Beaumont Enterprise, Beaumont, Texas, December 23, 2001
Keeping Time: Drummer a living history lesson on SE Texas Blues
BEAUMONT. Many of the music fans crowding into the Pearl Street Cafe Friday night walked past the corner table without a glance, oblivious of how much Southeast Texas blues history sat there.
They didn't recognize the veteran blues drummer wearing his signature Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt, or the sharp dresser whose new label, Doc Blues, is helping preserve the rich musical history of the area.
By the end of the night, even those who didn't know who they were grooving to recognized that something special was happening here, more than 40 years and thousands of gigs after it began.
The musical gumbo that came out of Louisiana and Texas is now so well blended it's hard to distinguish the original ingredients: the Africans and the French, the gospel and the groove.
By the late 1950s, musicians in Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana had created swamp pop, a fusion of New Orleans-style rhythm and blues, country and western, and Cajun and Creole music.
And Beaumont and Port Arthur teen musicians were right in the middle. At least three of them would go on to play Woodstock.
"This place has such a mystique, to be such a non-mystical place," Uncle John Turner said. "Because it was so oppressive, it produced a bunch of overachievers."
Musicians and songwriters like J. P. Richardson (The Big Bopper), Janis Joplin, Johnny and Edgar Winter, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, Jerry LaCroix and G. G. Shinn, Johnny Preston, Barbara Lynn, George Jones, Bob McDill and later, Tracy Byrd, Mark Chestnut and Clay Walker.
It also produced some whose names aren't found in the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur, but whose mark still can be seen on the music of the area.
Like Uncle John Turner.
"Unc" is a 1962 Port Neches-Groves graduate who got his first gig at 13, playing the bass at the American Legion Hall in Vinton, La., for $5. Another member of that teen band was Alan Wayne, who left to help form the Bridge City Rhythm Rockers, a group of 23- and 24-year-olds who were getting booked into Houston clubs.
Unc's next role was as a substitute in a band begun by a couple of Beaumont boys named Johnny and Edgar Winter.
When Johnny Winter decided to switch to his first love, blues (he once gave liner-note credit to Unc for talking him into trying it), Unc called in old friend and bass player Tommy Shannon, who later became Stevie Ray Vaughan's bass player. By this time, Unc had switched to the drums. He never went back to the bass.
In 1968, when Rolling Stone was getting attention as an underground hippie newspaper, it ran a centerpiece on Texas music, spotlighting Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter.
Record producers from both coasts started courting Winter. Steve Paul, who owned The Scene, a happening club in New York, came to Houston to find him. He convinced Winter to come check it out.
"Johnny went by himself the first trip," Unc said. "Paul took him to the Fillmore East and Mike Bloomfield was there. Mike called him up and introduced him. That pretty much set everybody listening real close."
Unc said Winter was blown away by all of the musicians hanging out, people like Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart.
"He came back and struck a deal and there's our Cinderella story," Unc said.
Unc went from sleeping in Edgar Winter's drummer's by-the-week motel room one night to a New York mansion the next, he said.
"We didn't really pay our dues. We went from $100 a night to $5,000 a night."
Johnny, Edgar and Unc also played in the best-known concert of the era -- a little gig called Woodstock.
Unc played with Winter for about two and a half years. Unc and Tommy Shannon formed Krackerjack. They drew crowds of 800 a night, he said, but never made a record under that name.
"We were wild and doing alcohol and drugs and never succeeded. We were together for about two years. Stevie Ray Vaughan was in the band for a while."
When it broke up around 1976, Shannon and Chris Layton got together as Double Trouble. Unc moved on to record and play with people like Willie Dixon, Ezra Charles and Isaac Peyton Sweat. He jammed with B. B. King and Lightnin' Hopkins, sat in with Muddy Water's band several times and even jammed with his "favorite musician of all time," Jimi Hendrix.
"Yeah, for about 15 minutes. He asked us if he could sit in."
He's toured Europe many times and recorded 27 known CDs. That's not counting the bootleg tapes, like the one he and Johnny Winter cut in 1968 or '69 not long after they were invited up to the Beaumont Enterprise to have their picture taken with Miss Beaumont, Unc said.
"We used those photos on the bootleg that was the second version of a legitimate contract Johnny had but I'm pretty sure he never got paid for."
That was the last time, Unc said, he made it in this paper.
At the Pearl Street Cafe, Jim Thompson sat at the table with the band members whose work he's capturing on the new record label and distribution company, Doc Blues. Thompson is from Port Arthur, a Thomas Jefferson High School and University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston grad who is now in private practice in Georgetown.
Friday night, the band gave the crowd a preview of Doc Blues' first release, Walter Higgs' "Just a Few Miles to Go," which hits the stores in early January.
Friday, the band -- most of whom have played at some point with Blues Power, the Austin-based band that calls Austin blues club "Joe's Generic Bar" home -- is frontman Higgs with vocals and harmonica, Uncle John on drums, guitarist Hector Watt, sax player Jack Payne, bassist Danny Turanski and keyboard player Matt Farrell.
The band went on just before midnight to a crowd that couldn't seem to get enough. The dance floor stayed packed.
One of the dancers was Stacie Milos, 39, a Beaumont native and South Park grad who calls Newport, R.I., home. Milos, who was home for the holidays, said she was thrilled to hear about what's happening.
"I heard that there is a revitalization project downtown and that they'd opened up this blues bar. I was very excited. I really hope it succeeds," she said.
Billy Hollywood, 65, of Beaumont sat at the bar, one of the many moving with the music. "I'm a regular here," he said, "and, yes, my name really is Billy Hollywood."
Hollywood said he tries to catch the blues at other clubs, but "there's nothing like this around."
Pearl Street Blues owner, blues musician and 1969 Thomas Jefferson grad Roger Ward is surrounded by old friends.
"We had a migration that started in the early '70s. Some went to Austin to go to school and some to get into whatever they could get into," he said. "There was a big group of us from Port Arthur, around 20 to 25. We kept in touch."
Uncle John Turner calls Walter Higgs, Paul Orta and other, younger Southeast Texas bluesmen "the second wave," Ward says he thinks of them as "part of the continuous wave."
"Papa John Pickett, Ervin Charles, Phillip Walker, all those Port Arthur people influenced us in the '60s and '70s," he said. "For me, it started with rock 'n roll and I found out blues guys were writing the songs. I researched it and thought, 'I want to learn how to play that.' When we went to Austin, we were a big influence. Clifford Antone was the cog in the wheel that brought Chicago blues to Austin with his club, Antone's. Clifford brought Muddy Waters in, and that's when it broke."
Ward hopes the Crockett Street project, which includes an Antone's, will help keep the blues as strong here as it once was.
"Do I think Beaumont is going to be the music Mecca of Southeast Texas? Yes. There's too much 'want to' here for it not to happen. The train's already rolling, and it's going to take a lot to get in its way."
Blues is our "roots," Ward said. "We have a strong, interracial culture here. Blues is a unifying factor. There's something here about music and socialization. Ever since I can recall, it's been our culture, from backyard barbecues or street dances. "We're a culture of gatherings. Music is not the main ingredient, but it's a big part of it."
"There are a lot of deserving artists whose work needs to be documented and recorded," Jim Thompson said about his label and distribution company. "It's an injustice that's being corrected. We want to record some older artists and some of the younger, emerging ones. That's why Doc Blues' slogan is "Bringing you today the blues legends of tomorrow."
For the record, Unc was wrong. In a full-page spread on Johnny Winter in the Beaumont Enterprise and Journal on June 27, 1981, way down in the bottom left-hand corner, there it is: "Backing Winter as he stormed over the fretboard of his electric guitar was the four-piece Texas Boogie Band, led by Winter protégé Alan Haynes on Guitar and vocals and featuring winter's old drummer, Uncle John Turner."
"Johnny and Tommy used to call me 'Uncle John' because I was the one who drove the car and found everybody. I was the responsible one of the bunch," Unc said. "I thought, if I use this name when I'm 25, I'll be able to go longer in the biz. I saw that as the door to longevity."
-by Jane McBride