Cary Baker remembers Blind Arvella Gray...

The Cary Baker of today is a successful music PR executive in California and a winner of the Blues Foundation's 2006 Keepin' the Blues Alive (KBA) Award. The Baker of the early 1970s was a teen-ager in Chicago and a frequent visitor to Maxwell Street, where he'd watch a Dobro-playing street singer named Blind Arvella Gray, who performed folk, blues and gospel.

Gray, whose real name was James Dixon, was born in Texas in 1906 and was blinded in the 1930s, possibly while holding up a bank, possibly in Peoria, Illinois. (He apparently never told the story the same way twice.) He arrived in Chicago in the 1940s, and he brought with him to the industrial North the music of the cotton fields and chain gangs, making him an unheralded missing link to the origins of American folk music, blues and gospel.

His repertoire included standards like "John Henry," his signature tune, and the traditional country number "More Pretty Girls Than One." He also touched on gospel with songs like "Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave it There." He accompanied himself on slide National steel guitar, and his fans even included Bob Dylan, whose 1961 song "He Was a Friend of Mine" was said to have been borrowed from Gray.

Baker became a catalyst in the recording of Gray's only full-length album, connecting the artist with David Wylie's Wilmette, Illinois-based Birch Records. The Singing Drifter , recorded in a single session, was originally released on vinyl in 1972, and once its initial pressing sold out, the record remained unavailable for more than 30 years. Its rebirth was made possible by Baker's Conjuroo Recordings label, which made the album's re-release on CD (with four previously unreleased tracks) its first order of business.

Baker's liner notes to the August 2005 reissue, reprinted here with his kind permission, are not only wonderfully written and informative, but they open a window to a time and place that have long since passed.

Blind Arvella Gray: An Appreciation

It was supposed to be a very brief tour. In 1970, when I was 15, my father -- the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Chicago -- took me to the city's Maxwell Street Market to show me where his parents had shopped in the '30s and '40s. By 1970, the Jews had, for the most part, moved on. The flea market, somewhat worse for wear but still bustling with energy every Sunday morning, had been carried on by African-Americans and an emerging Latino population.

Anyway, there we were in the brisk weather, walking up Halsted Street, north of Maxwell, south of Roosevelt Road, when I heard what surely must be this bluesman I'd read about in the British blues journals -- Blind Arvella Gray. He stood against a gated storefront, playing his metal Dobro with a slide and singing his best known song, his seven-minute adaptation of "John Henry." As I stood there transfixed -- as if a little bit of the field holler tradition of the '20s and '30s had come to visit me in Chicago in 1970 -- my father asked if we could please move on. I insisted I needed to take in as much of this as possible. And, over the next decade, I would return on many occasions.

Even more rewardingly, I would get to know Arvella Gray, and even play a part in the recording of this album, which was released in 1972 in small quantity and has remained sold out and unavailable for more than 30 years -- until now.

Although Arvella Gray was performing regularly -- playing blues not only on Maxwell Street but in front of Chicago's Jazz Record Mart and the South Side's Englewood shopping district -- little was known of him, and even less written of him. His only known recordings were three 45s on his own Gray Records label, plus four songs on the British import album Blues from Maxwell Street (Heritage Records).

Texas-born Gray came to Chicago by way of Peoria. The story of how he became blind changed every time he told it. Whether he was staging a holdup in 1930 or in a gun battle over a woman, we will never know. We do know that his eyes, along with two fingers, were pierced by birdshot propelled by a shotgun, which fortunately for him -- and for us -- did not penetrate his brain. And we know he came to Chicago with a National Dobro made of either copper or brass -- both his instrument and his means of defense (used to clobber anyone who tried to steal from him). The instrument was sold on eBay two decades after his 1980 death.

To witness Arvella Gray perform was a thrill I will not forget. Footage can be seen on Mike Shea's recommended video/DVD "And This is Maxwell Street." At the time Gray played on Maxwell, one could still see fellow street musicians like Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis, Little Pat Rushing, Big John Wrencher and a rockin' gospel ensemble helmed by Blind Jim Brewer. Gray's own sister, Clara "Granny" Litricebey (sometimes spelled with two t's), also played up and down Halsted. Occasionally there were sightings of other blues kingpins like Big Walter Horton, who, perhaps out of shame for slumming, shunned photos. You could still buy mint 78 recordings of Little Walter and Johnny Young on Ora-Nelle Records at the Maxwell Radio store for $1. One could feel the history of the Chicago blues tradition welling up within these four square blocks.

Today, condominiums rise where the original Maxwell Street market once stood; it's a desirable location just southwest of the Loop and adjacent to the University of Illinois Chicago campus. The open-air market itself, now devoid of funk and grit, has jumped across the Dan Ryan Expressway to Clinton Street. You can spot some good cheap merchandise, but don't go seeking ghosts of Chicago blues past.

Look for Blind Arvella Gray on the Internet today and you'll find little information of substance. One topic of fascination to many, however, remains the mysterious history of a song recorded by none other than Bob Dylan in 1961 titled "He Was a Friend of Mine." Dylan recorded the song for his first album sessions and it was a staple in his live set, although it remained unreleased until it appeared on Dylan's The Bootleg Series, 1961-1991 (Columbia Records, 1991). Dylan had long said that the song was inspired by Gray, and it is believed that Gray, in turn, had adapted it from a Southern prison song called "Shorty George," recorded by Leadbelly in 1935 and by various incarcerated singers for the Library of Congress archive recordings. And while other folk pundits such as Dave Van Ronk and Eric von Schmidt kept the song alive, no one except for Dylan recalls hearing Gray himself perform this song.

One might think that being a blind musician in Chicago might have posed its limitations. But to the contrary, Gray was something of a bon vivant. Reportedly, he would go to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby and win respectable money. He was equally adept at poker. He was an expert navigator of public transit, and could give good directions to anyone who was lost. I will never forget the time I saw him in Madison, Wisconsin, where he played a frat house. I was in Madison with some friends, and we asked the promoter -- Mad George Marx -- if we could drive Arvella back to Chicago the next day in exchange for free admission to the show plus a floor on which to crash. At 5:30 a.m., Arvella awoke and announced to the rest of us -- all still very much asleep -- that it was time to head back to Chicago. Once on Interstate 94, he proceeded to direct us in detail to his beige-bricked South Side apartment building.

In 1972, I made the acquaintance of David Wylie, who operated Birch Records out of suburban Wilmette, Ill. Birch had released LP records by country artists from the WLS-AM Barn Dance era such as Patsy Montana and Doc Hopkins. I asked him if he might want to record Blind Arvella Gray, knowing that it might represent a slight stretch musically. To my delight, Wylie was aware of Gray from the University of Chicago Folk festival, and arrangements were made to record what would become the artist's only full-length album. That night, I picked up Wylie in the North Shore on our way down to Sound Unlimited Studio in south suburban Harvey. Ever independent, Arvella got there on his own. The session ran into the wee hours and we could sense that Gray knew this was his time to immortalize his life's work. I am deeply thankful that we got it on tape for the world outside Chicago to hear.

More than 30 years had passed since the sessions for this recording when I woke up one morning and my first thought of the day was: "The Arvella Gray LP has never been reissued on CD. Someone needs to do that now. That someone is me." I set upon the long road to locating Dave Wylie. Birch Records was not on the Internet and Wylie does not have e-mail. A longtime colleague of Wylie's gave me his phone number. He still used the same P.O. box. Within a single discussion, we rekindled our friendship and agreed to go ahead with plans to reissue Blind Arvella Gray's The Singing Drifter.

I express my deep gratitude to Dave, as well to the legacy of Blind Arvella Gray. I am very excited for listeners in the 21st century to hear what I first heard at the corner of Maxwell and Halsted Streets on that cold Sunday in 1970.

-- Cary Baker, February 2005

These notes were originally published in the 2005 reissue of Blind Arvella Gray's The Singing Drifter (Conjuroo Recordings). The CD can be ordered ($15.98 postpaid) directly from Conjuroo Recordings (www.conjuroo.com), 13351-D Riverside Dr. #655, Sherman Oaks, CA 91423.

For online information, visit: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009ZE9V2/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-19