Tending the Roots
By Donald Liebenson
Elvin Bishop wasn’t fooling around when he fell in love with the blues.
Growing up in Tulsa on his family’s farm, the blues came to him in the night on radio stations from such far-flung locales as Nashville, Mexico, and Coffeeville, KS. “Out on the prairie, in those days, the local stations would shut down at midnight, and then you could pick up the 50,000-watt stations,” Bishop told Ravinia in a phone interview in anticipation of his festival debut with virtuoso harp player Charlie Musselwhite.
Bishop went at music “blindly,” he said. “My ear was not sophisticated because there was nobody musical in my family. I listened to records. I listened to an R&B disc jockey in Tulsa named Frank Berry, and I listened to what was happening on the Top 40 stations. I liked Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and all that. Eventually, I found out where the good part of rock and roll was coming from, and I went straight to the blues. The guys I really liked were John Lee Hooker and Lightning Hopkins. I was lucky enough to meet them later in life and got to be friends with John Lee.”
But it wasn’t so much the music that compelled him to pick up the guitar. It was “girls, I guess,” Bishop said with a laugh. “I’d go to junior high and high school dances and see the girls gathered around the guitar players.” That motivated him to purchase a guitar he found at a local pawn shop.
Bishop did not see the blues performed live until he came to Chicago. “It depends on how far you want to stretch the definition of blues,” he clarified. Tulsa, the site of race riots in the 1920s, was “pretty hardcore” when it came to anything with racial involvement, Bishop said. “But I attended what they called ‘package’ shows that featured Black and white performers on the bill. They’d have Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, Jerry Lee Lewis, maybe Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers. I went to see a Ray Charles concert at the Big Ten Ballroom. They ran a rope with white people on one side and Black people on the other.”
National Merit Scholar honors brought Bishop to the University of Chicago to study physics in 1960. He might have chosen Northwestern; both schools have stellar reputations, but the University of Chicago is in Hyde Park, and that’s where the blues clubs were.
“The first thing I did when I got to the University of Chicago was to make friends with the Black guys who worked in the cafeteria,” Bishop said. “They started taking me out. I got a chance to see Muddy Waters at Pepper’s Lounge, 43rd and Vincennes. Playing with him were James Cotton, Otis Spann, Pat Hare, and Willie Smith on drums.”
Bishop was self-taught on the guitar. “Like Bob Seger said, working on mysteries without any clues,” Bishop said. “I started shaping up really quick after I got to Chicago. I made friends with some of the musicians, and they’d invite me to their house. I just went at it 24 hours a day; just being able to see a guy’s hands on the fingerboard and see the lifestyle that went along with the words of the songs. They were much nicer than they had to be. I gave them a lot of respect and didn’t come across as an asshole, I guess.”
So much for studying physics. “I tried to keep it up,” Bishop said. “It was important to my folks, who went through the Depression. I come from a long line of farmers, and nobody had ever been to college in my family. It would have been extremely unpopular to mess that up, which I did, and it was.”
In 1963, Bishop met blues harp player Paul Butterfield, one of those fortuitous meetings that not so much changed the course of music, but spurred it to leapfrog miles ahead. The ensemble, proclaimed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for their 2015 induction, was “one of the first integrated blues bands with mass appeal. They pounced on the music and took no prisoners.”
The first two albums, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and East-West, especially, were staples of FM and underground radio stations. Bishop said that breaking musical barriers was not done with intention. “I was in the middle of it,” he said. “I was just thrilled to do what my heroes did; make a little living playing music.”
Rolling Stone ranked the band’s debut record among the top 500 albums of all time. Asked to confirm a claim that it was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band that inspired Dylan to go electric, Bishop demurs, “You’d have to ask him.”
Bishop recorded four albums with Butterfield before going solo, following the likes of James Cotton and Luther Tucker to San Francisco. “Opportunities opened to play auditoriums like the Fillmore, where legendary impresario Bill Graham put blues musicians on with the rock guys. That was a big attraction. Plus, the weather was better, and the girls were friendly.”
The Elvin Bishop Band released five albums in the mid-1970s. His 1975 album, Struttin’ My Stuff, featured his biggest hit, “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” featuring a pre-Jefferson Starship Mickey Thomas on vocals.
He has recorded prolifically since, earning four Grammy nominations in all. Which brings Bishop and Musselwhite to Ravinia on the heels of their Grammy-nominated collaboration, 100 Years of Blues. The project exudes labor of love. The two met in the early 1960s, but their paths, Bishop said, “didn’t cross as much as you would think.”
In 2017, Bishop prevailed upon Musselwhite to play on his album Elvin Bishop’s Big Fun Trio. “It worked out well and we got along,” Bishop said. “We did a couple of jam sessions and just started doing gigs together. I just like the guy. Most musicians our age are either dead or rehash old stuff. I’m impressed with him because he is always trying to improve. We play pretty good together.”
100 Years of Blues comprises originals, standards out of the Great American Blues Songbook, and updates of previously recorded songs, including Bishop’s “Old School,” whose lyrics reflect the strain of the blues that Bishop learned from Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Junior Wells, among many others: “I wear old-fashioned clothes / Old-fashioned shoes / Old Gibson guitar playing / Old-fashioned blues.”
“He came up with a list of songs he wanted, and I came up with a list of songs I wanted,” Bishop said of how the album came together. “We kept the ones that turned out good.”
At the age of 80, Bishop still gets around quite a bit, he said. “I really don’t enjoy the traveling like I used to. The romance has worn off. I like getting in front of the people and playing.”
He lives in Marin County, CA, where he avidly pursues another of his passions, gardening. Planting and the blues; it’s all about putting down roots. “I grew up on a farm,” he said. “Most of the blues guys had a rural background. The main thing I like is, you get out there and get to digging in the dirt and humping manure around, and sometimes ideas for the music pop up in your head.”
Bishop is in the enshrinement phase of his career. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2014, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with his Paul Butterfield bandmates in 2015, and the Blues Hall of Fame the next year. “I survived to be old enough to get those kinds of things,” he drily joked. “It’s better to get those honors than not to.”
Were he so inclined, he could log on to YouTube and watch vintage clips of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. But he is not. “I lived it,” he said.
Asked what he would tell that 20-something guitarist, he replies without missing a beat, “You couldn’t tell him anything.”