Little Jimmie played his 75th birthday at another of those ramshackle clubs which any other city’s fire department, police department or other bureaucratic nanny would close down. Little Jimmie’s a compelling blues guitarist and singer. Depending on your taste, he may lack the,charisma of some of the late greats but he is a direct link to an earlier era and the ‘authentic blues.’
Quite what authentic blues are, I’m not sure. Robert Johnson, certainly, but there are people who will tell you that once Muddy Waters invented electricity, he surrendered his authenticity. Most of those aficionados will be white and on the earnest side because blues, like jazz, does not have much of a Black following. Perhaps that’s why Little Jimmie’s band was all white, the drummer looking as though he’d be more at home in a country western setting; the harmonica lank haired and ineffably sad of expression; the bass player young, tubby, curly haired and apparently in charge of the play list. The set up reminded me of a Chuck Berry tour. One of the three or four fathers of rock, Chuck traveled solo and picked up usually white musicians at his various venues.
Little Jimmie’s audience in this fire-trap music bar was almost exclusively white and jigging enthusiastically in that somewhat spastic style which may have something to do with following the lead guitar or melody rather than the rhythm; or having no feel for on- and off-beat. It’s an intrusive and fundamentally uncool movement which doesn’t quite gybe with electric blues and tends to spill beer on adjacent patrons. If this reads like the classic ‘they’ can dance and we can’t – and therefore just another racial stereotype – there are reasons for stereotypes and anyone who cannot see that, as a generality, there is a big gulf between black and white dancing is either blind or terminally infected with political correctness.
Listening to Little Jimmie was another wonderful New Orleans night for me but I have to say that something just did not feel right and, without being able to put my finger on it, I believe that something is race-connected. Perhaps Rockets was organic where Little Jimmie’s night was constructed. One was life, the other a show.