Saturday Night At Big Tiny's Place
with Little Tommy and the Blues Kings
I somehow felt there wasn't enough brilliance in this issue, so after some serious consternation I decided that a couple Steele Reserves and some blues might be in order. I dug through my CD collection and happened upon one of those cheap records made at what used to pass for a recording studio.
The South was filled with them, places where old egg cartons on the walls became sound baffles and local wannabes, mixed with some real talent, converged to make records. It wasn’t Muscle Shoals but sometimes when that peculiar confluence of individuals came together you got the unexpected. Real blues, soulful blues, sung and played by auto mechanics and truck drivers—grocery clerks and music teachers. Most of these folks had given up on the possibility of a life of fame and instead played because they loved it—and sometimes because they needed some green to help pay the bills.
But there are always the diehards, the few who have been called and know it. The first time I heard Little Tommy and the Blues Kings I was headed back from a short visit to Vicksburg. I was born there the same year that Elvis cut his first Sun Sessions and, like Elvis, I was a poor son of the south. My Grandparents were share croppers, my father was a barnstorming basketball player and my mother was a shy, tall, statuesque Southern Belle.
Mississippi was the 50th poorest state in the union and life in the delta in the fifties and sixties was as different from the rest of America as Appalachia or an Indian reservation. In some ways it was frozen in time, especially for the poorest of the poor. When the rest of Black America had abandoned the blues for a more urban sound, places like Yazoo City and Greenville became a haven for a remnant of the old style. Cheap instruments prevailed—like dollar harmonicas and Sears and Roebuck guitars.
It was the dog days of August, the humidity hung in the air like a blanket and the drive back from Vicksburg to Florida with a broken air conditioner seemed irrational. So I decided to wait until the sun cooled a little and began to make its descent into the delta. What I hadn’t considered is just how dark it can get in the back country on a moonless night. Motorvating down a two-lane, dirt road in darkness began to seem foolish and the visibility provided by my headlights seemed like a very limited lifeline. Then I saw a sign that read “Black Bayou Road.” The question of which way to go no longer seemed like a question of direction, but, one of survival.
It was then that I heard it—a sound off in the distance, what sounded like, salvation, the sound of a guitar. It rose and fell like a voice, albeit one more like an electrified badger than a siren song and beneath it was a grooving rhythm section and a piano playing triplets like a hammer fisted Jerry Lee Lewis. Then a horn section began to play a response to the guitar and I felt like… Moses. This wasn’t a burning bush—that seemed to tame. Instead it sounded like a bonfire, with the flickering lights off in the distance the result of the sparks caused by the sheer ferocity of the sound.
The road before me veered to the left and continued, narrowing to what looked to be little more than a series of ruts grooved by tire tracks. I wasn’t sure if my car’s tenuous suspension could withstand the treacherous landscape or whether I would end up being lodged between the seven-foot weeds to my right or the canal of black water to my left. The ruts naturally guided my vehicle towards the dark effluvium—filled, no doubt, with Buick-sized alligators just waiting for a mistake.
The road began to straighten out and opened up into a field dotted with swamp red maple trees jutting up into the night sky and then the moon came out from behind the clouds. The surrounding pasture was illuminated under its glow and the darkness that had seemed so threatening only a moment before gave way to a landscape thriving with people.
A group of shanties painted yellow and orange came into view surrounding a larger pink and brown one-story shack that seemed alive, rumbling with a clamorous intent. I parked outside the perimeter of the structures and as I stepped out of my car I was inundated by music and the sweet smell of barbecue sauce and seared meat. The guitarist began to bend and twist a string, punctuated by a vibrato, or what bluesmen called worrying a note—shaking the tone until its pulsations were hovering above the shack—discernible to the naked eye.
As I moved towards the entrance I noticed a sign that read “Big Tiny’s Ribs and Chicken Shack” amateurishly painted on a sign above the door. To the left was an older man attempting to put the moves on a much younger, disinterested woman. To the right was the sole white face I had seen since entering the property, a young man no more than 16 with his left arm folded over his chest, intently listening to the music. Lost in a trance, he stood with his right ear to the open door, reveling in the sound.
I entered into a room where the incandescence from four light bulbs provided an unnatural glare. Each bulb was suspended from a thin wire hovering just above the heads of the crowd and shook like the rest of the shack to the syncopated rhythms of the dancers.
A black man of modest height and powerful build approached. Jimmy Rushing, the great jazz and blues singer best known for his work with Count Basie, was called Mr. five by five—five feet tall and five feet wide. The man before me was no more than 5’6” or 7” but had legs like tree stumps and the unnatural chest and shoulders of a man at least a foot taller. He looked me up and down and said, “Twenty bucks, man.” And then pointed to a sign that read, “All the beer you can drink and all the barbecue you can eat….20 dollars!”
I reached into my pocket, scrambling for my wallet and pulled out two tens. “Thanks,” I said, and handed him the cash.
He responded by grabbing my arm, and then said, “I’m Big Tiny—and you at Big Tiny’s place."
To be continued
Mark S Magula
The South was filled with them, places where old egg cartons on the walls became sound baffles and local wannabes, mixed with some real talent, converged to make records. It wasn’t Muscle Shoals but sometimes when that peculiar confluence of individuals came together you got the unexpected. Real blues, soulful blues, sung and played by auto mechanics and truck drivers—grocery clerks and music teachers. Most of these folks had given up on the possibility of a life of fame and instead played because they loved it—and sometimes because they needed some green to help pay the bills.
But there are always the diehards, the few who have been called and know it. The first time I heard Little Tommy and the Blues Kings I was headed back from a short visit to Vicksburg. I was born there the same year that Elvis cut his first Sun Sessions and, like Elvis, I was a poor son of the south. My Grandparents were share croppers, my father was a barnstorming basketball player and my mother was a shy, tall, statuesque Southern Belle.
Mississippi was the 50th poorest state in the union and life in the delta in the fifties and sixties was as different from the rest of America as Appalachia or an Indian reservation. In some ways it was frozen in time, especially for the poorest of the poor. When the rest of Black America had abandoned the blues for a more urban sound, places like Yazoo City and Greenville became a haven for a remnant of the old style. Cheap instruments prevailed—like dollar harmonicas and Sears and Roebuck guitars.
It was the dog days of August, the humidity hung in the air like a blanket and the drive back from Vicksburg to Florida with a broken air conditioner seemed irrational. So I decided to wait until the sun cooled a little and began to make its descent into the delta. What I hadn’t considered is just how dark it can get in the back country on a moonless night. Motorvating down a two-lane, dirt road in darkness began to seem foolish and the visibility provided by my headlights seemed like a very limited lifeline. Then I saw a sign that read “Black Bayou Road.” The question of which way to go no longer seemed like a question of direction, but, one of survival.
It was then that I heard it—a sound off in the distance, what sounded like, salvation, the sound of a guitar. It rose and fell like a voice, albeit one more like an electrified badger than a siren song and beneath it was a grooving rhythm section and a piano playing triplets like a hammer fisted Jerry Lee Lewis. Then a horn section began to play a response to the guitar and I felt like… Moses. This wasn’t a burning bush—that seemed to tame. Instead it sounded like a bonfire, with the flickering lights off in the distance the result of the sparks caused by the sheer ferocity of the sound.
The road before me veered to the left and continued, narrowing to what looked to be little more than a series of ruts grooved by tire tracks. I wasn’t sure if my car’s tenuous suspension could withstand the treacherous landscape or whether I would end up being lodged between the seven-foot weeds to my right or the canal of black water to my left. The ruts naturally guided my vehicle towards the dark effluvium—filled, no doubt, with Buick-sized alligators just waiting for a mistake.
The road began to straighten out and opened up into a field dotted with swamp red maple trees jutting up into the night sky and then the moon came out from behind the clouds. The surrounding pasture was illuminated under its glow and the darkness that had seemed so threatening only a moment before gave way to a landscape thriving with people.
A group of shanties painted yellow and orange came into view surrounding a larger pink and brown one-story shack that seemed alive, rumbling with a clamorous intent. I parked outside the perimeter of the structures and as I stepped out of my car I was inundated by music and the sweet smell of barbecue sauce and seared meat. The guitarist began to bend and twist a string, punctuated by a vibrato, or what bluesmen called worrying a note—shaking the tone until its pulsations were hovering above the shack—discernible to the naked eye.
As I moved towards the entrance I noticed a sign that read “Big Tiny’s Ribs and Chicken Shack” amateurishly painted on a sign above the door. To the left was an older man attempting to put the moves on a much younger, disinterested woman. To the right was the sole white face I had seen since entering the property, a young man no more than 16 with his left arm folded over his chest, intently listening to the music. Lost in a trance, he stood with his right ear to the open door, reveling in the sound.
I entered into a room where the incandescence from four light bulbs provided an unnatural glare. Each bulb was suspended from a thin wire hovering just above the heads of the crowd and shook like the rest of the shack to the syncopated rhythms of the dancers.
A black man of modest height and powerful build approached. Jimmy Rushing, the great jazz and blues singer best known for his work with Count Basie, was called Mr. five by five—five feet tall and five feet wide. The man before me was no more than 5’6” or 7” but had legs like tree stumps and the unnatural chest and shoulders of a man at least a foot taller. He looked me up and down and said, “Twenty bucks, man.” And then pointed to a sign that read, “All the beer you can drink and all the barbecue you can eat….20 dollars!”
I reached into my pocket, scrambling for my wallet and pulled out two tens. “Thanks,” I said, and handed him the cash.
He responded by grabbing my arm, and then said, “I’m Big Tiny—and you at Big Tiny’s place."
To be continued
Mark S Magula