One of the greatest of the not-yet-famous players, Brother Yusef is from California.
With an exuberant, highly rhythmic beat and a wildly flailing slide, the dreadlocked brother chugs and stomps the blues with impassioned devotion.
Many lesser bluesman have hit big time, but this dedicated soul has mostly stayed at home, playing locally at Disney. Go figure.
He has 5 or so seemingly self-produced CDs out and he is an excellent slide player and fingerpicker, with a strong singing voice. Indeed, he sings wonderfully, which adds to the full, rich sound, which he likes to call “fatt-back”, a term not off target.
This guy has it all going, with real verve and spark. His renditions of the old classic blues are delivered with a funky, deep-roots style that will make anyone sit up and listen. Brother Yusef is ready for the big time and one hot player.
The countryblues.com caught up with the bard, whose legal name is Yusef Hopkins-Olaitan, speaking to him via phone from Altadena, California.
“ …A lot of people know what the blues is but a lot of people don’t or don’t care. Everywhere I go I just like to make it clear that, first of all, blues is not a sad music; it’s a music that was created by African Americans for the purpose of healing and seeking freedom, which should be obvious, but for some people it’s not. The cultural aspects of the music – it did such a good job doing the healing and freedom gets lost a lot of time. The creators of the music get lost in the fray. That’s my message whenever I go around performing and when I talk to people about it. That’s what I’d like people to understand about this music, because it means so much to me, especially as an Afro American man.
I was born in Bakersfield, but I was raised in LA – Altadena actually, because we moved out of Bakersfield in ’67. Then in ’69 we moved to Altadena, and I’ve been there since.
I have a few gigs locally here in Southern Cal. I play in places like Anaheim and LA and so forth, sometimes in San Diego. I’ll either do a festival from time to time or a blues dance event. Blues dancing actually, that’s a phenomenon, that’s basically social dancing. I do a lot of blues dancing across the country as well as overseas. I go to Korea quite a bit, because Korea has the biggest swing dancing in the world. Dancing events are basically when you have a weekend where they have workshops and they have lessons and they have DJs and they have live music, so it’s like a whole weekend, like a convention or even like a festival where people go to spend the whole weekend. It’s all about learning about the music and dancing to the music – or how to dance to the music. I play in Portland from time to time. I play in Seattle from time to time, in the Bay area – I’m working on trying to get myself out there more on the independent level.
The style of music I play is a style that I call “Fattback Blues.” Fatback of course is from the South, a flavor. Southern cooking with salt pork and all that kind of stuff. I grew up in the ‘70s and I grew up on funk music. It’s almost like a funk approach to blues where it’s just really edgy, hard core, really in your face – you think of James Brown, you think of Bootsie Collins, all that stuff – where the music is just really in your face – no holds barred. That’s the way I approach my music, especially as a solo artist.
When I’m playing I’m trying to preserve my cultural legacy as a black man, because unfortunately a lot of us Afro Americans do not play blues, because we tend to create styles and move on to the next style, then move on to the next style. I wanted to take my approach to this music and to put it with the blues. I want to try to keep it alive as much as I can, without being a museum piece. Museum pieces are what I call are artists who perform the music like old records. My style is very fresh, it’s very funky. Think about it like one foot in the past and one foot in the present.
There’s not enough of us black folks playing blues. Historically we created this style of music and we do not control the economic aspects of the music. Let’s just take Elvis Presley for instance – I know I’m jumping off on a heavy note when I talk about Elvis, but you know Sam Phillips says if you can find a white guy with a Negro feeling you can make a million dollars. That right there says a lot. Why can’t you just give the million dollars to the black guy? Well, we all know why: because of racism. So, in walks Elvis. Sam Phillips was not being racist. He was doing business, and he couldn’t sell Howlin’ Wolf and Ike Turner to his white audience. But he knew they liked the music. Elvis fit that bill. So he became the king of rock ‘n’ roll, which is an Afro American construct. Now, when I play for white audiences, my message is: “Hey, y’all, this is an Afro American art form.” Please understand and respect that. In a way, I feel like I’m educating white people with it too. The majority of the audiences that come to see me perform are white. And that’s fine too. I have no problem with that. I just think that we – as people in this society we just need to be able to understand all cultures My mission is just to play my part in healing the world. I’m just a simple kid from California just seeing the world a certain way, and it frightens me, and I just want to try to make it better – just like folks before have made it better for me.
I never got into the guitar because my folks wanted me to take piano lessons, which I did for a couple of years. When I finally got my guitar, I was 19 years old. I wanted to learn how to play reggae and funk. I wanted to learn how to play jazz. I figured if I am going to learn how to play all these genres of music I’m going to have to learn how to play the blues first, because I knew obviously that was the root of most American music, Afro American music. I took a few lessons, I bought blues records and books. I didn’t get very far in the books because I’m so dyslexic that wasn’t reaching me. I threw the books away. I listened to the music and just tried to find my own path. I started playing blues, and when I started playing other styles of music I noticed that people would think it was cool when I played a jazz line. I’d try to play a Wes Montgomery line, or I would try to play like a reggae riff or whatever. If played some blues for them they got really, really excited. I said, well, clearly this is where I belong. I like people to like what I’m doing, so I’m going to go ahead and do the blues… The gospel artist Andre Crouch had me over to his house and we’d hang out in the studio for a while. One time he had us all sing in the room. I was very reluctant about singing, because I said, “I don’t want to be a singer. I don’t think I can sing.” And he said, “Sing.” So I sang something, and he said, “You got a good voice.” And I said, “Really?” So that’s what set me on my path like, okay, I can do this. So, you know, I started getting better at guitar, playing blues, and I would actually practice singing. It wasn’t until I did my first blues performance at an open mic at a coffee house in Pasadena called the Espresso Bar that I actually sang blues in front of people. And once that happened – because everyone got so excited in the performance – I said, “This is what I’m doing!” I didn’t go full-time until I started performing at Downtown Disney.
I learned from records, yes. Records – Lightnin’ Hopkins or Hound Dog Taylor or John Lee Hooker and all that stuff.”
