Edward Markham & the Blues

Black ranch hands introduced him to the gutbucket blues. “We had a big barn for horses, and off to the side was a tack room with the saddles and bridles,” Markham recalls. “I’d help them rub the horses down and clean the saddles. They kept the music going on a wooden box radio. I’d say ‘Who is this?’, and they’d say, ‘That’s Frankie Lee Sims from East Texas,’ or ‘That’s Henry Thomas from Big Sandy,’ or ‘That’s Lightin’ Hopkins from Houston.’”

Markham was entranced by the instruments. “What really caught my attention was the harmonica and the slide guitar, the unusual, strange sound. I’d say, ‘What is that?’ They’d tell me, ‘You put a piece of pipe on your finger, or a bottle, or a bone from a steak, anything you want to use, to slide [across the strings].”

As he grew older, Markham became attuned to deeper reverberations. “That young, I didn’t understand the meaning of the blues. The older I got the more I dabbled into it.”

By 1957, his parents were divorced and Markham moved to Louisiana with his mother and three older siblings. First they lived in Port Vincent, then Gonzales. “The shoeshine men in Gonzales were black,” says Markham. “One of them, a guy named Cotton, played harmonica. We became friends, and he helped me build a shoeshine box. That’s how I made my spending money to buy records. We’d divide up the street and shine shoes. In between, I’d sit and listen to him play.”

At Sammy’s Record Shop in Baton Rouge, Markham bought Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf discs. “Back then they called it race music,” he says. “I got terrible flak about it from my older brother,” says Markham. “He was from the old school: if you weren’t white, you weren’t right. I used to get many a whipping for hanging out with black guys and shining shoes. Finally, he made me dismantle my shoeshine kit and throw it in a drainage ditch. But I still had a lot of black friends. I loved the music, the culture, the atmosphere. All I knew was: it’s good music and I like it.”

In 1960 the family moved to Baton Rouge. Markham’s mother worked at the Piccadilly restaurant on Third Street and rented a duplex at the corner of Florida Street and North 11th. At twelve, Markham discovered the Temple Theatre on North Boulevard, walking distance from his house.

Built in 1925 by the Odd Fellows, and bought in 1948 by the Masons, the Temple is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Housing both entertainment venues and businesses, it became the social hub of Baton Rouge’s black population. Legends such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong played there and to young Edward Markham’s delight, so did blues men such as Big Joe Turner.

“I listened to WXOK radio and bought a few 45s, but my first live performance was at the Temple Theatre,” he says. “I was under age. I couldn’t say I heard it in person, because I was outside.” Standing at the back of the building near a side door, Markham soaked up the sounds that drifted down from the Temple’s fourth-floor Roof Garden, whose windows were wide open. (The building was not air conditioned.)

Each week Markham strolled the neighborhood, checking out posters stapled to telephone poles to see who was playing that Saturday. If it was a blues musician, he’d sneak out of the house carrying a Coke crate, which he sat on to listen in comfort, sipping soft drinks and munching on chips. “Every once in a while, somebody would come out to check on me,” he says. “They kept an eye on me.”  

A few years later, his older sister got a job as a waitress at the Carousel nightclub in Port Allen. Markham tagged along, although at sixteen he was under age. “I’d go to work with her at the restaurant. When the band started playing, I’d mosey on over to the lounge area. I saw Joe Tex there.”

In 1965, Markham dropped out of Istrouma High and signed up as a merchant seaman. He spent the next twenty years as a cook on ships traveling all over Europe and Southeast Asia. In 1985, he returned to Baton Rouge and took a job as a cook at Capitol Grocery in Spanish Town, where he met his wife Mary Jane, a fellow employee.

Markham continued to collect blues records and memorabilia. As word spread, he was invited to guest on radio programs at WXOK, KLSU, and WBRH, playing sides from his albums and talking about the artists. He also played disc jockey at nightclubs and private parties and was a consultant to two documentaries on the blues.

On his first job at Brown’s New Horizon on Scenic Highway one Saturday night, Markham was a hit. “I wanted to leave about ten because I had to get up at four to open the [grocery] store,” he says. “But the customers enjoyed it so much, they were nagging me to stay. I left at two in the morning.”

At that gig, he played sides from an album by a Chicago blues man with southern roots. “The club owner, Mr. Brown, came to me and said, ‘That’s J. B. Lenoir! Where in the world did you get that? That’s our cousin. We’ve got family that’s never heard his music.’ He was so excited that I gave him the CD for his family.”

Markham also donated 78s and photographs to The Rhythm Museum in Baton Rouge. On a recent visit, he was thrilled to see displayed a photograph of Lightnin’ Slim that he had given owner Phlip Stewart.

Markham developed a particular fascination with another blues aficionado, a man he’d never met. Harry Oster, who taught in the English Department at LSU in the fifties and sixties, was a great fan of folk music. He traveled to Angola State Prison to record work songs, chants, and hollers. There he discovered singer/guitarist Robert Pete Williams, whom he later helped get released from prison. Oster also recorded house parties in Scotlandville, Baker, and Zachary. He put out several albums on his own Folk-Lyric label and later sold the rights to Arhoolie Records.

Markham learned that Oster had also photographed the musicians and began trying to track him down. In 1995, he finally found Oster, who was retired from the University of Iowa. “I wanted some of his photos to display during Blues Week,” says Markham. “He told me that three years earlier he’d had a fire and lost every single photograph and negative.”

Markham knows what it’s like to lovingly assemble a collection and then lose it, although in his case it was a deliberate decision. After his wife became ill in 2005, the Markhams gave up their house in Spanish Town and moved to a much smaller apartment. Markham made the tough decision to sell his treasures. “I had 170 photographs,” he ticks off. “I had 150 or so 78s, 250 or so 33s, 175 or so 45s, 200 CDs, and four or five videos. I had a hand-cranked Unitone Victrola, cabinet style, with beautiful carvings. You raised it up, put in a 78 and hand cranked it. It had no volume control. You controlled it with the cabinet doors and the lid.

“It broke my heart, but I had to sell the collection,” says Markham, whose treasures included rare discs by Billie Holiday and Robert Johnson, as well as one of Oster’s early original records. “I put it on the Internet and sold it as one lot. I didn’t want to piecemeal it.”

Since then, he has gradually assembled new items, including recordings by Frank Stokes and Alberta Hunter, and a complete set of discs by the iconic Robert Johnson.

Last year during Blues Week, he gave a well-received library talk about Harry Oster’s album Country Negro Jam Session, featuring songs recorded at house parties. “I’ve been invited back this year,” says Markham. “I’ll take it a little further and talk about the Angola inmates’ work songs, chants, and hollers.

“Dr. Oster’s recording equipment was huge and bulky, and he took it out in the field, where the inmates helped him haul it around. On the records, you can hear birds chirping. You can hear the rakes on the gravel. You can hear them chopping logs. Especially on the cut ‘I’ve Got a Hurtin’ in My Right Side.’ You can hear the lead caller yelling out to one of the workers, ‘Move it on up a little bit.’”

Having pursued his passion for more than fifty years, Markham is as enthusiastic as ever. “I hardly ever listen to the blues people of today,” he says. “I’m more interested in the old original-school people from before I was born. That music always just drew me like a magnet.”