Archie Edwards: Barbershop Blues

by Dr. Barry Lee Pearson

Archie Edwards describes his music as “good old country blues.” Although he owns an electric guitar and can play some “Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed” he prefers the acoustic sound of the 1920s and 1930s. Following a typical pattern, Archie played as a youngster, then put his music away for a while. However, he later began to play again and, motivated by the presence of John Hurt, he brought his music to the public. Now he is a mainstay on the Washington blues scene. Edwards and a handful of other performers, including John Cephas and Phil Wiggins, Flora Molton and John Jackson, are keeping East Coast country blues alive.

Archie was born in 1918 in Rocky Mount, Virginia, and grew up in a musical family back in the country around Union Hall, Virginia. His father was a major inspiration but the recordings of Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Hurt, Furry Lewis, and Buddy Moss provided his early repertoire. Archie is, in a sense, a blues historian and can interpret the songs and the styles of his early heroes. But he is also an extremely creative songwriter with a great talent for blending traditional material with his own ideas to produce a special brand of East Coast blues. His repertoire includes ballads such as Stagolee, Frankie and Johnny and John Henry which he learned from his father. He has many original compositions to his credit, several of which are available on his first album, Living Country Blues USA, Vol. 6: The Road is Rough and Rocky, produced by Siegfried Christmann and Axel Küstner in 1980 for the German L+R label (L+R 42.036). His only previous recording was a 45, The Circle Live Boat, backed by his tribute to John Hurt, The Road is Rough and Rocky. His association with and admiration for John Hurt has deeply influenced his life and Archie is dedicated to keeping John’s music and memory alive.

Archie has performed all over the D.C. area in concerts and at house parties. He has worked clubs like the Ontario Place, Childe Harold’s, and McGuire’s Tavern on Capitol Hill. He has performed at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife several times and has also been to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Hudson River Festival, the Maryland Folklife Festival and the Folklore Society for Greater Washington’s Annual Festival at Glen Echo. He recently toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival. I first met him in 1976 at the Maryland Festival when he was performing with the late Mother Scott. As impressive as his blues playing was then, it has improved and now includes Blind Lemon Jefferson and Jimmie Rodgers pieces played on the ukulele! He has also resurrected a slide guitar style he learned from his father.

Archie moved to Seat Pleasant in the 1950s. he has been a barber, a truck driver, cab driver and a special police officer. Recently he retired from government work and is now content to drive his cab and play music. He is available for bookings and can be reached through Barry Pearson, Folklore Archives, English Department, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

Archie’s words are taken from several interviews and taped conversations which took place in his barber shop, my home, and at the University of Maryland. The interview was edited by Archie and myself.

Archie Edwards: I was born in Franklin County, Virginia, a little place out in the country. I started playing the guitar when I was about seven years old, back in the country. My father played the guitar very well, and the harmonica – everything. He was really a harmonica player, Oh boy! And the five-string banjo – he’s whip a five-string banjo to death but he never did do anything with it.
So I got interested in it from his playing. There was no radios, televisions at that time and the only music we heard was someone playing a banjo or guitar every now and then.

How I got started, people would come to the house, sit down and jam. Pick the guitar, play the banjo, harmonica, all that stuff. He had some friends that played and on Saturday night back in those days people didn’t have nothin’ to do but walk five or 10 miles and come by his house, you know, eat dinner, drink whiskey, and play the guitar. My father had a buddy named Boyd Maddox who would do that quite often. Now he played real good guitar. So he would come to our house on Saturday night and stay till Monday morning sometimes. So one Saturday night in March, I reckon around the early ‘30s, I was a little child. So my father and this fellow were playing the guitar and my mother fixed dinner. So they put the guitar o the bed, you know in the country there, the bed was in the living room. So he put the guitar on the bed and we were all sitting around the fire tehre.

So there was one note that that man made on the guitar, one note ringing like crazy in my mind, in my head, you know. So in those days, you know, children were not supposed to touch anything that belonged to anyone else. If you did, you just got tore up. But this note that this guy had made on the guitar, it sounded so pretty and one mind told me, “If you can just get over there to that bed and make that note just one time real low, you’ll have it made. If I could make that one note I knew I would be able to play the guitar. I finally got the courage to sneak over there to the bed and I picked up the guitar and I made the note. That was the old Red River Blues but I think I dropped down a little too heavy with that and my daddy heard it, my father, he said, “Who in the world is that in there in the living room playing that guitar?” that man said, “Uncle Roy, that’s your boy playing that guitar.” Sure enough, it was Uncle Roy’s boy and Uncle Roy’s boy has been playing ever since.

So that’s when I started, when I was about six or seven years old. I started on what you call the old Red River Blues, but I didn’t get a whipping either and that’s one thing my father didn’t whip me for. Said, “Now, wait a minute, as young as he is he done made a note. I like that.”

My father was a sharecropper so I grew up on the farm. I didn’t pick any cotton ‘cause I grew up in Virginia but I did pluck a lot of tobacco. We grow tobacco, call it priming tobacco. Pick off about eight or 10 leaves. Rest of it, take a tobacco knife and whack it out, call it cuttin’ tobacco.

Then I started working at the sawmill when I wa about 16. I did a little sawmilling and a lot of farmworking, you know. And someone had guitars, you know. We had this little camp out there in the bushes, not too far from the sawmill, and we would go out into the woods and cut logs and haul them down to the mill and saw lumber all day.

At night we’d go back to the camp and we would sit around. Some of the boys would play poker and some would pitch horseshoes and do this and that. But I would sist around and pick the guitar and listen to other guys play. So I got to the point where I was pretty popular at the sawmill camp with the guitar. That was in ’36, ’37. In ’37 I left the sawmill and I worked for a doctor.

What style music did your father play?

My father used to play John Henry and Frankie and Johnny. Of course they had a different way of playing, play in Sebastapol, play with a slide, John Henry and Frankie and Johnny. That was my father’s favorite piece. I use a slide but I don’t call it no bottleneck. What I use is more up to date – I use a piece of blow down pipe off a hot water tank.

My father made corn liquor. Franklin County was the corn liquor capital of the world. We would carry wood for them when I was a young boy. They would give us some, a little bit, a half a gallon, a great big gallon and pretty soon we’d have two or three gallons of liquor saved up. Somebody come by there to buy some liquor, if my dad didn’t have any, well, we’d sell it to them. Get four or five dollars. We kept the spare change, buy new shoes or a shirt. Started off knowing how to handle it ‘cause we didn’t drink it, but I wish we had, cause that corn liqor was good, you know. My daddy, he made the best.

They had a little Gene Autry guitar cost five dollars. So me and my brothers had to get the money to selling moonshine, selling a little whiskey. Me and my brothers figured to get it together, that’s only a dollar and a quarter apiece, so we sent up there and got it brand new, guitar case, instruction book and everything, and, brother, we took off from there. Started off with a Gene Autry guitar back in the ‘30s.

I had learned to tune before that, but the Gene Autry five-dolar guitar was the first one that I ever really learned to play and carry it out and win the public with it.

I used to listen to Deford Bailey, you know. He was the guy who played Up the Country Blues and Muscle shoals Blues and he was from Tennessee. You know, he was one of the early famous stars of the early Nashville Grand Ole Opry.

And my sister bought an old record player and we started playin’ that old record player and listening to old blues like John Hurt and Blind Lemon. But my oldest brother would go to parties at night and he would pick up old recordings from anybody that he could get ‘em from, and bring ‘em home, you know. And we’d put ‘em on the old record player and we would listen to them. So my younger brother Robert – we would listen to the records and I would pick the guitar and if I’d make a mistake he would stop me and tell me where I made the mistake, and he would play and I’d listen and I’d correct him. So we both learned professionally at home before we was 14, 15 years old.

I got into it a little deeper than my father because he was never gifted enough to listen to the records, see, and get the chords from the record player and get the chords like the professionals play. Now I can listen to a record twice. I’ll play it just like the record like the artist played – like Blind Lemon, Frank Hutchinson, all those old-timey dudes, you know. And every time we get a hold of a record I’ll play it around three times and whip it out on the guitar.

About everything I play now is stuff that I heard as a kid, that is any old tunes that I play – of course, I wrote a few tunes of my own. But the old tunes – the old Kansas City Blues, Evil Eye Mama, Bearcat Mama Blues, and all that stuff, Blind Lemon, Blind Boy Fuller stuff, I heard this when I was a kid because it was stuff my daddy played.

Growing up in the country, now this is how I got a chance to be exposed to the public when I was about 12 or 13, my brother had an automobile. Back in those days your parents didn’t let you out until you were about 18. My brother had an old Model A Ford, he was about 19. So he’d go to a party and if there was nobody to play the guitar he’d come back home and ask my mother to let me go play the guitar. So I kind of enjoyed that because it gave me a chance to get out o in the public. So I’d jump out of bed, get dressed, grab my little guitar, jump in the car with my brother and go sit and pick the guitar for the rest of the night.

So most of the time I used to play for house parties but in those days people didn’t have much to pay you. About the only thing I got out of playing when I was a kid was a soda and a couple of pieces of hot fried chicken. At these house parties I wasn’t old enough to drink whiskey so the proprietor or whoever was in charge of the house party would always give me cold sodas and hot friend chicken, biscuits – very good. ‘Cause the people always keep a tub of ice, ice cold Pepsi-Colas, always frying hot fried chicken, baking those homemade biscuits. So, man, I got a chance to get a grape soda, hunk of chicken on a biscuit. I was satisfied. Yeah, a really good time. I really enjoyed it.

Once you in a little community where everybody get to know everybody, they can get together and have some fun. Now the thing about it, certain times if the guys 10, 15, 20 miles away would hear about it they’d come in and try to take the girls over and then that would be the problem. Now down in Union Hall – if they had a community party you wouldn’t have any problem but sometimes guys from Roanoke or thereabouts – “Let’s see if we can find a country party.” They stop and ask questions. “So anybody giving a party tonight?” “Yeah, this and this person giving a party.”
And then they crash the party. They ain’t got no women with them, they come in to the party, get a few drinks, next thing you know they corner somebody’s girl over ther,e you know. Dudes get tough on it, have a few little fist fights.

But in those days – news couldn’t travel too fast. You could drive through a little town, you didn’t see no one to ask questions ‘cause people went to bed so early you could drive right through the town not see a damn soul, so you don’t know nothin’.

“Hey man, who’s givin’ the party tonight?” Sometimes it’s “Such and such person,” sometimes it’s “Who are you?” I’m so and so. “Where you live?” Uh-Uh. Nobody’s giving a party tonight because they don’t want you there.

But getting back to my guitar now. I played the guitar for myself all the way down through life. But during the time I was in the service, I kinda passed the guitar up. And as well as I played before I went in the service, I got back out of the service – picked up the guitar and couldn’t get a single note. So when I went to bed that night – I said to myself, well, I know I used to playt he guitar but what happened? And the next morning I picked it up and played it. Just overnight picked the guitar and went back to playin’ again.

So I had quite a few experiences while I was in the service because one of the greatest experiences that I had in the service during the time I was in Camp Blanding, Florida. The guy – Howlin’ Wolf was down there in the same camp that I was in. so I got a chance to play his guitar and he heard me play and he advised me to continue to play because he liked what I was doing so that made me feel pretty good.

John Hurt was my idol and I learned to play Stagger Lee and Candy Man Blues you know, and then in started picking up a little bit on Blind Lemon Jefferson and another great musician named Furry Lewis. I learned a little something from him. So I just kept putting pieces together. Got to the point where I could play pretty good. So there’s one song that I played on Saturday night I called the Saturday Night Hop because I hopped out of bed just about every Saturday night to go somewhere and play that song.

Now Mississippi John Hurt, there’s a story about him that you will never believe to save your life. I learned to play his pieces when I was a kid. I learned them in about 1931, 1932. And from then until 1964 I still played his songs and I always had a feeling I would meet him someday. In the back of my mind I knew one day I would meet Mississippi John Hurt. So I kept picking the guitar, and then I went, I was stationed in Mississippi. We was in a little town called Centreville, Mississippi, and I asked a lot of people around Centreville, Mississippi, if they knew Mississippi John Hurt. Well, some of the old-timers around there knew him but they didn’t know where he was. He had kinda faded out. So I stayed in Mississippi about two, three years and didn’t find John Hurt.
I didn’t find John Hurt, but I always had it in my mind I would meet him. That was in ’63 and Sunday paper came and I didn’t throw it away. I put it on the chair on my side of the bed. So on the Thursday I believe it was, I picked it up and was reading it and I found the picture of this man sitting, in the newspaper, playing the guitar, and I read it and it said Mississippi John Hurt is now appearing in Washington, D.C., at the Ontario Place nightly. I said, well, I didn’t find him in Mississippi but I found him in Washington.

I told my wife, “You see this? Now this is the man I been looking for all my life.” I said, “Now he’s here in Washington. I’m going down there and meet him and play the guitar with him.”
She said, “Oh well, don’t you think that’s quite a bit step for somebody like you,” say, “that man’s a pro.” I said, “I don’t care. I’m going there to meet him and we going to have a time,” and sure enough I did. I called down to the club to check it out. Pi picked up the telephone and called down there to the Ontario Place and I asked them if it was true that John Hurt was playing there and they said, “Of course he’s down here. Playing every night.” And I said, “That’s what the paper aid and I didn’t believe the paper.” He said, “Do you know John Hurt?” I say, “Yes, I sure do.” He says, “Are you from Mississippi?” So I said, “No, I’m not.” “But how do you know John?” I said, “Well, it’s kind of a funny thing. We have a mutual understanding I guess between the two of us.” I said, “I just happened to learn some of his music when I was a little boy and once I learned his music I figured I knew him. We have something in common so that’s how I know him.”

So I went down and met John and called to him. Man, me and that cat got hung up on some damn guitar. You talk about a hell of a time.

It was a beautiful thing between me and John Hurt ‘cause for the last three years of his lifetime he’d come to my house when he wasn’t on the road. He’d come to my house and we’d sit and play all night and I’d go to his house and we just had ourselves a doggone good time.

I talk to his wife now, pick up the phone and call in Mississippi. Ella Mae, his little granddaughter, came to Washington and stayed out in Seat Pleasant with me and my wife when she went to college.

I met a lot of people at festivals, Mance Lipscomb, he was a tough man. I met him when I was at the festival down at the Mall in 1970, we had a long conversation. And Skip James, he’d been here and played and sang with me and of course the Gaines Brothers, Willie and Leroy Gaines.

We’d have Saturday night gatherings at the barbershop. The Gaines Brothers and I, different people sit around play the guitar, swap songs, drink a few beers, a little whiskey. The Gaines Brothers with their guitar playing have been the biggest aspect of the barbershop recently but I had Mother Scott out here too. John Hurt used to come, at least I used to go down to his house to pick him up, bring him over to the barbershop during the time he was home, wasn’t on the road or at a gig or something. He would sit around play the guitar. I would cut a few heads of hair and join him, you know. So we would have a heck of a good time cutting hair and playing the guitar during those times.

I worked with Mississippi John Hurt about three years but then he went back to Mississippi and passed away. About three years after he passed away I decided to get back out in the music world again and I thought I better do something to take to the people to let them know I did knot John Hurt so I wrote the song titled The Road is Rough and Rocky.

Another thing, you won’t believe this, I was coming through Georgetown one night a few years ago and it was a rainy night and I was just cruising along there with nothing to do. So this bellboy came out to the corner and flagged me, you know. So I stopped for him and he said, “Follow me in here to the hotel,” hotel in Georgetown. He said, “Follow me right through here and wait, I’ll bring you a passenger out.” So he went on in and came back out and I saw this blind man and this lady with him. So he gets in the cab and says, “Take me to the Cellar Door.”

So I back on out and got on M Street there, going on down to the Cellar Door, so I asked him I says “Who’s playing at the Cellar Door tonight?” he says “I am,” he says, “I’m Sonny Terry.” I says, “Sonny Terry? Man, I been knowing you for the longest time.” He says “How do you know me?” I says, “Well back in the ‘30s, I was coming from school one evening and I passed by a place called Clayton Barnard’s filing station and the guy sold liquor there. So I saw these two white fellows in a ’30 Chevrolet coach, and they had these two colored fellows with them. So the blind boy with the gray guitar, solid metal guitar, was Blind Boy Fuller and that was – Sonny Terry was the young ma that was wavin’ at us, you know, walking past the highway there.”

So it was about 30 years later after Mississippi John Hurt was discovered. I was at John Hurt’s house one day and he was talking. And we brought up Blind Boy Fuller’s name and so I asked him, “What kind of guitar does Blind Boy Fuller play?” He says, “Blind Boy Fuller plays a solid metal gray dobro.”

I say, “Well, I saw the guy when I was a kid.” So it was. It’s true and when I told Sonny Terry about this, he says, “Man, you got a better memory than I have. But I know you too. You’re the man that plays that old steel pan Gretsch guitar and sounds like Blind Boy Fuller.” I say “Yeah.” He says “You are rough.” He says, “Come down to the club, them them you’re my guest and see the show.” So I went down and saw the whole show, sent me over beer and everything.

I never heard of too many who played the blues here in Maryland except Buster Brown. Now he was living out here in Capitol Heights. The boy that come out with his harmonica thing about Fannie Mae. He was from out there. Now Roy Clark, he lived up the highway in Maryland. He’s a local boy but he’s in bluegrass, plays guitar, banjo, everything, and Roy Buchanan, a rock ‘n’ roll man, they all got farms up there in Prince George’s County out Palmer Highway.

Over in Virginia there’s John Jackson and John Cephas. You find blues in most any Southern state because hardship has prevailed in all Southern states. Blind Boy Fuller, he was from North Carolina, Gary Davis, Jesse Fuller, Elizabeth Cotten. Those Carolinas have come up with some beautiful guitar pickers. I think you could find blues around any country town where boys get together on a Saturday tonight, drink some whiskey, and stomp their feet. Yeah, the guitar is pretty famous on the East Coast.

Now, I’m gonna keep my taxicab in shape. If they think I’m gonna work myself to death after I retire they must be crazy. I’m tired of working for the government. I gave them 32 years. No more. Now unless I do make a hit with the record then they can get some (tax money). Now I’m my own boss.

I love to play the guitar. That’s not really work. Working with something that you love, you don’t worry about it. I’ll play for hours and hours. That’s something that I want to do. Enjoyment takes the stress and strain out of whatever you’re doing. If you like to do it, no problem, but anything that you do, if you don’t like to do it, it will drive you crazy.

Like I quit that job as a police officer. I made up my mind to get that burden off of me because it was worrying me to death, ‘cause, see, I was doing my job but the other people wasn’t doing their job. When the clients come in to the building, instead of the workers coming downstairs to see them, to help the clients, so the clients can go about his business feeling good, why they’ll wait to the last minute. They wait till the client starts raising hell, then they want me to get the client out of the building. Why, you got to be crazy. I’m not gonna use no physical stress and strain on this client. You got to see him. Throwing him out of the building is not gonna solve the problem. You don’t throw a man out of the building when he’s mad and hungry ‘cause he’s coming back. Right? He gonna shoot up somebody when he come back. People got to be crazy – I ain’t nobody’s fool to fight and tussle with nobody when he has the right to be here too, that’s stupid.

Archie, do your blues, your songs, come out of these experiences in your life?

Some of it is actually everyday living, some of it is the hard times, hardsihp that people go through, and then again sometimes you just sit down and start imagining things. You might not have ever seen it. That’s like when I wrote that song about “Call my baby long distance ‘cause I want to talk to her so bad, when the operator asked me for my money took every cent I had.” Man, I didn’t ever do nothing like that, but I was just imagining if I was in that predicament.

Like an artist paints a picture, an artist sits down and starts to thinking about certain things and I might start writing a song about it but I don’t experience it.

Roosevelt Sykes told me almost the same words about “It’s like an artist.”

It is an artist but an artist will put his on a piece of paper; you put yours through your body out through your fingers on the guitar. You can imagine the blues, anybody with a mind can sit down and imagine yourself to be in the worst predicament in the world and not have it be true. You can imagine yourself being a bum standing on the corner – no shoes on but have a pocket full of money but you can imagine that – and start writing. But most of the blues did originate from the living, everyday trend, but not any more. It all depends on what you want to concentrate on, what predicament you imagine yourself in – or see somebody having a hard time. An artist might draw a picture, everything that they put on the paper is not real, but they can imagine it and some person come and look at it say, “My God, that person is – look at that expression on his face, look at how he’s dressed. He had a hard time in life.”

Sometimes I take stuff that I’ve heard and rearrange it but most of the stuff that you her me do today, if I say its mine, it’s something I did myself, something I just picked out of the blue sky.

Because you take a bluesman, they think alike – somewhere down the line they think alike. It is something that they have seen or done or had done to them, or something like that. So bluesmen think their life kind of coincides.

People have gone as far as they can go with music. They have to come back to home base again. Gone so far out it has no place else to go. So it comes back home to start all over again so this is what brings me in, you know, I’m here waiting for them. So this is about one of the best things I ever done in my life, hung on to the blues.

The greatest feeling that I have ever had in my life is to be able to sit and tell people that I did it myself. And it’s lookin’ so good now, so if I don’t make a dime I still think I’ve got a lot out of it, ‘cause it’s good to be able to say that all down through life the thing that I believed in and what I did is beginning to come back to the front again, you know. It bring you up. I feel mighty good about being able to play the guitar. Many people used to say, “Why don’t youplay jazz guitar, why don’t you do this, why don’t you go to school to study, you know, get into this deep stuff?”
I say, “Oh, no, this is deep enough. This is actually deeper than you think.” See, most people don’t know actually how deep blues is and once you know how to do it yourself, you’ll know how deep it is, ‘cause it’s the next thing to a spiritual.

I’m trying to keep the blues – what you call black heritage – I’m trying to keep it rolling. Yeah, and it doesn’t matter who I teach it to, ‘cause Mississippi John Hurt asked me, he said, “Brother Arch,” he said, “Whatever you do, teach my music to other people.” He said, “Don’t make no difference what color they are, teach it to them.” He said, “Because I don’t want to die and you don’t want to die. Teach them your music and teach them my music.”

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Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.