Snoopin' Around the Blues

Martin Hawkins was a schoolboy in England when he first heard a tune by Louisiana swamp-pop sensation Slim Harpo. “‘Rainin’ in my Heart’” was issued in England as a single,” said Hawkins in a transatlantic telephone interview. “I might have heard it on Juke Box Jury [on BBC television]. A few years later, I started really collecting records. ‘I’m a King Bee’ was one of them.”

Hawkins grew up in Ashford, in the county of Kent. “It was a railway hub,” he said. “My schoolmates’ parents were all sheep farmers and railway workers, but my dad was a printer. I was interested in books and words. 

“I remember vividly [reading] Black Like Me, but I’m sorry to say I probably remember it more for descriptions of noise from the juke joints than for its deeper messages.

“When I was fifteen or sixteen, my friend Colin Escott and I would occasionally go to see shows. I remember seeing Fats Domino with his original band in London, in 1965, when I was fifteen. He pushed the piano on and off the stage with the whole band marching behind him. We’d see people like Bill Haley and Carl Perkins.

“Colin’s dad drove us to the station, and we’d get a train into London, go see Fats or Carl Perkins, and get the last train back.” 

But the blues did not escape Hawkins’s notice. “I very strongly remember seeing Howlin’ Wolf on TV when I was thirteen or fourteen. He made a really big impression on me.”

His fascination with Harpo’s music was fueled by the articles of John Broven in the new magazine Blues Unlimited, a British monthly launched in 1963. “There wasn’t much information known then, but people from here were at least starting to look,” he said. 

At the University of Wales at Swansea, Hawkins studied social history and politics. But his love of the blues was fed by performances from such musicians as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup at a local club.

“After university, Colin Escott and I decided to write a book about Sun Records, which put out all the records we’d been buying by Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. A company in London was issuing books about music, and they gave us a contract. 

“We came over in September 1971 and just sort of arrived in Memphis and got the Yellow Pages and called every musician we could find. Colin and I had seen Cash and Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis in England, and things were known about them. So we went for all the others, starting with the most unlikely names—Malcolm Yelvington, who had a western-swing band; country singer Doug Poindexter; Ray Harris, who produced Slim Harpo’s Tip On In in Memphis as a custom job for Excello Records. 

“We also rode the Trailways bus out to Arkansas to see rockabilly singers like Billy [Lee] Riley and Sonny Burgess. Virtually nobody else had ever contacted these people. Same thing when I went to Jackson, Mississippi, or Lake Charles, Louisiana, or wherever. At the time, we were just doing it because we wanted to. But the book [Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘N’ Roll] is still in print after forty years, and it led to hundreds of LP and CD reissue projects and to fascinating midnight phone calls with [Sun’s founding owner] Sam Phillips. 

“Every year after that, for seven or eight years, I’d take a holiday during the month of April and come to the States to interview people and collect records.”

Hawkins defrayed travel expenses by buying records to take back to England and sell to collectors. “I’d walk into dealers’ shops and buy old 78s and 45s. If you could find the right one, you could make good money. In the early and mid 1970s, we bought anything that was good and rare in blues, R&B, country, or rock and roll; but rockabilly was the big thing. I bought a whole box of twenty-five copies of the Ray Harris disc ‘Come on Little Mama’ for eighteen cents each and sold them for about seventy-five dollars each. The most I ever got for a record was a thousand pounds sterling [about $2,500] for a 78 rpm copy of a rare R&B record by Rufus Thomas, The Easy Livin’ Plan.”

After a year spent freelancing for music magazines, Hawkins took “a proper job” in 1972, coordinating school building projects, followed by various planning jobs in the National Health Service. 

“Eventually I wound up with a serious job as assistant chief executive of the health authority in my region. I decided that this had to stop if the music research was to be given the time I wanted to take.” 

In 2006, while still working full time, Hawkins published A Shot In The Dark: Making Records In Nashville, 1945—1955. In 2007, he gave up his day job to devote himself fully to music writing and research.

He worked with Bear Family Records to put out a five-CD set of music by Harpo in 2015. He wrote the accompanying booklet about the musician and felt there was enough material to warrant a book. 

Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge, released by LSU Press last September, delves into the history of the singer and harmonica player whose work was covered by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, Van Morrison, and many others.

Last October, Hawkins came to Baton Rouge to speak at the Louisiana Book Festival on a tour that also took him to New Orleans; Jackson and Clarksdale, Mississippi; and Memphis. 

He conducted most of his research into Harpo’s life from his home in Maidstone, just twenty miles from where he grew up. “The first thing I did was read everything that had ever been written about Slim Harpo. I read specialist magazines like Living Blues. I checked Billboard and Rolling Stone online. There wasn’t that much known about his life. I wanted to get the fixed points down. People had written about him over the years; but it was all the same stuff, and some of it was wrong.

“For instance, that he was born on January 11th when he wasn’t. [Harpo was born February 11, 1924.] The Internet still tells you that today. But mainly it was that each story presented the same information, and you’d realize that one writer had copied the previous one or at least just rearranged the deck chairs without looking for new chairs or even checking that the chairs worked.” 

Next, Hawkins “spent ages going through online information,” mostly via the digital archives of the East Baton Rouge Parish Library and the LSU library. Slim Harpo’s given name was James Moore, which, said Hawkins, “made finding references to him comparable to looking for a needle in a haystack. 

“Local newspapers had few advertisements for local gigs. I found a lot of information about dances at the Acadian Club [a club for teenagers on Jefferson Highway] and the CYO in ‘Teenage Party Line,’ a social column in the Advocate. The biggest lack of information is coverage of the local clubs. You could rarely find who was playing where.” 

The third step was interviewing those who had known Slim, such as guitarist James Johnson, who played with Harpo for years; fellow musicians Lazy Lester and Otis Johnson; members of Slim’s family; and people who recorded Slim, including Lynn Ourso in Baton Rouge. “I also talked to people who had seen Slim’s shows. Overall it was a mixture of telephone interviews, personal visits, and emails.”

In the spring of 2015, accompanied by his wife Jenny, Hawkins spent about two weeks in Baton Rouge doing research. “I wanted to fill in niggling things I’d never been able to pin down.”

He looked at the black newspaper the News Leader in Southern University’s archives, poring over copies on microfilm. He visited Slim’s grave in Mulatto Bend on the west side of the river. He interviewed Slim’s stepson William Gambler, who drove him to various sites important in the musician’s life. And he attended the annual Slim Harpo Awards, where he received an “Ambassador” award for his work on the Bear Family boxed set Buzzin’ the Blues.

Hawkins is now working on Blues Kings of Baton Rouge, a double CD set from Bear Family Records that will include tunes by Lightnin’ Slim, Schoolboy Cleve, Clarence Edwards, Robert Pete Williams, Silas Hogan, and Raful Neal, among others. “These are all recordings made during Harpo’s lifetime,” said Hawkins. “And of course there are a few Harpo songs in there too.” 

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