John Jackson

John Jackson
Blues and Mountain Hoedown
Interview by Don Harrison

A semi-retired dairy farmer, picking guitar at a gas station, has an encounter with a folklorist that sets off record deals, critics’ laurels, a National Heritage Fellowship Award, and the adulation of international audiences.

Although he now lives in Fairfax Station, John Jackson has come a long way from rural Rappahannock, where he lived his first 25 years and where his large music-making family worked a farm. Father Suttee led a black string band, and the Jackson home provided shelter for traveling bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Learning “a few things” on the guitar from a chain-gang convict building the first blacktop road through Charlottesville, young John’s first gigs (on a $3.75 guitar) were at local house parties …

JJ: People used to come from miles around. One [musician] would play awhile and then the other… it would go on all weekend. Sometimes there’d be 200 people at a house, dancing, pitching horseshoes… something for everybody to do.
You grew up on a farm.
Jackson: There was 14 of us, nine boys and five girls.
Was everyone musical?
JJ: We’d play on the weekend. I mean, you had to work during the week Sometimes we’d sing songs before bedtime or have a game of checkers.
Did you learn guitar from your father?
JJ: [Laughs.] I couldn’t learn nothing from him, he played the guitar upside down, left handed. [I learned] his songs. He played something they called ‘Blues and Mountain Hoedown.’ I learned songs like “Railroad Bill” …
“Railroad Bill” is on your latest CD. So is “The Devil He Wore a Hickory Shoe.”
JJ: I learned [that] from my mom, an old spiritual. She sang that in church, that’s all I ever knowed her to sing was spirituals.
What did your mom think of the blues?
JJ: Well, it was in the family. My father, aunts and uncles all played too.
How would you characterize Virginia blues?
JJ: I think some of the earliest blues players there was come from Virginia. I mean, the first slaves settled here. Lots of Virginia artists recorded in the ‘20s. Carter Family, Luke Jordan.
Luke Jordan is a mysterious figure.
JJ: I never did meet Luke Jordan. I seen him one time. It was about 1942. I wasn’t in Lynchburg, I was in a little place up in the country and he [had] come back from Christiansburg, at a college somewhere, and stopped in this little place called the Pine Knot Inn…he played one song.
Another early Virginia bluesman was William Moore.
JJ: I never knowed…until my mama told me in her last years who the man was that used to come around to play with my father. A lot of people used to come. There used to be a man who (would) bring people to the farm for 10 cents a head.
You learned to play from 78s. Where did you get your records?
JJ: Two furniture dealers used to come around, selling the wind-up record player. They’d have records for sale. Ten or 15 cents, maybe a quarter.
Charles Perdue discovered you in Fairfax. How did that happen?
JJ: There was a bunch of kids playing in my yard and when they got tired of playing ball, they wanted to do this whip dance like Elvis Presley started, the hula dance, and they asked me to get out my guitar. I hadn’t touched a guitar since 1946. This mailman came by and asked me if I could teach him to play. He said he had a part-time job at the Amoco and I could get into the back room of the station and learn him the guitar when he wasn’t pumping gas. So I went down there and [Perdue] came in to get some gas and heard me.
Many older Virginia musicians just weren’t documented.
JJ: That’s right. Some of the people back where I was growing up was fantastic blues people. I could just name a whole bunch. All dead now.

Recommended on CD:
Blues and Country Dance Songs From Virginia (Arhoolie)
Front Porch Blues (Alligator)

— Originally published in 64 Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2001.