Long ago, when I played rugby, there was an old guy we nicknamed Daddy Stovepipe. Daddy was a human dynamo, still turning out for the seconds or thirds every week and tackling, ferociously, anything that moved in shorts. Daddy did this well into his late 50s before arthritis cut short his career and confined him, I’ve since heard, to a wheelchair. Was his arthritis a result of his rugby playing? Who knows, but one thing was for sure, people said, Daddy Stovepipe would have played for rugby for England if World War Two interrupted his prime playing years. This might just give you a clue as to how long ago it was.
Anyway, I always though Daddy Stovepipe was an odd name; but only when researching my book, How Blues Evolved (and later America’s Gift) did I become aware that Daddy Stovepipe was originally the name of an old African-American blues performer, reaching about as far back in history as old blues performers go.
Daddy Stovepipe 1867 – 1963
We know the original Daddy Stovepipe, born Johnny Watson in 1867 in Mobile, Alabama, played in a mariachi band in Mexico in the late 1890s. Obviously supremely versatile, Watson would certainly be the earliest blues performers ever known, if only we knew the exact genre of music he was playing in America before his Mexican sojourn. Unfortunately we don’t know.
As well as Daddy Stovepipe, Johnnie Watson also recorded under the names of Jimmy Watson, Sunny Jim (my Dad used to call me that) and the Reverend Alfred Pitts. He cut his first record, ‘Sundown Blues’, in Richmond, Indiana, in early 1924 aged 57. It is thought to be the third-ever country blues captured on record.
Johnny ‘Daddy Stovepipe’ Watson’s last record was made in 1960, at the grand old age of 93 and he died three years later aged 96. His nickname was due to the stovepipe hat that he always wore.
The puzzling thing is, somebody in middle England must have known of this old blues player’s existence way back in the 1940s when a young English rugby player called David Stovell acquired the most unusual of nicknames: Daddy Stovepipe. People who know about blues turn up in the most unexpected places, don’t they?
To read the first two chapters of HOW BLUES EVOLVES, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO free please follow these links.
BLUESMUSE31 While many blues historians write of the 1890s as the decade blues began, in the first volume of ‘How Blues Evolved’, I put a case for the 1890s being simply the second blues watershed before the birth of modern blues. The first blues watershed, I concluded, was in America in the 1830s. This view…
Updated 22 June 2016 AMERICA’S Gift has 43 chapters, an Epilogue and 20 pages of Index. See what you’re ordering. Before you order America’s Gift, you’re bound to want to know exactly what’s inside the 390 pages that make up the book. You can even preview the first few America’s Gift chapters, and check out the book’s index, on…
UPDATED October 11, 2021 Post was transferred from another site. Layout was very resistant to being re-formatted. “Cor blimey, guv’! Old London tarn a blues city? We ain’t Septics yet!”, cackled the black cab driver, as cockney as they come. I’d just put the question to him on my way to watch London garage blues band, the Jim Jones Review, at the…
Thursday 17 April Update AC/DC to record in May without Malcolm Young And now some good news (though tinged with sadness). While AC/DC confirmed today that guitarist Malcolm Young has “a debilitating illness”, which prevents him from playing the guitar or performing, they still intend to record in Vancouver, Canada, in May. Said a statement…
Updated 1 June 2016 The internationally acclaimed concert pianist, Percy Grainer Down Under this week, I visited Melbourne University’s Percy Grainger Museum. You’ve probably never heard of Percy Grainger, an Australian, but he was one of the more interesting composers that ever lived. Born in Melbourne in 1882, Grainger was an internationally-famous concert pianist, musical maverick and one of…
BluesMuse 3. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Furry Lewis and The Rolling Stones. This month is the 86th anniversary of the recording of the only two Blind Lemon Jefferson tracks that give us a true picture of the legendary performer’s talent. Known as the ‘Father of the Texas Blues’, Lemon recorded about 100 tracks for Paramount between…