Blues Pilgrim

David Evans’ lifelong journey into music.

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The music pioneered by the Memphis Jug Band, a lively hybrid of country blues and jazz, full of interjections like “Oh now sugar baby!” over a weave of guitars, mandolin, fiddle, washtub bass, musical jug, and, most uniquely, kazoo, was something Memphis was known for once upon a time.

Ranging from the exquisitely sparse to the clamorously rocking (sans drums), and quite popular in their day, jug bands had been out of fashion for decades when, in 1997, a little-known album was released by Inside Sounds that revived the music once more. Shake That Thing!, by the aptly named Last Chance Jug Band, was clearly an homage to music that had enjoyed its heyday from the ’20s through the ’50s, albeit with all the sonic clarity offered by modern equipment. Yet the sound remained rough, raw, and rocking, the vocalist’s delivery somehow off-hand, gruff and passionate at the same time, punctuated with earnest kazoo-playing — not unlike the city’s jug bands of yore.

But when he sang, “Well I’m going back to Memphis, gon’ get high up on the bluff/Then I won’t have to worry, ’bout these times being tough,” it was the singer’s original song; and the catch in his throat was loaded with soul, as was his kazoo solo that followed.

While laden with humor, this music was not a joke to him. Meanwhile, his pitch-perfect emulation of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s original guitar playing on “Write Me a Few Lines” was jaw-dropping. Hearing the album at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one might well have wondered, “Where did this anachronistic band and their impassioned singer-guitarist-kazooist come from?”

At the time, the answer would have led you to the University of Memphis, where the Last Chance Jug Band’s frontman, better known as Dr. David H. Evans Jr., taught for 38 years. Evans has blurred the lines between academia and performance all his life. Though trained in ethnomusicology before many graduate schools even offered such a specialization (his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California was technically in folklore and mythology), he was hired as an associate professor of music by then-Memphis State University in 1978. And so, unlike so many ethnomusicologists in anthropology departments, “as a music professor ... there was some expectation that I should be a performer,” Evans writes. One senses his arm needed no twisting.

Those words are from a recently penned memoir, Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s (University Press of Mississippi), co-authored by Evans and his early partner in research (and, for a time, romance), the late Marina Bokelman. It’s a tribute to both Evans’ modesty and his scholarship that his own playing figures little in the book. In keeping with his lifelong passion for others’ music, his own musicality chiefly occupies the early and late chapters. Yet it’s only in hearing his playing, as in the Last Chance Jug Band’s recordings, that one can grasp how deeply he’s internalized the music of other ages and cultures.

Furthermore, being an active performing musician has sharpened Evans’ insight as he’s pursued his twin passion: writing. The above volume, for example, reveals just how prolific he and Bokelman were even as young graduate students in the field, with three chapters of the nearly 300-page book derived from “the actual notes we wrote in the evenings following days of trying to locate, record, and interview musicians and their family members,” as Evans writes. The detail and care put into those notes reflect not only the discipline of anthropology generally, which has long relied on the monkish practice of daily field notes, but also the sheer dedication of the young couple, their love of their work and their subjects.

Not many 22-year-old grad students would have known to ask about playing slide guitar with a knife. Evans’ insight was rooted in years of careful listening, dating back to his undergraduate days at Harvard. Many collegiate types were falling in love with folk music in the early ’60s, and Boston-born Evans was no different.

“We interviewed Herb Quinn [of Franklinton, Louisiana],” goes one section of Evans’ notes from 1966, “with Marina getting it all down on paper. I don’t see how she did it.” Later that day, Evans broke out the tape recorder and his subject Quinn “wanted to start on mandolin, which is his favorite instrument. He asked me to play guitar behind him, and I did so reluctantly ... He and I did some instrumental pieces, which I managed to get through without too many mistakes.”

It’s a passage typical of the whole book, with Evans, only a year into his graduate studies at UCLA, approaching Quinn with his usual modesty, hoping most fervently to make a recording without his own playing. In the end, Evans’ prior knowledge of blues techniques helped him coax that and more out of Quinn. “He did a couple sentimental songs on guitar with one vocal ... When his fingers began to get sore, I asked him to play knife. He pulled out a huge curve-blade thing and played a great version of ‘Poor Boy Long Ways from Home.’ We left around 10:00.”

Not many 22-year-old grad students would have known to ask about playing slide guitar with a knife. Evans’ insight was rooted in years of careful listening, dating back to his undergraduate days at Harvard. Many collegiate types were falling in love with folk music in the early ’60s, and Boston-born Evans was no different. As he writes in Going Up the Country, folk and blues “seemed so much more mature than the adolescent pop music on the radio... The world these blues singers described in their songs just seemed more real than the life of a college student.”

Recalling that scene today, he notes that Cambridge, Massachusetts, was charmed at the time. “Just as I went to college, I got into this environment where I could hear what back then would have been called ‘more authentic’ folk music. A friend was into the Weavers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Leadbelly, so then I started getting those records. Then I met Al Wilson, who introduced me to more blues, and we would get interested in music together. So it was being in the right place at the right time. All these blues artists started turning up. Mississippi John Hurt and Bukka White and so on. They played locally in coffeehouses and you could meet them. In fact, some of them stayed with Al Wilson and I would meet them there. So it was a great opportunity to get into something that was very outside of my environment. It was happening right there where I was, but it opened up other worlds.”

Wilson was to have a profound impact on Evans. Both friends wanted to do more than just listen, and Evans even bought the same type of guitar that Leadbelly had played. “I guess I liked it so much, I wanted to see if I could do it. It started from records, but very soon I got to see Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon in 1962. And then a whole slew of others, Mississippi John Hurt and so on. So, I was just starting out and I could see these veteran performers, hear what they sounded like, and see how they played and performed. I tried to absorb as much as I could.”

Wilson, too, had a knack for deciphering how the old blues music could be played on guitar. A few years later, crashing on Evans’ couch in Los Angeles, Wilson would plan the launch of his own blues rock group, Canned Heat, who ultimately wowed audiences at festivals in Woodstock and Monterey with hits like “Going Up the Country” and “On the Road Again.”

But being in the spotlight wasn’t Evans’ goal. “I never wanted to really play with other musicians just for the sake of playing with them or saying that I played with them,” he says of his earliest days as a musician. The stage held no inherent appeal for this scholar. At Harvard, he majored in classics, and the power of words persisting over centuries seems to have profoundly shaped his life trajectory. By the time he wrote his senior thesis, “The Homeric Simile in Oral Tradition,” he realized that “my interests in blues and in Greek and Latin began to converge ... I began to perceive a similar type of formulaic composition in the older blues styles of the Deep South.”

From that germ of an idea, a distinguished scholarly career grew and flourished. Even before he began his major visits to “the field” of Louisiana and Mississippi, he was publishing in the British blues monthly Blues Unlimited, continuing to do so well into the ’80s. And as his academic career took flight, with Evans receiving his master’s degree at UCLA in 1967, his doctorate in 1976, and teaching at California State University, Fullerton, from 1969 to 1978, he published prolifically in more scholarly journals. One telling piece was titled “Few Scholars Are Involved in Studying and Preserving the Music We Call the Blues,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1988. Yet when Memphis State University eventually made him a full professor of music and director of Regional Studies in Ethnomusicology, he at least could continue to study and preserve the blues, now with tenure.

That included books such as 1971’s Tommy Johnson, a biography and analysis of the seminal African-American folk blues singer; Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues in 1982; and The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Blues in 2005. Along the way, his research was also celebrated by others. The late Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, which, along with a documentary of the same name, introduced many to the variations and complexities of Mississippi blues in 1981, paid homage to Evans’ research. And Evans’ two Grammys for liner notes to blues collections speak further to his popular impact, above and beyond any academic writings.

Evans went beyond simple documentation, occasionally accompanying performers when needed, and assisting them with touring or crafting their careers.

This highlights how much Evans continued to value his recording practice. If folk and blues had enjoyed a revival in his Harvard years, in retrospect that seemed but a brief respite from the steady decline in blues audiences throughout most of Evans’ career (though the genre now has a more solid foothold once again, thanks to institutions like the Blues Foundation). As with so many anthropological projects, studying the blues seemed to also entail a duty to preserve the music, and Evans threw himself into that mission from the start.

In 1980, Evans and Richard Ranta, the first dean of the College of Communication and Fine Arts, founded High Water Records to take the kind of recordings Evans had made for years out of the archives and into record stores. A university-based record label was an unusual move, but it not only helped connect ethnomusicology with Memphis State’s burgeoning recording technology curriculum, it created product that was invaluable to the blues, gospel, and jazz artists of the era.

Over the course of 64 singles and albums, artists like Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and Jessie Mae Hemphill, who came to be celebrated globally, were honored alongside more obscure performers like Hezekiah & the Houserockers or the Pattersonaires. All were obscure initially, and High Water brought them to light.

Furthermore, Evans went beyond simple documentation, occasionally accompanying performers when needed, and assisting them with touring or crafting their careers. As he recalls of Jessie Mae Hemphill, “She wasn’t really playing blues when I met her; she had a guitar but she was very rusty and didn’t have many songs. But I could see she had all the elements there, and I just encouraged her to start writing songs and keep playing and composing. So she started developing one after another and they were great. And she created a style that was quite unique. A lot of people didn’t like it, or thought it was extremely simplistic, and in some ways it was, but I’ve never heard anyone else do it.”

As with many High Water artists, Hemphill eventually found international acclaim. “She was one of kind and I’m glad I could help her sound get out there,” he says. “She had a career, and the kind of fame that lives on. They’re having a festival in Switzerland coming up this weekend that’s dedicated in her honor.”

But while the impacts of both High Water and the ethnomusicology program were significant, both were strangely undervalued by the university system that launched them. Evans retired in 2012 (though continued teaching for four more years), but since his departure, the University of Memphis has not replaced him or kept High Water active.

“Now, I don’t think they care about things like that at the university,” Evans laments. “They’re interested in what you might call prestige grants, and they measure research success in dollars, not results. It’s killed the humanities and the arts and some of the social sciences.”

Evans is not alone in this assessment. Recently Leslie Luebbers, director of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM), felt the need to recognize Evans’ work so powerfully that she decided to do something about it. “The university has not done well by him,” she says. “And this is at a time when the university has put a lot of work into making this a campus that has a focus on African-American history and culture. So it’s really unfortunate, in that environment, for his work to be ignored.”

With these thoughts in mind, Luebbers put together the twin exhibits, “Blues at Nightfall: High Water Records” and “Build a Heaven of My Own: African-American Vernacular Art and the Blues,” which opened this April and will be on view at AMUM through September. While the second exhibit was only indirectly related to Evans, being curated by his former Ph.D. student, William Ellis, the first was an outright celebration of the recording company that Evans directed for decades, including a separate showing of classic High Water album covers as redesigned by current U of M students.

Yet, as Luebbers explains, there was more to the project than met the eye. “There were two students in my museum studies program who were both interested in doing this project. And one of them is an incredible researcher. One of the problems with doing this was that the High Water documents were scattered all over the place. Nobody had ever taken the time to assemble them or treat them as something of value. So they were stashed here and there, and this student went all over the campus, hauled them all back together, and turned them in to the music library. They found films and tapes and all this stuff. I think the work that was done to produce the High Water show is actually more important than the show itself.”

Luebbers adds that “we did this with a hope that it would bring some highly deserved attention back to him,” and indeed it did. The exhibit’s opening night drew a packed house to bear witness to the label’s many releases in blues and gospel, as well as later releases of music from Ethiopia and Venezuela. Most movingly, perhaps, the opening night drew attention to the man himself. In preparation for the opening, Kip Lornell, guest editor of the Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, put together the “David Evans Festschrift,” a celebration of Evans’ work by former students and colleagues. As a surprise, it was presented to him that night.

Now retired and living with his wife, Marice, in the semi-rural Woodstock area north of Memphis, Evans carries on pretty much as he has done since the mid-’60s, writing, recording, and — of course — playing and singing the blues. When first contacted about this article, he was most eager to speak of his show with the Last Chance Jug Band a few days earlier, in Brownsville, Tennessee. “It was the Exit 56 Blues Festival,” he explains. “They used to be very small, but honestly, yesterday they had a thousand people there!”

Evans himself sees some overlap between his playing and his scholarship, but ultimately wants to keep them distinct. “The fairly esoteric kind of music that I play is not something people hear every day. These days, it inevitably has an educational quality to it,” he admits.

Then he adds, “When you hear any type of music you’re not used to hearing, you learn something. But it’s not my primary purpose as a performer. When I play and sing, I’m trying to entertain, not make it into a lecture. That’s the bane of my career, to be introduced on stages as ‘Dr. David Evans,’ or ‘Professor David Evans.’”