There's better ways to make money than trying to sell records.  Sure wish I knew what they were...

Lightnin' Wells, Tad Walters, Boo Hanks and me made this record to give out to the people who donate money to the Floyd Council Memorial Project.  The record is called Pink and Mr. Floyd.  There are thirteen songs on the album.  Most of them were part of Floyd's repertoire...or Floyd's and Pink Anderson's.  Me and Lightnin' each took three of the six songs Floyd recorded commercially in 1937.  Tad played Bad, Bad Whiskey...

I was standing in Floyd Council Jr's driveway talking to him about the songs his Dad used to play around the house when Floyd Jr. was a kid.  He told me that his Deddy's favorite song was probably Bad, Bad Whiskey...that he played it almost every time he got his guitar out of the case.  See...a couple of months before we had this conversation Tad was telling me about playing Bad, Bad Whiskey for his little boy, Charlie.  Jen came in the room and asked if that song wasn't a little advanced for a three year old, so Tad changed the words to Bad, Bad Kool-Aid.  For weeks, Charlie'd been running around the house singing the Bad, Bad Kool-Aid song and every evening he was adamant that the Kool-Aid song be sung to him before the possibility of sleep could be considered.  The whole deal seemed like kismet to me...

So Tad recorded Bad, Bad Whiskey at Osceola Studio for the record and he did a few of the Fuller/Floyd songs (Floyd Council backed up Blind Boy Fuller on seven songs during sessions for the ARC label back in 1937).  He also contributed a lovely version of Weeping Willow - a song him and me usually do together, though I play it in a different key and with none of the flourishes Tad plays on the guitar.  He has a sweet little part on the chromatic harmonica when we play it together.  It sounds ancient and modern (you know, flappers sucking face around their long ebony cigarette holders while Rhapsody in Blue plays on a phonograph in the near distance, kind of modern) and will probably hafta wait for another record.

Lightnin' brought Pink's version of Chicken.  Tad sang the Frank Stokes version of the chorus and the two blended together beautifully.  It's a funny, charming take on the old medicine show tune and one of my favorites on the record.  He also recorded Boots and Shoes.  Some variation of this song was in every Piedmont bluesman's repertoire - Pink called it Meet Me in the Bottom.  Floyd backed Fuller on his version of the song...

Me and Clark Stern did what Clark lovingly refers to as our "delightfully drunken" version of Oozin' You off my Mind, another of the Floyd/Fuller collaborations.  Reckon it's safe to tell you that our version has precious little in common with their version.

The last song on the album is See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.  Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded it first, but Pink Anderson knew it and played it around the house.  I don't believe he ever recorded it, but his son lovingly reproduced Pink's arrangement of it on his "Carolin Bluesman" record.

You can get this record and a whole lot more HERE.

The current state of the White Oak Zion A.M.E. Church.  We're going to get in there in January and tear up all the vines and brush and knock down the trees that are obviously growing out of the graves.  There's some talk about getting the NCSU Forestry kids in there to help out with the timber.  We'll see how that shakes out...

Bluesman wants to give another his due

BY DAVID MENCONI - dmenconi@newsobserver.com

Published in: Music

Even if you don't know Floyd Council's music, you probably know his oddest legacy: inspiration for the name of iconic English psychedelic rock band Pink Floyd. And if Bullfrog Willard McGhee has his way, someday there will be an actual place where you can pay your respects to the Chapel Hill bluesman.

McGhee, 40, is a bluesman himself. He came to Raleigh six years ago, after Hurricane Katrina drove him out of New Orleans. Once here, McGhee started up his own brand of "tombstone tourism," seeking out the local landmarks of blues history.

He found the place in Durham where the Rev. Gary Davis used to live with Sonny Terry, which is now a parking lot. The bike trail in Chapel Hill that used to be the railroad bed at the end of the street where the teenage Elizabeth Cotten wrote the blues standard "Freight Train" early last century. And in Sanford, the overgrown cemetery that is Council's final resting place.

By the time he died in 1976, Council's most enduring claim to fame in the Pink Floyd name was well established. That came about as an accident of fate.

"There was a list of Carolina blues guys on the back of a Blind Boy Fuller album, with Pink Anderson and Floyd Council's names next to each other," McGhee said over a cup of strong and heavily sugared coffee one recent morning. "Syd Barrett saw it and that was that."

Despite that connection, Anderson lived in South Carolina and was not part of Council's musical circle. Council played in a black stringband, the Chapel Hillbillies, who did a lot of gigs at white UNC fraternities in the 1940s.

But he's best-known for his association with Blind Boy Fuller, the iconic Piedmont bluesman from Durham. Council backed Fuller up on a number of records in the 1930s and also recorded himself under the name Dipper Boy - variously billed as "The Devil's Daddy-In Law" or "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy."

While Council's own records are long out of print, he was a major player in the local Piedmont blues community. UNC folklore professor Glenn Hinson said that the late Willie Trice, who was also part of Fuller's circle, used to talk about Council a lot.

"Trice said that in his day, Council was a very fluent musician whose picking was sharp, clean and fast," Hinson said. "So Council had a reputation among other blues guitarists in the area. He was one of the local luminaries, very much a player in Chapel Hill."

Given Pink Floyd's Hall of Fame stature, it's easy to imagine fans making pilgrimages to Council's grave. But there's just one problem. No one knows exactly where that grave is in the 23-acre White Oak AME Zion Cemetery, although McGhee has a pretty good idea. He has it narrowed down to a plot of land in a forest of large trees that have grown up over the past three decades since Council was buried.

"His wife preceded him in death and has a marker," McGhee said. "I knew he'd be in an unmarked grave, but I did not expect a forest to contend with."

McGhee was complaining about this sad state of affairs to Josh Preslar of the Triangle Blues Society - who asked why he didn't do something about it himself. So McGhee did. He tracked down Floyd Council Jr., a retired truck driver living in Sanford, and they started making plans.

"His son told me, 'If you can find my mom's gravestone, I know from there where my dad is buried,' " McGhee said. "There's some trees to knock down to do that. And his son also knows the man who dug the grave. So the trick is to do that, walk in with Floyd Jr. and the gravedigger and find the spot. It will take clearing a few acres' worth of lumber to do it right. We'll probably do that in a few weeks, after the poison ivy has frozen off and the snakes are gone."

It's an ambitious project that will take a lot of money to pull off. So McGhee is working with the Questell Foundation (a local nonprofit organization that provides support to aging blues musicians) to raise $20,000 to go toward cleaning up that part of the cemetery and buying a suitable monument. If enough money is left over, McGhee would also like to start a Floyd Council Blues Festival either in Sanford or the Triangle.

There are two fundraising tribute albums, "Pink and Mr. Floyd" and "Blues Under the Bottle Tree," featuring covers of Council and Anderson songs plus other Piedmont blues standards. McGhee, Tad Walters and John Dee Holeman appear on the records, and they'll also play Thursday at Raleigh's Amplified Art Gallery.

Thursday's show is the first of a number of fundraising events for the Council project. Along with music, it will feature various blues-inspired artworks by artists including Tim Lee, Amplified owner Ryan Miller and others.

Meantime, McGhee will continue his blues sleuthing. Even though the Council project is taking up most of his time lately, he's still out there looking for details.

"That's the problem with being a historian, you always wanna fill in all the gaps," McGhee said. "It can be dangerous. I've turned into a total blues nerd in my old age. But there are plenty of mysteries out there to unravel. This is just one of them."

Menconi: 919-829-4759 or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat

We officially started fundraising for the Project on December First.  There'll be blues-related art hanging at Amplified Art, 325 Blake Street, Raleigh, until January 13th.  So far, the show's raised about a thousand dollars.  We have great artists and photographers.

Phil Blank, who is one of my favorite artists, local or otherwise, has a bunch of pieces in the show, including one of my favorite pieces of his, a portrait of Elizabeth Cotten.  I love his work and am proud and privileged that he agreed to part of the show.

Hannah Pearce has a bunch of pieces in the show.  This is a photo of John D. Holeman she took at Osceola Studio in Raleigh.  She is my one of my favorite photographers...

Dave Brainard's work is the anchor of the show and it's selling like hotcakes.  He took this picture of Boo Hanks and Tad Walters playing at the opening.  The space just beyond Boo's head is currently occupied by a piece Jeff Magner put together from the parts of an 1870's piano - he took the felt hammers out of the piano and arranged them like musical notes on a giant slab of soapstone to make the musical notation from Floyd's Poor and Ain't Got a Dime.

Tim Lee's piece sold before Ryan Miller could get the price tacked up on the wall next to it.  I envy him the way he sees colour.  I wish I could paint like he does...

I have several pieces in the show too, like this drawing I did of Furry Lewis a few years ago.  Strictly speaking, I dunno that Furry's a Piedmont guy, but I love his playing and he sure took a fine photograph...
    You can see the show at Amplified Art until January 13th.  Come on down and get you some awesome art...look until your eyeballs are full...

 

Buddy Guy signed a pick guard for me at the Bull Durham Blues Festival.  We'll screw it down on a Strat and sell it on the IndieGoGo to raise money to clear up all the brush and trees in the White Oak A.M.E. Cemetery down there in Sanford where Floyd's buried...

Dave Brainard took this photo of Floyd Council Jr. at Floyd's home in Sanford, NC.

So I called up Floyd Council Jr.

He answered on the fourth ring...

"Um...this is kind of an odd phone call to come, you know, out of the blue and all, but I'm looking for a dead blues guitar player named Floyd Council and I was wondering if you were any relation to him at all..."

"He was my Deddy'" he said.  I could hear a deep and patient amusement in his voice.

"Do, uh, do you reckon I could come by and talk to you about your Deddy?"

"Come on," he said.  And we did...

     Floyd Council Jr. has a fine high sense of humour about the historical accident that caused Syd Barrett to name one of the most successful rock groups in history after his Dad and Pink Anderson - a man his Dad most likely never met.  He's a big man who laughs readily and eases through his sphere with smooth and precise movements that make his size seem less imposing but rather...comforting.

He's got a walking stick his Deddy used to carry.  Everything else is gone.  There are no family photos.  A female relative tracked down the Kip Lornell and the Pete Lowry photos of his Dad on the internet and printed them out for him (those are the only two photos I know of).  Another relative made him a cassette tape of the six commercial recordings Floyd made.  Everything was lost after his Dad died.  Floyd Jr. thinks a cousin of his Dad's who was bad to drink probably carted all of his possessions off to a pawnshop on the afternoon his Dad died and pawned it all.  It makes me like him, you know...and feel a kind of orphan kinship.  After Katrina, the thing I missed most terribly and regretted most having lost to the storm were the postcards my own Dad sent home to my Grandparents from the army.  I missed his spidery handwriting and his homesickness and his sense of duty and his affection for his Mom and Dad.  I missed the faded and dog-eared pictures of Germany and his certainty that the alpine foothills in Bavaria were nice enough but couldn't hold a candle to Seneca Rock or East River Mountain or Spruce Knob...

Floyd and his Dad were both over the road truck drivers.  Both men play(ed) the guitar.  Floyd Jr. plays the guitar in his church.  In fact, he got his guitar and his amp out and insisted we play for him.  Standing in his driveway, he best remembered his Dad's lyric about:

I'm gonna get me a razor, a knife and a blue steel gun
I'm gonna get me a razor a knife, and a blue steel gun
Gonna cut you if you stand...shoot you if you run.

So, sitting in his living room I played his Dad's song Runaway Man.  That's where that verse comes from...it was kind of quiet after I got done and then Floyd Council Jr. laughed and shook his head and said, "Man, times sure was different back then, wasn't they?"

Yeah...I was on WUNC talking about Floyd on his birthday.  The State of Things with Frank Stasio is the secret dignity graveyard where my credibility goes to die.  He started off the show talking about the hundredth anniversary of Floyd's birth and I said, "Gee, I hate to say this, but..." and then went on to talk about how this was actually the thirty-fifth anniversary of his death rather than the hundredth anniversary of his birth...

Of course I was wrong.  Frank has an army of interns and fact-checkers.  I have a copy of Floyd's death certificate which I didn't bother to check...I did, however, manage to misread my own handwritten notes on my way into the studio...

Makes me think of the time I was in the public library down in Sanford pulling Floyd's obituary up on the microfiche machine.  My buddy Eric Manning, a fine musician and song-writer in his own right, came into the room there and asked me if Floyd had any kids...

"Naw," I said, "I reckon Pearl died first and it seems to me from reading the Bastin that he died childless and alone" (Bruce Bastin is innocent in all this).

He flipped the Sanford, North Carolina directory from 1974 around and stabbed one of the pages with his index finger.

"Then who do you reckon Floyd Council Jr. is?"

Well, I dunno, let's call him and find out...

And here we are...

You can listen to the show HERE.