Curtis Jones (Born 18/08/1906, Died 11/09/1971)

His early child hood was much the same as that of other black children of the day and as soon as he was able he found himself working in the fields. By the time he reached his teens he had suffered sufficiently from the sharecropping regime - "Sometimes you have a good year and sometimes a very bad year. In my father's condition all of his years seemed very bad. The kind of shelter was a tumbled down log cabin where you had to stuff the walls with rags in the winter season to keep from freezing to death"

In 1929, Curtis Jones left Dallas working his way through the Mid and Southwest via Kansas City, then travelling to New Orleans where, it would seem, he married a girl called Lulu Stiggers and finally joining various performing troupes en route to Chicago. Arriving there in 1936, he formed his own group and began playing at rent parties and in Southside joints or bars. Soon he was spotted by Vocalion talent scout Lester Melrose, who had been responsible for getting recording contracts for many of the great names of the day, including Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and Washboard Sam. Melrose arranged a recording session on Tuesday 28th September 1937, and accompanied by Willie "Bee" James on guitar and Fred Williams on drums, Jones cut four titles of which only 'Lonesome Bedroom Blues' and 'You Got Good Business' were released. Over the next five years Curtis Jones was in the studio no fewer than twenty times, recording some hundred titles, the majority of which were notable for their lyricism and imagery. None of this prolific output, however, was to prove as popular as 'Lonesome Bedroom Blues' although he did have passable sales with 'Highway 51 Blues' and 'Bull And Cow Blues'. The recording company even teased out of Jones a 'Lonesome Bedroom Blues No.2' and 'I Feel So Good In My Bedroom' in an attempt to get as much mileage out of the tune as possible.

Outside of his studio work, he played club dates with a band which comprised tenor, trumpet and drums - a line-up which, Jones revealed in later years, he preferred to the setting of guitar and drums he was forced to work with in the studio. Ironically, the only side he cut for Melrose with a trumpet in the line-up (played by Punch Miller who had recorded with Big Bill Broonzy) was never issued. However, by 1941 Curtis Jones's record sales were on the wane and that, coupled with a disagreement with Melrose, led to Jones working outside of music in unspecified day jobs. It wasn't until 1953 that he recorded again. Bronzeville Record Manufacturing Co., a company formed by disc jockey Al Benson, had released on the Parrot label recordings of jazz and swing musicians like Coleman Hawkins and Herbie Fields. Jones was Parrot's first bluesman (later they recorded Albert King and J.B. Lenoir) but the four titles he cut failed to bring him any renewed recognition and he had to be content with playing local club dates for the next few years.

In 1958, blues enthusiasts Bob Koester, Dave Mangurian and Don Hill located Curtis in a run down hotel in Chicago. Through their efforts and the interest of the New Jersey based record company Prestige Bluesville was aroused, and in 1960 they took him into a New York studio with a trio of jazz musicians and a blues guitarist. The resultant album, "Trouble Blues", managed to capture Curtis's vocals superbly but his piano was swamped by the accompanying organist, and only the five minute instrumental title track showed anything of his old piano prowess. However, the recording succeeded in bringing him back to the public eye, albeit that of a white, highbrow coffee house audience, and he secured a regular Tuesday night spot at the Blind Pig in Chicago as well as a concert at Illinois University.

Soon after, urged on by fellow pianist Champion Jack Dupree, Curtis Jones found himself on a plane to Zurich, Switzerland. From that moment on he became, like Dupree, a Euro bluesman eventually making Paris, France his base. He toured France, Belgium and Germany where, in January 1963 at Koblenz, he appeared in concert with a variety of other expatriate jazz and bluesmen to celebrate "American's In Europe"; a concert which was subsequently to appear in its entirety on an Impulse double album (LP 1037). Later that year Curtis was in London with the Chris Barber band performing at the many jazz and blues venues throughout the town, a good number supporting a very young Madeline Bell.

In November 1963 Curtis Jones, guitarist Alexis Korner, bassist Jack Fallon and drummer Eddie Taylor got together for producer Mike Vernon in Decca's West Hampstead studio to record his third album, "Curtis Jones In London". The choice of material tended to reflect the music he had been playing for his European audiences numbers like the Percy Mayfield perennial, 'Please Send Me Someone To Love', or the self-penned instrumental, 'Young Generation Boogie'. One song was 'Alley Bound' a version of his 1938 original, a theme he had reworked several times culminating in 'Tin Pan Alley Blues' in 1941, only for it to be given the definitive modern treatment in 1953 by West Coaster Jimmy Wilson, with whom it is usually, if wrongly, identified. At that session he revealed an unexpected talent with his guitar accompaniment to 'Red River Blues' and 'Skid Row' with its echoes of Big Bill Broonzy's picking in his latter days.

Curtis Jones spent the next two years in North Africa, mainly Morocco, then toured Spain, Greece and finally France between 1966 and 1967. In 1968 he was part of the American Folk Blues Festival which toured England and while there recorded an album for Mike Vernon's Blue Horizon label, appropriately entitled "Now Resident in Europe".

The release failed to get the promotion, sales or acclaim Jones obviously thought it worthy of, as he made clear at the time. He then returned to Germany, spent the following three years working concert or club dates in Europe, and died unexpectedly from a heart attack at the Schwabinger Krankenhause in Munich, Germany. He died in penury and was buried nine days later in a Sozialgrab (pauper's grave) at the Perlacher Forst Cemetery. Eight years later his grave was sold because no one had paid for its upkeep. Curtis Jones never did enjoy the acclaim or recording contracts that fellow pianists Memphis Slim, Jack Dupree and Willie Mabon found abroad but his original compositions live on through the recordings of others. The journey he took is worthy of note and the way it finished is an all too familiar one. Anyone wishing to investigate Jones' output can trace his recording history on four CDs "The Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order" (4 volumes which cover the period 1937 through to 1953). You can also find him on compilations such as "Raw Blues" on London Records.

(Thanks to Alan Balfour for most of the information for this Jones piece).