The Man

Tommy McClennan is straight from the mould of the hard drinking, hard living blues men of the Mississippi Delta. His raw and infectious style is a testament to his contrary and ultimately self destructive life. There isn’t a lot known about him, and despite living into the 1960’s, there is only one known photograph of him (a lot of sites and publications incorrectly feature a photo of his best friend Robert Petway – which is a bit ironic because it’s also the only known photo of Petaway). Even his Mississippi Blues Trail marker features a photo which likely doesn’t contain him.Born on Highway 51 in Durant, Mississippi, (technically outside the Delta that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers) on January 4, 1905 or in Yazoo City in April on 1908, to an unknown father and his mother, Cassie, Tommy and his siblings frequently moved back and forth across neighbouring counties. The family show up on the 1910 and 1920 census under different spellings on his name – McLinton, McClinton, McCleland – always living on plantations in different counties. It is very likely that he lived on the J.F Sligh plantation in Yazoo City sometime between 1910 and 1925 where he met his good friend and sometime musical companion Petway.

Tommy learned to play the guitar and piano in these areas and was drawn to the relatively big town of Greenwood, where a young BB King played some of his first gigs. In Greenwood, Tommy became a regular at bars and the local pool hall, playing his brand of blues with Petway, Booker Miller (a protege of Charley Patton), and David ‘HoneyBoy’Edwards, a close friend of Robert Johnson who was present on the night Johnson died. Honeyboy remembers McClennan as a decent guitarist with a deep, gravelly voice, but an average piano player who could ignite a crowd with his raucous ‘hokum’ styled versions of traditional songs: “He could play the guitar pretty good, but he sure wasn’t no piano player. He threw the people; he had them dancing and hollering. …He could play that guitar, and he could holler”.

Tommy was married by 1930, but continued his playing and drinking around the bars of the Yazoo City/Greeenwood area. He had started to make a name for himself, with raunchy versions of songs like “Bottle it up and Go” and “Shake ’em on down”, which gave him his Yazoo City nick name “Bottle”. Honeyboy Edwards recalls the good times he, Tommy and Petway had around Greenwood: “Tommy McClennan and me played both sides of town [Greenwood, MS]. We used to serenade in the white neighbourhoods. We’d walk down the street amongst all those old houses, strumming our guitars, and we’d see them curtains fly back and they’d chuck nickels and dimes out in the street for us. We’d play ‘Tight Like That’, little jump-up songs for them. Then we’d go back across the river where we come from, raise hell and drink, holler our asses off all night long, singing the ‘Cotton Patch Blues’ in them shotgun houses in our part of town”.

Lester Melrose, a talent scout and record producer who would travel the south looking for artists to record, found Tommy and Petway in Greenwood in 1939 and invited them to Chicago to cut some records. Tommy recorded 8 tracks fro Bluebird on November 22, 1939, which were released on 4 double sided 78’s. On the first track he can be heard saying “take your time now, play it right for you in Chicago”. The hokum styled discs were a mild success, leading to further sessions and releases in May and December, 1940. He set up home in Chicago, and continued to party and drink his way through the Chicago scene, though the Chicgo audience wasn’t as receptive to his hokum style as the southern crowds. Big Bill Broonzy recalls Tommy escaping a party through a window with the remains of his guitar hanging around his neck after being hit with it .

Tommy’s lifestyle began to catch up with him, he recorded twice more in September, 1941 and February, 1942, though these songs were not as tight as earlier recordings and some were simply repackaged version of earlier songs given a new name. Disappointed by his lack of professionalism and growing problems with the bottle, Bluebird cut him loose from the label. Tommy slowly drifted from the Chicago blues scene.

Honeyboy Edwards remembers seeing him in the late 40s, playing at a second rate bar: “He played a little bit and he sang, but he didn’t play too long ‘fore he just …Tommy just dranked so much he just, he couldn’t…” Tommy seemingly disappeared until Honeyboy ran into him out at a scrapyard in 1961. Tommy was living in a trailer as a hobo, and drinking more than ever. Honeyboy tried to take care of his old friend but he was too far gone: “he studied drinking all the time. …He asked me to take him back to that [hobo] Jungle. I carried him back down there. …Later on I heard he had taken sick, that he was in the hospital. …That alcohol was what Tommy was living for, but it ate him plumb up.”

Admitted to hospital later that year, legend Big Joe Williams took the owner of a local blues club and up and coming guitarist Mike Bloomfield (who three years later would play on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited) to visit Tommy: “”he was just like a skeleton but his eyes were like hot coals burning at you. And his music was like that, too – it had a savage, searing sound. He was a fierce man.”

Tommy McClennan died of bronchopneumonia caused by decades of alcohol abuse on My 9, 1961.

