“Rescue Me,” Fontella Bass’s Story and Stories
Fontella Marie Bass (1940-201) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri. A gospel child prodigy, she learned piano and toured with both her grandmother and mother Martha Carter Bass from age 5 through 16. In the company of her grandfather and uncles, she began sitting in at various Saint Louis and East Saint Louis clubs, eventually working with Oliver Sain and Little Milton, whom she eventually followed to Chicago where both signed with Chess Records. He had several major hits in the 1960s: ‘Don’t You Mess up a Good Thing’ with Bobby McClure, ‘Rescue Me,’ 1965, and ‘Recovery.’ After spending some years in Europe with her husband Lester Bowie, she returned to live and work in St. Louise in the 1980s. This interview took place in Lansing, Michigan, September 5, 1992.
Barry Lee Pearson
“I’m what they call, not a Hollywood child star, but I’m a child star in the churches. My grandmother and I, we started out playing for the different mortuaries, funeral homes they were called then. I would play the piano and she would sing and then we would do duets together. And I did that until the age of maybe 8, 9, 10 – through those ages from 5 on.
Then I started playing piano for my mother, Martha Bass, who used to sing with the Clara Ward Singers and Marion Williams with the ‘Stars of Faith.’ And we traveled all through, like Georgia, Texas, all the Southern states, you know. And even at the age of 16 I used to pass for the age of 10 or 11, to get those free train rides, you know.
But then I played for, oh, about every church in the city of St. Louis. At one time or another, either I was their pianist or their organist. And then I pursued my career. I started working, we have a place called – it’s an entertainment place called ‘Chain of Rocks’ in St. Louis. It’s no longer there, but it was an amusement park. And that’s when I started doing riverboat, showboat tunes like ‘Georgia,’ ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ and things like that. ‘Body and Soul,’ ‘God Bless the Child.’
So, you know, we had a lot of the riverboat things going. Leon Claxton with the Royal American Show came to town, which was a carnival thing, and me and my girlfriends, we’d slip into the tent and they dared me to audition -and sent my name up. And they called me for the audition and at the time the only pop tune I knew was a tune of Nina Simone’s called ‘I love you Porgy.’ And I did it and got hired. Well, my mother wouldn’t let me go off on the Royal American Show, although I was grown, I thought I was grown. She literally took me off the train. So that was a short-lived career there.
My mother, you know, just stayed on her knees and prayed. As a matter of fact, she wrote a song called ‘Come Home Wandering Child, Come Home’ and recorded it. But when I got with Chess and I got my first hit, which was ‘Don’t Mess Up a Good Thing’ with Bobby McClure, and I put a few pennies in her hand, she saw that it was really a good living for me. So she’s never complained about that. Not because of the money situation, but, you know, at that time musicians were noted for drugs and you know there was kind of a stigma thing on the musicians. And she just didn’t want me to be around that type of life with alcohol, drinking and everything. And evidently it rubbed off, because I’m not a drinker. I’m not a drug user, so it paid off.
My grandmother was just the opposite. She just saw talent. And when my mom was on the road I could play the boogie woogie all day long. As long as I was getting my lesson. And that’s the way it was. But with my mom, it was lesson and that’s it. But with my grandmother, everybody came around and I would play really nice for them. Then she’d say, ‘now you can play something,’ you know, because I knew I had that freedom, that liberty to eventually do that. But with my mother, she made everything like, ‘You’ve got to keep it in the mold.’
Everybody in the house was a musician. All my mother’s brothers, all of them singers, pianists, all musicians. These were all of my grandmother’s children. And I used to sneak out and go to the clubs with my grandfather and my uncles. Yes, every Friday, Saturday I would leave my clothes, my uncle lived across the street with his wife, Aunt Edie, and I would leave my mother and there, Saturday night, 9 o’clock, they would be in bed, you know, because of church. They’d have to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, get ready for Sunday school and so forth. My mother and father they were early sleepers. They went to bed with the sun, so when the 10 o’clock news would come on, I would go yawn, I’m so sleepy. I would retire for the night to go to sleep and about 11 o’clock I was out the window dressed. And we would come in. Sometimes on Saturday nights I would almost get caught because my folks got up like 6 o’clock to go to church on Sunday mornings. And sometimes I’d make it in like 5:30, quarter to six. And I was the designated driver, because everybody else would be zonked and I was the only one, because I couldn’t drink. That’s the only reason why I could go. My grandfather said if I took a drink I wouldn’t go. So drank Coke all night long. And they would send my name up to the band, and I’d sing the blues. I did that for about two years.
Yeah, but I would get up and sing and we used to be in the levee, ‘Red Top,’ ‘Lakeside,’ you know, and they’d be singing the blues. I’d get right up there with them and sing the blues. And they would be amazed.
And a lot of times it would get back to my mother, but they couldn’t pronounce my name. You know, and I was real popular. But they said ‘that girl, that little young girl.’ But they couldn’t pronounce my name, Fontella. So they would call me Penelope, ‘Fonella,’ everything. And sometimes I’d get tickled because they would honestly be telling my mother, but she wouldn’t catch on because they’d have some other name, you know. And I’d just play it right off.
But I guess I was close to 40 before my mother let me know that she really knew, because I was with family and the secret to that was with my grandfather. He’d say: ‘Hey, you can sing, you can dance. No fellas, no alcohol, no smoking.’ They were very strict. I had the freedom, but I had my limits. Now if you mess this up, that’s it.
So I didn’t abuse it. So that was great. Then plus it gave me the insight to, oh, I don’t wan to be like that, you know, that type of image. And I learned at an early age that wasn’t the kind of image that I wanted. So it paid off too.
We had Blue Monday parties too. Blue Mondays we just go club hopping every Monday. Blue Monday was mostly a ladies’ things more so than a male thing. The disc jockey Dave Dixon, we used to have Blue Monday nights at the Harlem Club when I was playing piano with Little Milton. But it wouldn’t start until about 11 o’clock at night on a Monday night, and he’d play until like 3 o’clock in the morning.
So that was great, because in Illinois everything could stay open until six in the morning. But in Missouri everything closed at 1 o’clock. In the summertime when the hours changed you could stay until 1:30, quarter to two. And basically it’s almost even like that now.
We didn’t have the house party thing. The thing of it is we had plenty of what they called taverns with house bands, you know, that you could go in. Just local musicians would be around. And you could just go in on Saturday, you could hear the bands striking up, you know, just harmonica and the drums. Taverns they called them. They were juke joints but they called them taverns in the city. See, that’s in the country. But we had a lot of juke joints you’d be afraid to pass by on Friday, Saturday nights, because everything Missouri is a dry state. On Sundays everything’s closed. But you could go right across the bridge in Illinois and get the alcohol 24 hours. So Sunday was Illinois night. Everybody went across the river. That’s why we call it ‘going over the river tonight.’
The juke joint, no it’s not illegal. See, juke joint is in the Sothern states, you know, but in the city they were taverns.
I gave a few rent parties myself. I lived in the project and to get that $40 a month.
It was a lot of fun and at the time it was a way to eat for me, because it helped pay my rent. And that’s why we gave the rent parties where they had this. I was trying to think of the name of the wine, it cost 25 cents. And I would get a case of wine.
Paree parties. That was from Paree wine you could get for 25 cents – well, two for 25. What I would do was take $5 and buy up some Paree’s and you could get a fifth of Paree for 25 cents. And some Robin Hood wine, 40, they used to call it ‘thirty nine and one’ Robin Hood wine. And you could serve your party. And my uncle worked at the Holiday Drive-In, so we would have little boxes of hotdogs, buns and popcorn. Yeah, we did it all. There were records when I gave the rent parties. We’d play Little Richard, Tutti Frutti, the Platters, they were big, Ray Charles. Folks would start coming in anytime after 12. They couldn’t get in the door until after 12. This was in St. Louis. See, gambling was illegal in Illinois, but it wasn’t in Missouri. So a lot of people didn’t want to go over on the Illinois side to play.
And since I was a starving musician at the time, you know, working sometimes on the weekend or two or three gigs a week, that’s what I did when I ran short.
And I used to take the kitchen table and I had a Ping-Pong table that would turn around and I would put it on top of there and it would make a casino table, and then I’d put a blanket over it. So that was the gambling house.
Some of the high rollers, believe it or not, would come in. One night I came home and I lived on the sixth floor, so you had to get off on the fifth floor to get to the sixth floor, and all these people were standing in the stairwells waiting for me to get home. I said, ‘Wow.’ So it was like an after-hours place so I didn’t want the police, and you know, so I kind of busted it up after that.
And there were goons, gangsters, oh yeah, the Turks and the Dukes. Talk about the gangs but gangs wasn’t like gangs are today. What they did was neighborhood territories like if you crossed Cass Avenue by yourself you got your butt whupped. Or if you crossed Franklin by yourself and you was a Turk, you got your butt whupped. It wasn’t no killings. Basically it was gang fights. It’s not like the gangs that are today.
But my grandmother used to dare my uncles, ‘Go out. I dare you. Just go. Let me catch you. I’ll whip you all the way home, I’d embarrass you so bad.’ So I mean I think parents can control a lot of that but of course things have changed. In those days, parents were home sort of looking after the kids. They had one parent, like my grandmother, my provider for me for many things. When my mother was out of town I mean I couldn’t go nowhere because I was a girl and it was all boys. ‘Where is she?’ (Laughs) you come home and you didn’t know here I was you couldn’t come home.
And that’s the way it was. And then we had police in the area that would walk the beat very night and they knew who would do the crime. They just come right to the door: ‘Okay, Carl, come on down. We know you did it.’ So it was always like one in the neighborhood, maybe two or three, that you knew they were doing those type of things, but at that time all they were doing was breaking in to stores, getting food or clothes or shoes or something, but now it’s not like it is now because the world’s really changed. We used to have communities but now we don’t have communities anymore. We’re trying to get back to those days and we’re finding it very hard to do.
Blues, that goes all the way back. My uncles and my aunt that’s all they played was the blues – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed. My aunt would get up on a Saturday morning by noon. Old Grandad and Old Taylor would be gone. And so would she. But the house would be clean and dinner you know would be cooked. But she was out.
Oh, yeah, I know about the blues. Ike and Tina, Little Milton, Oliver Sain, you know, even Chuck Berry – all kind of arrived in St. Louis at the same time from the South because they had a lot of blues clubs around the Levees. As a matter of fact, that’s how I really started. Because I used to play at a club called Chaney Rocks – this was an amusement park. And at that time blacks wasn’t even allowed in the amusement park. But I would play in the club riverboat songs like ‘Georgia,’ and everything. And one night a cat wanted me to sing ‘Georgia.’ I made 300 bucks.
‘Do it one more time, yeah.’ So that was great. Sometimes I made more money than my salary just on tips. People would come and they had their favorite songs and I would do it over and over all night. Then Little Milton and Oliver Sain heard me doing the show and they said if I didn’t leave with the show would I come and be their pianist. And I did, and that’s how I got started in rhythm and blues, through Little Milton. Of course there were other bands before I got with Milton. During the breaks in between I was playing with Eugene Neal, Charles Drawe, oh, we had a very good time in between there. And then I went with Little Milton and Oliver Sain.
It was very, very easy because the leader of the band, like Milton, would require as a a leader no one could flirt with me. No one could, wasn’t no going together. None of that. And that was it. Respect. It was taught. And most musicians do respect the ladies even today. I give them credit for that. They really do. Honestly. And then when you find one that don’t, I mean it’s always a way to get around that, always a way. (Laughs.)
When I came to Chicago I came to do recordings. That’s when I knew I was leaving St. Louis. When I ventured in Chicago I knew I was seeking a career at that time when I made the move. I was on my own. I was on Shindig with the black and white riding outfit, you know, a lot of people don’t remember that because you know I started the hat fad. Every time I performed I had a different hat – something on my head. I have a tape of that. I was fortunate to get a tape of me doing ‘Rescue Me’ on Shindig.
We were trying, you know, they had what they called a Motown Sound. We were trying to get a Chicago sound, and everybody was original. One of the original members of Earth Wind and Fire, he played the trombone with Earth Wind and Fire – his name is Louis Satterfield. And Maurice White is on drums on ‘Rescue Me.’ We had some really great musicians on that session like Minnie Riverton is doing the background, the late Minnie, Bunky Green, Paul Serrano, who owns PS Studios in Chicago now, all these people were on ‘Rescue me.’”
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.