By David Whiteis
He wasn’t the first white fan to investigate Chicago blues. Bob Koester had been a south-side habitue since arriving here in 1958 from Saint Louis, where he had recorded long-ignored jazz and blues artists as head of Delmar Records. In Chicago, Koester’s renamed Delmark label had become an internationally recognized jazz and blues outlet, and his Jazz Record Mart was a gathering place for fans and artists alike. “The best source for blues information at the time was Blues Unlimited, which was published in England,” says O’Neal. “That seemed kind of absurd, to have to subscribe to a magazine in England to find out what was happening in your own city.” The European magazines seldom wrote about live performance or gave the musicians a voice, so O’Neal and a few other true believers who hung around the Jazz Record Mart decided to start their own.
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Living Blues, “A Journal of Black American Blues Tradition,” debuted in spring 1970 with Howlin’ Wolf on the cover, and for the next decade Jim and his first wife, Amy van Singel, concentrated on developing the magazine as a voice for blues authenticity; historical scholarship shared space with interviews and record reviews. As O’Neal was to learn, the black and white communities could differ in their ideas of authentic blues. “We put Bobby Bland on the cover of number four, and we were reviewing 45s a lot, and I was always trying to find out what the latest ones were from Memphis and down south, on the soul labels. So we did try to cover that end of it from pretty early on, and didn’t meet with too much acceptance from the white blues fans who didn’t regard that stuff as blues.” Yet O’Neal doubts that the magazine had much of a black readership, despite a deal with the giant distributor Charles Levy Company that got it placed in south-side supermarkets and the like.
The Hugginses dreamed up the name Rooster Records because of “the general association ‘rooster’ has with the blues: ‘The rooster crowed ‘fore day,’ ‘Little Red Rooster’–all those images. And also Sun Records–we were all fans of the blues stuff that had been recorded on Sun. We didn’t actually have the Sun rays, we just had the rooster, but the rooster looks pretty similar. Mick, who designed it, says it’s pretty similar to the Kellogg’s rooster too.” The discovery of a Rooster Records in Vermont forced them to change it to Rooster Blues.
In Mississippi, O’Neal found a mother lode of largely undocumented blues talent, but the label didn’t release much until he settled in Clarksdale in 1988. He says he received a solicitation from “a committee of the mayor, the director of the Delta Blues Museum, the chamber of commerce, the local arts council, a banker, and a newspaper writer” inviting him to move the label there. “I guess they thought we were bringing big money and jobs to town, but when it turned out we needed a business loan to get started, none of the banks would help. We did end up bringing money to town via tourist dollars, something few people at the time believed would ever happen there, and putting money in the local musicians’ pockets from recordings and out-of-town bookings.” In Clarksdale, O’Neal opened a record store, Stackhouse Records (named for Delta bluesman Houston Stackhouse); it soon became internationally known among collectors, but as any hard-scuffling bluesman will affirm, reputation doesn’t pay the bills.
“It’s completely overwhelmed right now, the general concept of what blues is,” says O’Neal. “I can’t fight that, so all I can do is just continue to try to record these folks, the artists I think should be recognized. I don’t mind white artists playing blues, country artists, rockabilly–I like a lot of that. It’s just when they tend to get promoted as authentic Delta blues artists, as if there’s no difference between their culture and the black culture. It’s a case of numbers, too–the numbers of white blues bands are just swelling enormously, and their access to the whole system, the publicity system, is so much greater.” Of course, many contemporary black blues artists sound at least as mainstream as their white counterparts, but O’Neal insists that the distinction remains valid. “There’s a connection there that white people just don’t have. Where the blues came from is about being black in a predominantly white society where the power was white. And all those things haven’t changed.”
