Bman's Blues Report

Jesse Fuller was born in 1896 in Jonesboro, Georgia. He never knew his father and his mother gave him away to another family at the age of seven. He was beaten and starved, "treated worse than a dog" he said. When he was nine, living with a family named Wilson near Macedonia, Georgia, he showed his first musical interest when he constructed himself a mouth bow. "I made a bow like the Indians used to use and put some wax on the string," explained Fuller. "I put the bow in my mouth and pick the string and it sounded like a jew's-harp. I don't know how the idea ever came into my head." By the age of ten, he had also built a crude guitar and was learning to play songs from various musicians at Saturday night dances that he managed to sneak into. Jesse Fuller died on January 30, 1976 in Oakland. By the start of the 1980s, though folk artists still included some of his songs in their repertoire, little of Jesse's recorded work was still available. A ...

Jesse Fuller (March 12, 1896 — January 29, 1976) was an American one-man band musician, best known for his song "San Francisco Bay Blues" Fuller was born in Jonesboro, Georgia, near Atlanta. He was sent by his mother to live with foster parents when he was a young child, in a rural setting where he was badly mistreated. Growing up, he worked a multitude of jobs: grazing cows for ten cents a day, working in a barrel factory, a broom factory, a rock quarry, on a railroad and a streetcar company, shining shoes, and even peddling hand-carved wooden snakes. He came west and in the 1920s worked briefly as a film extra in The Thief of Bagdad and East of Suez. Eventually he settled in Oakland, California, across the bay from San Francisco, where he worked for the Southern Pacific railroad. During World War II, he worked as a shipyard welder, but when the war ended he found it increasingly difficult to find work. Around the early 1950s, Fuller's thoughts turned toward the possibil...