Albany

By Kip Lornell

Albany, a rather dismal city of 110,000 lies 150 miles north

of New York City. Albany and nearby Troy and Schenectady

comprise the "Tri-Cities" area. Most of Albany's 12,000

blacks live in two sections, Arbor Hill and the South End,

which are divided by a business district. The main drag in the

South End is South Pearl Street while Arbor Hill is com-

manded by Clinton Avenue. Most of the blues people live in

the South End within a radius of three blocks of South Pearl

Street. A section near the Hudson River has been taken over

by a new highway in the past three years but the rest of the

South End will probably remain as is, for at least another few

years. The most threatening feature is the "South Mall"

which is to house most of the office workers for New York

State.

My research was entirely concentrated in Albany. Troy,

about 12 miles up the river, has a black population of at least

several thousand. I never got a lead on any blues people in

Troy, but would be surprised if there were not at least one or

two there. Arron Washington once lived in Troy but was

never involved in music there. C. D. Dobbs lives in

Schenectady but, having only recently moved in from

Albany, knows very few people outside his neighborhood.

Research in the Albany area supports the theory that there

is a distinct migratory route up the East Coast from Florida,

Georgia, North and South Carolina to the cities of the Nor-

theast. Most of the bluesmen we know who have lived in New

York City, including Brownie McGhee, Gary Davis, Larry

Johnson, Alec Seward and Sonny Terry came from the

Piedmont.

Most of the Albany musicians I have interviewed over the

past several years have also arrived via the Piedmont. Only

one, Blind Donald Dawson, was born locally. Four came

from various scattered points, from Oklahoma to Alabama. I

believe that research in cities like Boston, Newark, Hartford

or Philadelphia would reveal a similar trend.

This series will comprise short biographies of 11 artists and

one non-musician, George Nickerson. Willie Morris told me

that George could help me locate a piano player name Roy

Brown (Roy lives in New York City now) but he turned out to

be helpful because he grew up in Rockingham, North

Carolina, and is kin to the family of Fulton Allen, better

known as Blind Boy Fuller!

The Albany artists can be grouped into two categories. In

the first group are those whose main trade is entertainment:

"Fats" Jefferson, Blind Donald Dawson and "Mac"

McKenzie. These people have made a major portion of their

living through music, though not blues to any degree. Mac is

known as a jazz violinist, while Blind Donald and Fats both

have spent scores of hours behind the pianos and organs of a

myriad of bars and nightclubs. They are all concerned with

entertaining people and thus have played a wide range of

music. Most of their material is not of blues interest, but the

important thing is that they are all blues players too. Of the

three, Fats is most indebted to blues, having learned and

played blues at clubs and house rent parties in New York City

in the 1930's. Blind Donald plays a bit of blues piano prin-

cipally because he heard it as the basis of much of the rock 'n

roll of the 1950's. Mac is familiar with blues simply because

the blues and blues progression (1-4-5) is so basic in playing

jazz.

Blues has been the primary musical interest of the second

group, but none have ever been more than part time

musicians. With the exception of Arron Washington, who is a

full generation older than the others, these men all started

out in music in the 1930's or 40's. In the South their playing

was confined mainly to country parties or "frolics" on

weekends. Almost all moved to Albany not long after World

War 11 and are now in the late 40's or 50's. The blues records

that they remember from their youths were those of the more

popular artists of the late 1930's, such as Blind Boy Fuller,

Peetie Wheatstraw, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Names from

the 1920's like Blind Blake, Blind Lemon or Papa Charlie

Jackson remain hazily in their memories, but playing tapes

of some of these records proved quite helpful. Papa Charlie's

Shake That Thing must have been a smash as it is well

remembered even though it was released in the mid-1920's.

All of them also had learned pieces from older relatives or

acquaintances. In some cases the songs are quite

fragmentary but, occasionally, they have somehow survived

to be played in 1973. C. D. Dobbs, for example, learned a few

songs, including Candy Man and Left My Home Dissatisfied,

in the early 1930's from a man who was probably then in his

late 50's. He also claims that the song Bukka White recorded

while in Parchman prison, Sic 'em Dogs On Me, was around

Aberdeen, Mississippi when he was a child during the

depression and C. D. now performs Downtown Women Sic

Them Dogs On Me.

A similar example comes from Sylvester Rankin, who is in

his early 40's. One of his favorites was Lil' Son Jackson, and

most of his guitar work is roughly in the style of popular

artists from the late 1940's and early 1950's like Hooker and

Hopkins.

I also came across the names of several bluesmen in other

northern cities. John Carter travels to Hartford, Connecticut,

frequently and knows people there who play. C. D. mentioned

two people he used to know in Mississippi. Guitarist Calvin

Lockwood, he thought, now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan,

and harp player Shorty Gates is in Milwaukee. Leroy Holmes

knew a guitar player, James Jameson, who has since moved,

either to Springfield or Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And a

musician known to Buddy Durham only as Johnny recently

moved to Philadelphia. Obviously if anyone were to take the

effort, bluesmen could be found in cities such as these, or

Cleveland or Washington, D.C. Simply because most field

recordings and rediscoveries have been made in the South,

often in rural area, it does not mean that there are no people

playing the old styles of blues in the northern cities-

especially considering the number of blacks who have

migrated from the South.

Finally, I would like to thank several people whose help

made this research possible: Edward "Mr. Buddy" Durham,

Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Lornell, and the late Willie Moore, who

started this entire mess.

(Incidentally, Flyright Records in England will be issuing

an anthology of Albany musicians that I have recorded.)

The music of Elias “Mac” McKenzie belongs more

properly, perhaps, under the category of jazz than it does

blues. During the late 1930’s and 1940’s, he was involved in the

New York jazz scene where bop was just coming into vogue.

He listened to musicians like Thelonious Monk, Dizzy

Gillespie and “Bird” at Minton’s and other local clubs, where

he would sometimes sit in on violin. By 1938, he had amplified

his violin, which made him a double novelty.

Mac was born on May 15, 1915, in Charleston, South

Carolina. Around 1918, his family moved to New York City.

“I started out when I was real young, about eight, dancing. It

was in the Bowery in New York. I used to sing and dance, do

comedian work. At that time we used to go out on street

corners and dance, sometimes we’d even go into bars and do

a 15-minute show and make some nickles and dimes.”

Mac also listened to records of the popular blues singers of

the 20’s. “That’s all I was raised up with, the blues singers,

Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, all of them.” By the late 1940’s, the

blues singers that he enjoyed were jazz-influenced vocalists

like Jimmy Rushing, Eddie Vinson and Wynonie Harris...