“They had a piano in every house, every beer garden here. You could hear music all over Cincinnati back then.”   —Big Joe Duskin

Cincinnati may not be as famous a “Home of the Blues” as Memphis, Chicago and St. Louis, but the blues tradition in this Southwest Ohio city goes back to the music’s beginnings early in the 20^th Century.

Like its better-known sister rivertowns, Cincinnati is a gateway city, auspiciously located at the crossroads of America’s North and South, East and West, a place where Southern migrants and European immigrants flocked for good-paying jobs in the factories, railroads and on the busy Ohio riverfront.

Cincinnati became a business and transportation center in the mid-19^th Century, when the steamboats ruled the inland waterways. Railroads later kept the Queen City of the West on the move.

One thing shared by Cincinnati’s hard-working citizens, whether they be German-Catholic, African-American or Southern-Appalachian, was a love of good times, usually accompanied by good beers. Along with commercial goods, the river and the railroads kept musicians moving through town.

When the radio industry boomed in the 1920s-1940s, Cincinnati’s 500,000-watt WLW became “The Nation’s Station,” with a staff that included Fats Waller, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Andy Williams, the Mills Brothers and homegrown divas Rosemary Clooney and Doris Day.

After Prohibition, Greater Cincinnati’s surviving bootleggers ran fancy casinos in Northern Kentucky like the Glen Rendezvous, the Flamingo, the Tropicana and the Beverly Hills. Controlled by the Cleveland and New York mobs, the casinos served the Cincinnati population under the unwatchful eye of lax and usually corrupt Kentucky law enforcement.

Blues came early to Cincinnati, carried by Southern musicians working the steamboats and trains as deckhands or porters. The riverfront was a gathering spot and the downhome music there was documented by journalist Lafcadio Hearn in the late 19^th Century. In 1919, Cincinnatian Mamie Smith became the first African-American woman to have a blues hit with “Crazy Blues.” She began the classic-blues recording age of the ‘20s that would include Bessie Smith (no relation), Ma Rainey and others.

When country blues recordings became popular a few years later, locals like Bob Coleman and the Cincinnati Jug Band were among the first to put their music down on those shellac 78 RPM records.  Many early blues records (including some of Charley Patton’s) were cut at Gennett Records in nearby Richmond, Ind.

Joe’s younger brother Alfred, who died young, poisoned by a neighbor, was the only other musical member of the family. “My other brothers were woman lovers, and they’d never practice,” Joe recalls with disdain. “Always be chasing the girls.”.

Joe stuck with the piano, and a few years later discovered the bustling Cincinnati blues scene.

“They had a piano in every house, every beer garden here. You could hear music all over Cincinnati back then,” Joe recalls. “Dr. Clayton, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Slim, they’d all come through here. If you had a piano in the yard, they’d stop there in the yard and play. Sometimes they’d play for free and sometimes they wouldn’t. If they needed money, they’d put their hats out.”

Bigger names, such as boogie woogie king Pete Johnson, played posher venues like the Cotton Club, the area’s top black nightspot, or the Graystone Ballroom, the name under which the Topper Club served Cincinnati’s black community during segregation.

Young Joe was bitten hard by the blues bug by the time he was a teen-ager. But while the Duskin household was a musical one, it was strictly church music. Joe was encouraged to play, as long as he kept it sacred.

He knew better than to play blues in front of his father. Perry Duskin, like most preachers, considered it “the Devil’s music,” and wasn’t afraid to literally beat the Devil out of his son.

“If he caught me playing boogie woogie and blues, if I was in the house, that’s curtains for me. He’d grab that old bullwhip and man, that old man would eat me up.”

On this CD, Joe recounts being caught by his father in mid-blues performance. Despite a sudden switch to a hymn, he received a fierce beating.

But blues and boogie woogie were the hot new sounds for young urban blacks in the 1930s, and despite the scars, the teen-aged Joe challenged his father, “I told him, ‘Dad, you’re gonna have to keep beating me all the time. I’m gonna play this music.’

‘Well, I don’t want you playing it.’

“And I said, ‘Dad, what’s wrong with it.?’

‘God will send you to Hell for this’.

“I said, ‘God ain’t no fiend, Dad. Come on, what he want to send me to Hell and give me life in Hell? He gives life to those that are Christians.’”

But logic couldn’t sway his father. Even proof of the commercial value of Joe’s skills couldn’t convince him. In the late 1930s, Joe once came home from a concert at the University of Cincinnati with almost $800, paid by students who passed a bucket while he played. At first, the elder Duskin thought his son had robbed a bank.

“That was money back then,” Joe says. “You could take a nickel and get a loaf of bread. We lived off that money for almost a year.”

But if Joe’s father reluctantly accepted the wages of sin, he still didn’t accept the sin.

“Last time he whupped me, he brought a preacher and his wife to the house. And he told me to entertain them while he went to the store and got some refreshments. And the preacher asked me, ‘Can you play anything else but church songs?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I can play jazz and boogie and I can do blues and all that.’ And he said, ‘Let’s hear some.’ And I did that and he was up dancing, him and his wife. And the old man came in.”

His father became incensed at his son’s disobedience, and, to make matters worse, he’d done it in front of a guest. The visiting preacher defended Joe, saying that he had requested secular music. “And he told this minister, ‘You get out of here and never come back. I don’t want him playing nothing but church songs.’

“And after they got away I said, ‘Dad, look, I’m gonna play this music, and you’re gonna have to be beating me every time.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you wait until I’m dead and in the grave?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s good. I’ll do that.’”

It wasn’t merely that Joe was a dutiful son. “It’s in him and it’s got to come out,” in the words of John Lee Hooker (who, on the way from Clarksdale to Detroit, called Cincinnati home in the 1930s). But Joe thought he’d be able to let it out again soon.

“Dad was about 79 years old. I thought, ‘He doesn’t have too much longer.’”

All that time he figured he’d soon be able to play blues again. But his father had other ideas.

“He got to be 80-something years old and I said. ‘Mom, how long do you think Dad’s gonna live?’ And she said, ‘You want to play that piano.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I made a promise that I wouldn’t until he was in the grave.’ “And when he got around 90, I went to my Mom and I said, ‘That old man is gonna live like Methuselah. I’m never gonna play another note.’”

Finally at 105, Perry Duskin died in the arms of his devoted, blues-loving son. It was 1963 and Joe, still a Cincinnati cop, had pretty much forgotten everything on the piano except for what he played in church. At last free of his promise, Joe still couldn’t play the blues like he did as a young man.

It wasn’t until the early 1970s, when Steve Tracy, a young Cincinnati blues fan/musician/scholar, showed up at his front door, that Joe started again in earnest. With Tracy’s encouragement (and harmonica accompaniment) Joe re-learned his old boogie woogie and blues and became a popular draw at blues festivals and clubs, both in the States and abroad. In 1979, Arhoolie Records released an album that was both a debut and a comeback, Cincinnati Stomp.

Today, at 83, Joe remains in demand at international blues fests, but poor health keeps him in the States. He walks with crutches, due to complications from diabetes, and his lightning-fast boogie woogie chops have faded.

But as his piano agility has slowed, his voice has grown more powerful and expressive. He also remains the warm and gentle blues patriarch who never refused any musician who asked to sit in with him.

Joe was a mentor to several generations of Cincinnati blues players, and all of them talk proudly of sharing a bandstand with the great singer and pianist.

That’s how co-producer William Lee Ellis, then a student at the Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, first met Joe in the mid-1980s and that’s how I met him in the late 1970s, shortly after I came to town to play upright bass in the Katie Laur Band. Then and now, Joe’s warmth and charisma made playing the blues a joyful, accessible experience. 

Today, Joe is one of the last genuine American bluesmen, part of the blues’ Greatest Generation, the pioneering men and women who, before World War II, created a uniquely American body of work that fueled global interest in the music and continues to inspire young musicians and fans the world over.

He’s also just about the last of the original Cincinnati bluesmen. Guitarist Big Ed Thompson, pianist Pigmeat Jarrett and singer/instrumentalist Albert Washington are all gone. Blues shouter H-Bomb Ferguson keeps the flame alive, but he too isn’t in the best of health.

The recordings here were meant to capture that Cincinnati blues sound before it’s lost forever.

Covington-born bassist Ed Conley was on many of Phil’s King sessions and even knew Joe when the two worked at the main branch of the Cincinnati post office.

Guest guitarist Peter Frampton is the most recent Cincinnatian here. He met — and jammed with — Joe at a benefit the British rock great had organized at Cincinnati’s Taft Theater for the victims of 9/11, shortly after that tragedy. Peter also was old friends with Phillip, having recorded “Hide Away” with him for the King records tribute, Hidden Treasures, a charity album that raised funds for the Inclusion Network. His work with Joe here is a reminder of the hot young blues-rocker raised on Bluesbreaker records who powered the first — and best — version of England’s Humble Pie.

The session’s other guitarist is co-producer William Lee Ellis, who plays National steel guitar. Now based in Memphis, Ellis cut his teeth in the 1980s Cincinnati blues scene, playing with Big Joe and in the acoustic blues quartet The Midnight Steppers with Steve Tracy, Dudley Radcliff and myself.

Cincinnati singer Shawna Snyder is one of the rising talents on the scene, her big, soulful voice featured on numerous local recordings as well as performances with her Shawna Snyder Band. She sings with Joe, William Lee and myself on the old Bessie Smith barrelhouse number, “Black Mountain Blues.”

Put them all together and you’ve got Big Joe Jumps Again!, an informal audio documentary of a natural bluesman, playing some favorite songs with old (and new) friends.

There’s his driving version of Memphis Minnie’s “One Dirty Rat,” Memphis Slim’s “Beer Drinking Woman,” Big Joe originals like “Mean & Strange” and standards like “Every Day I Have the Blues” and “Key to the Highway.”  There are also some surprises, like Joe’s version of the country warhorse “North to Alaska,” which he just started hammering out at the end of a session, or the meditative “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” that ends the disc.

There have been unexpected twists and turns and one very long detour in Big Joe’s career. But through it all, his music stayed straight and true. He loved playing the blues as a teen-ager and he still loves the blues today. The fingers may have slowed, but his voice has grown deeper and more resonant and his soulfulness shines brighter than ever. So here’s Big Joe Jumps Again!, a pure and undiluted shot of Cincinnati blues, the most complete portrait of the great Big Joe Duskin you’ll find anywhere.

—Larry Nager, Cincinnati Ohio