“Blues from the Apple” was the “Living Blues.”

Blues from the Big Apple
We were never all that good at “working” the press, but between the two of us, Tom was definitely my better. He was an early, avid subscriber and supporter of “Living Blues,” Jim O’Neal’s and Amy Van Singel’s Chicago magazine homage to all that is contemporary in the blues, and he pushed them relentlessly to embrace his vision of New York as a comer in the community. This article was the result, and probably the best press we got on Blues from the Apple.

Here’s the entire text as it appeared in the Living Blues Autumn 1974 issue: 

Blues from the Big Apple
By Honest Tom Pomposello

“My name is Charles Walker. I am a 52 year old; I was born in Macon,  Georgia on July 26, 1922. My father was a blues player. His name was Freeman Walker, but everyone called him ‘Boweavil.’ 

“Guitar was inherited to me through my father. But my musical career started back in 1955. At that time I was playing in a club called Ben 29 in Newark, New Jersey. We had a three-piece band – a piano man by the name of Larry, a tub bass player caller Cooper, and myself. I had made a foot-clapper which played along with guitar and singing. We played there three nights a week: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I really enjoyed playing and the people enjoyed the music.”

“One of the bartenders there had a lady friend who lived in New York. He told her about the live music they had where he worked at. So when this lady came over to the club, she brought another girl friend. Her name was May McKay. After we finished playing that night, Miss McKay called me over to her table and asked me if I ever recorded? So I told her no. She told me that she managed groups and that she knew all the right people in New York and she could make me a star. She told me that I was wasting my talent playing and signing in these honky-tonk joints in Newark.

“So I talked it over with the piano player, and the tub player. They said they didn’t want no part of leaving their old ladies in Newark and moving over to New York. I told her what they said, and she said – ‘So he hell with them.  Backup men are a dime a dozen. I will get you a band to accompany you. I am interested in you and your guitar, and your voice.’ I told her OK, I would take a chance at it. And that as how I come to say goodbye to Newark, New Jersey, New York City here I come.

“When I came to New York, she got me a room in this hotel 125th and 5th Avenue. And she got me an audition at the Baby Grand Club, also on 125th Street. They had a house band there and they gave me some nice backup. So I got a booking at the Baby Grand, but as my luck would have it I never did make the booking, because when I went back to Newark to tell my friends the good news and, I wound up getting my jaw broken. (See, I was quite a ladies man in them days.) But I did recover quickly enough and when I finally got myself together to play again, I cut my first record, Driving Home Part I & II.

Charles Walker made his way recording debut for New York based Holiday label, which was owned and operated by Danny Robinson, brother and “competitor” of Fire/Fury Records owner Bobby Robinson. The record, released in the late 1956, did fairly well for the times. Robinson had a managed to secure airplay and distribution for his records partly because he was handling a hot R&B group called the Love Notes, who had hit it, big with a tune called United.

Driving Home was a two-part instrumental, not unlike Bill Doggett’s then popular Honky-Tonk. The label credit featured Maurice Simon on sax. The late DJ Jack Walter (no relation to Charles) of WLIB used the record of the in time for his morning show, “Wake Up New York” which was broadcast live from the Palm Café on 125th Street.

Although Charles was not to record again for another 3 years, he was working regularly and manages to put together a top-notch band “so I could sound as good live as I did on my records.” In 1959 the band he brought into Danny Robinson’s studio was a tight one. The resulting record, issued on the Vest label is perhaps Charles best known. It Ain’t Right* couples with the instrumental Charles Walker Slop* (featuring the harmonica of B. Brown). 

The band also included a young incredibly gifted pianist –composer named Lee Roy Little whom everyone affectionately called “Bluebird” in reference to his song of the same title.  B. Brown, the featured harmonica man is not to be confused with Buster Brown of Fire Records and Fannie Mae fame. It seems though that B. Brown (no one seems to recall his real name) adopted the pseudonym to cash in on the reputation and popularity of Buster Brown. And actually, their harp styles were not dissimilar. B even did a record called Fannie Mae is Back!)  Drummer Danny Q. Jones rounded out the group with Charles handling the guitar and most of the vocals.

But Charles also so the band in a different perspective: “You know, I always wanted to have an all-star blue band. Because Bluebird was a very good vocalist as well as piano player. And B. Brown and Danny Q could also hold their own on vocals.” 

In theory, this might have been an ideal arrangement, but in practice… “Everything was going fine,” recalls Charles “until each one made a record of their own. Then each one went out on their own and I was left alone.” But Charles is not the one to begrudge a fellow musician anything. And when Lee Roy and B. Brown wanted to cut records under their own names, Charles was more than willing to keep the band together for their sessions. In 1960 he even wrote the “A” side of Brown’s first record, Hard Workin’ Man*, which was backed with My Baby Left Me*. The Vest label credited “B Brown and his Rockin’ McVouts.” B. Brown recorded at least two other records and then left New York for the South. Charles believes he is still active musically in Tennessee.

Lee Roy Little on the other hand cut two records (and two only, as far as I know) for the Cee Jay label in NY (no connection with Carl Jones’s Chicago C.J. label). Charles played the guitar again on Lee’s first record, and both sides, were magnificent examples of bluesy New York R&B at the best: I’m a Good Man But A Poor Man* and Your Evil Thoughts*  (The second record, without Charles, was Hurry Baby, Please Come Home* and Let Me Go Home Whiskey).

Throughout this time Charles managed to stay busy and in 1963 he was again invited to record under his own name. Tommy Robinson (name coincidence again, since the man is no relation to Bobby or Danny Robinson) operated the Atlas/Angleton labels. He took Charles to a studio in the old CBS Building. Walker had put a new band together for the occasion, as he recalls: “I had a young boy named Bubba on piano, a drummer we called Peanuts, and Henry Copeland on bass.” The session yielded on record, Nervous Wreck/Down Heated Blues, but the band was a short-lived one. Nonetheless the record did well enough that the producer called Charles in again later that year. Studio Musicians were utilizes and the record issued was Wrong Kind of Woman, backed with Louise.

Around this time Walker also had a booking as the featured attraction out on Long Island in Huntington Station at the Colonial House. Located just South of the train station, the club was quiet a popular nightspot. Charles says, “My record was on the juke box, and people would wait for me to perform it on stage, live. They had a house band that backed me up but they could not play my song good enough. They didn’t sound nothing like my record.” No matter, for the Colonial House soon burned down. This combined with other musical frustrations, caused Charles to re-evaluate his life in music. “I decided I would give up show business because I was not getting the sound I wanted and I wasn’t making no progress. It seemed like people were losing interested in the blues and I couldn’t even keep a band together. So I sized up my life. I felt I didn’t do too bad. When came to N.Y. I didn’t have nothing. But now I had a wife, an account and a new car, so I decided to retire from music.”

But 1968, the day after Christmas, Teresa Harrison, the woman Charles was so attached to died. They had met in N.Y. in ’59, shortly after he had come to live in the city. They were married 3 years later and their lives was evidently quiet a happy one. Charles found it hard to carry on without her. “By 1970 I had lost home, money and everything, grieving over the loss of my wife. So I sold my furniture and decided to leave New York. And that’s when Mr. Bobby Robinson came into the picture with me.”

“Bobby told me he wanted to record me again. I told him it didn’t make no sense and that it wasn’t worth it. So he said to me, ‘Charles, you are ready to record now more than ever. People bought all those records you did before because you had style and you were a new face. But now you’re just like an old whiskey that’s been aged and now people who tasted you before are ready to taste again, and they’ll find how you’ve improved with age like that whiskey. Charles, I am going to be honest with you. Elmore James was my blues player when he was alive. But now he’s dead and gone, and I feel you are qualified to be next, I am very willing to invest my money in you, you see when you had your wife, your home, and your new car, show business was not something you took serious. But now you have lost everything and you’re really living with the blues everyday.’”

In 1971 Bobby produced one extended session with Charles and a band they together assembled which included Lee Roy Little on piano, Bobby King on drums, and Larry Johnson along with a bassist and a second guitarist. The proposed album never did materialize, but Robinson did issue a single on his reactivated Fury Label Rock Me Mama, and a new version of Charles original hit You Know It Ain’t Right. But Robinson, widely known for his guile as a producer/promo man, failed to do justice to his reputation. The record went virtually unnoticed except in his Harlem record shop and a few isolated Southern towns, where Bobby still has contracts “from the old days.” Robinson’s concept of “marketing a blues record” had not changed: he felt that he should sell almost exclusively to a black audience. While to a small extent Bobby probably realizes that much of today’s blues audience is young and white, he made no attempt to send review copies to Living Blues or Blues Unlimited for instance, nor to underground and college FM radio stations which regularly feature blues shows; but this is another matter.

Charles got another chance to record later that year for the P&P Label. Producer Peter Brown desire was to recreate a lot of music in the 50’s and update it for the 70’s. Charles assembled a band once again that featured drummer Bobby King, guitarist Bob Malenky and an astonishingly fine harp man, Bill Dicey, whom Charles had met playing in a bar and who had worked singles resulted from those sessions. Charles has a penchant for Muddy Waters-Little Walter material, and he cut a fine version of Forty Days and Forty Nights backed with My Babe.  The other record was credited to Bill Dicey, since he was featured up front on both sides, instrumentally on Juke and vocally on Hootchie Kootchie Man. Both Charles and Bill were more than displeased with this one. “They tried to make me sound like a 60-year old black man,” commented Bill. “They did all this weird rechanneling to my voice…. I did all I could to even prevent them from issuing the damn thing.” Both records, however, were “pick hits” in a December ’71 issue of Record World magazine. But this didn’t help either the records or the scene almost as sudden as he had originally appeared mysterious Peter Brown who vanished from the scene almost as suddenly as he had originally appeared.

Last year while talking with Larry Johnson, I asked him what had ever happened to all the old blues bands that used to abound in New York City. Larry admitted that New York blues had really gone underground, but that a lot of older bluesmen still got together from time to time and that “one man in particular, Charles Walker, he’s still tryin’ to hold a band together and he sometimes plays around town and in the bars around Harlem.”

I met Charles soon after, got to know and like him and had him up on my radio show a couple of times. Subsequently, we produced a couple of recording sessions for radio with very gratifying results.

Oblivion Records will be issuing Blues From the Apple: The Charles Walker New York City Blues Band this fall. Strangely enough this will be the first New York City urban blues band album in almost 15 years! Featured prominently along with Charles on the album are Lee Roy Little and Bill Dicey as well as many of Charles’s old (and new) cronies. This is a record we’re all quite enthused about, but no one so much as Charles, who says it best: “All I know is that I want the world to hear me now, cause I’m deeper in the blues now than I’ve ever been before.” 

*Song titles marked with an * in this article have been reissued by Flyright Records in England and, in the cases of Charles Walker and Lee Roy Little, royalties have been paid.

Living Blues Magazine
Chicago, Illinois 
Autumn 1974