“As we was drivin’ down, you know, the highway that’s close around Clarksdale…Just before we’s get to Clarksdale… There was all these trees, all these vines. Listen to me real closely, all these vines seemed to cover the trees, the trees looked like they’re dead. They’re like it’s night time, the ghosts all hanging around ya.’ It’s just like old bluesmen from Mississippi all dyin’ out, there’s just a few left…”
So says Floyd Lee, the latest addition to the 2012 Roots & Blues Festival slate, and by his own omission, an “old original knock-down-drag out bluesman.”
His latest CD, Full Moon Lightnin’, sounds as though it is from the same sound and spirit that still haunts the woods of the Mississippi Delta. Recorded in Clarksdale, MS, in the same studio where greats such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, BB King and Elvis Presley once played live for DJ Early Wright’s blues show on WROX radio, it echoes the spirit of those past masters.
“[It’s called] Full Moon Lightnin’ because the moon is shining on those trees, and those are the souls of the dead bluesmen – the people that love the blues so much… Boy, that’s a heartbreaker.”
Like his most recent record, Lee is a product of the Mississippi, where he was born in 1933. When he was three-months old, his mother gave him away because she could not provide for him, and he left the Delta region.
Growing up in Memphis Lee often got into trouble and eventually the woman who cared for him put him on a train with a sign hanging around his neck reading, “Chicago.”
Though he first began singing in a doo-wop group in the 1940s, it was the blues that always attracted him. As a boy, he would watch his father play guitar and witnessed firsthand the power it had over an audience, especially the ladies.
When his father wasn’t around, Lee would venture down to the basement and play his guitars. And although he has been playing the blues his whole life, it was only recently that his music received widespread recognition.
Guitarist and Amogla Records founder Joel Poluck saw Lee perform on cable television in the late 1990s, and “roped him in” to record his songs. The two, along with Brad Vickers on bass, now perform and record under the Floyd Lee Band moniker. Whether playing in a juke joint in the middle of a Mississippi cotton field, or performing in the middle of Times Square in NYC, the Floyd Lee Band delivers the real deal – hard edged blues.
They have topped blues radio charts around the world.
It has been more than 60 years since Lee left the hill country of Mississippi and, with his exodus, he turned his back on a troubled childhood and a harsh life in the cotton fields.
Lee still wrestles with unanswered questions about his mysterious and painful past. Now at the age of 73, he and his band have embarked on a deeply personal journey back home to Mississippi.
It is a journey that has been captured in film, one that, like their lives, stretches through heartache, abandonment and racial divide.
“This is a true and uplifting story of transcendence,” says Roots and Blues Festival marketing manager Scott Crocker, who invites everyone to an outdoor screening of Full Moon Lightnin’ – The Film at 9 p.m. Thursday, July 19 at R.J. Haney Heritage Village.
Tickets are $5 each. Use the new online reservations system at www.routesandblues and click on the tickets tab, or call 250-833-4096.
Roots and Blues runs Aug. 17 to 19.
