I know the year because the bar served Billy Beer, the cans endorsed by President Jimmy Carter’s brother. It was 1977; I was sixteen, in tenth grade, a passenger in a car when I spotted a new bar sign: BIRTH OF THE BLUES. Sounded like a place I and my friends needed to go. It was across the street from the Ritz, a movie theater turned concert hall. We weren’t old enough to enter either place, let alone be served, but we became frequent patrons, stumbling from one to the other when bands went on break. The bartenders knew us well.
Furry Lewis had piqued my interest in the original bluesmen and blueswomen, these living links to another time and culture. At Birth of the Blues, the band was all elder players, a great thrill. After the core group would wind down, barrelhouse piano player Mose Vinson would stay late, playing in the bar’s picture window. Because that’s what born barrelhouse piano players do. His keys had long propelled a night’s diminishing party, and as the waitresses cleared tables, we last revelers gathered close around his piano bench, shouting encouragement and dancing the white middle-class boogie.
I didn’t get to know Mose like I did Furry, but Mose was younger—he lived until 2002—so I got to hear him a lot more. He didn’t record much, but fortunately Judy Peiser, who was giving Mose regular employ at the Center for Southern Folklore, got with producers Knox Phillips and Jim Dickinson and they made the Piano Man recording happen. (Sun Records alumnus Roland Janes engineered.) I was honored to write the liner notes, and it’s a disc I still play often.
Liner notes to Piano Man, 1997
“You ain’t got no pain pill, is ya?” asks Mose Vinson, having turned all the blues in the room into a joyous sound. Bringing relief is his personal sacrifice, and he takes on the woes, like he’s always done.
“I was born playing, Holly Springs, Mississippi,” he answers, when asked what he would like listeners to know about him. “The good Lord give me that talent, and I play that talent behind the good Lord. I didn’t learn from nobody, he give it to me.”
Short of the new supermarket off the town square, Holly Springs—and especially the outlying area—fairly resembles how it was in 1917 when Mose was born. Which means the good Lord had to do some serious driving on backcountry winding roads to find Mose for the delivery of this gift. Thank you, Lord.
Mose, eighty, began his musical career when he was five years old. “First thing I saw was an organ, an old-time organ what you work your foot on the pedals. That’s what I started playing, then I left that to the piano and I played a whole lot better. Organ was too soft for me.” Behind the force of his piano keys, you can almost hear the din of a drunken juke joint, almost see an organ turn to toothpicks.
Mose Vinson, boogie woogie piano player. (Courtesy of Axel Küstner)
Those hands were made for music. When his peers took to the cotton fields, Mose joined a touring show and established a life in music. “I just play my own style,” he says. “I never did practice anybody else’s style.” That style has defined the man. In the days when everyone had monikers—Dishrag, Butterfly, Turkey Hop—Mose Vinson was known as “Boogie Woogie.” And while he can make a piano jump like a fat lady wearing thin house shoes on hot concrete, boogie woogie is much too constraining a term. There is a strong jazz element that runs through his playing, and the gospel that is so near his heart never gets away from his fingers.
There is great humor in Mose and in his music. He punctuates his sentences with piano notes, running his big hands over the keys. He smashes notes together like a piano Impressionist. “I go up there and get the black keys, then come on down and mix it with the white keys. That makes my music sound pretty good.”
It also sounds pretty good when, in contrast to his rumbling vocals, Mose adds a giddy “yeeeh,” hearkening back to the abandon that prevailed in juke joints. “During that time when I used to play for nightclubs, they drink corn whiskey,” he says. “People come in and stay all night long, tell me to play the blues, and I played the blues too. Ole country, way way back old dirty blues. All night long. They be shooting dice, those women get drunk, three, four o’clock in the morning, those women would have me play some dirty blues. Stay up all night playing dirty blues. Have a ball all night. Daylight in the morning. Five, six o’clock, I was through, do it again.”
When recording settled into Memphis, Mose went to Sun Records for a job, and he ended up sweeping the floor. “Cleaning up, stuff like that. I’d play a few pieces.” Sam Phillips auditioned him a few times and Mose lucked into the occasional released session (James Cotton’s “Cotton Crop Blues” and “Hold Me in Your Arms”).
As you’ll hear during the discussion that intersperses Piano Man, Mose comes from another world. “He dead now,” becomes an all-too-familiar refrain. His mother is dead (his father, a gambler, was shot when Mose was eight), his brothers are dead, his sister is dead. His friends and his rivals are dead. Some of my interview, in fact, took place among the barely living, in a convalescent home with Mose seated at the piano in the activity room (he was the only one wearing shades indoors), and when he began to play, the number of wheelchairs in the room increased, the attendants passed out tambourines, and suddenly two doctors came rushing in because (I swear) a bedridden patient was up and dancing.
There is nothing mournful about these blues. Mose Vinson absorbs pain, transforms it into music that, despite its sadness, evokes joy. Yeah, I got a pain pill. It’s about five inches in diameter, it fits into a CD player, and it’s got Mose Vinson’s name on it.