Hutto Speaks!

 

Keeper of the Flame – JB Hutto

This is something I wrote in 1981 for a publication called Sweet Potato. It was the first time I ever got paid for something I wrote.

JB Hutto is a musical powerhouse. A small man in a red gabardine shirt and gray sports cap, he pops his eyes and grins to the back seats as he plays. It's late on a weeknight at Cambridge’s soon to be defunct Speakeasy, and the crowd is thinned in preparation for the next day's work. But JB is somehow spurred on, jumping from the stage with ferocious good fun. He is soon dancing on one foot, snaking through the audience and to his guitar cords’ limit.

The man has his own style of playing and young guitar players typically line the stage watching his hands. He's the king of slide stylists today. Only Muddy Waters performs slide with such skill and he often plays the instrument with cold frugality. But JB’s playing is abundant and his leads map a tune’s wildest borders. Theatrical antics can mask it from the first-time listener but JB Hutto is an especially serious artist.

Hutto plays a rockin blues. Club goers encountering him are treated to a roots music of unearthly intensity. His band - The New Hawks - is composed of dedicated young musicians going into their third year with JB. Having a regular band raises JB from the ranks of blues legends who pick up players nightly going from gig to gig with no regular band.

JB has found the Northeast a better base to work from than his former Chicago home. He's listening to a concert recording when I enter his Malden apartment. Cordial and understated, he's drinking ice water. He is a diabetic and avoids alcohol, which may surprise those who associate blue singers exclusively with alcohol. He says he turned down recent European tour offers waiting until he could take his group too.

“I’m happy with the group’s sound and want to be heard right. These boys are really working and they're sincere about what they're doing,” he says. “They're getting so I can just hit a number and they're right on top of it. Slow, faster medium, however it is. Now they can feel my position, where I'm coming from and what I'm ready to do.

“Tonight, the band will be here, we'll play some records of my old stuff, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, or Junior Parker or whatever we want to get learning now. That even brings back memories of things I forgot and it teaches the band how to get into the stuff. Then we'll get together and we'll do a rehearsal." -- Jack Vaughan

The piece continues, mostly as a revue of his then current record - Keeper of the Flame. I'll continue instead with some quotes:

He spoke about open tuning - "I've been playing open tunings since I started he says Johnny was playing that and I learned from him there. Now I guess I'm too old to learn anything else. I play in all keys open tuning doesn't limit you to one key. It's just like a regular tuning. Once you learn. You can play anything in it. It gives you more inspiration and room to play. I'll tell you that because when you get in that open, you can do a lot of slide and you can slide in just about any key."

I asked him what he thought of rock and roll - recall that these were the days of the dominance of Disco - "I think blues got enough rock in it for me, he replies I think some rock and roll songs like Louis Jordan's Caledonia and Shake Rattle and Roll are rock and roll.  A lot of people think that blues is just a drag. That you have to be half drunk or mad with somebody to hear the blues - but blues is the root of music really. And it's a thing you can be happy with, can be sad with, anything. You can dance by it just like you dance by what you call rock and roll or disco. You take a song like John Lee Hookers' Boogie Chillin. That's just a one beat song and that's all disco is all the way through it." 

JB Hutto was amazingly acrobatic. When C and I saw him complete his show at the Speakeasy he vaulted over a rail.. but first ... There was a thank you and ... 

A memorable admonition to the audience - "Old clock on the wall says you better get on the ball y'all. God bless you and when you see our name on the marquee, come on in. You know what you're gonna get!"