Johnny Palazzotto remembers the only time he saw Slim Harpo perform live. It wasn’t in a club—it was on a Baton Rouge street.
“He was sitting in his driveway on 36th Street when I drove past,” recalls Palazzotto in the control room of his downtown studio, with his rat terrier Maggie standing guard. “He had a harmonica around his neck and he was strumming on a guitar. I didn’t know who he was then. It was only later I realized that was Slim Harpo.”
That was in the mid-1960s, and the teen-aged Palazzotto was already a fan of blues music. “I used to listen to Diggy Doo [disc jockey Ray Meaders] on WXOK every afternoon after school,” he says. “He played a lot of great local and regional music—Fats Domino, Ray Charles. That’s where I first heard Slim Harpo’s ‘Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu’ and ‘King Bee.’”
Born James Moore in Lobdell, Harpo grew up in a poor farming community in West Baton Rouge Parish. He left school and struck out for New Orleans, where he worked as a stevedore. As a child, he had loved music. Unable to afford a guitar, he bought a ten-cent harmonica and taught himself to play it. Soon he had numerous “harps,” which he carried in a tackle box. He also began writing songs.
After moving to Baton Rouge, he played with local musician Lightnin’ Slim. Adopting the stage name Slim Harpo, he eventually recorded with J. D. Miller of Crowley, who leased the recordings to Excello Records in Nashville. Such songs as “Rainin’ in My Heart,” “I’m a King Bee,” and “Baby Scratch My Back” would become classics.
Harpo’s tunes appealed to such rising stars as Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds. The Stones covered “I'm a King Bee” on their 1964 debut album and “Shake Your Hips” on Exile on Main Street. The Kinks recorded “I Got Love If You Want It” in 1964.
Those covers brought royalty checks, but for most of his career Harpo kept his day jobs—he worked construction, hauled scrap metal and sugar cane, even worked at a gas station. Around 1950, he met Lovell Jones Gambler; they later married and Slim became a stepfather to her children, William and Betty. Lovell often traveled with him, and she wrote or cowrote several of his songs.
To Palazzotto, Harpo’s music always stood out. “If you look at Slim’s lyrics compared to most other blues songs, it’s not, ‘Ooh, baby, you broke my heart,’” he says. “His lyrics are so untypical of the blues. Listen to ‘Don’t Start Cryin' Now’ and ‘I Got Love If You Want It.’ They’re unique and written from a different standpoint. The roots is in the blues, but the simplicity of the chords and the interesting lyrics make his music more adaptable to rock and roll.”
A star quarterback at Baton Rouge High School, Palazzotto attended LSU for several years before dropping out for a stint in the Coast Guard reserve. He moved to Los Angeles in late 1969. “Like a lot of kids then, I just wanted to get out of town,” he says. “Baton Rouge was considered boring and not happening.”
In L.A. he worked in every aspect of the music business. He became a music publisher, managed artists, auditioned and signed new writers, filed copyrights, negotiated contracts for recording artists, produced and distributed albums, and produced concerts. He didn’t return to Baton Rouge until 1981.
Reconnecting with the musical roots of his hometown, Palazzotto learned that Slim Harpo had met an untimely death from a heart attack at age forty-five in early 1970. Sadly, he had died just on the verge of a quantum leap in his music career. Royalty checks were beginning to roll in, and he and Lovell had passports for a planned tour of England and Scandinavia.
Reconnecting with his roots, Palazzotto started the Baton Rouge Blues Foundation and started staging an annual blues festival. “Being so much in love with music, when I came back from L.A. and got more involved in the history of Baton Rouge music I got the idea to start the Slim Harpo award,” he says.
As a guest on Rob Payer’s radio show on WBRH-FM, he expressed his admiration for Harpo. Before he left the station, Palazzotto got a call from Harpo’s stepson William Gambler, who just happened to be listening. “He started telling me stories about Slim,” recalls Palazzotto. “And later he introduced me to his mother, Miss Lovell.”
Palazzotto became friends with Harpo’s family, and they organized the first Slim Harpo Music Awards in 2003. Among the recipients were Harpo’s sidemen James Johnson and Rudolph “Rudy” Richard, who were both still fixtures on the local blues scene. (Johnson is still performing; Richard died in 2014.) Also recognized was Raful Neal (now deceased), a respected bluesman in his own right, who often sat in with Slim for club dates. Lovell Moore herself presented the awards.
It wasn’t much of a stretch to realize that Harpo’s life had the ingredients for a great documentary. The family agreed, and Palazzotto began by recording the only videotaped interview Lovell Moore ever made.
“What meant more to me [than his music] was him being a good husband and father to my children,” she says on the tape. “He worked construction. He hauled sugar cane. He bought a truck; he’d haul scrap iron, he worked at a service station. Anything to make an honest living. The only thing I regret is he didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Lovell Moore died in 2004 at the age of eighty, having seen that labor finally come to fruition. Palazzotto has also taped interviews with Harpo’s stepson; with Neal, Johnson and Richard; and with musicians Lazy Lester and John Fred Gourrier. He also talked to David Kearns, who arranged several Alabama appearances for Harpo and recorded a 1961 performance that was released years later on a London label. “It’s the only live album Slim ever did,” says Palazzotto. He hopes to interview major artists who have recorded Harpo’s tunes. “In Rolling Stone magazine, Keith Richards named his top ten favorite songs,” he says. “Slim’s ‘Blues Hangover’ was number four on the list.”
Palazzotto has found no videotape of Harpo. “He appeared on American Bandstand in July 1961, but all the kinescopes for that year have been lost,” he says. Even still photographs are sparse.
But Palazzotto has great music to work with—about forty tunes, he estimates. And he lucked out when he discovered at Columbia University’s archives an audiotape interview Harpo did in New York around 1967. “I think Slim was there to appear at the Apollo Theatre,” says Palazzotto, grabbing a CD. The room fills with the voice of Harpo, talking about hardscrabble times.
“I think my style is a little bit different,” he tells the interviewer. “I’m a country boy. I express my experience living in poverty. . . . Everything wasn’t all peaches and cream with me.”
He recounts his start in the music business: “I ran across this guy Lightnin’ Slim who was recording for Excello. I met him in Crowley at a club called the Lucky Mule. I told him I had [written] some numbers I thought would be real good for records. One was ‘King Bee,’ one was ‘Got Love If You Want It,’ and one was an instrumental, ‘Moody Blues.’ We cut [them] and they came out real good. . . . Around ’59 or ’60, I did a song my wife wrote called ‘Rainin’ in My Heart.’ . . . . My wife do just about all my writing for me.”
What strikes the listener is the intelligence and articulateness of this man who grew up well below the poverty line in rural Louisiana, and whose education was cut short by the need to earn a living. His answers are thoughtful, his diction crisp.
“Miss Lovell said Slim was a good-hearted, honest person who didn’t let the race problems of the era get to him,” says Palazzotto. “He didn’t drink much, he never did drugs. He was good to his musicians. Rudy [Richard] and James [Johnson] talk about what a gentleman he was.”
Although documentary-making can be a race against the clock—trying to get to people while they are alive, in relatively good health, and coherent—Palazzotto says he is in no rush to finish the video, which he envisions as a ninety-minute DVD with a companion CD of Harpo’s music.
“This story is somewhat never-ending,” he says. “There is so much to cover. Slim’s songs were being recognized and recorded by major artists forty or more years ago. His songwriting was as significant as anybody’s you can think of.”
Slim Harpo was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2011. Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
