by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

In 1979, I spent a week with the family of the late bluesman J. B. Lenoir. J. B.’s acoustic blues in the 1960s had a dark, mysterious, quality that had really captured me. In the 1950s, Lenoir had recorded a bunch of exciting Chicago blues sides, one of which, “Mama Talk To Your Daughter” had reached #11 on the R&B charts. The acoustic music, though, that he called “African Hunch music” was unlike anything else out there. It was a sound that simultaneously reached back to the beginnings of the blues and forward to a postmodern sensibility. He did what a lot of blues and soul singers weren’t doing in the 1960s — sing about the racial issues in the civil rights movement, the often unmentioned elephant in the living room of American culture at the time. Songs like “Alabama March” celebrated Martin Luther King’s marches, but also asked troubling questions about God. Why did God allow oppressed people calling on His name to get murdered?

John Mayall had issued some of J.B.’s acoustic songs, along with parts of an interview with his widow Ella Louise, on his short-lived Polydor subsidiary label called Crusade. I had talked with the Lenoirs on the phone, using some phone interview material for my show. Finally we decided to have me visit in Champaign, where they lived at the time. In five days I got to cover a lot more territory than John Mayall had. I met people who knew J.B., relatives, and co-workers (he worked in a kitchen at the University Of Illinois; despite two European tours and an album out on CBS in Europe, music couldn’t support him). He was well-liked. I saw his lyric book. The last song he was writing, mentioned in the Mayall interview, isn’t the song that is on the album after that interview section. It’s a different, never-recorded song, where J. B. is talking about knowing that something is wrong with his health. I tracked down his death certificate and the results of an inquest into his death. He had been in a car crash, and was never the same after that. He died soon afterwards, and they said it was a heart attack, but the inquest showed that the doctors missed the fact that he was bleeding internally. He actually had lower than average arterial plaque for a man his age (38). It was before the age of seatbelts. If he’d been wearing a belt, he probably would have had only a minor injury.

I looked at his royalty statements. I’m no accountant — that’s “no accountant” NoT “no account”! – but I could see that his family was getting very little money from airplay of his songs and apparently nothing from retail sales of any units that were out there. I played his guitars– his unique tone was not from his instruments; it was from the way he played them. I wanted to write a book about him, but realized I would never have the resources to trace his steps & spend large amounts of time in places getting to know people. I did become friends with the Lenoirs and have been able to share what I learned on album liner notes, especially the “Vietnam Blues” CD reissue of his last two albums, his stunning acoustic performances.

I consulted with the team working with Wim Wenders on the film “The Soul Of A Man” in the PBS Blues series curated by Martin Scorsese. I helped them get information and connected them with people, and persuaded the reluctant Lenoirs to work with them, hoping the project would generate some funds for the family. They explained to the Lenoir family that they couldn’t pay directly for their assistance because the film was a “documentary” — for a family that had heard many excuses over the years for non-payment of royalties (Willie Dixon actually called the house while I was in Champaign explaining why there was less money coming in than the family expected), it was just one more excuse. I hoped, however, that the film would generate royalties. The filmmakers made sure copyrights were in order for the songs that were used, and there was the possibility that new recordings of the songs would generate some money for the family as well.

If he had lived, I’m sure that J. B. would have been very successful on the festival circuit and make a comfortable living at music, though he probably would not have been the full superstar that he was, and is, to me. No one else so thoroughly modernized the blues tradition while touching its core essence so deeply.

J. B. Lenoir “God’s Word”

J. B. Lenoir “Slow Down”