Triangle Blues Society NC Blues Heritage Trail

NC Blues Heritage Trail

Bull Durham Blues Historical Marker

Image - NC Historical marker commemorating Bullo City Blues in Durham, NC.

NC State Historical marker located at 1201 Fayetteville Street Durham, North Carolina 27707 next to the Stanford L. Warren library. Map

Select to view a larger image of the Historical marker.

Piedmont Blues Heritage Trail - Part 1

By th' Bullfrog Willard McGhee. Originaly published in the Blues News - Newsletter of the Triangle Blues Society, June 2010 Edition.

Howdy Folks! This month’s Blues Geography lesson is going to have to be short since the big Nat Reese show at the Rialto on June 24th is getting the better part of my free time these days.

Blind Boy Fuller House
Fuller lived on Ninth Street in Durham, NC for a little while and then moved to a house at 7th and Chestnut in Winston-Salem. I’m still working out those addresses. I haven’t had a chance to go have a look at those neighborhoods and make sure they’re still there. Anybody wanna go have a look for me? Later Fuller lived at 904 Massey Ave., Durham, NC Map until his death in February 13, 1941. This house is often referred to the Blind Boy Fuller House.

Blind Boy Fuller
One of Fuller’s favorite and most profitable places to busk was the train station in Rocky Mount, NC. If you wanna walk in Fuller’s footsteps, get yourself over to 101 Hammond Street in Rocky Mount, find a comfortable bench and play for the weary commuters as they get off the trains there. I’m sure it’s a whole lot different crowd than it used to be when the "commuters" were tobacco, soy, and cotton men on their way to Durham, NC to gamble with their commodities. The station was built in 1893 and modernized during the 1960’s. Thankfully, between 1997 and 2000, the station was remodeled again and has been largely restored to its former earlier 20th Century glory.

Sonny Terry and Rev. Gary Davis
When Sonny Terry first moved to Durham, NC from Rockingham, NC around 1934, Gary Davis invited him to come stay at his house. Terry and Davis lived together for a while at 805 Colfax Street in Durham. Get off the Durham Freeway (147) at 55 and take S. Alston south. You will turn right onto Linwood Avenue and then right onto Colfax Street. The lot where the house stood is on the right up on the next block - now the parking lot for the Oak Grove Freewill Baptist Church.

J.B. Long
The United Dollar Store Long managed when he discovered Fuller was at 2501 W. Club Blvd. in Durham, NC. This is where Long recorded Fuller’s first demos for the Columbia Recording Corporation. Get off the Durham Freeway (147) at Hillandale Road and drive north. Cross Hillsborough (70) and the next big street is W. Club Blvd. Take a left onto W. Club – the store sat at the corner of W. Club and Georgia Avenue. I’m going to have to do some research on this address – either the neighborhood has changed radically in the last eighty years, always a possibility, or else Durham has changed the way they number their streets…stay tuned campers.

That’s the deal. As always, if you’ve got some pictures, an address or anecdote you want to share with me – and I wish you would – feel free to write me some of your lines. Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…

North Carolina Blues Geography

By th' Bullfrog Willard McGhee. Originaly published in the Blues News - Newsletter of the Triangle Blues Society, August 2010 Edition.

Heya Folks! Blues Geography this month takes place exclusively in the parking lot of Rick Hendrick Chevrolet in Durham, NC. The biggest chunk of the old Hayti neighborhood lays under the various parking lots of Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolet – Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers and the only American woman ever considered by the Vatican for sainthood said “A long memory is the most radical idea in America today…” or something like that – it was Utah Phillips who gave me that quote. He’s dead and google’s not helping…

Reverend Gary Davis
If you walk down to the intersection of Fayetteville Road and Pettigrew Street, stand on the southern-most corner of the intersection and look around, you’ll be awful close to where Fayetteville Street and Pettigrew intersected when Hayti was still a viable neighborhood. At this corner, there was a barbecue stall owned by a woman whose name is apparently lost to history where Gary Davis liked to set up and play on the sidewalk right around five in the evenings when the tobacco workers were getting out, getting grub and getting home. This was one of his favorite and most profitable spots…

Blind Boy Fuller
If you walk about a hundred feet north on Pettigrew street and stop, you’ll about be where Henry Street used to pour into Pettigrew. It wasn’t much more than an alley – I’m given to believe that this is the street that was colloquially known as “Death Alley.” Fuller wrote a song about it called, appropriately enough, “Death Alley.” He recorded the song in 1937 at the same session where he recorded “Mamie.” The Trice Brothers had gone along with him on that session…

The Wonderland Theater
East Dillard becomes South Dillard at the intersection where it crosses Pettigrew. If you stand on the northwest corner of that intersection, you will be right close to where Ramsey Street used to be. The Wonderland Theater stood at the corner of Ramsey and Pettigrew. Whether for vaudeville shows, live concerts, pig pickin’s or moving pictures, for fifty years the Wonderland needed, used and schooled piano players. Every great piano player in the country at some point played at the Wonderland and as a result, the Wonderland became a rite of passage for some and a musical college for others. Why more of the local piano players were not recorded is a mystery to me.

Reverend Gary Davis
If you walk west along East Dillard between Pettigrew and Roxboro, you will essentially be walking parallel to and about ten feet off from where Poplar Street used to be. When Gary Davis first came to Durham, he lived at 410 Poplar Street. His mother, Belle Davis, lived at 410A Poplar. Apparently, there was a piano in this house, though his welfare case worker described the house as being a two-room tenement where Gary slept in the kitchen.

That’s the deal for this month. Next month I reckon we’ll still be in Rick Hendrick’s parking lot since so much of Hayti vanished underneath it. As always, if you’ve got some pictures, an address or anecdote you want to share with me – and I wish you would – feel free to write me some of your lines. Any additional information you have about these folks is appreciated. Remember, if you go hunting a cemetery or house where one of your heroes hung up or laid down their hat and that place is on private property, get permission first and be nice…you’ll be astonished at how forthcoming most people will be with you…

North Carolina Blues Geography

By th' Bullfrog Willard McGhee. Originaly published in the Blues News - Newsletter of the Triangle Blues Society, September 2010 Edition.

Howdy Folks! Blues geography for this month is situated right here in Raleigh, North Carolina, City of Oaks and Perpetual Surface Street Construction. The problem with Raleigh – as it seems to be the problem with most of urban Carolina - is that any place poor people or black people (ah, but I repeat myself) lived, worked and played has been razed, dragged off and paved over. There are, however, a few gems in Raleigh…

From the “Muddy Waters Invented Electricity” Department:
D.H. Hill Library, NCSU Campus – intersection of Hillsborough Street and Pogue. Walk around the back of the library (which faces out onto Hillsborough Street) into the brickyard and over to the front of the library. The sullen college kid there will take your ID and direct you to the hallway…

I lifted this bit whole from the Goodnight Raleigh Blog – which all of you with a historical bent should be reading – it was posted by Danielle Carr on August 27:

The hallway between the Learning Commons and the Special Collections Silent Reading Room in NC State’s D.H. Hill Library is used to exhibit various artifacts from the NC State Library’s special collections.

Among other things in the new display is what is believed to be the world’s first fully electric guitar.

The blurb from the Department of Physics reads: At the NC State Engineering Fair in 1940, first prize went to NCSU physics professor Sidney Wilson for his invention of the world’s first fully electric guitar. The instrument was also the first to have single-string pick-up. Clearly the sensation of the fair, the guitar was played by physicist Mickey May.

The Gibson Corporation had introduced a converted acoustic guitar – the ES-150 – in 1937 that used a single bar to pick up the signal from all strings. The instrument achieved some popularity, but was plagued by unequal loudness across the six strings.

Professor Wilson reasoned that: 1) individual pick-ups could remedy the unequal loudness problem, and 2) the acoustical body was not necessary for a fully electric instrument. He developed the guitar shown in the figure and entered it in the annual engineering fair. The highlight of the fair was the playing of the guitar by Mickey May, and the invention won the fair’s first prize.

Patents from academia were quite unusual in the 1940s, so it is not unexpected that Professor Wilson did not patent his invention. Had he done so, it would have been one of the first patents granted to NC State faculty. In 1949 Gibson incorporated both the individual string pick-up and the cut-away body in its model ES-175. The design was attributed to Ted McCarthy of Gibson Corporation, but the features were first conceived and implemented by NC State physicists.

The display guitar is part of the 50 Years of PAMS: A Legacy of Discovery exhibit, which includes a cast of a T-Rex femur and a variety of vintage physics equipment as well. According to the Special Collections librarian I spoke with, the display exhibit will be available for another month or so.

Sam “Pegleg” Jackson, Blind Boy Fuller, Sonny Terry, Gary Davis, Blind Blake and others…
Raleigh’s old train station was a favorite place for blues men to busk. See, they were already busking Rocky Mount, Durham, Chapel Hill, Sanford and every other little platform in the country that you can imagine. Occasionally, they’d get tired of the same scene, jump on a train and ride a few stops up the line – which usually meant Raleigh. The current train station is near the intersection of Cabarrus and Dawson, but this isn’t the one you want – don’t be fooled fellow Blues Illuminati. The old train station has been turned into a home improvement outfit called Logan’s. Come down Peace Street and turn onto Semart Drive. Keep winding back and around to the left until you see the Logan’s. They’re awful nice in there – if you tell them what you’re doing they’ll probably let you walk the tracks and sit and play on the old platform where Blind Blake and Gary Davis used to sit and play for Mercury dimes.

Smoky Hollow
The neighborhood that used to stand around the old train station was called Smoky Hollow. This was a rough part of town and a hothouse incubator for blues in Raleigh. There’s no part of the old neighborhood left standing, but you can walk the north side of Peace Street and imagine how it used to be – the imagining part will be easier after the next few installments of Blues Geography which will include recollections from Mike “Howlin’ Wind” Davis a fine harmonica player who grew up around the edges of Smoky Hollow in the fifties and sixties.

Rialto Theater
The Rialto is at 1620 Glenwood Avenue. Originally constructed as an A&P Grocery, in 1941 the owners started converting the building into a theater. Finished in 1942, this was the last building made with steel in Raleigh until long after the war. There are small photographs of some of the acts that played this room as they travelled through Raleigh – frustratingly…tantalizingly suggesting jazz and blues acts who must have brought the house down in the forties and fifties, but so far I haven’t been able to find a picture large enough that the bands in the photos are recognizable. Leon Redbone played here - as did Robyn Hitchcock, Bonnie Raitt (it’s easy to forget sometimes that Bonnie got her start playing in front of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House), David Bromberg and the Squirrel Nut Zippers. The Triangle Blues Society held an event here which included performances by Nat Reese, John D. Holeman, Tad Walters, Kelly Pace and me.