Photo by Ruth Laney
Tabby Thomas and producer/engineer Rob Payer at the WBRH studio at Baton Rouge Magnet High School, circa 1998.
Remembering Baton Rouge's most famous bluesman
When blues musician Tabby Thomas died on New Year's Day last month, just four days shy of his eighty-fifth birthday, it wasn't exactly a surprise. He had been ill for several years after suffering a stroke while about to go onstage in 2004. That ended his career, as he could no longer play guitar and piano.
Tabby got quite a sendoff. The funeral service at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church was packed with his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, musicians, and fans. In a two-hour service, his brother Gus Washington preached, and others reminisced about playing at Tabby's Blues Box, the nightclub he opened in 1979. Musician Kenny Neal drew an affectionate laugh when he reminisced about playing at the tiny North Boulevard club. “We finished the set, and I was wringing wet,” said Neal. “I went to the bar and asked Tabby for a beer, and he handed me one and said, 'That'll be two dollars.'”
In the open coffin, Tabby wore his trademark black hat and sunglasses. An American flag, folded into a triangle, rested beside him. When the service was over, the coffin was closed and the flag opened and draped atop it. A veteran of the air force, he was buried at Port Hudson National Cemetery.
That evening a capacity crowd braved freezing temperatures to fill the Manship Theatre downtown as musicians from Kenny and Ray Neal to Tab Benoit to eighty-eight-year-old Henry Gray rocked the house. For the grand finale, about thirty musicians filled the stage and played “Hey, Hey, The Blues Is Alright,” with the audience clapping and singing along.
Tabby's son Chris Thomas King, a Grammy-winning musician in his own right, did not play. “It's been a long, trying day, burying our father this morning,” he said. “We have cried and cried and cried this week. This is a fitting tribute to our father. He helped bring this community together-not just the music community but the entire community. That's his biggest legacy.” Sadness and joy were present in equal measure as people recalled the man who kept the blues alive in Baton Rouge almost single-handedly. He was forced to shut down the Blues Box in 1999 to make way for the North Boulevard overpass. He reopened on Lafayette Street but closed four years later when his health began to decline. (But he kept up his radio show until 2010.)
I began going to the Blues Box in the mid-1980s and recall three different locations for the stage-in a loft above the bar, in front of the painted mural of a tabby cat pounding on a guitar above the words “Good Rockin' Tonight,” and in the front window of the Box (formerly a drugstore). A peeling, pressed-tin ceiling, Christmas lights draped over mirrors, posters of long-ago gigs, and yellowing newspaper articles pinned to the walls made up the decor.
The place was a dive, with grittiness worthy of the blues, beloved by musicians and fans alike. You paid your three-dollar cover at the door, were shown to a rickety table with mismatched chairs, and ordered two-dollar beers served in cans. (Tabby also served stronger spirits and sometimes food. I treasure a menu I saved.) Open Wednesday through the weekend, the Blues Box became famous for its Wednesday-night jams, when anybody who wanted to play was welcome. Ernest Joseph Thomas picked up his nickname in his football-playing days at McKinley High School. “I was a quarterback, and I used to fake the ball, hide the ball; so they called me Tabby the Cat,” explained Tabby in a 1996 interview. He was born in 1929 and grew up on California Street in south Baton Rouge.
He fell in love with the blues when he heard Roy Brown play in the auditorium at McKinley. At twenty-one, just out of the air force, he won a talent show in San Francisco singing “Long About Midnight,” beating out upcoming stars Etta James and Johnny Mathis. He hung around the Bay Area for a while, “runnin' wild,” before finding his way back home. He and his wife Jocelyn had seven children, and for years he supported his family by working at local plants.
Our interview was conducted over coffee. (Tabby ordered “one of them cappa-chinos.”) He was crowding seventy then, but suddenly the world took notice. IBM splashed his photo across its double-truck ads. Catfish Town suits flashed big bucks, begging him to move his club there. And the Europeans couldn't get enough of him. He was getting in shape for an upcoming tour of Switzerland, trying to drop a few pounds by walking and cutting out red meat and bacon.
Around 1994, WBRH 90.3 FM introduced Tabby's Blues Box, an immensely popular radio show that aired on Saturday afternoons. Every Thursday, Tabby squeezed into a tiny recording booth at Baton Rouge Magnet High School to tape the show with engineer/producer Rob Payer.
Listeners loved the talk as much as the music, for Tabby was a raconteur par excellence, a man seemingly incapable of uttering a boring sentence. Between cuts of Guitar Slim, Raful Neal, Slim Harpo, and Buddy Guy, he warned young people against fighting with the boss, hanging out with the wrong crowd, and cheating on their loved ones. Best of all, he talked about Baton Rouge in the old days.
Some stories sounded like pure urban myth, especially those about Henry Sims. Tabby spun them out like a blues riff, repeating phrases with just enough variation to keep you surprised. “Henry Sims was half a man,” he'd say. “His legs was cut off right here, right up to his hip. He had high-top shoes on, but they were turned backwards. He had two horses. He'd be ridin' one horse, and he'd have another horse walking behind that horse.
“He could tell that horse to lay down, and that horse would lay down and let him get off. And I never will forget, he had a bullwhip.
“He'd tell that horse, 'Go over there and pick out the ugliest man.' And the horse would go out in the crowd and do like that, right in front of the ugliest man in the crowd. I'm serious! He'd ride way from up there in Dixie, up there by the Standard Oil. He'd be all over Baton Rouge, all in the park, all up in Scotland[ville].
“Everybody knew about Henry Sims, all the older black people that came along during that time. This is somethin' that happened. It's Baton Rouge folklore.”
Tabby recalled East Boulevard as “a mecca for black people. That was a street where black people used to congregate, because McKinley High School and the McKinley Theater was on that street, and they had a lot of little black businesses. Cafes, shoe shops, drugstores, barber shops, barrooms. You don't have many black businesses now, because the bigger businesses done ate 'em up, gobbled 'em up.”
His musical selections were punctuated with stories of the local blues scene. A prolific songwriter (“Hoodoo Party,” “Bald Headed Lena,” “You Let the Cat out the Bag”), Tabby had written for and played with everybody from Buddy Guy on down.
“Baton Rouge got a lot of great guitar players, but they never got recognized,” he said. “Bo Melvin, Boogie Jake. Don't call my name! I get up and hit a good note every now and then. People don't realize the treasure we all have here. People like Silas Hogan, Whisperin' Smith, Clarence Edwards-we lost 'em. Sometimes I go to the Blues Box by myself and I can feel the presence of Silas Hogan and those guys. Baton Rouge is the blues mecca.”
As part of my 1996 interview, I also sat in at WBRH while Tabby and Rob Payer recorded the show. Introducing Slim Harpo's “I'm a King Bee,” Tabby said, “First time I ever heard this, I was across the river at a little joint on the levee. They were shootin' dice in the back-not me! This was on the jukebox.”
Next he spun Albert King's “I'll Play the Blues for You.” “Albert was a big man, about six-five,” said Tabby.” One thing about Albert, you had to play right. You couldn't play no bad notes. He had you on the [tour] bus, he'd put you out in the middle of nowhere if you didn't play right.”
Often Tabby would air his own tune, “I Love Big Fat Women.” “This was after that song came out, 'Skinny Legs and All.' I wrote this little thing for the fat women. This is from my newest CD.” He made many recordings, including several at J.D. Miller's studio in Crowley.
Sprinkled throughout his on-air chatter were trademark Tabby-isms: “This goes out to you, you, and you,” “This is one of my favorite 'artises,' and “Let's listen at it.” Whenever he talked about a bluesman who had died, Tabby said, “He got his hat.”
At the end of the show, he would recite his closing mantra: “Blues is my life. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm not saying it's right. C'est la vie!”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.
