BLIND ARVELLA GRAY

The Singing Drifter

Conjuroo Records

by Terry Abrahamson

          There were no names in marquee lights on Maxwell Street. To me, he woulda been just part of the atmosphere -- some guy I may or may not have heard on one of my trips down to Jewtown to buy boxes of socks and underwear at wholesale prices because somebody’s father ran a collection agency.

          Eventually, I did hear of him.  1971.  I was a college kid booking Blues bands when that name rolled off of Bruce Iglauer’s alligator tongue like it could’ve  pierced armor. “What do you know about Blind Arvella Gray?” Well, I knew that The Ghost of Blind Arvella Gray was the one Mark Twain let get away.  If it was scarin’ the bejesus out of me, imagine what it would have done to Tom and Huck!  And that was all I knew, all I wanted to know. So I buried that name where it could never hurt me: deep in the dark recesses of my mind. And there it sat. Waiting. Biding its time. For 44 years. Until last week. When I was asked to review a Blind Arvella Gray cd. 

          “Blind Arvella Gray!!!” 

photo:  by Tom Smith, 1978

          It was my Willie Best Moment: eyes big as banjos, mouth open wide enough to catch a fully-inflated football as that old ghost sailed forth from the darkness to the here-and-now of my consciousness like Vincent Price’s dead wife on the haunted house zipline. Somehow, I’d missed the release of David Wylie’s 1972 recording of  Blind Arvella’s only LP, which, amazingly, sold out its thousand platter run.  I also missed its 2005 reavailablization on cd.

          But this time, there was no place to run, no place to hide. I stood eye to eye with the re-release of Blind Arvella Gray: The Singing Drifter, complete with previously unreleased bonus tracks!  You might call it The Return of the Ghost of Blind Arvella Gray, although that’s a lot to squeeze onto a cd spine and still have room for Conjuroo Records, which is Cary Baker’s label. Every time Blind Arvella tried to escape from anonymity, Cary was the guy on the other side of the wall, behind the wheel with the motor running. That would include facilitating the ’72 session and re-releasing it now. And sure enough, ghostbuster Cary has scared up a gem of an American musical journey for all of us who’ve waited long enough to have our Blind Arvella Gray cherry popped.

          “The Singing Drifter” opens with “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One,” which sounds like it might be more at home around some campfire, sung by the “Well, I’ll be a blue-nose gopher” guy on Disney’s old Spin & Marty serial than leading off a cd reviewed in a Blues publication. The closest to the Blues “More Pretty Girls" could ever hope to get would be as somebody’s B-side to “Goodnight, Irene,” which wasn’t much more than a folk song sung by a few guys who we’d probably consider to be Blues singers.  But that’s the point.  Few of our musical heroes are Blues guys who only heard Blues guys who only heard Blues guys.  Bits and pieces of the non-Blues stuff is frequently - if not always - woven in.  The chances, however, to hear it in the big chunks served up by Arvella Gray are few...and fewer. Born in Texas in 1906, Arvella might actually have grown up around a cowpoke or two who had heard songs like this suddenly go silent as Liberty Valance entered the saloon, six-guns drawn.  It’s one of those indispensable spices snuck into the recipes that cooked up Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell.  And, under the right circumstances, had I heard Arvella tear into this one some Sunday morning on Maxwell Street, I’d’ve been breaking in those wholesale socks with a little Jewtown waltz.

          True to its title, “The Singing Drifter” immediately drifts into one pre-Blues style after another. Arvella’s “John Henry” is blistering and exhausting, hammering home all the history and hollers of the classic Appalachian folk song, and rockin’ that National guitar like...well, a steel-drivin’ man.

          “Arvella’s Work Song” is the first of two Texas work gang shouts that had me nodding to the pounding of the spikes that must have set the beat when these chants first rose from Southern fields. Again - all that history! Plus, you tell me I’m crazy to believe a line like:

Don’t tell me that infant didn’t walk barefoot across Texas, tiptoe through them Louisiana swamps and swim over to Vicksburg where it lodged in the subconscious of young Willie Dixon.

          “Take Your Burden to the Lord,” is our first window into the generously represented gospel side of Blind Arvella Gray -- a repertoire staple he shared with

Not-Totally-Blind Jim Brewer, also a Sunday morning Maxwell Street regular. Maybe it was Sunday that inspired all that choichy stuff. Whatever drew it out of him, the real value of Arvella’s gospel tracks are as representations of what the Blues standard bearers like Charlie Patton and Son House were hearing, and sharing with recordings like “I’m Goin’ Home” and “Jesus is a Mighty Good Leader.”

          The liner notes explain that the original LP recording of these tracks all happened on a single night during which Blind Arvella laid down everything he could. Since everyone involved that night was probably physically and emotionally decimated after the second track - “John Henry” - I’m assuming the order of tracks was not the order of recording.  But however it got there, it’s not until Track 7 that “Those Old Fashioned Alley Blues” gives us some something I’d call Blues, drifting from a post-laryngectomy yodel into a “St. Louis Blues” groove that was also a staple of Not-Totally-Blind Jim’s. And all that “not really the Blues” a-wailin’ and a-strummin’ that led up to it gives Arvella’s begrudgingly shared Blues morsels like this one a helluva lot more weight and facets than other contexts might have allowed.

          Another work gang shout, and it’s back on the Glory Train, to a seven track Hallelujah finish. But it’s a revival meeting heavy with musical trailers of the Country Blues blockbusters coming soon. And I’d be hard-pressed to point to three among these numbers that Blind Willie McTell couldn’t make his own. To quote the previously unreleased “Cryin’ Holy Unto the Lord”:

He laid the foundation, opened up the door,

What more could God do?

          That, Blues lovers, is the ticket! Layin’ the foundation! Opening the door!  Even without a follow-up, payin’-it-off album featuring a little Bukka White drone or a little Piedmont bounce or a little Skip James gunbarrel-in-the-mouth, this is a valuable and necessary addition to any Blues fan’s collection. It’s the prequel to thousands of records that didn’t just come from Robert Johnson or Lightnin’ Hopkins, but from a whole bunch of stuff that most of us never take the time to connect with the music we love. But it’s there, in so many tracks on all of our shelves. Thousands of Blues records haunted by The Ghost of Blind Arvella Gray.

To buy the CD, visit: www.conjuroo.com

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