Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 201; Larry Nager interview with Wallace Coleman, part 1 of 10

Q:

LARRY: There’s a... there’s a classic story in the blue’s. It’s... it’s the migration story in blues where, you know, that y—rural southern blacks move north for, you know, better opportunities, and that usually is mu—uh, rural southern blacks from Mississippi, Arkansas, the Delta area who moved to St. Louis or move up to Chicago. Uh, Wallace Coleman’s story’s different than that, in that he grew up in East Tennessee. And that’s the land of the Smokey Mountains, moonshine stills, banjo’s, fiddles, Dolly Parton, that kind of background. And that really is kind of the background he grew up in. He grew up among country music. And uh, you know, the Grand Ole Opry coming in on the radio on Saturday nights and just the... the local folks playing barn dances and that kind of thing. And it were black and white musicians doing it. This—it wasn’t exclusively white. There were a lot of great black string bands and most of the fiddle tunes we know, many of the American fiddle tunes came out of uh, slave fiddle players. So, well you know, Wallace grew up and that was the tradition he grew up in. It wasn’t a really strictly a blues tradition. And even the blues players in that area w—had a tendency to be a little more uh, pop or country oriented. Carl Martin and uh, Howard Armstrong from the great Martin, Bogen, and Armstrong string band uh, players... there’s a man named Leslie Riddle who actually travelled with A.P. Carter and taught May Bell Carter the guitar arrangements for a lot of the songs that are country classics now, but he was... he was a black man from the Knoxville area. So, that’s where Wallace came from. And uh, he grew up—his first instrument was the harmonica and he discovered that listening to the radio uh, oddly enough from radio station WCKY out of uh, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky there was a... that’s when they sold everything from baby chicks to, well, you know uh, the Shroud of Turin prayer claw this and those kind of things on the radio. And one of the things that was sold was Wayne Raney and Lonnie Glossen, two great country harmonica players were partners and they sold magic harmonicas and they could make the harmonica say “mama”. So, when Wallace was just a kid he heard that and he had to have one. And his mama uh, Ella May uh, bought him his first harmonica. But that was his inspiration. Now... so that’s the first lightning bolt. The second lightning bolt was when he’s listening to that radio—and he had his own radio, which was a very, you know, his most precious possession... and Wallace is tuned in one late at night just... (PAUSED) So, the second lightning bolt was when Wallace was listening to his radio one night and it—it was his own radio, wasn’t the family radio. His mom had gotten him his own radio, and he was tuned to a new station, he heard this strange music playing and it was WLAC out of Nashville with the legendary John R. John Richberg was the uh, disc jockey, and he was playing blues. And that’s where Wallace heard little Walter... little Walter Jacobs on the Chess Records label out of Chicago. And, there was... he was the first really great electric harmonica player. You know, uh, before that, harmonica was played straight through a microphone or just loud enough in the room. We started seeing the electrification of the harmonica after World War II. Probably, one of the first uh, g—really great ones was Sonny Boy Williamson the II, out of Helena, Arkansas and he had a sh—radio show called King Biscuit Time, so he did a lot to popularize the electric music. Now, the electric harmonica was a unique instrument, in that, it was played through a, a cheap microphone and an amplifier. The combination of that gave it a... a musically pleasant but very distorted sound... made the harmonica much bigger and, and gave it a sound uh, well, the Mississippi saxophone was one of the nicknames for the harmonica and it really gave it uh, like an over driven tenor sax, kind of, tone to it. Sonny boy was starting to, you know, some of that was in his music, but Walter was... was the genius, little Walter and his records like Juke were hits on the jukeboxes and was cutting edge, popular music in the uh, early 1950’s when uh, Wallace was introduced to that. And that’s what he wanted to do, that’s how he wanted to play. So uh, he didn’t entertain uh, the idea of a... it—career in music at that point, you know, he wanted a good job. So, he looked around uh, east Tennessee and there wasn’t much for a young black guy. And he went down to Alabama huntin—trying to hunt up some work... nothing happened there. So, he came home. Meanwhile, his mom had remarried and moved to uh, Cleveland, so Wallace saw this as a good opportunity and he went up there looking for work. He found a really good job in a bakery. He was a maintenance man in the Huff Bakery, which is one of the famous Cleveland bakeries. And, anybody who lives in Cleveland knows...knows Huff. And so uh, and he kept that job for over thirty years. He—he kept it until he got retirement, good union job... got a pension and did not really pursue the music, although, he was still playing for fun. He also was uh... one of the places he lived... he lived in an apartment over a jazz club in Cleveland owned by Don King. And, at this point, the late fifties... early sixties, that, of course, is Don King the fighting uh, boxing promoter uh, but at—at—at—at the time when Wallace was living in—over this jazz club uh... jazz was popular music. There was the great organ trios, it was very bluesy, people like, you know uh, Jimmy McGriff uh, Jimmy Smith, uh, just uh, a great, very rootsie uh, sound. So uh, Wallace got to hear all these guys in the club and that uh, influenced his playing as well. And, he also got to hear Sonny Boy Williamson who, who—for some reason, had relocated to Cleveland. Up—there was a band leader there who asked him to come and he—and Sonny Boy had a standing gig. And Sonny Boy brought his guitar player from King Biscuit Time uh, who had also moved to Chicago and then moved to Cleveland from there and uh, had been a session man on Chess Records and that was Robert Junior Lockwood, the stepson of Robert Johnson. So, Wallace got to know these guys in—in the clubs there. But again, he wasn’t playing out. He might sit in, but everything was done very, very casually. He starting doing this again in the uh, in the early eighties and that’s when he and uh, Rob— er—Sonny Boy was long gone at that point, but Robert Lockwood and Wallace really kind of bonded. There was a chemistry there. And, Robert was trying to get Wallace to join his band. But, Wallace wasn’t gonna give up his job in the last few years. He...he... he saw that pension coming and it was... it was a good steady gig. But, wha—uh, on his retirement uh, he—a few months later, he contacted Robert Lockwood. Now, the fact that Lockwood would invite Wallace Coleman to play in his band, I think, is really important part of—of Wallace’s story, because uh, Lockwood was notorious as a very tough and very demanding band leader. In the fifties he had played with the best harmonica players. He had accompanied Sonny Boy Williamson and Little Walter on their records, so for him to hire another harmonica player is sort of like you’ve be— you’ve been driving a Rolls Royse you don’t get, you know, a, a, a little red wagon after that. And that would have been the equivalent for uh... for... for Robert Lockwood. But, he heard something in Wallace that made... that is... and I say Wallace has the for T’s... and that is technique, tone, uh, (PAUSED)