The "Gospel Blues" of "Bishop" Joe Perry Tillis

(b. July 29, 1919 - d. November 3,  2004)

Photograph © Axel Kustner 1990

One of the last generation of performers in the rural African American musical tradition of the "gospel blues," Tillis died  at the age of 85. He first attracted attention as an itinerant musician more than 60 years ago when he performed with Blind Willie Johnson.

Born in Talladega County, Alabama and raised in Coffee County, near the town of Elba, his family worked as sharecroppers, which meant that he also worked on the farm beginning in his youth. His father, however, found relief from the acerbic nature of farm labor in music and religion. Often hosting Saturday-night fish fries on his farm, complete with blues accompaniment, he found balance in attendance at the local Pentecostal church

Tillis took up music when he was 14; his first instrument was a ukulele. Having saved for months for an acoustic guitar, he took his instrument to the streets, while still working on the family farm. Before long, however, he discovered that playing the music coming out of the regional blues tradition--a pastiche of styles that flourished across the South--paid better. Tillis sang and played slide guitar. "I always did play alone," he later told an interviewer. "I never did like no band. If I went off and things didn't go good, nobody would know it but me." 

Tillis travelled all over the country as a musician, initially hitchhiking or riding freight trains. The reason he never got recognition from the largely white audiences who have embraced blues music since the 1960s is that he refused to record.

"I never did want no records much," he said. "There just wasn't enough in it. See, I could get out there with my guitar, I played the blues and I'd get out there in a club or some building and make myself $2000 a week. I couldn't get that on records."

Out on the road, Tillis often encountered some of the more recognizable artists, such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

In the late 1940s, Tillis drove trucks for a local firm, but had to retire after the onset of blindness in 1954. He focused on playing blues again and employed a neighbor to drive him around the country until 1967, when a religious conversion returned him to the church.

Instead of giving up music, he turned his talents to making gospel music at Our Saviour Jesus Holiness Pentecostal Church in Samson, Alabama. In 1970 he began playing electric slide-guitar to accompany his hymns and preaching. Never ordained, he adopted the title "Bishop" and until recently gave services on the first and third Sundays of every month.

It was his "gospel blues" style--similar to that of Leon Pinson and Elder Roma Wilson, that drew the attention of folklorists, In the end, Tillis allowed some both European and American musicologists commit his virtually extinct rural form of music to tape.

He was survived by his third wife, daughter, son and several stepchildren.

Blues Scholar Paul Oliver dies at 90

Paul Oliver interviewing the blues artist
Mance Lipscomb in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1970.
Credit - Chris Strachwitz/Arhoolie Foundation

Paul Oliver, a Briton who wrote some of the earliest and most authoritative histories of one of America’s great indigenous musical forms, the blues, died on Tuesday in Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, England. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by Michael Roach, the co-executor of his estate.

Mr. Oliver first heard black American music as a teenager in England during World War II. While he was gathering crops for the war effort at a harvest camp in Suffolk, not far from an American military base, a friend asked him if he wanted to hear something unusual.

“He took me down to a kind of hedge between the two farms, and there was this extraordinary crying and yelling,” Mr. Oliver told the web publication earlyblues.com in 2009. “I couldn’t call it singing, but it was quite spine-chilling. He said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve no idea,’ and he said, ‘You’re listening to blues.’

“He wasn’t quite right, really,” Mr. Oliver added, “because we were actually listening to field hollers, but nevertheless I found it quite extraordinary.”

The extraordinary sounds sent Mr. Oliver on a lifelong quest as a record collector, field researcher and historian, the British counterpart to Samuel Charters, the American historian whose groundbreaking book The Country Blues appeared in 1959, the same year Mr. Oliver’s biography Bessie Smith was published in Britain. Mr. Charters died in 2015

Mr. Oliver, a scrupulous researcher with a fluent writing style, opened the eyes of readers in Britain and the United States to a musical form that had been overlooked and often belittled.

“He possesses broad sympathies and deep insights lacking in most American writing on the blues,” the folklorist Benjamin A. Botkin wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1960, reviewing Mr. Oliver’s second book, “Blues Fell This Morning,” one of the first efforts to examine closely the music’s language and subject matter.

After taking a trip through the American South in 1964, interviewing and recording blues singers, Mr. Oliver wrote The Story of the Blues. Published in 1969, it was the first comprehensive history of the genre and remains an indispensable work.

“He provides a complete factual panorama from field hollers to Chicago electronics,” the jazz historian Stanley Dance wrote in Saturday Review. Mr. Oliver, he added, “relates people, time and place in a way that has not been done before.”

Despite its importance, Mr. Oliver’s work on the blues was a sideline to his principal occupation, as an architectural historian. He wrote extensively on local forms of architecture around the world, a field he extended to include suburban housing tracts and squatters’ camps, which he regarded as forms of cultural expression worthy of study, like the blues.

While teaching in the architecture department at Oxford Brookes University, he edited two monumental reference works: the three-volume Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997) and, with Marcel Vellinga and Alexander Bridge, “Atlas of Vernacular Architecture of the World” (2007).

Paul Hereford Oliver was born on May 25, 1927, in Nottingham, to W. Norman Oliver, an architect, and the former Dorothy Edmunds. The family moved to north London when he was young, and he attended the Harrow County School for Boys.

He trained as a painter and sculptor at the Harrow School of Art, but switched to graphic design because most art materials aggravated his asthma and various allergies. At the school he met Valerie Coxon, whom he later married. She died in 2002. He leaves no immediate survivors.

Published in 1969, “The Story of the Blues” was the first comprehensive history of the genre and remains an indispensable work.

Paul Oliver interviewing the blues artist
Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston in 1960.
Credit - Chris Strachwitz/Arhoolie Foundation

After earning a diploma in 1948 from Goldsmith’s College in London, Mr. Oliver returned to the Harrow County School to teach art. There he founded the Harrow Jazz Purist Society; played mandolin in the Crawdads, a skiffle band; and in 1951 wrote his first scholarly article, on gospel songs, for Jazz Monthly.

Dissatisfied with the quality of the cover art on records released by the British Decca label, he wrote to the company to complain and was hired as an illustrator. His first assignment was the cover for “Backwoods Blues,” a collection of songs by Bobby Grant, Buddy Boy Hawkins, King Solomon Hill and Big Bill Johnson, released in 1954.

He later illustrated and wrote the liner notes for dozens of albums. In 1955 he earned an art-history degree from the University of London.

Mr. Oliver was at work on Blues Fell This Morning when an editor at Cassell approached him to write a biography of Bessie Smith for its Kings of Jazz series. Pleased with the result, Cassell then brought out his second book.

Encouraged by librarians at the United States Embassy, Mr. Oliver won a grant from the State Department and received financing from the BBC to travel to the United States and record blues artists. His journey through the South led to an enormously popular exhibition at the embassy that was attended by the singer and guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins, whom Mr. Oliver had interviewed at his house in Houston.

The exhibition became the starting point for The Story of the Blues, which was accompanied by a double album tracing the music’s development from its African roots to the 1960s.

Mr. Oliver edited nearly a hundred interviews from his trip for Conversation With the Blues (1965), an oral portrait of the music and the American South that included indigenous musical artists of every description.

He wrote in the introduction: “Barrelhouse pianists and juke-joint guitarists, street singers and traveling show entertainers, jazz musicians and jug band players, sharecroppers and millworkers, vagrants and migrants, mechanics and laborers — these were amongst the speakers. Some had secure jobs, some had none; some were on relief and some in retirement; some played for themselves, some played for others, some had once ridden high and others were going down slow, some were famous, some unknown, some were young and others venerable: all had played their part in shaping the pattern of the blues.”

He explored the myriad influences on the development of the blues in Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1968) and Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (1970).

His other books on the subject included Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (1984), Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era (2006) and Barrelhouse Blues: Location Recordings and the Early Traditions of the Blues (2009). His liner notes were collected in Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary (1984).

During this time, Mr. Oliver’s career as an architectural historian also blossomed. In 1960 he joined the Architectural Association as an artist. He became a lecturer on art and art history, and in the early 1970s served as head of the association’s graduate school.

He left in 1973 to lead the art and design department at Dartington College of Arts, in Dartington Hall, Devon, and in 1978 he joined the architecture department at Oxford Polytechnic in Headington, near Oxford. It was renamed Oxford Brookes University in 1992.

Mr. Oliver’s interest in vernacular architecture sprang from the same impulses that fueled his passion for the blues. Local forms, he said in a lecture at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2015, “are an expression of the cultures that built them.” Architects failed, he added, by regarding architecture as an “abstraction separate, in a sense, from the values or the qualities that the peoples of the various cultures require in their buildings.”

His many books on architecture included “Shelter and Society” (1969), “English Cottages and Small Farmhouses: A Study of Vernacular Shelter” (1975), “Dwellings: The House Across the World” (1987) and “Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular Architecture” (2006).

At his death Mr. Oliver left a 1,400-page manuscript on the Texas blues that he had begun writing with the researcher Mack McCormick in 1959. The project was abandoned after the two men quarreled. Mr. McCormick died in 2015.

Texas A&M University Press is scheduled to publish it in fall 2018, with essays by Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell, as “The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book.”

Blues Sleuth Earns Spot in Music Hall of Fame

 Blues Sleuth Earns Spot in Music Hall of Fame

By Peggy Gale - Pensacola News Journal - May 17, 2006.

Special to Santa Rosa Extra Gayle Dean Wardlow holds a 1923 78 rpm recording of Edith Wilson singing "Pensacola Blues." This is just one of the 2,000 records he has collected from the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

A lifetime of chasing blues music has landed a Milton man in the Blues Hall of Fame. 

Blues researcher and author of the book, Chasin' That Devil Music, Gayle Dean Wardlow, 65, accepted the honor from the Blues Foundation last week at the Memphis Convention Center. Wardlow, who began seriously collecting old 78-rpm records of hillbilly country music at age 12, said the blues bug bit him in 1961 and he has been chasing down blues records and musicians ever since. His record collection has now grown to about 2,000 recordings and has become one of the best collections of 1920s and '30s blues music in the world. He started collecting old blues records when some New York collectors told him they were looking for Mississippi blues recordings made by pioneer musicians that were fast slipping into historical oblivion. 

"They had some of these old records by some of these blues singers, but no one knew anything about the guys who actually made the records," he said. "All they had were the records. They didn't know whether they were from Louisiana or Mississippi. So I started knocking on doors in black neighborhoods looking for records from the '20s and '30s. I told people I buy old Victrola records and pay 25 to 50 cents. I did this for more than 25 years until the 1980s." 

During that period, Wardlow worked for newspapers in both Meridian and Jackson, Miss. On his days off, he would visit towns in the Mississippi Delta searching for both records and information about blues music and blues musicians Charley Patton, Skip James, Son House, and Robert Johnson, which he chronicles in Chasin' That Devil Music.
 

"I became a blues detective," Wardlow said. "I was going to find out what happened to these guys. I was tracking down relatives and people who knew them." It was Wardlow's investigation that turned up the true story of blues musician and composer Tommy Johnson, which was depicted in the movie "O Brother. Where Art Thou." [Actually, that distinction goes more to David Evans, who wrote the book Tommy Johnson in 1971.]

He said being a southerner helped him gain the confidence of elderly blacks while trying to glean information from them about blues music and musicians. "They were amazed that a white boy was interested in the music they had listened to when they were young," he said. "I was able to solve most of the mysteries about who the musicians were and where they came from"

Wardlow was sometimes very lonely out there driving 200 or 300 miles looking for someone or a relative to talk to." Mark Ellis, 33, Pensacola's Tringas Music store manager and member of the local band Good Foote, said he has become friends with Wardlow during the past three years. "I am a really big blues fan," he said. "There is no one in the United States who has the knowledge of those musicians and their music that Wardlow has. Without Gayle finding out who wrote the songs and who recorded them, we would be missing out on a large piece of American history."

Mississippi attorney Wendell Cook, 65, said Wardlow is one of the world's foremost authorities on the blues and has been for many years. "It is great that he is being recognized by his peers," he said. "He now has an international reputation as a blues researcher and expert. He is also a lifelong friend, and a good, decent man."

Old Walter Phelps Goes Uptown - Asheville Citizen Times, Apr 4, 1978.

"I had me a band," said Walt Phelps, and the gaze from his red-rimmed old eyes drifted off into the distance of time. “Used to play round here till all my boys died off some time back. We'd play uptown, out toward Black Mountain, Waynesville, Burnsville..."

"One fellow played the washboard, and had him two fryin' pans — different sizes — a cowbell, a cymbal. and thimbles on his fingers. We had a washtub bass. I was lead man, and then we had a fellow who got him one of them big old horns from a old Sab. Edison phonograph, then went up to the pawn shop and got him a kazoo. He had that kazoo welded into the end o' that big old horn and called it his saxophone. That sounded better'n a kazooxophone'. He could play that thing. too."

Walt Phelps was a music man. He played music to pay the rent, to feed himself, and purely for the fun of it. He loved music, he said, almost as much as he loved white liquor--the corn squeezings that came out of a hundred copper stills between here and the South Carolina line.

Soon to be 82, his face less wrinkled than most men of that age, and his hair a close-cropped white, Old Walt still makes music — only now he's really gone uptown.

From Street Corners To Concert

In his younger days, he played on street corners or playgrounds, or in the ball park, wherever he thought he could draw a crowd and make a few dollars.

Now he's a concert performer. In his old age, with music still working its way out of him, Walt Phelps does shows on college campuses and at the Asheville Junction and draws rave applause from audiences and good notices in such publications as "The Arts Journal."

"The Arts Journal said he graduated from the fourth grade," said Walt s wife, Ethel.

"I didn't graduate from no fourth grade," said Walt "I just got in the fourth grade. Never did get out."

His education didn't come from school. It came from his music. "Even in school," he said. "I was always playin'. That was in Laurens, South Carolina, where I was raised on a farm. In school, when we went out for recess, they'd put the little girls on one side and the little boys on t'other. I bought me a five-cent harmonica and learned to make enough music with it to make them little girls dance. You should'a seen 'em a-kickin' an' a-stompin."

Walter plays the blues — the deep down, gut-level, bone-chilling blues.

"This is the blues," declared Dan Lewis, laying aside his guitar for a moment. "These people stood around on street corners, or sat on back porches, and really lived the blues." They're totally real. They can put aside all the garbage and get down where it is. This is the raw, crude thing. The energy is incredible."

Lewis makes music with Ethel and Walt Phelps. "You should have seen the people at Warren Wilson College taking to Walt's music," explained Lewis. "He had them on their feet when he did 'Darktown Strutters Ball' and 'Big Crap Game,' and he kept them on their feet the rest of the night."

Medicine Show Days

On Saturday night, Lewis and Walt and Ethel will do a concert in Lipinsky Auditorium at the University of North Carolina--Asheville. "You come and watch Old Walt," Lewis said. "He'll have them in the aisles."

Walt's had 'em in the aisles all his life. He used to stop the ball games at McCormick Field when he'd suddenly appear in the grandstand aisle on the third base side, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat and plug hat, dancing and huffing on an old harmonica. We didn't know him as Walt Phelps; he was just "Old Walt."

Walt's fondness for music and corn whiskey helped him make a living.

"Back in the thirties," explained Walter Phelps, "I worked with Dr Nonzetta's Medicine Show. I wore a split-tailed coat and top hat, and Doc called me 'Stovepipe.' I'd draw a crowd playin', tellin' jokes, dancin', and cuttin' shines, and Doc Nonzetta sold patent medicine and some soap that he'd made hisself."

He'd pour iodine on his shirt sleeve — he always wore white shirts — an' that soap would wash that iodine out of his shirt ever bit. He sold three little bitty cakes of that soap for a quarter, and they went like hotcakes. I'd go out in the crowd and sell his medicine — it was pretty good stuff, too — and soap, and sell my corn liquer on the side."

"I'd holler and say, 'Doc, I done sold out,' and then I'd tell 'em, 'but I got some of my own.' I bought that stuff fer $3 a gallon and sold it $1.50 a pint. Lots'a times, though, I was my own best customer."

Walt worked for the city 19 years, but before that he worked wherever work could be found. "Back before World War II." he said. "they hired me and Peg Leg Charlie Williams to sit on two cotton bales out front of the Imperial Theater and play music to draw crowds for that new mom' picture. 'Gone With The Wind.' I'm tellin' you, we whomped up some mighty big crowds for that picture show

Back To Music

"But the most fun of all was that medicine show. Doc hired Georgia Dooley from over on the East End. and she was supposed to be my wife. Georgia was two feet tall and had awful big feet. Old Doc would say, 'Look at 'ern. folks, that big old feller and his dear sweet little wife, the mother of his six children,' and they'd look at me, six feet tall, and at Georgia and her great big feet. 'We're a-tryin' to make them some money.' Doc would say, "an' them people would open up their pockets."

"When I wasn't playin' with Doc '• Walt said, "we sometimes had trouble payin' the rent, so we'd cook up a big mess o' chittlins, fry some fish, make a big pot o' chili, an' throw a rent party. People would come from all over to eat that stuff and lissen to our music. They'd pay a quarter apiece, an' we'd pay the rent.

When World War II came along, Walt was drafted at age 46 and went to Fort Bragg for his physical.

The doctor looked at him and asked, "What county you from?"

"Buncombe." "I thought so " "Huh?" "Never saw a man from Buncombe yet didn't have some other man's initials on his face " The doctor pointed to a scar on Walt's forehead "Yes, sir." Walt said. "Them's initials, all right. But you should'a seen t'other man, I wrote my whole name on his face.”

The Army rejected him, and Walt looked for more honest labor than the medicine show. He went to work at Fontana where the TVA was building the highest dam.

In the east "I saw seven men killed there," Walt said. "Last one killed got hit with a bucket full of seven yards of concrete. He was standing right beside me. I was wearing one'a them tin hats, an' a rock come down and chipped my nose an' split my chin like a apple Man, I didn't stop till I got to the personnel office."

He went back to his music then, and he's been with it since.