Bluesman wants to give another his due
- 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."
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