A little-known fact: Houston is the blues capital

Katie Webster made a name for herself with her special brand of boogie-woogie. Katie Webster made a name for herself with her special brand of boogie-woogie. Photo: Peter Amft, Alligator Records Photo: Peter Amft, Alligator Records Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close A little-known fact: Houston is the blues capital 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A few miles east of downtown, deep in Houston's Fifth Ward, there sits a nondescript-looking building that was — the last time I drove by, several years ago — serving as a church. But if the walls of this building could talk, what a tale they'd tell. For it was in this building, home of the Bronze Peacock nightclub and Peacock Recording Studios, that some of the greatest recordings in the history of American music were cut.

Beginning in the late 1940s, Peacock Records at first recorded mostly gospel music. After merging with Memphis-based Duke Records in 1952, the Duke-Peacock label began focusing more on secular music. What followed was a decades-long series of records — Johnny Ace's Pledging My Love, Junior Parker's Drivin' Wheel, Bobby "Blue" Bland's I Pity the Fool, to name just three — that defined a new sound in popular black music, marking the evolution from the rough-and-tumble, electrified Delta blues coming out of Chicago to a jazzier, more sophisticated, uptown R&B style.

Under the direction of founder Don Robey and his top assistant, Evelyn Johnson, Duke-Peacock became the largest black-owned record label in the country prior to the rise of Detroit's Motown label in the 1960s.

So why aren't more Houstonians familiar with the Duke-Peacock legacy, one of the great bootstrap capitalist success stories of the music business? True, Robey's business methods were at times unsavory, if not illegal, but from a historical vantage point, this only adds to the mystique.

You can walk off an airplane in New Orleans and head right into a store specializing in Crescent City jazz, blues, funk and parade music. The clubs in the French Quarter keep the city's musical identity intact, even as half of the former residents now live elsewhere. Memphis has revitalized its fabled Beale Street district. And Chicago is host to a huge blues festival held annually on the shores of Lake Michigan that celebrates the city's African-American musical heritage.

In Houston, the city's business and political leaders are justifiably proud of our musical institutions — the symphony, the opera, the chamber music association. Yet, we continue to overlook the cultural heritage that is uniquely our own. Although Chicago, New Orleans and Memphis get more notice — perhaps because these cities have done so much more to promote their musical identities — Houston's contribution to the blues as an art form is second to none.

Lightnin' Hopkins, probably the blues musician most closely associated historically with Houston, was already a throwback to an earlier style of rural, East Texas country bluesmen when he arrived on the Third Ward scene in the 1940s. Robey is said to have intensely disliked Hopkins' primitive, country-rooted blues. He favored the hard-swinging, guitar-driven, big band blues of T-Bone Walker, the singer-guitarist from South Dallas who influenced a generation and a half of Houston-based blues guitarists that included Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, "Texas" Johnny Brown, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Joe "Guitar" Hughes and Pete Mayes.

This generation of African-American blues guitarists would in turn inspire a legion of rock-era white guitarists — most notably Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan — to reclaim Texas' blues heritage in the 1970s and '80s.

Of course, guitarists aren't the only notable blues musicians to come out of Houston or to have done some of their best work here. A partial roll call would include singers and singer-pianists Beulah "Sippie" Wallace, Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton, Esther Phillips, Katie Webster, Amos Milburn, Charles Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter and Percy Mayfield.

Then there are those who polished their craft in Robey's studios or on the road with the bands of artists such as B.B. King, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Percy Mayfield, Big Walter the Thunderbird, Jimmy "T-99" Nelson, Calvin Owens, Grady Gaines, Milton Hopkins, Miss Lavelle White, Peppermint Harris, Teddy Reynolds, Clarence Green, Earl Gilliam, Trudy Lynn and the list goes on.

As popular black music evolved through soul into funk, disco and rap, many of these musicians were forced into semi-retirement. When I moved to Houston in 1989 to take a job as music critic at the Chronicle, Grady Gaines — the original saxophonist with Little Richard and the Upsetters and a member of the Duke-Peacock house band — was working as a skycap at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. I was fortunate enough to bear witness to a renewal of interest in these older artists among local club audiences.

It is not as if blues music needs official civic recognition in order to survive. On any given night, a dedicated listener can find live blues and blues-based music being played in any number of Houston nightclubs and juke joints. The local Pacifica radio station, KPFT-FM, features blues thoughout the day on Sunday, with a frequent focus on local happenings in the blues community.

The blues also lives on through its musical offspring rock and R&B, of course, and also zydeco, in which young African-American musicians are consciously preserving the blues as part of their Creole birthright.

And, yes, the spirit of the blues can be felt in the slow-rolling, hard-banging beats of Houston hip-hop. It is not too much of a stretch to go from Juke Boy Bonner's Stay Off Lyons Avenue to Z-Ro's King of the Ghetto and Trae's In the Hood.

It is no accident that ZZ Top, the most famous rock 'n' roll band ever to come out of Houston, is at heart a garage-psychedelic blues band, and that Clint Black, the most popular country singer to emerge from Houston in the past 20 years, blows a mean blues harmonica. It also is no accident that Jason Moran, the Houston's High School for the Performance and Visual Arts-trained jazz pianist, released an album a few years ago called Same Mother, in which he honored his hometown's blues heritage.

Back in the days of Duke-Peacock and Robey, when Houston was a segregated Southern town, it was obvious why the civic leaders declined to recognize the city's vital role as a cultural hub for black music. Can it be that we are still susceptible to a more subtle form of bias, in which European-based musical institutions are celebrated as "fine arts," worthy of public subsidy, while indigenous forms — in this case, African-American forms — are taken for granted as primitive folk music?

There is an old slave song called Red River Blues that asks the question, "Which way do that blood red river run?" The song took on new meaning for slaves in East Texas, because to run north of the Red River meant escaping to freedom. As excellent as our symphony and opera may be, Houston will never rival Vienna, Paris, London or Rome as a center for classical music. But deep in its soul, from the falling-down barbecue joints and storefront churches of the old wards to the hipster Inner Loop icehouses and after-hours clubs, Houston knows which way that blood red river runs.