Blues icon 'Big Joe' has new CD
He's a generous mentor to a new generation of blues musicians By Rick Bird
Post staff writer

Big Joe Duskin remembers Cincinnati's blues heyday as if it were yesterday. After all, he was not only part of it, he helped create it. He remembers the West End and Over-the-Rhine saloons where the blues flowed into the streets like the beer in the late '30s.

"Listen, in every beer garden and every home there was a piano," Duskin said. "Man, you'd go in there and beat out those blues. I'd go and sit in and get about fifteen cents. You thought that was money back in them days. It was great."

The rugged elegance of Duskin's boogie woogie piano work has been captured on a new CD, "Big Joe Jumps Again: Cincinnati Blues Session" to be released this weekend coinciding with Duskin's annual appearance at the Cincy Blues Fest.

The 16-cut CD amounts to a civic musical treasure capturing Duskin performing at a session on a February day earlier this year. What oozes through are Duskin's booming rich voice and piano blues that immediately take you back to the birth of the blues -- Cincinnati style.

"This was an audio documentary of Joe," said Larry Nager, co-producer of the CD. "It's a portrait of Big Joe Duskin at 83 after a lifetime of music."

Nager and his Midnight Steppers bandmate, William Lee Ellis, put together the sessions hooking Joe up with two other Cincinnati musical legends: Philip Paul, the veteran King Records session drummer who played on hundreds of seminal recordings including Hank Ballard's "The Twist," Freddie King's "Hide Away" and Little Willie John's "Fever"; and Covington-born bassist Ed Conley, also a King session player.

Nager, the former music critic for The Cincinnati Post and Cincinnati Enquirer, said he wanted to give a decidedly local feel to the recording noting Duskin's previous CD, in 1988, was done in Chicago.

Nager also enlisted some guitar tracks for the project from Cincinnati's newest rock-star-in-residence, Peter Frampton. But it's Big Joe who is the star here.

"In Cincinnati, he's the guy," Nager says. "He's the Howlin' Wolf, the Muddy Waters of Cincinnati blues."

Nager dubs Duskin part of "the blues' Greatest Generation," borrowing the phrase Tom Brokaw used to describe the World War II generation that liberated Europe. Nager sees Duskin as one of the pioneering musicians who, from roughly 1925 to 1950, would create the American blues sound and its genres.

"These are the people who originated the music. Joe is definitely one of them and there aren't very many left," Nager said. "The idea of the record is to preserve that sound, to preserve the Cincinnati blues sound of Big Joe Duskin."

Duskin's life is one of those legendary "what if" stories. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1921 the third of 11 children, Joe and his family became part of the great black Northern migration when his dad moved to Cincinnati for a railroad job. By the time he was a teenager, Duskin was playing boogie woogie piano and getting jobs playing around the West End. But his father, also a preacher, considered the blues "the devil's music." Joe has said his father would whip him if he heard Joe playing the blues.

Joe finally gave in to his father. He stopped playing the blues when he was around 17, just before World War II. (Duskin would serve in the infantry in Europe).

"I promised him I wouldn't do it no more until he died," Duskin said.

When he made that promise, Joe's dad was into his 70s. Perry Duskin lived to be 105, dying in 1963.

Joe kept his promise, but by then he had lost interest in music. He was a Cincinnati policeman for 10 years and later worked for the post office for 20 years.

"I would have been great if I had kept going," Duskin says, admitting to regrets about giving up the piano for 30 years. "When you quit you lose a lot of prestige and they have a lot of things added to music and if you don't keep up with it, you are way behind."

Nager and many other musical historians familiar with Duskin's early work don't doubt he had a shot at becoming a major blues star. But Nager thinks those "what if" questions don't have pat answers.

"I take a different view. If Joe had continued he might have been a blues star and he might be dead by now. Those guys are touring all the time, playing bars all the time. A lot of those guys don't last until they are 83. Joe's had a pretty good life."

Duskin started playing again in the early '70s thanks to the encouragement of a young Cincinnati harmonica player, Steve Tracy, now a professor in African American studies at the University of Massachusetts. Tracy, like many white rockers of the time, began to discover the roots of rock in the blues. After doing some local research, Tracy heard about this boogie woogie player tearing up a piano in Cincinnati in the '30s. He looked up Duskin, played around town with him, helped him record and relaunch his career. Duskin says he literally had to relearn how to play, but it's paid off with a late-in-life career that has taken Joe across the United States and Europe the last 30 years.

The new CD is vintage Duskin, with his big voice and gutty piano playing, running through a number of blues standards and a couple original compositions, including his autobiographical "The Preacher and the Devil's Music."

It is a wonderfully rugged live recording with hardly any overdubs. "This is not a perfect recording," Nager said. "We didn't try to sanitize it. It's as real as it gets."

Joe throws a couple of hooks at listeners, such as playing the old Johnny Horton hit "North to Alaska," not a tune that comes to mind as a blues standard. But to Joe it's all music. "I always played that in my bands. I loved western blues. I love all music."

Big Joe no longer is the lightning fast boogie woogie player he used to be. He constantly fights health complications these days from his long battle with diabetes. As Nager says, "He's lost his fastball as it were, but his singing is so much better. He's deeper, a good rich singer."

Nager and other local musicians will tell you Duskin's biggest contribution the last 20 years has been to the music community, becoming a gentle mentor to a new generation of players.

"Joe is so accessible," Nager said, "with so much generosity. He never turned anyone down who wanted to sit in with him. That has turned so many people into better musicians."

Saturday has been declared "Big Joe Duskin Day" in Cincinnati by Mayor Charlie Luken and Duskin will get the key to the city at his performance at the blues fest. Joe is enjoying the personal attention but, more importantly, what it may do for his beloved blues.

"I like for people to read about this stuff because I think the blues is coming back strong. Rock 'n' roll have to go set down," he says with a big laugh.

Duskin chuckles about today's hip hop scene thinking back to those old West End days when he was as a teenager banging out the "devil's music," and, yes, experimenting with new sounds.

"Music today, that rap. I can't stand that. I don't even go for hip hop. Those are crazy things. We did that when we was growing up. They did nothing but change the name of it. They called it jitterbug in my day. They call it hip hop now."


The new CD
• "Big Joe Jumps Again: Cincinnati Blues Session" is officially released Saturday to coincide with Duskin's performance at 4 p.m. at the Cincy Blues Fest, Sawyer Point Park.

• Duskin will appear at the Jazzmania club in Covington at 9 p.m. Saturday night. Limited-edition, autographed CDs, signed by all the players on the project, will be available.

• The CD is available at most independent tri-state record stores including Borders Books and Music, Everybody's Records, Joseph-Beth, Moles, Shake It Records, and Phil's Books and Music.

• The CD is released by Yellow Dog Records, a Memphis-based boutique label that specializes in roots music (www.yellowdogrecords.com).