Mo' Better Bluesmen

DURHAM, N.C. — John Dee Holeman is blue. His peaked cap, pressed shirt and high water work pants are all shades of indigo, setting off the dark walnut-brown of his skin. The 86-year-old sits attentively in a metal chair on the roof of a barbecue restaurant in downtown Durham, North Carolina. As a child, he came into town with his father from their farm in neighboring Orange County and sold tobacco in this same building, back when it was one of the many warehouses for that trade.

Joan Bagley, Holeman’s self-described ‘special friend’, sits at a card table close by, his three cds displayed for sale.

“John Dee," she urges him, her voice slightly raised because of his hearing loss. “Play a little something.”

Holeman says nothing but begins gently coaxing sounds from his electric guitar – a Fender Telecaster, an instrument as slender as he. His long fingers wrap around the neck with a casual authority. The thumb of his right hand begins a rhythmic down stroke on the low strings, as his index finger plucks alternating rhythms. The sound from the small amp is sinewy and lean.

Holman plays in a style as old as it is familiar: a gentle ragtime that recalls Piedmont and Texas bluesmen from the 1930s. It is a music that predates and informs the blues. The song he plays offhandedly takes a moment to be recognized. It’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” usually a mainstay of white, old-time and country musicians.

A traditional, it has been covered by George Jones and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. In Holeman’s hands, the song is without category. He laconically bends blue notes out of a melody that might as well have been written for bagpipe. It is his song now, even though one hears in his performance the labor of generations that came before him, obscure figures making music in the black bottom of the Mississippi Delta, the scrublands of East Texas, or on street corners down by Durham’s big brick tobacco warehouses.

Holman is playing for a group of doctors; gynecologists in town for a conference, a crowd who are largely white and dressed in pastels. Durham’s mayor, Bill Bell, a 73-year-old African American who is in his second term, welcomes them. He tells them a bit about the history of the town, famed for its Bull Durham brand of tobacco and the old buildings – like this one – his community has worked to preserve.

“We own our past," Bell says.

He introduces Holeman, a native of neighboring Hillsborough, born in April 1929, who spent much of early life working on the family farm. These days, he’s known as a Grammy-winning recording artist, recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He might be at a barbeque restaurant tonight, but he’s played Carnegie Hall.

Much of the credit for that goes to the Music Maker Relief Foundation, celebrating its 20th anniversary of working to secure performance and recording dates for more than 300 musicians, most of whom are over 55, making less than $18,000 a year. They’ll celebrate on Saturday, October 4th with a concert featuring close to 50 of those artists.

The artists who work with Music Maker Relief still play in the traditional Southern vernacular: blues, string band, gospel, and Native American music. To date, MMRF has helped schedule countless shows for millions of fans and released over 150 CDs.

The group’s founder, Tim Duffy, credits Mark Levinson with creating the idea. Levinson is a high-end audio designer who, as a young man in the late 1960s, lent a mono audio mixer he invented to a friend for an upcoming event called the Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

In the early 1990s, Tim Duffy was up in New York with a cardboard suitcase full of primitive field recordings he had made of North Carolina blues artists. Levinson was the mastering engineer as the two worked days on end with little sleep to polish the sounds and improve the listening experience.

It was then that Levinson gave Duffy his life’s mission. As the two worked, Duffy talked of the difficulties faced by the artists he recorded. One night, as the two were at a meal with Duffy’s wife, Denise, Levinson had a vision.

“He told me that I was going to start a non-profit to help these artists, and the name of the organization will be called The Music Maker Relief Foundation,” Duffy recalls.

Their next move was to Las Vegas and the vast Consumer Electronic Show. Levinson played only the recordings Duffy had made and together they solicited donations.

Once converted, Duffy found a guide in the form of an old bluesman named Guitar Sam. “I know where you want to go – been there,” he told Duffy. “I will take you there. When I die, bury me with my guitar.”

Guitar Sam took Duffy into an unseen world of working-class black communities in the Southeast. They performed on the streets and in drink houses, stood in commodity food lines, gathered coins to pay Sam’s light bill, Duffy recalls, adding, “It really was an education.”

Even as Duffy and Guitar Sam ultimately played their own way into Carnegie Hall, Sam was dying. Duffy came to an understanding that artists like Guitar Sam were in much the same circumstances as the part of American culture they represented: starving, and dying off.

John Dee Holman was one of the early Music Maker artists, joining the roster in 1995. He has received monthly stipends for instruments, car repairs, and medication. Music Maker has recorded three CDs of his music – occasionally backed by luminaries like Taj Mahal – and booked tours for him in the United States, France, Germany and Switzerland. Recently, Music Maker relocated him from a sketchy Durham neighborhood – one where the elderly musician couldn’t leave his house at night – to a quiet street in Hillsborough, the town of his birth. His neat beige trailer sits under a stand of pines, fronted by a colorful bed of chrysanthemums.

When he was 14, John Dee Holeman spent $15 to buy a new Sears Silvertone guitar. His uncle and a cousin taught him some chords. “I listened to 78s like ‘Step It Up And Go’ by Blind Boy Fuller, the Grand Ole Opry, and heard others play at pig-picking parties,” he recalled. “I was good for catching on.”

Holeman wasn’t able to see all of his musical heroes perform, but that didn’t stop him from learning. “I got the chance to copy their records in my brain,” he says later in his trailer on a rainy day. “I don’t know that much of music,” he said, holding up a closed thumb and forefinger. “You put a music sheet out there before me, and it’s just like some Chinese writing. But you get it up here,” he said, pointing to his forehead, “you can read your own brain.”

Back in Durham, Holeman accepts his introductory applause with a nod. “I don’t consider myself a professional,” he tells the gathering audience in a slight but steady voice, “but I will do for you my most regarded.” And with that, he bursts into a fierce version of “Stranger Blues,” his voice high with a slight rasp, his guitar every bit as fluid as his hero Jimmy Reed’s.

I’m a stranger here, just pulled in your town

Because I’m a stranger everybody want to dog me around

I wonder why people treat a stranger so

He may be your best friend that you will never know

The Music Maker Relief Foundation celebrates 20 years of existence with panels and performances this Saturday, culminating in “Homecoming,” a six-hour show featuring 50 Music Maker artists. John Dee Holeman will be there, along with Music Maker notables Ironing Board Sam, Alabama Slim and Lakota John and Kin.

Duffy has accomplished much, but is most proud of the fact that he was able to bury Guitar Sam with his guitar, as he had promised.

“I would like the world to know that Music Maker is working with our nation’s unknown legends of music,” Duffy wrote in an email. “There are so many out there, our work is never done. We are striving to sustain the musical backbone of American culture, through partnering with the musicians who are performing these traditions that have been passed down for centuries. We do that by giving a voice to those shadowed by poverty and geography.”

Mark Levinson, who conceived of the Music Maker Relief Foundation all those years ago, is proud of his friend Tim Duffy. “It’s one thing to want to help people,” he says. “It’s another thing to actually do it. It’s a third thing to do it at great cost to yourself and your family, for decades. Tim is doing what he needs to do, but not many people would do it.”