NOTE: Andy Cohen is a superb musician who is also president of the Beale Street Blues Society. He lives in Memphis but like many blues fans all over the world, he has a strong, personal interest in the fate of Maxwell Street. He was a longtime friend of Maxwell Street bluesman Blind Jim Brewer. Here is what Andy sent to the IHSAC before the meeting in Barrington, June 9.
Some Comments on a Maxwell Streetsinger
Jim Brewer played on Maxwell Street off and on for over forty years. In addition, he traveled a good deal, on his own or with his friend Albert Hollins. The sixties brought him into the coffeehouses and festivals, and there were about twenty of us young hot dogs who used to get him work and take him places: the Atlantic coast, around the Midwest, up to Canada, and into the Midsouth. Jim was part of the Traveling Blues Revue, which made it all the way out to Vancouver and back in a Winnebago and an old Dodge van.
He left two records, one on Philo and one on Earwig, and some concert tapes that could be prepared for issue. He was also recorded by Testament for the classic issue “Blues For President Kennedy,” and for a Swedish radio broadcast, now reissued as “Bluesquartier.” Jim was a journeyman musician with a large repertoire of blues, gospel and folk material, and managed to carve out a living for himself and his wife. The primary substrate on which he did this was Maxwell Street.
It will not surprise you to learn that he was functionally blind. His right eye had been removed in his youth, and his left was massively cataracted, but he had a small open spot through which he could see “what he needed to.” Fanny, his wife, had had both eyes removed during childhood. Nevertheless, he accepted the sobriquet “Blind Jim Brewer” with reluctance: “My mother didn’t name me ‘Blind’,” he once told me, “she named me ‘Jim.’" He was a proud man.
Jim was from Brookhaven, Mississippi, and since he was blinded in youth, his parents encouraged him to learn music as a way to support himself. That he did, from the time he was fifteen, hopping freights (!) and hitching rides to places where folks needed a little music. In 1940, his family left the South for Chicago, and he followed later that same year.
His mother and father did not quite agree on what kind of material he should do. His dad, a barber, was a bit of a blues player. Jim recorded some of those blues on his Earwig outing. His mother, on the other hand, felt gospel music to be more fitting. Ever the diplomat, Jim learned both, reconciling the perceived diametric difference by declaring “No one was ever hurt by a song.”
Did you ever hear of a black man playing the autoharp? It’s rare, but it happens. While Jim was on the road with me one time, in Pennsylvania, we ran into one at a flea market -cum -old timey engine show. He learned to play it in three minutes flat, and his style on it was unique. It didn’t sound like Mother Maybelle, but rather a bluesman expressing blues. To this day I don’t know how he did it, even though I have toyed with the instrument for over thirty years.
One day he called me up: I lived in Ohio at the time. “Listen to this, you old skunk”, he says to me, and turns on a tape of himself playing a number called “I’m Gonna Work Till The Day Is Done,” but there are four Jims: two singing, one playing guitar, the other autoharp. I don’t know how familiar you all are with recording technique, but I’ll try to explain: he had overtracked himself four times on two Panasonic cheapo office-style cassette recorders, bouncing from one to the other until he achieved what he wanted. It was extraordinary, and I deeply regret not ever having the money to take him to a studio to do it properly.
Needless to say, the tape recorders, the mikes and the autoharp all came from Maxwell Street. That was his environment, and he was comfortable there. He could eat, shop, play and make money all at the same time. He was safe. He was among friends. Everybody there knew and respected him, he was a valued member of that community. He was a part of that community, even when he left for a road trip, even when he and Fannie went to stay with her family for a year in West Virginia. Nobody ever tried to bump him.
He contributed to that community, too. There are films of him playing there, with various people, in gospel groups, and as a blues solo or part of a duet. He contributed by buying things there and coaching people on the guitar there and encouraging young white college kids to go there and have a Polish and learn something real. That we did, quite a few of us.
I went back to college when I was forty. I finished up the Anthro degree I had started in Champaign, back when Ramapithecus was a hominid, and went on in grad school, ultimately to get a masters in the subject. My thesis topic was the way bluesmen differentially use their thumbs. Guess who I got that idea from?
I had enough training in Archaeology to keep a job for four years at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Most of what we dug up was “historic,” that is, associated with documents that delineated locations and inhabitants of buildings, and with the advent of city water. I can tell you from my experiences in East Liverpool, Jacobs Field, and several other digs that it’s a lot easier to understand what went on in the buildings if they are still there. For instance, if I’d never asked Jim how he powered his amp, I never would have learned that the shopkeepers all had a symbiotic relationship with the musicians. It was probably against code, but the common thing was to run a long extension cord through a shop window, and pay the shopkeeper a few bucks at the end of the day.
Oh yes, Jim was a big part of my education, just as Maxwell Street was a big part of his. In memory of Jim and a thousand others like him, leave what little is left of the Maxwell Street area alone. It’s hard enough to reconstruct the past when the participants are still living and the buildings are still habitable.
I am reminded of a story I read once, which turned upon a totalitarian regime finding a need for a poet, and finally understanding that the last one had died in prison some months ago. The city of Chicago does not need to put itself in that position.
Andrew M. Cohen
Return to the Maxwell St. News Update page.
Return to the Maxwell St. page.
Return to Chuck Cowdery's home page.
Go to the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition home page.
Contact Us
TO REACH US VIA EMAIL:
TO REACH US VIA THE USPS:
Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition
P.O. Box 6435
Evanston, IL 60204