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Fritz Richmond
Wasn't That A Time:
The Story of Jug Band Music and Fritz Richmond
Article Reprint from the April & May 2002 BluesNotes
By: J.T. "Bugs" Engel
Make no mistake about it. Before the Blues was born as a recognized art form, Jug Band Music was heard throughout the poorest Appalachia and Piedmont regions and Deep South. Jug Band Music was the definitive precursor and the heart and soul of traditional Blues music.
It really doesn't matter how it all got started. Indentured slaves and sharecroppers like Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel, Jab Jones, John Lee (Sonny Boy) Williamson and Hammie Nixon (more about them later) were playing Jug Band music in rural Delta and Piedmont settings. As rural as it was in its earliest beginnings, some Jug bands, in the `20s and `30s, really `swang' with an uptown flavor as well. Jug band greats, such as Jed Davenport arid his Beale Street Jug Band, Earl McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band and the Memphis Jag Band, proved the point that "rural music could become sophisticated" and appeal to an urban audience. These bands legitimized the stuff of what had been front porch "hootenanny" legend. Great labels, such as Yazoo, immortalized these early artists and they're often scratchy, but gloriously, genuine sides.
Jug Band Music, in the earliest days, was played with thrown together instruments like diddley bows, cigar box guitars and banjoes, wash tubs, comb and wax paper, kazoos and jugs. Some Blues traditionalists believe Blues really started being played on these types of instruments; the likes of which gave Jug Band Music its heart and soul.
That brings us to Fritz Richmond. I know ...I know ...you're saying, "What does a skinny white guy in his late '50s know about the beginnings of the Blues?" My answer ...a lot!
Just when you think you've heard and/or seen all of Portland's famous (or infamous) hidden musical treasures, you run into a guy like Fritz Richmond. I know about Fritz's body of work, on washtub bass and jug, because I played many of the same jug band tunes Fritz did when I played Delta Blues and roots music in the DC area. That was in the late `60s and early `70s. So, when I actually got the chance to MEET Fritz and reminisce, I felt like Mike Wallace must have felt interviewing Edward R. Murrow.
I recently met with Fritz, on two occasions, once over Chinese food at a local Sellwood standard and once at his magnificent but simple home. On both occasions, he was forthcoming and meticulous as a storyteller.
The interview section that follows is separated into several parts. (BluesNotes will run the next part in the May 2002 issue.) It is a striking retelling by Fritz of how the early `60s Jug Band Music revival came into being. The story also covers a few of the historic Tennessee Blues men. It is also a Who's Who of the music industry over the past 40 some years.
Fritz's marathon journey starts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, winds its way across the country to Berkeley, California, his imminent return to the east coast by way of New York City, back again to Hollywood, California and then, to his current residence here in Portland.
Interview: (Part 1)
Fritz Richmond & his Washtub BassBugs: We were talking a bit about your experiences with John Hurt. He was on Vanguard Records about the same time the Kweskin Band was, wasn't he?
Fritz: He came through Cambridge when we were living there, I think for a couple of summers, and there was this venue, a coffee house, I believe, on Martha's Vineyard, where Folk and Blues acts would play for about a week at a time. These acts were very well received because, besides the sort of preppy beer drinking, there wasn't really much to do there so anything even remotely related to Folk music was hugely popular. So, John Hurt came to Martha's Vineyard, where he went down to the beach. Now, imagine Mississippi John Hurt dressed in shorts and a straw hat on Martha's Vineyard. He saw these guys surfing out about 50 yards or so and said, "Oh, they've got wave saddles!" What a mind.
Bugs: I think it would be helpful for Cascade Blues members to know a little about your musical upbringing, so to speak. Did one or both of your parents play musical instruments? Were there other early musical influences you'd like us to know about?
Fritz: There was a piano in my house and my mother played it a bit. My father played clarinet so there was that. I ended up taking up piano for about six years, although I was never very good at it. My buddy, who took lessons from the same teacher I did, Roger Callaway, has gone on to become quite a famous musician. Anyway, we both became the bass section in my school orchestra, with bows of course, never really picking as I would later on, or improvising because it never occurred to me that I would play-by-ear. I'd watch Roger and sort of fake it when I didn't know where I was."
I had other relatives that were more musical than Mom and Dad were. They sang and encouraged me to get involved in the Glee Club (interviewer's note - older folks will remember this as a sort of folk chorus in high school). I learned how to sing harmony there. It just came upon me, sort of like riding a bicycle.
Bugs: David Crosby says the same thing.
Fritz: Yes, so later I had a couple of friends who decided they were going to put a band together and one played guitar and one played banjo and they said. "Hey Fritz, you need to be in the band too." So, I went down into the basement and got an old wash boiler. You know the kind you would put on the wood stove and boil up the water and wash the clothes. We hooked that up as a wash tub bass, but it really didn't work. I knew then I had to get a wash tub and it lasted a little longer and sounded better. You could get notes out of it.
The real difficulty had to do with the string. A clothesline really didn't work and it pulled through the bottom. Then I went to a Venetian blind cord and I could get sustain from that because it was smaller and harder. It worked! This was about 1954, in Newton Mass., when I was in junior high school. We would go into the coffeehouses and play. That lasted about a year and a half. Then I went into the army.
Bugs: Didn't you do a hitch in Korea?
Fritz: Yes, and other places. A great realization came to me one day. You see I was a helicopter mechanic and they would replace this flight control cable on a regular basis and there was yards of this cable they would pitch. Well I liberated it, you know, because, after I tried it on the washtub bass, it worked beautifully. And, I've been using the same basic setup ever since.
Bugs: So, when you got out of the army, you went back to Cambridge?
Fritz: I enrolled in college and managed to sleep on couches all over the area. I played quite a lot of music and when I wasn't playing music, I was listening to it. This was before the great hootenanny craze and the Club 47, in Cambridge, was doing very well. They had music six nights a week. Right away bands wanted me to be a bass player because none of them had a bass player. Well, I sat in with this group called the Charles River Valley Boys and immediately they made me a member of the band.
It was not long after I got out of the Army that I met Geoff Muldaur and he thought the washtub bass was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. So, I started playing with him at the Club 47 every couple of weeks. This was in 1962. Then there was Jackie Washington, Bill Keith, Jim Rooney and I; we played with Tom Rush for quite a while. Tom was a Harvard student in `62 and I think he took a year off. He was quite serious and businesslike about this so he was starting to get gigs at all the prep schools around Boston. There must be about 100 prep schools within 100 mile radius around Boston and he really wasn't good enough to play colleges because he was, I think, in his final year at Harvard. So, I'd play washtub bass and, sometimes, jug with Tom.
And, this is sort of a Blues lesson. I played with both Rolf Kahn and Eric von Schmidt at the Club 47. It was really Rolf's show. He would come out on stage with a cigar in his mouth and a Flamenco guitar and play Flamenco for about 20 minutes. Then he would switch gears and sing the Blues, with a heavy German accent, you know, "Trouble In Mind" stuff.
Bugs: I'm curious, when did the Jug Band Music become more formalized for you? Was it when you first started playing with Jim Kweskin?
Fritz: Well, Jim wasn't living in Cambridge at that time. In December 1962, he showed up after having been on the road, in an old Buick with his girlfriend and her dog, traveling around the country with an old Wollensack tape machine. Do you remember those?
Bugs: God yes! Some of the earliest recordings I made were on one of those.
Fritz.: He had gone around and found dozens of people who were old `78 collectors. You know those old slates from the early `20s, `30s, and so forth, and he would record these songs onto the tape machine. He had, I guess, what would be a shelf three or four feet wide of these seven-inch tapes. And, there were 30 or 40 tunes on each tape so there was a wealth of material on each tape. He had learned many songs and was a really good finger-picking guitar player. We immediately hit it off.
So, I hung out with Jim every night, at the Club 47, and played with Jim. This was great fun and I started making money gigging with him so I said to myself, "If I can do this in Cambridge what could I do in Berkeley?" There was this sort of a natural axis for the music being one node in Cambridge and another in Berkeley. So, I moved to Berkeley leaving all my friends behind.
Bugs: Wow. You sort of gave up your good thing. Why did you move?
Fritz: They don't have a winter there! I went at Christmas. The scene was at a place called the Cabal down on San Pablo Avenue, about a mile from the University, and musicians would come from all over the country. There was a west coast Blues guy there named K.C. Douglas, who I played with a couple of times. He was tough! Just like Lightnin' Hopkins. You know 11 bars and 13 bars, what ever felt comfortable and then he'd change the chords. Whoa. I wasn't used to that. Great lesson for me.
Then, Jesse Fuller would show up at the Cabal, must have been about early 1963, and he'd play this device called the Fotdella. It was a sort of bass instrument he had made. It looked like he had cut up a couple of pieces of furniture glued them together in the shape of a tombstone. Then attached the bass strings of a piano, about eight of them. Each string had a contraption sort of like a piano hammer attached to it and when he'd hit it with his toe it would hit the string. He even had one special shoe. Very pointy because he wouldn't want to play more than one string at a time. He could play the bass notes on the Fotdella, with the other foot he could play a high hat, and he had a neck set up for harmonica and kazoo and miced them both. Then he had a big 12-string guitar with a pickup. Of course, he sang too. It was just amazing to think that, here was this guy who lived in Oakland, surely didn't have much money, and had this do-it-yourself one-man band rig that worked. I was at his 68th birthday party one night there.
Bugs: Did any of your musician friends show up, and come out to play with you in Berkeley?"
Fritz: No they didn't. The only folks I knew there were John Cooke and Bob Neuwirth who were from the Boston area. I was only out there less than six months.
Interview: (Part 2)
(Editor) Part I ran in last month's issue of BluesNotes. Bugs prepared a rough draft of Part 2 prior to his passing away in late March. We had Fritz edit the draft and submit Part 2 for this month's publication. Enjoy! Bugs would have loved it if you did.
Bugs: Did any of your musician friends show up, come out to play with you in Berkeley?
Fritz RichmondFritz: The only folks I knew there were John Cooke, from the Charles River Valley Boys, and Bob Neuwirth, another Cambridge guy. I was only out there less than six months.
Bugs: Why was that?
Fritz: Well, I wasn't working as often at I liked to and I was running out of money. Finally, one day, I got a transcontinental call from Jim Kweskin saying, "You know, Fritz, we're having a Jug Band and you're invited. Would you think about coming back." I said yes, and I rode back across the country with John Cooke, who was going to return to Cambridge as well. That was in May of 1963.
So, I went to a rehearsal and it was Jim on guitar, David Simon on harmonica, Geoff (Muldaur) on guitar and Bob Siggins, who was the banjo player from the Charles River Valley Boys. As I mentioned, this was about the time of the hootenanny craze and WBZ in Boston got on this big time. Radio brought people out and would fill up the house at Club 47 and places like the Unicorn in Boston and Outside In, which was in a particularly bad area of town.
I was also experimenting with different instruments at that time. Geoff had a recording of a guy playing a stovepipe. I listened to it and could tell it was a kazoo fastened into a piece of stovepipe. So, I made a stovepipe and played it like a jug. It had an elbow in it so I put my elbow through the elbow like a piece of armor and it had an enormous stovepipe cap on the top where my fist would be. I cut a hole there and shaped it to be the same size as the hole in a jug. I could play the thing like a jug, and then at the bottom of it, more for effect than anything else, 1 put in a damper. It actually worked as a volume control.
Bugs: Almost like a mute in a horn, eh?
Fritz: The best thing about it was, in those days, there were no PA's so we had to all get around a single microphone. Well, one night, 1 hooked the stovepipe up to an industrial strength vacuum cleaner hose, and the guys held it up to the microphone and I played the stove pipe from behind the curtain!
We'd been doing gigs for about three months and rehearsing at Bob Siggins' place. His upstairs neighbor was on the Board of Directors for the Club 47. His name was Paul Rothchild. "
Bugs: Would this be "THE Paul Rothchild" who produced the Doors?
Fritz: Yes, and he became my particular friend. We had a lot in common and he taught me how to listen to music and music production. He knew all about classical music, had studied it in school and had been a conductor. One day he said, "We should make a record of the Charles River Valley Boys and Club 47 would front the money." This was an LP and was one of the first records produced in the area. He then did, right in a row, records with Tom Rush, Eric von Schmidt, the Bill Keith - Jim Rooney Bluegrass Band, and Geoff Muldaur. Club 47 didn't want to become a record company, so Paul sold the masters to Prestige Records and then moved to New Jersey to work as a record producer for Prestige. I think he probably produced over 150 records during his career.
I got a call from him sometime later and he said. "1 need you to come down to New York and do a record with Tom Rush. When I got there he had this harmonica guy with him named John Sebastian and that was the first time I met John. Well, Tom had enough tunes for about two LPs and Paul took them over to Jac Holzman at Elektra Records and said, "You know Tom's contract is up at Prestige. How would you like to sign him?" Jac signed him immediately and hired Paul as a staff producer. So, suddenly we were dealing with Elektra Records. This was really good for us.
The Kweskin Jug Band got a gig in New York at the Bitter End. This was a big deal for us because The Bitter End was a famous place. Bill Cosby was playing there when we got the news. At about the same time, Rothchild decided reproduce a Jug Band called the Even Dozen Jug Band. It so happened that John Sebastian was in the Even Dozen Jug Band and had heard, from Rothchild. that the Kweskin Jug Band was not to be missed. So, John says to Maria D'Amato (later Muldaur), who was also in the same band at the time, "Lets go on a date to see a real Jug Band; this Kweskin Jug Band at The Bitter End."
John Sebastian had been trying to score with Maria for quite some time, so he brought her to see our show. After the gig, there was going to be a party at the Elektra Records suite of offices in the Village. This was a lease breaker party because they were moving to larger digs. Of course, there was quite a spread and much wine, and Maria had a little too much to drink, but nonetheless danced her ass off and was quite impressed by Geoff Muldaur. Well, the evening went on and she spent most of it next to Geoff in spite of having come to the party with John Sebastian, and, at some point, she leaned over to Geoff and lovingly puked in his lap! It wasn't two weeks later that she moved up to Cambridge and in with Geoff.
Bugs: So, the band members who ended up doing most of the recording on Vanguard Records were: Geoff on guitar and clarinet, you on jug, washtub bass and kazoo, Jim on guitar, Maria on vocals, Richard Green on fiddle, Bill Keith on banjo. Didn't he play a Jazz banjo? Four string tenor banjo, rather?
Fritz: Actually, he played his five string and unhooked the fifth string.
Bugs: Interesting. So, when did the band quit playing?
Fritz: That would have been May of 1968. It had been a five year party. An incredible party!
Bugs: I've been dying to ask you this question forever because I heard, actually from a guy I met who reportedly played with Roger McGuinn that you had something to do with the birth of "granny glasses". Can you set the record straight on that?
Fritz: Well, I'll give you the scoop on those. When I lived in Berkeley I stayed in a place called The Tenement that was right on Telegraph Avenue. It was full of people who were barely hanging on as parts of society, in one way or the other. The rooms were teeny and there were many of them. Bob Neuwirth had a room there but wasn't using it, so he let me use his room. And in his room, I found two little squares of, well, some people call it Cobalt blue, but the stained glass people call it Flash blue glass. Very thin. It wasn't pitted like a lot of stained glass, it was clear and optically correct. I thought these were wonderful because I could hold them up to my eyes and look at things though them when I was stoned.
Bugs: Somehow I knew there was a Reefer story tied to this discovery.
Fritz: The colors seemed noticeably more beautiful, of course. Just when I was about to give Bob money for these pieces of glass, which I, of course, had to have, he said he knew nothing about them. So, I would take them around to parties and everyone would marvel at the colors. I took them back to Massachusetts when I went, where one of my brothers had a job with the City of Newton as a trash collector. In some optometrist's trash can he found an old pair of little wire frames. Of course, the light went on and I took these frames and the Flash blue glass to an Oculist and had the stained glass put into these frames.
This made a major difference in my life because, at the time, I was learning to play the jug. It required a lot of huffing and puffing and it made me dizzy sometimes. especially if I was stoned. I would find myself sort of wavering around on stage, but if I stared at the microphone I could steady myself. Well, one night someone came up after a set and said, "Fritz are, you cross-eyed'?" Well, I had been looking at the microphone and I guess it did appear that I was cross-eyed. So, I knew what to do. I'd put on those little blue glasses and no one will know if I was cross-eyed or if I was stoned.
The next time I went to New York, of course, I took them with me. I ended up partying with John Sebastian and with Jim (Roger) McGuinn. So, the next time I go to New York they both have a pair! Then, a little while later EVERYONE has a pair!
Bugs: Yea, that's what this guy told me. McGuinn got them from you and made 'em famous!
Fritz: Well, I still have mine, the original pair. So that's how that came to be, and I always had them on every time I played the jug during the whole run of the Kweskin Jug Band.
Bugs: I just heard that you folks played with the Doors at the Fillmore in 1967!
Fritz: That's true. We had already met them by then. When they made their first tour they came to Boston, and I get this call from Paul Rothchild. He says, "I got this Rock band with me and I told them all about you and the Jug Band and they would like to meet you. Can we come over NOW". (editor's note: They had probably heard from Paul about how Fritz was fun to be with.) So, all the Doors come over to my apartment in Cambridge and I Suppose I got 'em high, and gave them beers, etc. So, we knew them when the gig was set up at the Fillmore. Another time Big Brother opened for US! I Cotta tell you, those Doors were pretty timid guys. They left Paul to do all the talking,
Bugs: Didn't you work for Elektra Records for a while as an engineer?
Fritz: Yes, for about eight years.
Bugs: And didn't they send you to the Islands to look for Joseph Spence?
Fritz: No, that was earlier, during the Kweskin Band time. I did that on my own. Remember, I was telling you about that great big collection of tapes Jim Kweskin had? Well, one of them was labeled: Joseph Spence. We couldn't tell, from the tape, if this was one guy or four guys, it was so complex. We'd listen to the whole thing and at the end go, "Wow, man." Nobody played like that; he was an incredible finger picker. We had pals who could play in the style of Blind Lemon, Blind Blake, or Gary Davis, but no one could play like Joseph Spence. It drove me nuts! So, I decided that one day before Joseph Spence died or I died, I was going to watch him play. I resolved to find him and I did. Jim Kweskin and I finally determined that the tape we had been listening to for all those stoned evenings was of a Folkways LP produced by Sam Charters. The next time I was in New York I got hold of him. He said come over and I'll play for you the stuff that DIDN'T make it onto the record! I'm at Sam's apartment in The Village and he plays me the outtakes! I was in finger pickin' Heaven. But, Sam didn't know if Spence was alive or in real Heaven.
Bugs: This is very cool because Joseph Spence was actually a ship yard worker in southern Virginia during WWII, I believe.
Fritz: Sam Charters told me to start looking in the Bahamas, on New Providence Island, and I found him. 1'd ask Black folks, "Do you know Joseph Spence?" And, finally a guy said, "Oh you should ask Blind Blake. Bahamian Blind Blake, not the famous Chicago Blind Blake. He plays at Dirty Dick's every afternoon. Well, sure enough, Blake told me the neighborhood and I found Spence's house. His wife came to the door. She was not very happy to see some white stranger, I can tell you. Fearful she was. She said, "You come back tomorrow."
I usually sleep pretty good, but I did walk the beach for a couple of hours that night. I was going to meet my all-time musical hero! The next day I went back and a guy opens the door, and I say. "Hello, Mr. Spence, I'm here from Cambridge. Massachusetts. and I love your music." I stick out my hand. He pokes out this big hand from around the other side of the door. My hand completely disappeared inside his hand. He invited me in and made me feel very welcome. He invited me back the next day. I brought my washtub bass and a small bottle of rum. And, for the next few afternoons we'd play music and tell stories. I noticed he played the guitar with a very strong hand and had a lot of knots in his guitar strings.
Fritz: I had an arrangement with Paul Rothchild to ask Spence if he would consider recording again. Spence admitted that he'd never heard the first one, but that he'd love to make another record. So, I get this terse cable out to Rothchild: "Spence lives. Will record. Bring twelve sets heavy bronze guitar strings." The New York folkies went nuts! The Folklore Center in New York obtained Paul's copy of the cable and hung it on their wall!
Bugs: Of course! Did Paul come down and record it?
Fritz: Yeah, he did, and made the record "Happy All The Time" on Elektra. Spence was in his early 60s, about the same as me. Ha Ha! He was a stone mason.
Bugs: The stuff I've heard, it's almost like dual 12 strings with overdubs.
Fritz: Yes, he was one of not many guitar players who were completely unique. You listen to one second of his music and you know who it is.
Bugs: And, inquiring minds would like to know if you worked for Maynard Soloman at Vanguard?
Fritz: "Didn't.
Bugs: You say that with such alacrity!
Fritz: There's a Yiddish word for what he was: gonniff.
Bugs: Yea, so, how about those Yankees!
Fritz: You know, things got so in Cambridge that I didn't know where the next beer was coming from after the Kweskin Band ended. The Club 47 had closed, too. I had to get out of town. Paul says, "Elektra is building this big studio in L.A. Keep in touch and I'll help you get a job in it." I drive my `48 Chevy across the country, meet with the VP at Elektra and the first question is, "What's your sign?" It was the same as his! I was in like Flint! I went to work on Labor Day in 1968. I lived in Laurel Canyon, five minutes from any studio in Hollywood. I worked at Sunset Sound occasionally, but 1 was a full-time music engineer at Elektra Sound Recorders.
Fritz: So how does this all connect to the CBA and Jug Band music?
Bugs: One of the biggest heroes of the Blues is Sleepy John Estes. He was in a Jug Band with Hammie Nixon and Yank Rachell, the great mandolin player. They were all from Brownsville, Tennessee, and back during the worst of the bad old days, Yank, who hadn't moved away to Chicago with Sleepy John and Hammie, was in a local band. During a gig, one of the guys in the band was observed to be eyeing a white woman. This was very bad. All the guys in the band were told to leave Brownsville. Yank got run out of town!
Bugs: "Didn't you record with Yank Rachel?
Fritz: Yes, it wasn't that long ago, 1996 or 1997. He went to Indianapolis and didn't go back for 30 years! Then he met The J-Band. John Sebastian found out that Yank was alive. He was old when we were young. Yank was infirm, didn't travel well, so we went to Indianapolis. We recorded a dozen or so tunes with him, then we spend the next two days hanging out with this guy. He had hits in the 1930's! Blues mandolin hits!
Actually, the Beale Street Blues Society was honoring him that year. The J-Band was his back-up band at the annual Handy Awards ceremony. Not only that, the City of Brownsville, which was trying to get itself on the map for music tourists, (it's halfway between Memphis and Nashville) wanted to make amends with Yank by putting on a Yank Rachell concert and giving him the Key to the City. Now here two threads come together. Delmark Goldfarb (a CBA founder) had located the grave, near Memphis, Tennessee, of pioneer Jug Band leader, Gus Cannon, and had enlisted the aid of John Sebastian in raising money for a head stone. The existing marker was in danger of being covered by vegetation and lost forever. It was decided to do a benefit on Beale Street and raise some money for the stone. John and I went to the cemetery and I said a few words over Gus Cannon's grave. I'll tell you I've never done anything like THAT before! I felt for this guy. We raised $1,000. It was enough to purchase a nice stone with a carved design by Eric von Schmidt.
The second time we go to Memphis, the president of the Beale Street Blues Society says to me "I have Gus Cannon's Jug, would you like to play it?" Now, I've gotta say - many jugs look alike. I will accept that this was Gus Cannon's jug. He puts a cardboard box on my lap and this box is very light in weight. I opened the box, removed the packing and in there is a velvet sack containing a hand-soldered copper jug with a neck strap and adjustable rack so it could be played while strumming a banjo.
It was clearly the Maestro's jug and he probably made it himself! I was reluctant to play it.
Bugs: "I'll bet you were. Kind of like playin' Bill Monroe's 1932 A4 mandolin.
Fritz: I later heard that the woman who kept it wanted to sell it to me for $5,000. It would be an object of great veneration to me, but I would then have had to donate it to a museum and I would have nothing for my money.
Bugs: You never know. She gave us a bunch of money.
End of Part 2.
Fritz: And, here J. T. "Bugs" Engel laid down his pen and joined the great pioneer Bluesmen and Jug Banders he loved to write about.
Editor: Because I know there will be interest, I've asked Fritz to continue with additional parts to this series. Watch for those in upcoming issues of the BluesNotes.
© 2002 Cascade Blues Association
Wasn't That A Time:
The Story of Jug Band Music and Fritz Richmond
Article Reprint from the April & May 2002 BluesNotes
By: J.T. "Bugs" Engel
Make no mistake about it. Before the Blues was born as a recognized art form, Jug Band Music was heard throughout the poorest Appalachia and Piedmont regions and Deep South. Jug Band Music was the definitive precursor and the heart and soul of traditional Blues music.
It really doesn't matter how it all got started. Indentured slaves and sharecroppers like Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachel, Jab Jones, John Lee (Sonny Boy) Williamson and Hammie Nixon (more about them later) were playing Jug Band music in rural Delta and Piedmont settings. As rural as it was in its earliest beginnings, some Jug bands, in the `20s and `30s, really `swang' with an uptown flavor as well. Jug band greats, such as Jed Davenport arid his Beale Street Jug Band, Earl McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band and the Memphis Jag Band, proved the point that "rural music could become sophisticated" and appeal to an urban audience. These bands legitimized the stuff of what had been front porch "hootenanny" legend. Great labels, such as Yazoo, immortalized these early artists and they're often scratchy, but gloriously, genuine sides.
Jug Band Music, in the earliest days, was played with thrown together instruments like diddley bows, cigar box guitars and banjoes, wash tubs, comb and wax paper, kazoos and jugs. Some Blues traditionalists believe Blues really started being played on these types of instruments; the likes of which gave Jug Band Music its heart and soul.
That brings us to Fritz Richmond. I know ...I know ...you're saying, "What does a skinny white guy in his late '50s know about the beginnings of the Blues?" My answer ...a lot!
Just when you think you've heard and/or seen all of Portland's famous (or infamous) hidden musical treasures, you run into a guy like Fritz Richmond. I know about Fritz's body of work, on washtub bass and jug, because I played many of the same jug band tunes Fritz did when I played Delta Blues and roots music in the DC area. That was in the late `60s and early `70s. So, when I actually got the chance to MEET Fritz and reminisce, I felt like Mike Wallace must have felt interviewing Edward R. Murrow.
I recently met with Fritz, on two occasions, once over Chinese food at a local Sellwood standard and once at his magnificent but simple home. On both occasions, he was forthcoming and meticulous as a storyteller.
The interview section that follows is separated into several parts. (BluesNotes will run the next part in the May 2002 issue.) It is a striking retelling by Fritz of how the early `60s Jug Band Music revival came into being. The story also covers a few of the historic Tennessee Blues men. It is also a Who's Who of the music industry over the past 40 some years.
Fritz's marathon journey starts in Cambridge, Massachusetts, winds its way across the country to Berkeley, California, his imminent return to the east coast by way of New York City, back again to Hollywood, California and then, to his current residence here in Portland.
Interview: (Part 1)
Fritz Richmond & his Washtub BassBugs: We were talking a bit about your experiences with John Hurt. He was on Vanguard Records about the same time the Kweskin Band was, wasn't he?
Fritz: He came through Cambridge when we were living there, I think for a couple of summers, and there was this venue, a coffee house, I believe, on Martha's Vineyard, where Folk and Blues acts would play for about a week at a time. These acts were very well received because, besides the sort of preppy beer drinking, there wasn't really much to do there so anything even remotely related to Folk music was hugely popular. So, John Hurt came to Martha's Vineyard, where he went down to the beach. Now, imagine Mississippi John Hurt dressed in shorts and a straw hat on Martha's Vineyard. He saw these guys surfing out about 50 yards or so and said, "Oh, they've got wave saddles!" What a mind.
Bugs: I think it would be helpful for Cascade Blues members to know a little about your musical upbringing, so to speak. Did one or both of your parents play musical instruments? Were there other early musical influences you'd like us to know about?
Fritz: There was a piano in my house and my mother played it a bit. My father played clarinet so there was that. I ended up taking up piano for about six years, although I was never very good at it. My buddy, who took lessons from the same teacher I did, Roger Callaway, has gone on to become quite a famous musician. Anyway, we both became the bass section in my school orchestra, with bows of course, never really picking as I would later on, or improvising because it never occurred to me that I would play-by-ear. I'd watch Roger and sort of fake it when I didn't know where I was."
I had other relatives that were more musical than Mom and Dad were. They sang and encouraged me to get involved in the Glee Club (interviewer's note - older folks will remember this as a sort of folk chorus in high school). I learned how to sing harmony there. It just came upon me, sort of like riding a bicycle.
Bugs: David Crosby says the same thing.
Fritz: Yes, so later I had a couple of friends who decided they were going to put a band together and one played guitar and one played banjo and they said. "Hey Fritz, you need to be in the band too." So, I went down into the basement and got an old wash boiler. You know the kind you would put on the wood stove and boil up the water and wash the clothes. We hooked that up as a wash tub bass, but it really didn't work. I knew then I had to get a wash tub and it lasted a little longer and sounded better. You could get notes out of it.
The real difficulty had to do with the string. A clothesline really didn't work and it pulled through the bottom. Then I went to a Venetian blind cord and I could get sustain from that because it was smaller and harder. It worked! This was about 1954, in Newton Mass., when I was in junior high school. We would go into the coffeehouses and play. That lasted about a year and a half. Then I went into the army.
Bugs: Didn't you do a hitch in Korea?
Fritz: Yes, and other places. A great realization came to me one day. You see I was a helicopter mechanic and they would replace this flight control cable on a regular basis and there was yards of this cable they would pitch. Well I liberated it, you know, because, after I tried it on the washtub bass, it worked beautifully. And, I've been using the same basic setup ever since.
Bugs: So, when you got out of the army, you went back to Cambridge?
Fritz: I enrolled in college and managed to sleep on couches all over the area. I played quite a lot of music and when I wasn't playing music, I was listening to it. This was before the great hootenanny craze and the Club 47, in Cambridge, was doing very well. They had music six nights a week. Right away bands wanted me to be a bass player because none of them had a bass player. Well, I sat in with this group called the Charles River Valley Boys and immediately they made me a member of the band.
It was not long after I got out of the Army that I met Geoff Muldaur and he thought the washtub bass was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. So, I started playing with him at the Club 47 every couple of weeks. This was in 1962. Then there was Jackie Washington, Bill Keith, Jim Rooney and I; we played with Tom Rush for quite a while. Tom was a Harvard student in `62 and I think he took a year off. He was quite serious and businesslike about this so he was starting to get gigs at all the prep schools around Boston. There must be about 100 prep schools within 100 mile radius around Boston and he really wasn't good enough to play colleges because he was, I think, in his final year at Harvard. So, I'd play washtub bass and, sometimes, jug with Tom.
And, this is sort of a Blues lesson. I played with both Rolf Kahn and Eric von Schmidt at the Club 47. It was really Rolf's show. He would come out on stage with a cigar in his mouth and a Flamenco guitar and play Flamenco for about 20 minutes. Then he would switch gears and sing the Blues, with a heavy German accent, you know, "Trouble In Mind" stuff.
Bugs: I'm curious, when did the Jug Band Music become more formalized for you? Was it when you first started playing with Jim Kweskin?
Fritz: Well, Jim wasn't living in Cambridge at that time. In December 1962, he showed up after having been on the road, in an old Buick with his girlfriend and her dog, traveling around the country with an old Wollensack tape machine. Do you remember those?
Bugs: God yes! Some of the earliest recordings I made were on one of those.
Fritz.: He had gone around and found dozens of people who were old `78 collectors. You know those old slates from the early `20s, `30s, and so forth, and he would record these songs onto the tape machine. He had, I guess, what would be a shelf three or four feet wide of these seven-inch tapes. And, there were 30 or 40 tunes on each tape so there was a wealth of material on each tape. He had learned many songs and was a really good finger-picking guitar player. We immediately hit it off.
So, I hung out with Jim every night, at the Club 47, and played with Jim. This was great fun and I started making money gigging with him so I said to myself, "If I can do this in Cambridge what could I do in Berkeley?" There was this sort of a natural axis for the music being one node in Cambridge and another in Berkeley. So, I moved to Berkeley leaving all my friends behind.
Bugs: Wow. You sort of gave up your good thing. Why did you move?
Fritz: They don't have a winter there! I went at Christmas. The scene was at a place called the Cabal down on San Pablo Avenue, about a mile from the University, and musicians would come from all over the country. There was a west coast Blues guy there named K.C. Douglas, who I played with a couple of times. He was tough! Just like Lightnin' Hopkins. You know 11 bars and 13 bars, what ever felt comfortable and then he'd change the chords. Whoa. I wasn't used to that. Great lesson for me.
Then, Jesse Fuller would show up at the Cabal, must have been about early 1963, and he'd play this device called the Fotdella. It was a sort of bass instrument he had made. It looked like he had cut up a couple of pieces of furniture glued them together in the shape of a tombstone. Then attached the bass strings of a piano, about eight of them. Each string had a contraption sort of like a piano hammer attached to it and when he'd hit it with his toe it would hit the string. He even had one special shoe. Very pointy because he wouldn't want to play more than one string at a time. He could play the bass notes on the Fotdella, with the other foot he could play a high hat, and he had a neck set up for harmonica and kazoo and miced them both. Then he had a big 12-string guitar with a pickup. Of course, he sang too. It was just amazing to think that, here was this guy who lived in Oakland, surely didn't have much money, and had this do-it-yourself one-man band rig that worked. I was at his 68th birthday party one night there.
Bugs: Did any of your musician friends show up, and come out to play with you in Berkeley?"
Fritz: No they didn't. The only folks I knew there were John Cooke and Bob Neuwirth who were from the Boston area. I was only out there less than six months.
Interview: (Part 2)
(Editor) Part I ran in last month's issue of BluesNotes. Bugs prepared a rough draft of Part 2 prior to his passing away in late March. We had Fritz edit the draft and submit Part 2 for this month's publication. Enjoy! Bugs would have loved it if you did.
Bugs: Did any of your musician friends show up, come out to play with you in Berkeley?
Fritz RichmondFritz: The only folks I knew there were John Cooke, from the Charles River Valley Boys, and Bob Neuwirth, another Cambridge guy. I was only out there less than six months.
Bugs: Why was that?
Fritz: Well, I wasn't working as often at I liked to and I was running out of money. Finally, one day, I got a transcontinental call from Jim Kweskin saying, "You know, Fritz, we're having a Jug Band and you're invited. Would you think about coming back." I said yes, and I rode back across the country with John Cooke, who was going to return to Cambridge as well. That was in May of 1963.
So, I went to a rehearsal and it was Jim on guitar, David Simon on harmonica, Geoff (Muldaur) on guitar and Bob Siggins, who was the banjo player from the Charles River Valley Boys. As I mentioned, this was about the time of the hootenanny craze and WBZ in Boston got on this big time. Radio brought people out and would fill up the house at Club 47 and places like the Unicorn in Boston and Outside In, which was in a particularly bad area of town.
I was also experimenting with different instruments at that time. Geoff had a recording of a guy playing a stovepipe. I listened to it and could tell it was a kazoo fastened into a piece of stovepipe. So, I made a stovepipe and played it like a jug. It had an elbow in it so I put my elbow through the elbow like a piece of armor and it had an enormous stovepipe cap on the top where my fist would be. I cut a hole there and shaped it to be the same size as the hole in a jug. I could play the thing like a jug, and then at the bottom of it, more for effect than anything else, 1 put in a damper. It actually worked as a volume control.
Bugs: Almost like a mute in a horn, eh?
Fritz: The best thing about it was, in those days, there were no PA's so we had to all get around a single microphone. Well, one night, 1 hooked the stovepipe up to an industrial strength vacuum cleaner hose, and the guys held it up to the microphone and I played the stove pipe from behind the curtain!
We'd been doing gigs for about three months and rehearsing at Bob Siggins' place. His upstairs neighbor was on the Board of Directors for the Club 47. His name was Paul Rothchild. "
Bugs: Would this be "THE Paul Rothchild" who produced the Doors?
Fritz: Yes, and he became my particular friend. We had a lot in common and he taught me how to listen to music and music production. He knew all about classical music, had studied it in school and had been a conductor. One day he said, "We should make a record of the Charles River Valley Boys and Club 47 would front the money." This was an LP and was one of the first records produced in the area. He then did, right in a row, records with Tom Rush, Eric von Schmidt, the Bill Keith - Jim Rooney Bluegrass Band, and Geoff Muldaur. Club 47 didn't want to become a record company, so Paul sold the masters to Prestige Records and then moved to New Jersey to work as a record producer for Prestige. I think he probably produced over 150 records during his career.
I got a call from him sometime later and he said. "1 need you to come down to New York and do a record with Tom Rush. When I got there he had this harmonica guy with him named John Sebastian and that was the first time I met John. Well, Tom had enough tunes for about two LPs and Paul took them over to Jac Holzman at Elektra Records and said, "You know Tom's contract is up at Prestige. How would you like to sign him?" Jac signed him immediately and hired Paul as a staff producer. So, suddenly we were dealing with Elektra Records. This was really good for us.
The Kweskin Jug Band got a gig in New York at the Bitter End. This was a big deal for us because The Bitter End was a famous place. Bill Cosby was playing there when we got the news. At about the same time, Rothchild decided reproduce a Jug Band called the Even Dozen Jug Band. It so happened that John Sebastian was in the Even Dozen Jug Band and had heard, from Rothchild. that the Kweskin Jug Band was not to be missed. So, John says to Maria D'Amato (later Muldaur), who was also in the same band at the time, "Lets go on a date to see a real Jug Band; this Kweskin Jug Band at The Bitter End."
John Sebastian had been trying to score with Maria for quite some time, so he brought her to see our show. After the gig, there was going to be a party at the Elektra Records suite of offices in the Village. This was a lease breaker party because they were moving to larger digs. Of course, there was quite a spread and much wine, and Maria had a little too much to drink, but nonetheless danced her ass off and was quite impressed by Geoff Muldaur. Well, the evening went on and she spent most of it next to Geoff in spite of having come to the party with John Sebastian, and, at some point, she leaned over to Geoff and lovingly puked in his lap! It wasn't two weeks later that she moved up to Cambridge and in with Geoff.
Bugs: So, the band members who ended up doing most of the recording on Vanguard Records were: Geoff on guitar and clarinet, you on jug, washtub bass and kazoo, Jim on guitar, Maria on vocals, Richard Green on fiddle, Bill Keith on banjo. Didn't he play a Jazz banjo? Four string tenor banjo, rather?
Fritz: Actually, he played his five string and unhooked the fifth string.
Bugs: Interesting. So, when did the band quit playing?
Fritz: That would have been May of 1968. It had been a five year party. An incredible party!
Bugs: I've been dying to ask you this question forever because I heard, actually from a guy I met who reportedly played with Roger McGuinn that you had something to do with the birth of "granny glasses". Can you set the record straight on that?
Fritz: Well, I'll give you the scoop on those. When I lived in Berkeley I stayed in a place called The Tenement that was right on Telegraph Avenue. It was full of people who were barely hanging on as parts of society, in one way or the other. The rooms were teeny and there were many of them. Bob Neuwirth had a room there but wasn't using it, so he let me use his room. And in his room, I found two little squares of, well, some people call it Cobalt blue, but the stained glass people call it Flash blue glass. Very thin. It wasn't pitted like a lot of stained glass, it was clear and optically correct. I thought these were wonderful because I could hold them up to my eyes and look at things though them when I was stoned.
Bugs: Somehow I knew there was a Reefer story tied to this discovery.
Fritz: The colors seemed noticeably more beautiful, of course. Just when I was about to give Bob money for these pieces of glass, which I, of course, had to have, he said he knew nothing about them. So, I would take them around to parties and everyone would marvel at the colors. I took them back to Massachusetts when I went, where one of my brothers had a job with the City of Newton as a trash collector. In some optometrist's trash can he found an old pair of little wire frames. Of course, the light went on and I took these frames and the Flash blue glass to an Oculist and had the stained glass put into these frames.
This made a major difference in my life because, at the time, I was learning to play the jug. It required a lot of huffing and puffing and it made me dizzy sometimes. especially if I was stoned. I would find myself sort of wavering around on stage, but if I stared at the microphone I could steady myself. Well, one night someone came up after a set and said, "Fritz are, you cross-eyed'?" Well, I had been looking at the microphone and I guess it did appear that I was cross-eyed. So, I knew what to do. I'd put on those little blue glasses and no one will know if I was cross-eyed or if I was stoned.
The next time I went to New York, of course, I took them with me. I ended up partying with John Sebastian and with Jim (Roger) McGuinn. So, the next time I go to New York they both have a pair! Then, a little while later EVERYONE has a pair!
Bugs: Yea, that's what this guy told me. McGuinn got them from you and made 'em famous!
Fritz: Well, I still have mine, the original pair. So that's how that came to be, and I always had them on every time I played the jug during the whole run of the Kweskin Jug Band.
Bugs: I just heard that you folks played with the Doors at the Fillmore in 1967!
Fritz: That's true. We had already met them by then. When they made their first tour they came to Boston, and I get this call from Paul Rothchild. He says, "I got this Rock band with me and I told them all about you and the Jug Band and they would like to meet you. Can we come over NOW". (editor's note: They had probably heard from Paul about how Fritz was fun to be with.) So, all the Doors come over to my apartment in Cambridge and I Suppose I got 'em high, and gave them beers, etc. So, we knew them when the gig was set up at the Fillmore. Another time Big Brother opened for US! I Cotta tell you, those Doors were pretty timid guys. They left Paul to do all the talking,
Bugs: Didn't you work for Elektra Records for a while as an engineer?
Fritz: Yes, for about eight years.
Bugs: And didn't they send you to the Islands to look for Joseph Spence?
Fritz: No, that was earlier, during the Kweskin Band time. I did that on my own. Remember, I was telling you about that great big collection of tapes Jim Kweskin had? Well, one of them was labeled: Joseph Spence. We couldn't tell, from the tape, if this was one guy or four guys, it was so complex. We'd listen to the whole thing and at the end go, "Wow, man." Nobody played like that; he was an incredible finger picker. We had pals who could play in the style of Blind Lemon, Blind Blake, or Gary Davis, but no one could play like Joseph Spence. It drove me nuts! So, I decided that one day before Joseph Spence died or I died, I was going to watch him play. I resolved to find him and I did. Jim Kweskin and I finally determined that the tape we had been listening to for all those stoned evenings was of a Folkways LP produced by Sam Charters. The next time I was in New York I got hold of him. He said come over and I'll play for you the stuff that DIDN'T make it onto the record! I'm at Sam's apartment in The Village and he plays me the outtakes! I was in finger pickin' Heaven. But, Sam didn't know if Spence was alive or in real Heaven.
Bugs: This is very cool because Joseph Spence was actually a ship yard worker in southern Virginia during WWII, I believe.
Fritz: Sam Charters told me to start looking in the Bahamas, on New Providence Island, and I found him. 1'd ask Black folks, "Do you know Joseph Spence?" And, finally a guy said, "Oh you should ask Blind Blake. Bahamian Blind Blake, not the famous Chicago Blind Blake. He plays at Dirty Dick's every afternoon. Well, sure enough, Blake told me the neighborhood and I found Spence's house. His wife came to the door. She was not very happy to see some white stranger, I can tell you. Fearful she was. She said, "You come back tomorrow."
I usually sleep pretty good, but I did walk the beach for a couple of hours that night. I was going to meet my all-time musical hero! The next day I went back and a guy opens the door, and I say. "Hello, Mr. Spence, I'm here from Cambridge. Massachusetts. and I love your music." I stick out my hand. He pokes out this big hand from around the other side of the door. My hand completely disappeared inside his hand. He invited me in and made me feel very welcome. He invited me back the next day. I brought my washtub bass and a small bottle of rum. And, for the next few afternoons we'd play music and tell stories. I noticed he played the guitar with a very strong hand and had a lot of knots in his guitar strings.
Fritz: I had an arrangement with Paul Rothchild to ask Spence if he would consider recording again. Spence admitted that he'd never heard the first one, but that he'd love to make another record. So, I get this terse cable out to Rothchild: "Spence lives. Will record. Bring twelve sets heavy bronze guitar strings." The New York folkies went nuts! The Folklore Center in New York obtained Paul's copy of the cable and hung it on their wall!
Bugs: Of course! Did Paul come down and record it?
Fritz: Yeah, he did, and made the record "Happy All The Time" on Elektra. Spence was in his early 60s, about the same as me. Ha Ha! He was a stone mason.
Bugs: The stuff I've heard, it's almost like dual 12 strings with overdubs.
Fritz: Yes, he was one of not many guitar players who were completely unique. You listen to one second of his music and you know who it is.
Bugs: And, inquiring minds would like to know if you worked for Maynard Soloman at Vanguard?
Fritz: "Didn't.
Bugs: You say that with such alacrity!
Fritz: There's a Yiddish word for what he was: gonniff.
Bugs: Yea, so, how about those Yankees!
Fritz: You know, things got so in Cambridge that I didn't know where the next beer was coming from after the Kweskin Band ended. The Club 47 had closed, too. I had to get out of town. Paul says, "Elektra is building this big studio in L.A. Keep in touch and I'll help you get a job in it." I drive my `48 Chevy across the country, meet with the VP at Elektra and the first question is, "What's your sign?" It was the same as his! I was in like Flint! I went to work on Labor Day in 1968. I lived in Laurel Canyon, five minutes from any studio in Hollywood. I worked at Sunset Sound occasionally, but 1 was a full-time music engineer at Elektra Sound Recorders.
Fritz: So how does this all connect to the CBA and Jug Band music?
Bugs: One of the biggest heroes of the Blues is Sleepy John Estes. He was in a Jug Band with Hammie Nixon and Yank Rachell, the great mandolin player. They were all from Brownsville, Tennessee, and back during the worst of the bad old days, Yank, who hadn't moved away to Chicago with Sleepy John and Hammie, was in a local band. During a gig, one of the guys in the band was observed to be eyeing a white woman. This was very bad. All the guys in the band were told to leave Brownsville. Yank got run out of town!
Bugs: "Didn't you record with Yank Rachel?
Fritz: Yes, it wasn't that long ago, 1996 or 1997. He went to Indianapolis and didn't go back for 30 years! Then he met The J-Band. John Sebastian found out that Yank was alive. He was old when we were young. Yank was infirm, didn't travel well, so we went to Indianapolis. We recorded a dozen or so tunes with him, then we spend the next two days hanging out with this guy. He had hits in the 1930's! Blues mandolin hits!
Actually, the Beale Street Blues Society was honoring him that year. The J-Band was his back-up band at the annual Handy Awards ceremony. Not only that, the City of Brownsville, which was trying to get itself on the map for music tourists, (it's halfway between Memphis and Nashville) wanted to make amends with Yank by putting on a Yank Rachell concert and giving him the Key to the City. Now here two threads come together. Delmark Goldfarb (a CBA founder) had located the grave, near Memphis, Tennessee, of pioneer Jug Band leader, Gus Cannon, and had enlisted the aid of John Sebastian in raising money for a head stone. The existing marker was in danger of being covered by vegetation and lost forever. It was decided to do a benefit on Beale Street and raise some money for the stone. John and I went to the cemetery and I said a few words over Gus Cannon's grave. I'll tell you I've never done anything like THAT before! I felt for this guy. We raised $1,000. It was enough to purchase a nice stone with a carved design by Eric von Schmidt.
The second time we go to Memphis, the president of the Beale Street Blues Society says to me "I have Gus Cannon's Jug, would you like to play it?" Now, I've gotta say - many jugs look alike. I will accept that this was Gus Cannon's jug. He puts a cardboard box on my lap and this box is very light in weight. I opened the box, removed the packing and in there is a velvet sack containing a hand-soldered copper jug with a neck strap and adjustable rack so it could be played while strumming a banjo.
It was clearly the Maestro's jug and he probably made it himself! I was reluctant to play it.
Bugs: "I'll bet you were. Kind of like playin' Bill Monroe's 1932 A4 mandolin.
Fritz: I later heard that the woman who kept it wanted to sell it to me for $5,000. It would be an object of great veneration to me, but I would then have had to donate it to a museum and I would have nothing for my money.
Bugs: You never know. She gave us a bunch of money.
End of Part 2.
Fritz: And, here J. T. "Bugs" Engel laid down his pen and joined the great pioneer Bluesmen and Jug Banders he loved to write about.
Editor: Because I know there will be interest, I've asked Fritz to continue with additional parts to this series. Watch for those in upcoming issues of the BluesNotes.
© 2002 Cascade Blues Association
