Photo by Ruth Laney.
William Gambler, stepson of the late Slim Harpo, at the house that Slim built for his family in 1963, replacing the frame house in which they had previously lived. Gambler will help present the Slim Harpo Music Awards at Chelseas’s Café this month.
William Gambler was nine years old when Slim Harpo came into his life. Born James Moore in 1924 in Lobdell, Louisiana, Slim would later become famous as the harmonica player, singer, and composer of such tunes as “I’m a King Bee,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “Baby Scratch My Back.” But when Gambler met him, he was just a hard-working man who liked to play harmonica, or harp.
“He was tall for that time, six-one, six-two,” said Gambler in a recent interview. “He really was slim during that time. But I never called him Slim. I called him James or Cuz.”
Slim, who worked as a laborer until his music took off, first noticed Lovell Jones Gambler when she was waiting for a bus on North 33rd Street (now North Acadian Thruway) in Baton Rouge. He was up on a roof at the time, doing carpentry work, but he scurried down to talk to her. They began a courtship and eventually married. When Slim joined the household in 1951, Lovell was living on North 36th Street. The gravel road would not be blacktopped until the 1960s. There were no streetlights.
“It was a little raised frame shotgun house that belonged to my grandmother, Edna Henderson,” Gambler said. “No indoor bathroom—there was an outhouse out back. At night we used chamber pots. When James moved in, my grandmother, my mom, me and my younger sister Betty, and two older cousins lived there. All three rooms were used as bedrooms.
“We had a double fireplace with one chimney between two rooms. One side burned wood and one side burned coal. That was it for the winter. We had patchwork quilts that my grandmother made.
“In the summer it was hot, but we didn’t have all this concrete around us like now. We had a window fan that kept the house cool.”
Gambler had a good relationship with his stepfather. “He was a fun man to be around. We’d play cards, or we’d sit and talk. I remember one bit of advice that he gave me. I had problems with cars, getting in wrecks, and I told him ‘I think I’m jinxed.’ He said, ‘No, you’re careless.’ I had accidents because I wasn’t paying attention.”
Unlike Slim, Gambler lacked both musical and mechanical ability. “They tried to teach me guitar and drums, but I wasn’t musically inclined. Nothing worked.
“Slim was mechanically inclined. He knew how to fix things, especially cars. He tried to teach me, but I didn’t like dirty hands. He would give me certain things to do—paint the house, keep the yard clean, cut the grass. I was an obedient child.”
Gambler recalled a happy household. His grandmother did the cooking—his favorite dish was her butter beans cooked with okra and seasoned with ham hocks.
There were plenty of neighborhood kids to play with, and one neighbor who kept an eye on them.
“Miss Bert across the street, she was the neighborhood security. ‘All right, William, don’t do that. I’m gon’ tell.’ We lived between two families that were mentally disturbed. Mr. Gray would throw water at us and we’d throw rocks at him. The same with Miss Rose on the other side. They were people with mental problems.”
Gambler recalled when Slim decided to give up other work and focus on music. “This was around 1954 or ‘55. He was doing construction work for a dollar an hour.
"The work was hard. They didn’t have all the equipment like they do now. He was already playing with Lightnin’ Slim [guitarist Otis Hicks] at gigs in Baton Rouge and nearby clubs.”
As he got older, Gambler served as Slim’s “roadie.” “I’d drive the car, drop posters or placards off at the clubs, collect money at the door. He knew that whatever money I got would still be there. He paid me just like I was in the band.”
Gambler’s mother Lovell helped Slim write songs. “They’d be riding in the car. [Slim drove 1951 and 1952 Buicks that he bought used.] He’d come up with a few words and start singing. Then she would come up with some words. She carried a notebook. They would do the words, and he’d come up with the music. ‘King Bee’ was one they wrote together.
“He had a sixth-grade education. My mother had an eighth-grade education, but she got her GED in the 1960s. She could read and write, but she didn’t have a formal education.”
Gambler, who had left Southern University to join the Air Force, remembered coming home on leave in 1963. Slim had replaced the frame house with a brick one.
“They tore the old house down except for one room; they lived in that. He had a contractor, Juban Lumber, build a new house for eight thousand dollars.
“It had rooms on both sides—kitchen, dining room, living room, three bedrooms, a bathroom.
“That night when I got home I walked all around the house before I even knocked on the door. I thought I was in paradise.”
So did his mother Lovell. “She was completely happy. She was in the Pastors Aid Club. They’d raise a few dollars to help the pastors. Every time the ladies came to her [old] house for a meeting, she was embarrassed. She was truly overjoyed when she got the new house.”
Although the new house was a joy to the family, there was one sad result of building it. Although it is commonly thought that Slim’s memorabilia—mostly photos and news clips—was lost in a house fire, Gambler said that is not true.
“When they tore down the original house, they tore all the rooms down but one. They moved that one room to the back of the lot; Slim and my mother lived in it.
They had to get rid of it [the memorabilia] because there was no room for it. Nobody thought of it as being important. All that got thrown out. But their house didn’t burn down.”
By 1970, Slim’s career was taking off. His songs had been covered by such groups as the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds. Royalties were coming in, and he had bought his first new cars—a 1966 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, which he traded in for a 1967 baby blue Coupe de Ville.
He was planning a tour of England and Scandinavia. He and Lovell had gotten passports and were excited about their trip, scheduled for April and May. “If he had gotten to Europe, he may not have come back home,” speculated Gambler. “He was popular in Europe more than here.”
Then tragedy struck. In the middle of the night on January 30, 1970, Lovell heard Slim cry out. He rolled over in bed, jostling her, and died of a massive heart attack. He was forty-five.
“I was living about six blocks away when she called and woke me up,” said Gambler. “I drove to the house and gave him CPR. I learned it in the service. But I knew he was dead.”
There was no ambulance service then, so a hearse from a local funeral home transported Slim’s body to Baton Rouge General Hospital on Florida Street, where he was briefly worked on in the emergency room. The newspaper reported that he had died there, but Gambler adamantly stated, “He died at home in bed with his wife.”
Gambler recalled an incident a few years prior when Slim had probably suffered an earlier heart attack. It happened as he was loading iron into trucks to sell at a scrap-metal yard.
“We were out in Denham Springs loading a long piece of iron,” he said. “The guy holding up the other end dropped it, and all the weight was on Slim. He probably had a heart attack then, but he wasn’t going to a doctor. Black men don’t believe in going to doctors. It costs money for one thing.”
Slim’s funeral was held on February 7 at St. John Baptist Church in Mulatto Bend on the west side of the Mississippi River. It was well attended by family, friends, and musicians. “I remember that [blues guitarist] Little Milton gave him a wreath,” said Gambler.
Slim is buried in Mulatto Bend Cemetery. Fans visit often, leaving harmonicas and small bottles of whiskey on his grave. (That is ironic; according to Gambler, Slim wasn’t much of a drinker, nor did he do drugs. “He did like to gamble. He played poker for money.”)
Lovell took Slim’s loss hard. “It was tough,” said Gambler, who had left Southern University to work at the post office, where he would be employed for thirty-three years. “My mother had stayed at the house most of her life. She didn’t know how to do anything else. When Slim came, he told her to just stay home, don’t worry about it.
“It took her a little while to go to work. I moved back home to help her out. I took care of the bills and stayed with her a couple of years. She went to work at Illinois Central Railroad, cooking, until she retired.”
With Slim gone for forty-five years, Gambler is happy to see his work getting more attention than ever. In 2014, the West Baton Rouge Historical Association dedicated a Louisiana State Historical Marker to him near the cemetery where he is buried. It is the first of the parish’s twenty-six historical markers to honor a musician.
Earlier this year, Bear Family Records released Buzzin’ the Blues, a set of five CDs with a beautifully illustrated book by Martin Hawkins, whose biography of Harpo will be published in 2016.
On June 4, the annual Slim Harpo Music Awards ceremony will be held at Chelsea’s Café on Perkins Road, honoring guitarist Jimmie Vaughan and vocalist Lou Ann Barton as Legends; harmonica player Kim Wilson as a Pioneer; and Hawkins and Bear Family Records as Ambassadors. Gambler and two of his three children are on the selection board for the awards.
He and his wife Dorothy and their children plan to be there. Gone, but not forgotten, will be Lovell, who died in 2004 at the age of eighty. No doubt the family will share the sentiment she expressed in an interview with the awards’ executive director Johnny Palazzotto: “The only thing I regret is he didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
Ruth Laney’s article on Johnny Palazzotto’s planned documentary on Slim Harpo was in the October 2011 edition of Country Roads.For information about the music awards, go to LouisianasMusic.com/slim-harpo-music-awards.
