Thursday, March 1, 2007

Back in the '40s, when bluesman Jimmy McCracklin first hit town after mustering out of the Navy, Richmond was booming. Shipyard work more than doubled the city's population during World War II and North Richmond was crawling with gin mills and juke joints and that's where the blues lived.

McCracklin, still an ox of a man at 85, lives in a fine house in one of Richmond's remaining nice neighborhoods a few blocks from the massive Hilltop Mall that helped destroy the city's downtown.

"It's not what it used to be," McCracklin says. "It's a whole different ball game. All people care about is shooting, killing, stuff like that."

McCracklin is a very proud man, with good reason to be. Over a career that has spanned seven decades, he says he's written almost a thousand songs and has recorded hundreds of them. He was a contemporary and peer of the greats of his generation, and all of them except B.B. King are dead and gone now.

The top of his piano is littered with awards, plaques and the keys to a couple of cities. Framed photos and memorabilia adorn the mantelpiece, under a painting of his daughter Susie, who lives with McCracklin and his wife of 52 years, Beulah, along with her 14 year-old son, James, McCracklin's 300-pound grandson ("He's a whopper," says his granddad).

McCracklin has written out a list of the performers he has appeared with over the years, printed in careful handwriting on two paper towels, and it is virtual who's who of the blues and R&B world of the '50s and early '60s. He pulls a briefcase out of the front hall closet and extracts a dog-eared computer printout of music publishing information from his massive song catalog. He also fans out a handful of sealed, self-addressed stamped envelopes, sent to himself over the years, a well-known poor man's way of copyrighting songs. The earliest bears a 1948 postmark.

"Once I got to the position where I learned more about how to protect my material, we started going in a different direction," he says.

McCracklin towered over the Oakland and Richmond blues scene in the sunny days that followed the Second World War. Along with Lowell Fulson, who left the Bay Area shortly after he became successful, McCracklin was the biggest name to ever emerge from the Oakland blues scene. His 1958 record, "The Walk," actually landed him in the Top 10 on the pop charts, after more than 10 years of selling records in the black community on a series of small labels.

Somehow, McCracklin got passed over by the blues revival. As the blues went out of fashion in the African American community, McCracklin evolved his music into a tougher, more modern big-band R&B sound. By the time the white audience for the music developed, McCracklin's music was too refined for the tastes of the new audience and an anachronism with his old audience. He slowly faded away through the '70s and '80s, his obscurity only interrupted by a pair of albums he was loath to call comebacks -- "I never went anywhere," he says -- in the early '90s for the Boston-based blues revivalists at Rounder Records.

Lisa Walters of E.U. Booking in Corte Madera, a boutique agency that specializes in older blues and R&B performers such as the late Ruth Brown, started working with McCracklin two years ago. He didn't have a regular band and hadn't been working much.

"He hadn't played in a long time," she says. "Maybe a festival here and there, but it had been quite a while."

Now McCracklin sports a well-rehearsed nine-piece band with three background vocalists led by his daughter, Susie. He has been playing European festival dates in the summer and already has performances lined up this year in Italy.

He was born in Arkansas in 1921, a date he disputes by 10 years, even though that would make him 14 years old when he first recorded. "They got that wrong, too," McCracklin says. His father was a good friend of the noted '30s barrelhouse pianist Walter Davis from St. Louis, where McCracklin grew up, and McCracklin's early records show him to be a studied disciple of Davis' strong style.

He made his first record, "Miss Mattie Left Me," for the Globe label in Los Angeles in 1945. Two years later in Oakland, he began a mutually antagonistic relationship with record producer Bob Geddins that would last on and off over the next two decades. Geddins, who also made Fulson's first records, was a key figure in the Oakland blues scene, a pioneer even more forgotten than McCracklin these days. Geddins died in 1991 at age 78.

Geddins recorded blues and gospel records around the East Bay on a variety of his own labels, leasing the recordings to larger, national labels if he found some success locally. "All Bob Geddins wanted to do was get two, three hundred dollars in his pocket," McCracklin says. "After that, he didn't care about nothing."

McCracklin recorded "The Walk" with his own band in Chicago, where he found himself stranded, working a dead end gig for pocket change, and took the tape to Chess Records, who released the single. The hit not only had McCracklin rubbing shoulders with the "American Bandstand" set for a brief moment, but blues guitarist Freddy King retooled the song's key lick for his 1961 instrumental hit, "Hide Away."

Years later, the Beatles cut the song as "When Ya Walk" during the "Get Back" sessions, although it never surfaced anywhere except bootlegs. But that didn't stop Christian singer Steven Curtis Chapman from covering the Beatles version on a recent album.

In 1962, following Geddins' strategy, McCracklin recorded "Just Got to Know" for his own Art-Tone label in Oakland and, after the record made No. 2 on the R&B charts in 1961, he leased the master to Imperial Records, where he continued his recording career for a number of years. In 1971, his star dimmed, he cut one last legitimate album for the Memphis soul company, Stax/Volt, although the album barely registered at the time.

McCracklin prides himself on his songwriting. He is a fine pianist and can shout the blues with the best of them, but it is his songcraft that makes McCracklin stand out.

"I was a helluva writer when I was young 'cause I could think better," he says.

His biggest success in the songwriting field came with his song "Tramp," a number he never recorded himself, originally done by Fulson in 1967 and covered the same year by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, a version that hit the pop charts. Salt-N-Pepa made a hip-hop hit out of the song in 1987. Although Fulson is credited as co-writer of the song, McCracklin said he had nothing to do with the songwriting.

"He was a helluva singer, but he never was a good writer," McCracklin says of Fulson, who died in 1999 at age 77.

McCracklin also maintains that he is the true author of "The Thrill Is Gone," the 1969 hit by B.B. King, perhaps one of the best-selling blues records of all time, which was originally recorded by little-known Oakland blues pianist Roy Hawkins. Hawkins, who also recorded for Geddins and worked the scene at the same time as McCracklin, had a Top 10 R&B hit with the song in 1951. In a 12-minute film made last year for the Regional Oral History Office of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, McCracklin visits B.B. King at a casino appearance and the two laugh in the back of King's bus about McCracklin's assertion that he wrote the song.

Rick Darnell, the credited writer of the song, doesn't think McCracklin is funny. "He didn't write a single word of it," Darnell says by phone from his home in Farmville, Va.

Darnell was 22, with songs recorded by Billie Holliday and Charles Brown when, following a performance at Los Angeles' Lincoln Theater, he went back to Hawkins' hotel room where, he says, he wrote the song and its flip side, "Trouble Makin' Woman." Hawkins died in obscurity in the early '70s without ever giving an interview to any blues scholar on the subject. He remains virtually unknown to this day, although jazz great John Handy began his career in Hawkins' band.

McCracklin has a fondness for telling tales. On his mantel there is a frame containing two separate Xerox photos: One looks like McCracklin in boxing trunks and gloves; the other shows light heavyweight champ Archie Moore getting up off the canvas. McCracklin says he fought under the name Jimmy Mackey and lost a decision to Moore, although he knocked him down in the fight.

The only thing is, there is no record of the great Moore ever having fought either Jimmy Mackey or McCracklin. In fact, there is no record of either McCracklin or Mackey fighting anybody in the records kept by the International Boxing Research Organization, although his pugilistic past has been a part of the McCracklin legend since at least the '50s.

Who knows? Maybe he did write "The Thrill Is Gone." One of those sealed, postmarked self-addressed envelopes in his front hall closet says "The Thrill Is Gone" on the outside. But whether he did or not, McCracklin remains the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Oakland blues.