Christopher Briscoe
Little Freddie King hadn’t planned to ride out Katrina in the swanky Hotel Monteleone. His friend Alabama Slim’s wife, Dixie, worked at the four-star hotel—most famous, perhaps, for its Carousel Piano Bar—and in exchange for extra shifts, she was offered a room for the run of the storm. The hurricane was drawing near, and the reports were grim. The couple beseeched King to join them on higher ground. But he had seen the worst the world could offer and always came out in one piece, and so he declined. The couple, being good friends, wouldn’t let up with their plea, and, finally, King gave in. He rode his bike through heavy rain and fierce gusts, and managed to arrive to safety without breaking his neck.
“The whole hotel was vibrating and shaking,” he recalled. “Knocked a lot of windows out the east side.” The streets beyond the high ground of the French Quarter of course were flooded, but the building remained intact, and by the grace of God, or just a bit of luck, King and his friends survived.
I sat with Little Freddie King and “Wacko” Wade Wright (King’s longtime friend, manager, and drummer) at BJ’s Lounge in the Bywater neighborhood of the Upper 9th Ward. BJ’s is the kind of bar you while away Sunday afternoons with your neighbors and pals. It’s also known for lively, loud local gigs. In other words, it’s King’s kind of place, unvarnished and familiar, and his band has played there most Friday nights for the last twenty years. As we sat around a tall round table in high-backed chairs, King sipped on a Coca-Cola and I nursed a whiskey and soda. Although it was a Friday evening, the three of us and the bartender were the only ones there. Four months into a deadly coronavirus pandemic, the future of the city’s bar scene and music communities remained imperiled and unforeseeable.
When King performs, he likes to gussy up in eccentric, colorful suits. A plastic skeleton hangs from his mic stand, and skull and crossbones adorn his guitar strap. He wears shades indoors. He is short and compact, but with the presence of a giant.
Just the Sunday before, on July 19, King had celebrated his eightieth birthday right here—he and his quartet performing a set of “gut bucket blues” as he calls it: raw, upbeat, electric blues that owes heaps to his distant Mississippi roots. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, no audience was allowed to attend, but the set was transmitted on the Facebook pages of the celebrated radio station WWOZ and the Frenchman Street record store, Louisiana Music Factory.
And King wasn’t dismayed, far from it.
“I thank God that He let me live to see eighty years old,” he said. “I felt good. They gave me a big cake and everything.”
He also had some thoughts about the moment the whole country has been pondering. “I have faith it will be back like it first was,” he said, referring to overcoming the pandemic. “But it’s gonna take time.”
And time, too, is something King knows a lot about.
Little Freddie King is a true bluesman, one of the last. He has more than paid his dues. King lost everything in Katrina, and later fled to Dallas to one of the apartments the federal government set up to house evacuees. A church donated furniture, and other private donations came in. Wright helped King acquire a new cherry red Gibson B.B. King Lucille electric guitar from Music Maker Relief Foundation, a nonprofit out of North Carolina dedicated to helping Southern American roots musicians in their times of need.
“I was happy as a fee lock in whistling time,” he said of the guitar. With shelter and his instrument, he was ready to get back on stage.
For two years, Wright brought King to New Orleans for weekend shows. Wright helped King apply for a residence in a new housing development called Musician’s Village in the Upper 9th Ward, a project spearheaded by Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. Sometime later, Wright flew King to New Orleans for what King thought was another gig. When they drove past all the usual haunts, King knew something funny was afoot. Soon they pulled up to a new double shotgun house where a crowd awaited them, with decorations and balloons. Someone handed King the keys to his new house, gave him a Bible, and welcomed him home.
This is how King’s life has gone: up, down, sideways, and back up again. He’s been stabbed, shot, and beaten to within an inch of his life. He drank booze like a fish. In his youth, his friends called him Rough and Tumble. “I was always fightin’ and I was always in jail,” King said to me with a grin. “The jail was my second home, when I wasn’t in the hospital.”
But he eventually grew up, sobered up, devoted himself to his craft, and became one of the most important bluesmen of his generation: a New Orleans fixture, with a following from Brazil to France. For decades, he has graced the stage annually at Jazz Fest. Ten years ago, he was inducted into the Louisiana Hall of Fame. His music has been featured in TV shows and films. He performed alongside Beyoncé in her 2016 “visual album” Lemonade. He’s toured all over the planet. And still, King remains humble, grateful, and aware that his life could have easily gone another way.
King was born in 1940 as Fread Eugene Martin, because of a misspelling on his birth certificate—he grew up Freddie Eugene Martin. His deeply religious parents worked from before sunup until well past dark, but with six children—the other five girls—there was still not much money to go around. Freddie milked cows in the early mornings and picked cotton with his father Jessie James Martin—a bluesman in his own right—who taught his young son how to work hard and gave him the musical bug. As though to jumpstart his musical career, Freddie built his first guitar from a discarded cigar box, a fence plank for a neck, and clumps of horsehair for strings.
In those days, McComb, Mississippi was a viciously segregated railroad town. Racist murders and beatings were common. But on their side of the tracks, the Black community could find some relief in live entertainment, food, and drink in the string of juke joints along Summit Street, which was a popular stop for Black touring artists in the Jim Crow South. Freddie’s father sat in with various blues acts at some of those joints. But he passed away when Freddie was still young, before he could teach his son the guitar.
Freddie yearned for something easier than his current life and looked beyond those cotton fields. After a school trip to New Orleans, he knew he’d found the answer. As soon as he was able, he hopped that train to the Crescent City, moved in with his older sister, who lived Uptown, and got on with his new life. He saved up to buy his first electric guitar and taught himself to play by listening to a couple of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Jimmy Reed 45s slowed down. He got a job at a generator shop and kept honing his chops, and in time found himself playing in front of small crowds—shy at first, but improving—and gaining an audience.
At some point in the 1960s, Freddie Eugene Martin changed his name to Little Freddie King, a nod to the original Freddie King, a Texas bluesman that people said Freddie’s playing resembled. In a city mostly known for jazz and R&B, King eventually found his people: a small group of other blues players that included “Boogie” Bill Web, Polka Dot Slim, Arzo Youngblood, and an old friend of his father’s: Babe Stovall.
He finally got a regular spot at a dive called the Busy Bee, long since torn down, where a guy once tried to sell him a rifle and accidentally shot him in the leg. Another time he witnessed a man shoot a woman down in cold blood, and King took a bit of shot into the back of his neck. Part of King’s legend is that he dubbed this place the “Bucket of Blood” because of all the bloodshed he witnessed splash onto the floors, including his own.
“New Orleans never reached the critical mass to develop an explosive blues culture like in Memphis or Chicago,” writes Barry Yeoman in “The Gutbucket King,” an essential sprawling essay for King fans about his life. “It was an underground Mississippi crowd,” Wade Wright told me, elaborating Yeoman’s point. “They all knew each other. They worked on the river. And if they could get a barroom gig, great. If [King] got a gig, he’d invite his friends. If they got a gig, they’d invite him.”
King sometimes played the renowned Dew Drop Inn, an uptown hotel and nightclub that hosted the crème de la crème of Black performers in its heyday, everyone from Sam Cooke to Ike and Tina Turner. But more often than not, he played the rougher nightclubs and bars in town, or played until dawn on somebody’s porch. He finally got a regular spot at a dive called the Busy Bee, long since torn down, where a guy once tried to sell him a rifle and accidentally shot him in the leg. Another time he witnessed a man shoot a woman down in cold blood, and King took a bit of shot into the back of his neck. Part of King’s legend is that he dubbed this place the “Bucket of Blood” because of all the bloodshed he witnessed splash onto the floors, including his own.
The most shocking chapter of King’s biography occurred in 1986, when lapsing into jealous rage, his wife Amy buried a butcher knife into his shoulder and fled to their nearby home. King staggered after her, leaving a trail of blood, and when he arrived to a locked door, he kicked it in. Fearing vengeance, Amy panicked, and blasted him with five rounds from King’s own pistol. The whole incident was a terrible misunderstanding, instigated by a mutual friend.
“Shows you how the devil works things,” King said of the matter. But he believes God intervened and yet again ensured that he and the marriage would survive. A judge gave Amy a chance to avoid prison time if she nursed her husband back to health, and that she did.
All wounds healed, but tragedy clung to the couple. Years later, during a horrific home invasion, Amy was beaten by a stranger with an iron pipe. King did the best he could to care for her, but she suffered brain damage and slid down into poorer health until she passed away.
It’s these and so many other hard knocks that inform King’s musical life. He recorded some in the 1960s and put out a record with Harmonica Williams in 1971, but he wasn’t able to survive full-time as a musician until the 1990s, after Wade Wright helped him form a regular band. Wright, turning seventy-six this year, got his start backing R&B outfits all the way back in the sixties, and he has been instrumental to King’s current success.
Not long after the band formed, they released “Swamp Boogie,” a comeback album of sorts, and a few years later the harmonica player, Bobby Louis diTullio Jr., secured them a steady gig at BJ’s, where he worked. Since then, King has delivered nearly a dozen albums, most of them on Wright’s own MadeWright Records label. The latest release, Jaw Jackin’ Blues, is a slight departure—“Just a change of pace,” Wright said—in the form of a spoken word collaboration with Detroit’s Tino G (formerly of Fat Possum Records), on which King tells his favorite stories backed by samples and hip-hop beats.
With all of this recent down time King and Wright have written around a dozen new tracks together, and recorded a vinyl LP back in March titled The New Orleans Collection for Newvelle Records in New York that will be released this fall. But for now, live music is off the table, a sad reality all too familiar to musicians everywhere.
When King performs, he likes to gussy up in eccentric, colorful suits. A plastic skeleton hangs from his mic stand, and skull and crossbones adorn his guitar strap. He wears shades indoors. He is short and compact, but with the presence of a giant.
During his birthday performance, he chose a canary yellow shirt, baggy burnt orange trousers, a pale paisley-covered blazer, and bright red shoes. A straw hat sat atop a do-rag on his head, which hung past his shoulders. He looked glad to be back.
The music began with some guitar licks, and then came the backbeat, while the harmonica wove melody around the walking bass. King cradled his beloved guitar and ran through enough bars until it was time to approach the microphone. He began the first song with the truest words he could have uttered that day: “I used to be down,” he growled, “oh, but I ain’t down no more.”
