The blues is in his blood
Pearl Street player William Maxwell finds joy in music
Daily Camera, Boulder Colorado
By Greg Glasgow (Contact)
Sunday, November 26, 2006
“Do you take requests, sir?,” asks the young man with an armload of vinyl records.
“I don’t know if I know anything,” comes the reply.
“How about some Bo Diddley?”
“I really don’t know his tunes, but I’m gonna play some blues for you. How about some T-Bone Walker? You like ‘Stormy Monday’?”
And with that, William Maxwell lays into his hollow-body guitar, coaxing a timeless progression through his battery-powered Crate amplifier as his raspy voice, full of soul, fills the air on the 1000 block of Pearl Street.
Maxwell, 69, lives at the Samaritan House shelter in Denver, but when the weather is nice he takes the bus to Boulder to sit outside and play blues and jazz for passers-by. His favorite spot is just outside the Daily Camera building, across from Juanita’s (where he stops in for a glass of apple juice on a regular basis) and the Kitchen.
“If it’s warm anywhere and I can make pretty decent money playing in the street, I would rather do that and be on my guitar than to be waiting tables or bar-backing, because I’m getting money and I’m enjoying what I’m doing,” Maxwell says. “I meet different people, and it makes me feel good playing.”
In Denver, he plays at clubs such as Herb’s and Kokopelli’s, but he says playing on the street in Boulder, he can make between $100 and $200 per day.
Born in Lexington, Ga., Maxwell grew up in a poor family for which music was a primary source of entertainment.
“When I grew up, that’s about all we had, besides work, was the blues,” he says. “We’d go to a little place called the juke joint on the weekend. It had sawdust on the floor, and sometimes they’d have a harmonica player and a guitar player. ... We had a jukebox with some good blues on it, and we danced to that.
“You didn’t have much, but you appreciated it. That’s why so much feeling is into (the music). It was something that you really treasured, and it’s something that really made your life feel better.”
From 1952 to 1960, Maxwell served in the Army, where he hung out around the band room and got some tips from Army musicians. When he got out of the service, he studied with a couple of well-known jazz guitarists, including Stacy McKee, of Les Brown’s band. He learned jazz standards, like “Misty” and “Take The A Train,” but he also continued with his first love, the blues, learning songs by heroes like B.B. King, Charles Brown and Ray Charles. He says he spent time in Brown’s band as well as in Charles’, where he was a fill-in guitar player.
“I love to play the blues. It’s something that’s part of my life, being raised up in the South and through depression and trials and tribulations,” Maxwell says. “It’s like a therapy to me.”
Blues fan Louise Martorano, manager of Bart’s CD Cellar, says Maxwell is the only Boulder street performer she’ll tip. She says she appreciates the musician’s authentic style.
“I feel like he’s the only one with soul on the mall,” Martorano says. “He plays pretty simple 12-bar blues stuff, but he’s there with his amp — he reminds me of B.B. King in some ways, but more slowed down, more mellow.”
Maxwell’s Army days are far behind him now, but his time in the service continues to be a benefit. The Department of Veterans Affairs has helped pay for treatment for the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2003; he says he’s in Denver now to get some work done on his teeth, which were destroyed by the chemotherapy.
Last year, he says, he recorded a blues CD in North Carolina through a government program that helps musicians who have fallen on hard times.
“I thank the Lord I was in the Army, because if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be able to survive through none of these hard trials and tribulations with my health I’ve had, because I couldn’t afford none of the stuff that was given to me by the United States government,” says Maxwell, who has two children living in California.
The last two years, Maxwell has spent his summers in Colorado and his winters in Florida. He says he’ll be heading back to Florida soon. He wants to be there in time for the Super Bowl, which happens Feb. 4 in Miami, and for a big annual art show in December. Both mean lots of tourists — and potentially lots of money for street musicians like Maxwell.
In Florida, Maxwell has plans to wed his longtime girlfriend. If time — and his health — permits, he may even try to go back to Portugal and Spain, where he performed in his younger days.
“You can’t predict what life will bring you,” he says. “We’re not in control of that; the Lord is. We pray every day that things will be all right and come out better, but you never know what hard trials and tribulations or what good’s going to happen in life. You have to take one day at a time and hope and pray that everything will be all right.”
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Melvin Taylor (born March 13, 1959 in Jackson, Mississippi, United States) is an American electric blues guitarist, based in Chicago, Illinois.
Born in Mississippi, Taylor relocated to Chicago in 1962.
In his adolescence, Taylor joined The Transistors, a band managed by his future father-in-law, playing popular music of the 1970s at talent shows and nightclubs. After the Transistors broke up in the early 1980s, Taylor devoted his attention to playing blues in the Chicago's West Side clubs.
During the 1980s he joined Pinetop Perkins and The Legendary Blues Band in a year long European tour, and since the late 1980s he has been making regular tours of Europe with his own group, where they have opened for B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Santana.
Taylor's recordings include two songs he first recorded for a French record label: Blues on the Run, originally recorded in 1982, and 1984's Plays the Blues for You. Back in the US, Taylor signed to Evidence Music and entered the studio with John Snyder to record Melvin Taylor and the Slack Band, which showcased his original songwriting. He returned in late 1996 to record his second US album, Dirty Pool. Taylor's debut remains the Evidence label's best-selling release.
Though his singing is relaxed, even sometimes conversational, his guitar improvisations have much of Jimi Hendrix's tightly curled strength.
He used to play regularly at Rosa's Lounge in Chicago. Taylor's most recent album, Beyond the Burning Guitar, was recorded in Misty Creek Studios in Fairfax, Virginia. He also recorded a cover of the Eminem song, "Love The Way You Lie" with the rapper, Matt Christian, at Misty Creek Studios.
Richard Arnold "Groove" Holmes (Camden, New Jersey, May 2, 1931 – St. Louis, Missouri, June 29, 1991) was an American jazz organist who performed in the hard bop and soul jazz genre. He is best known for his 1965 recording of "Misty", and is considered a precursor of acid jazz.
Holmes' first album, on Pacific Jazz with guest Ben Webster, was recorded in March 1961.
His sound was immediately recognizable in the upper register, but even more so because of his virtuosity in creating, undoubtedly, the most rapid, punctuating, and pulsating basslines of all the jazz organists.[citation needed]
Though he died at the age of 60, he established a recognition within the community of jazz organ giants of Jimmy Smith (The Sermon!), Brother Jack McDuff (A Real Good 'Un), Jimmy McGriff (I've Got a Woman).
He recorded many albums for Pacific Jazz, Prestige Records, Groove Merchant and Muse Records, many of which featured Houston Person.
Holmes died after a long struggle with prostate cancer, having performed his last concerts in a wheelchair. One of his last gigs was at the 1991 Chicago Blues Festival with his longtime friend, singer Jimmy Witherspoon. A year after his death, the Beastie Boys honoured Holmes by adding an organ-based instrumental track, Groove Holmes to their album Check Your Head.
