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| Floyd Council's Death Certificate - Stolen from the good people who run the Dead Blues Guys website |
Hold your arms out in front of you, bend your elbows a little and touch your fingertips together to make a circle. There are trees that big around growing up out of the middle of some of the graves in the White Oak A.M.E. church cemetery down in Sanford, North Carolina. Floyd Council is buried in an unmarked grave in that cemetery.
Blind Boy Fuller only ever let two guitar players back him on his recordings: Gary Davis and Floyd Council. Gary went on to make hundreds of recordings. Floyd only ever recorded six commercial sides by himself. He appeared as accompanist on fifteen of Fuller's commercial recordings. Long after he'd had a series of strokes he recorded six songs in his home for, I think, Pete Lowry's Trix label, though they apparently weren't worth releasing - twenty...uh...seven total recordings...twenty-one recorded in his prime.
Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 2, 1911. He lived around Chapel Hill most of his life. He was a truck driver. He played with the Strowd Brothers - they called themselves the Chapel Hillbillies. Record companies promoted him as "the Devil's Daddy-In-Law" and "Dipper Boy." His earliest recordings were released under the name "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy." All of those were record company gimmicks. He was called "Mr. Floyd" locally and though strokes started slowing him down in the sixties and had rendered him effectively unable to play by 1970 he was considered until the end of his life one of the finest guitar players in the Piedmont. He died in Sanford, NC. on May 9, 1976.
I am annoyed that he's lying in an unmarked grave.
So this is what I’ve decided to do about it...
Blind Boy Fuller only ever let two guitar players back him on his recordings: Gary Davis and Floyd Council. Gary went on to make hundreds of recordings. Floyd only ever recorded six commercial sides by himself. He appeared as accompanist on fifteen of Fuller's commercial recordings. Long after he'd had a series of strokes he recorded six songs in his home for, I think, Pete Lowry's Trix label, though they apparently weren't worth releasing - twenty...uh...seven total recordings...twenty-one recorded in his prime.
Floyd Council was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on September 2, 1911. He lived around Chapel Hill most of his life. He was a truck driver. He played with the Strowd Brothers - they called themselves the Chapel Hillbillies. Record companies promoted him as "the Devil's Daddy-In-Law" and "Dipper Boy." His earliest recordings were released under the name "Blind Boy Fuller's Buddy." All of those were record company gimmicks. He was called "Mr. Floyd" locally and though strokes started slowing him down in the sixties and had rendered him effectively unable to play by 1970 he was considered until the end of his life one of the finest guitar players in the Piedmont. He died in Sanford, NC. on May 9, 1976.
I am annoyed that he's lying in an unmarked grave.
So this is what I’ve decided to do about it...
This is the first entry in my blog about Floyd Council, the great and unheralded piedmont bluesman from Chapel Hill, NC. The Triangle Blues Society, the Questell Foundation, Reverend Laura Brown of the White Oak A.M.E. Zion Church, Me, Tad Walters, Lightnin’ Wells, John D. Holeman and most of the radio stations with blues programming in the triangle have made up our minds to raise up enough money to clean up this cemetery, put a marker out there for Floyd and maintain the damned thing for future blues fans to find, see, enjoy and pay their respects to…
I’ve spent six months trying to figure out what specific patch of ground Floyd’s buried under down in Sanford and I’ll keep looking until I’ve turned over every rock, slid down every poison-oak-covered embankment, climbed every tree, swum every ocean (as the song says) and run out of places to look.
We’ll put some kind of memorial out there to Floyd one way or the other by the end of next year. To do that, we’re gonna need money. We auctioned off the enormous poster that hung outside of the Rialto Theater advertising the Nat Reese show this past June to a wonderful woman named Kim Pearce. She bid $200.00, won the auction and then turned around and donated the poster back to us so we could auction it off again. Buddy Guy signed a genuine Fender Stratocaster pick guard for us which we will be auctioning off in the near future. All the winner of that auction has to do is screw it down on the front of a genuine Stratocaster guitar and he’s the proud owner of a Buddy Guy hand-signed Strat. Alvin Youngblood Hart signed a poster from his recent show at the Berkeley Café which will be auctioned at some point and Cedric Burnside (this year’s Blues Music Award winner for best drummer) signed some sticks for us which have been raffled and should also appear in future auctions/raffles. The Questell Foundation pledged two hundred dollars. I’ve contributed some art work and designed a t-shirt with a drawing of Floyd and the legend “Get a Piece of the Rock.” Very droll, I know. Very soon there will be a link on the Triangle Blues Society’s website so you can buy those shirts from them – you could buy one from my Reverbnation page right now, but that’s a little creepy – I want you to know deep down in your heart of hearts that when you spend this money it’s going to Floyd’s memorial, so I want to get all that stuff off of my sites and onto the TBS’ site as soon as possible. Finally, disc jockeys at WNCU, WXDU, WFSU, WSHA and WKNC have generously agreed to contribute time on their radio shows for me, Tad Walters, Lightnin’ Wells and John Holeman to come on and talk about Floyd Council and play his songs – we’ll record these programs and take the Floyd Coucil and Pink Anderson tracks from them and release a little download-only-record on the internet…the name of the record, hilariously, will have something to do with Pink Floyd and we’ll use all the proceeds from those downloads to buy Floyd the best memorial we can afford.
We can do this together. We are a community of blues musicians and blues lovers and we should look out for our own. We are the Piedmont Blues and we should look out for our own. If you’d like to keep up with my quest to discover the precise location of Floyd Council in the White Oak A.M.E. cemetery, you can subscribe to my blog: Floyd Council’s Blues at http://floydcouncilblues.blogspot.com/ and you can always get more information through the TBS website at www.triangleblues.com.
Finally, I’d like to tell you a story.
In 1985, a smelly gutter punk rocker named Stevie Tombstone put together a swampabilly rock band and named it after himself: the Tombstones. After kicking around the scene for six or seven years and playing some big gigs with D.R.I., Stray Cats, Bad Brains et.al, Stevie got signed to Relativity Records. He took his up-front money from Relativity, bought a gravestone for Robert Johnson, loaded the stone and Robert’s friend and travelling companion, Johnny Shines up into his car and rode down to Greenwood, Mississippi where they placed the stone in the yard at the Payne Chapel Missionary Baptist Church near Quito, Mississippi. This was in 1991. Robert Johnson had lain in an unmarked grave since August of 1938. Stevie got knocked around a good bit in the press and people around Greenwood still talk about him and sneer at the audacity of what he did. When I visited the site in 1997, I was told that the band was from Sweden by someone who spat on the ground after he spoke their name…
That same year Columbia Records, still drunk from all the money and the Grammy award Robert earned for them, lo, those many years after his death put a hideous one-ton obelisk in the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church Cemetery in Morgan City, Mississippi. That’s gratitude…
Perhaps the most reputable site for Johnson’s grave is on Money Road at the Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church about two miles outside of Greenwood, Mississippi. This site is closest to the place where Robert died (at the Stars of the West Plantation) and there’s an eye witness. Rosie Eskridge was discovered by blues historian Steven LaVere. She asserts her husband “Peter Rabbit” dug the grave and buried Robert under a pecan tree in that cemetery. The Mississippi Blues Commission thought the evidence for this location was compelling enough to place their highway marker there…of course, it was promptly perforated with buckshot and subsequently stolen by rabid fans. Carrie H. Thompson, Robert’s sister, contributed a little scrap of paper with a prayer scrawled in Robert’s own handwriting which was faithfully reproduced in the stone that sets in this graveyard. It says:
Jesus of Nazareth. King of Jerusalem. I know that my redeemer liveth and that he will call me from the grave.
Floyd doesn’t need the mystique that comes from dying young and having three tombstones – he just needs one. Let’s get him one…working together instead of against each other…
If you have any information about Floyd Council – photographs, a diary, the phone number of his nearest relative, a guitar he played, an anecdote, story or recollection of him…let us know. If you have an idea about what his memorial should look like, let us know. If you want to organize a fundraiser to help Floyd’s Memorial Fund, let us know. If you want to buy something from us, participate in an auction or raffle, or make a donation, let us know. If you happen to know exactly where the Horton Funeral Home planted Floyd in his cardboard box coffin under that Potter’s Field outside of Sanford, let me know – I’d appreciate you…
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