After More Than 60 Years In The Business, James Cotton Is Staying With The Blues James Cotton is a jovial person who is as warm and down-to-earth as your favorite grandfather. This Chicago blues veteran and I spent some time discussing his illustrious career. He came to life and was the most vivid while recalling the Muddy Waters era. Cotton is now 72 and is enjoying his 63rd year in the entertainment business. He still maintains a hefty performance schedule which took him to Japan a few days after this interview took place. His fiery performances bring together the past and the present of America’s greatest music. He has always been a tough act to follow. Rock groups such as The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin learned that in the late 1960s. Cotton was very modest about his musical accomplishments and legendary status. His speaking voice has been ravaged by years of smoking, drinking, and cancer. This makes it very difficult to converse with him. With a colossal presence, he approached the hotel lobby area very slowly, while dressed in a bright, summer-patterned shirt and dark shorts. Regarding his greatest accomplishment, Cotton said, “I would say being a true blues harmonica player. That’s all I always wanted to be. I didn’t want to be a star.” This son of a preacher was born in Tunica, Mississippi in 1935. He described 1930s and 1940s Mississippi as being “rough.” The life of a sharecropper included longs days that were filled with physically exhausting work. “It was hard for the old black people. We did a lot of work and didn’t get paid for it. When I was seven years old, I was driving tractor with my uncle. They paid us every two weeks and every two weeks we got 36 dollars. My uncle said, ‘this ain’t no place for you, you need to be away from here.’” Present day Tunica is now one of America’s favorite gambling destinations. The first casino opened in 1992. Now, there are nine huge casinos and resorts like Bally’s and Harrah’s that bring a steady flock of tourists to the area. James commented on this controversial revitalization of his homeland. “All the [local] people pretty much left [because they] knocked down a lot of the houses [to build the casinos]. The casinos have given some of the people there jobs. But it left a lot of people broke because they win but spend all the money trying to win more.”
Orphaned at the age of nine, Cotton’s dignified destination was determined when he met Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) shortly thereafter. The thing Cotton learned the most from Sonny Boy was, “How to play the harp. Way back then, when I was trying to play and I’m still trying to play, my mother had a harmonica. She didn’t really play songs on it. She’d play the sounds of a train and a chicken cackling. I learned how to play that.” Young Cotton thought those where the only sounds a harmonica could produce until he heard King Biscuit Time on KFFA from Helena, Arkansas. “I thought, ‘what was that?’ I had never heard sounds like that from a harmonica before. I didn’t know that it was Sonny Boy; I was just messing with the radio. At the end of the show, the announcer would say tune in tomorrow at 12:15 for Sonny Boy and the King Biscuit Boys. I thought, ‘that’s what I wanna do with my life.’ I tried to make my harp sound like his.” The same uncle, that warned Cotton to get away from sharecropping, took him to meet Williamson. “I came from a family of nine kids and my mother’s brother; he took me to see Sonny Boy in Helena. He told me what to say to him. I told him I had lost my parents and didn’t have a home. My uncle asked him to listen to me play and to take care of me and he did. He took me home.” For the next six years, the two lived, worked and traveled together. Cotton would open for Williamson on the front steps of the jook joints because James was too young to get in. “I left when I was 15. I mean, he left when I was 15. His wife moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and we was in West Memphis, Arkansas. I don’t know what that was all about. After a few months, one morning he just split for Milwaukee to live with his wife.” Cotton inherited Williamson’s band but wasn’t able to keep them together for long. With no real home to go back to, Cotton packed his harmonica and ended up in Memphis. He performed on Beale Street for tips. A chance meeting introduced him to his second major influence, Howlin’ Wolf. This helped Cotton become greater known in Memphis and before he knew it, while still a teenager, he was recording for Sam Phillips in 1953.
The big break came the following year, when Muddy Waters asked Cotton to join his band. The virtuoso harp player breaks into a smile and has a hearty chuckle as he remembers how he and Waters met. “I was in West Memphis, Arkansas. I played two days a week at the Dinette Lounge. Friday evening and Saturday evening from four to six or something like that. One time in between sets, this guy approached me and introduced himself. He said, ‘I’m Muddy Waters’, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Jesus Christ.’ I didn’t believe he was Muddy but we talked for a while. He said, ‘Look, I’ve come looking for you. I want to take you with me up to Chicago. I’d like you to play harp for me.’ I still didn’t believe him. So he said, ‘I’m playing a one niter in Memphis. Meet me there, show time is nine o’clock.’ I went and there was Jimmy Rogers, Otis Spann and Muddy’s whole band. I told them Muddy sent me over here and at nine o’clock I’m supposed to play. Jimmy was the bandleader and he set me up to play. But I still wasn’t believing it. Then Jimmy Rogers announced it was show time and introduced Muddy. I had heard his records so I thought I’ll know now if its really him. Well, it was, and I couldn’t believe it. This was on a Saturday night. We played another gig near the state line of Arkansas and Missouri on the Sunday and then headed north to Chicago. I stayed with him until ‘66.” “Muddy was a sweet, sweet guy. The only time he got cross at you was when you didn’t play his music right. Muddy was the type of fella, whatever you heard on the record, when you went to see him play, you heard the same thing. You had to play it like that or you were gone. Or you’d be fined. We all wore suits and the handkerchief was supposed to be seen. If you couldn’t see it, it would cost five dollars.” He fondly remembered what it was like to see the big city for the first time. It was as if he was reliving it again right then and there. “I had never been to a city that big before. It was crazy there and it got really, really cold and it snowed. People would stand out in the snow waiting to get into the clubs where we played.” Urban life proved just as dangerous (if not more) than rural Mississippi. “We were in St. Louis. This guy came into the club we was playing at and shot five or six times. Then, we started getting all these crazy telephone calls. They’d hang up or say, ‘I’m gonna blow your brains out.’ That went on for a while then it all died down. In 1961, I left Muddy’s house and went to the corner to catch the bus to travel nine blocks. I was waiting at the bus stop and I seen him. We knew who he was. I just stood there while he walked up and asked, ‘how come you treat me like you did?’ Then, he fired his gun boom, boom, boom, just like that. It was eight or nine months before I recovered. He was nuts so he didn’t stay in jail too long.”
After the move to Chicago, Cotton wanted to learn how to play swing style harp. So, he asked Little Walter to demonstrate how to play it. “He said, ‘there is nothing to it,’ then he turned his back and did it.” Laughing sarcastically, Cotton continued. “I said, ‘thank you.’ Walter didn’t like harp players and given who he was, he didn’t have to.” Not long after that, Otis Spann took Cotton under his wing. “Spann showed me what I asked Little Walter to show me. Muddy lived on the first floor. I lived on the second floor. Spann lived in the basement. We would play music all day in the basement. That house is still there today. I think Muddy’s granddaughter owns it. I wish I did,” he said jokingly. After 12 years, Cotton and Waters parted ways and by all accounts it was James who was the one that left. “I had to play the same solos [as Little Walter]. I did that for a long time and then I got so bored with it. I told Muddy, ‘I like playing your music but I ain’t Little Walter and I never will be.’” In ’66, James Cotton formed his own band. By then, the white audiences had started to get into the blues. That period brought a lot of attention to the blues but the genre’s new audience didn’t always easily fit in. “One night, Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop, Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites came to see us in an all-black club.” Already laughing, Cotton recalled what happened next. “When Muddy saw them, he jumped up and hid. He said, ‘it’s the tax department, they’ve come here to get me to pay tax.’ They all stayed, listened to the music, started talking to me and that’s when I found out they were all musicians. Me and Paul got to be good friends. We lived 15 blocks apart. That era was beautiful to me because I influenced people to play like Butterfield, Charlie Musselwhite, and Magic Dick.” The 1970s were turbulent times for the blues but Cotton survived thanks to his constant touring and stunning LP releases. He even re-united with Waters, courtesy of Johnny Winter, for a series of highly popular albums. Throughout the 1980s, Cotton recorded for the up-and-coming Alligator Records and Blind Pig Records. His releases for those labels garnered him Grammy nominations. In the mid 1990s, he was awarded a Grammy for his album, “Deep In The Blues.” Ten years ago, Cotton battled throat cancer. “I feel pretty good now. My singing voice never did come back but other than that, I think I’m all right.” His newest disc, Baby, Don’t You Tear My Clothes, features many venerable guests just like the Blues Music Award winning 35th Anniversary Jam. This time around, the focus is on roots music as opposed to concentrating entirely on blues. “Just people I know,” is how Sir Superharp unpretentiously refers to special guests such as: Bobby Rush, Jim Lauderdale, Odetta and Peter Rowan. “I told the record producer that I wanted to do something different. He called a few people and I called a few people. We put it all together and I think it’s pretty good. Without singing, it gets me to play and concentrate on the harp more. The record was recorded in Maine and mixed in Austin. [Producer] Randy Labbe does everything I want. He just says, ‘do it.’ If there is something he hear, he will raise it to me and say, ‘James, what do you think about this, do you like that?’ Sometimes he is right and sometimes I say there is nothing wrong with it. What I say stays, stays, and I like that. This time they had a lot of songs they wanted me to do so I did them.” James still managed to squeeze in a few of his original tunes. All three are instrumentals and the most moving is called “Blues For Jacklyn.” “Jacklyn is my wife. She didn’t know about the tune until the CD came out.” Cotton was mentored by some of the greats. Now, he has mentored the next generation of blues musicians. Current, contemporary blues artists like Rico McFarland and Michael Coleman have learned plenty about the blues by performing with James Cotton. Donnie Walsh, of The Downchild Blues Band, was so impressed with Cotton’s celebrated band-leading skills that when Walsh became a bandleader, he used Cotton as a role model. “I’m trying to [pass the blues onto the young generation]. There ain’t as many players now as there was then. All the young people wants to do rap.” Regarding his feelings towards rap, he hesitated then stated, very diplomatically, “well, its selling but I could never do that. It ain’t for me. I’m a bluesman and I’m staying with the blues.” Special thanks to Telarc Records and Tom Heimdal for making this interview possible. Sources: Writer’s interview with James Cotton             : James Cotton biographies courtesy of Telarc Records and Jacklyn Hairston Tim Holek