor, they couldn't play. That's the way they thought. Buddy Guy, Junior Wells-that's what they did."

Beard was the cooly elegant sideman, his 6-foot-4 body in its familiar three-piece suit, sometimes smoking a cigarette out of a holder. It wasn't until 1990 that he released his first album, No More Cherry Blues. Six years later, Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters and saxophonist David "Fathead" Newman backed Beard on Blues Union. "Noooooo, ahhhh don't like chicken, but ahhhh own a big fat hen," he moans in the opening seconds over an ambling, twangy guitar.

Noooooo, ahhhh don't like chicken,
but ahhhh own a bigfat hen.
You know she cackles
for me, but she lays for the other men.

Now that is a blues record. Beard goes back to that night at Chicago's 3030 Club to play a Jimmy Reed song on the album; Beard's singing is a lot like Reed, relaxed yet emotion-laden. And on Blues Union Beard also reaches back to that night John Lee Hooker told Beard he played "Sallie Mae" better than John Lee Hooker. "He told me, 'If you ever go into a studio, record that song for me,"' Beard says. And he did so, for Blues Union.

Beard released For Real two years later and Dealin' in 2000, both with Robillard and Muddy Waters harmonica player Jerry Portnoy.

So recording-wise, Beard was a late bloomer. From that early trio that grew out of a conversation outside of a Com Hill liquor store, Ellison got off to a much-quicker start. He wrote and sang the lead on "Some Kind of Wonderful" in 1967 with a The Soul Brothers Six, and has lived well off the royalties after others recorded it, including Grand Funk Railroad. 

Lincoln Day was not so fortunate, "He died of an overdose," Beard says. 

Son House's drinking was legendary. Jimmy Reed was a major influence to The Rolling Stones, but he was raging alcoholic, a life that likely prevented him from becoming a major figure in blues history. That's the blues, the life on the road, the temptations at hand while playing the clubs. "Everything you think you want is there," Beard says.

He wanted something else.

"I knew from Day One I could never be a Matt Murphy or a B.B. King," Beard says. "Everybody picks up a guitar and the first note they hit is B.B King. That's a one-time guy. B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, there won't be no more. Buddy Guy said to me, 'You're the only guy that don't want to be a B.B. King. A Freddie King.'

"No matter how had you are, be yourself. I'm not getting onstage to be somebody else."

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