After thirty years, Columbus’ Willie Pooch, could make it big on the world stage.
WOSU’S Jennifer Hambrick reports on the so-called “Godfather of Blues.”
by Jennifer Hambrick
AUDIO FILE IS HERE
Blues singer Willie Pooch has been entertaining Columbus audiences for more than thirty years.
After a lifetime of paying his dues at a tough, gritty day-job and low-paying music gigs, Columbus’ seventy-three-year-old “Godfather of Blues” is at the crossroads between staying at home and becoming the city’s next international blues act.
WOSU’s Jennifer Hambrick found out how Willie Pooch got where he is today, and how close he might be to making it big.
It was a small crowd that gathered one recent Sunday night at The Canabar on Columbus’ Near East Side.
About fifty people nursed beers and chatted with neighbors around the four-sided bar and at a cluster of small tables.
A man took out a cell phone to tell his girlfriend that Willie Pooch would be singing later on. That’s something everyone in The Canabar’s crowd knew that night.
Backed by his band, The Upsetters, Willie Pooch shuffled to the stage in a light yellow suit with sky blue pin stripes, yellow crocodile-textured leather shoes on his feet.
He’s played with virtually all of Columbus’ blues musicians at blues bars and festivals around town. And those who know blues have no doubt: Willie Pooch is one of the greats. Pete Fallico, an independent radio producer and blues expert in Santa Cruz, California, says Pooch’s talent is the real deal.
“He’s got an incredible gift: the gift to convey a message, the gift to tell a story. If you can tell a story and reach into someone else’s heart, then you have done your job. If you want people to walk away remembering you, you have to touch them. And he has that ability.”
Willie Pooch’s story begins in Tupelo, Mississippi, where at the age of eight he started singing with the Gospel choir at the Little Red Oak Baptist Church.
When Pooch moved with his mother to Chicago at 16 and found no Gospel choirs to sing with, he thought his singing days were over. But a friend invited him to come to a blues club one night. That was when Pooch first heard the great bluesman Luther Allison.
“I’d sit up front and I listened to him play the guitar and sing. And I didn’t know too many blues songs at the time, you know. So then I started buying blues records, and I started listening to them.
After I learned the song, then I’d be out there in the audience there singing, you know. And so, he asked me, he said, ‘Man, I’m gonna get you up there and sing with me one night.’”
When that night came, Allison saw right away that Pooch’s Gospel roots were showing.
“Finally about three weeks later he called me up to the bandstand and I started singing “Sweet Little Angel,” you know, by B.B. King. And I had a knack of saying ‘O Lord’ and O, Jesus’ by singing the Gospel. And he reached over and hunched at me and said, ‘Just remember “Honey” and “Baby.” Leave the “O Lord” out, let’s remember “Honey” and “Baby.”‘”
Pooch bought himself a guitar at a pawn shop and plucked and sang his way by ear through songs he’d heard at the clubs.
He started playing guitar and, later, bass with other Chicago bluesmen, earning $9 for three hours of playing. Eventually he backed up blues greats like Elmore James, Luther Allison, Muddy Waters and Freddy King.
Pooch ended up in Columbus in 1962 when a one-time gig at Sam’s Bar and Grill, in what is now the Short North, turned into an eight-year job.
He earned eighty dollars a week playing and singing the blues at Sam’s, and added to his income blacktopping driveways and working construction.
He wasn’t Nelson Rockefeller, but he wasn’t starving. And he says the only blues he had at this time in his life were the happy blues.
“The happy blues is like when you wake up in the morning and you walk around the room, you get you a cup of coffee and you . . . you just hum to yourself, you know. You’re just in a good spirit, you know. That’s happy blues.”
Pooch later got a job chipping and grinding steel for railroad cars at Buckeye Steel Castings.
While Pooch was working at Buckeye Steel, his mentor Luther Allison asked him to back him up on a trip to France, but he says the union wouldn’t let him take time off from work to pursue a hobby.
From time to time, Pooch looks at the postcard Allison sent him from that trip, showing a sunset descending behind the rooftops of Paris. And he channels his frustration at not making that European trip into his art.
“I had my chance, but my job turned me down. I had my chance, but my union turned me around.”
And it wasn’t for nothing that he wrote “Buckeye Steel Mill Blues.” The three decades he put in doing that hot, sweaty work is what other blues musicians say makes Willie Pooch a great bluesman and, in a word. . .
“Authentic”
Upsetters drummer Greg Winter.
“I think he’s come from the real life. Working for Buckeye Steel, I mean, he was a laboring man, so he’s seen probably all sides of the blues.”
That’s why internationally known Columbus jazz organist Tony Monaco produced Pooch’s first solo album, Willie Pooch: Funk-n-Blues, on his own record label, Chicken Coup Records.
The recording has been well received. And Kevin Gregory, president of the Columbus Blues Alliance, says Pooch’s talent can take him to the next level.
“He really ranks very high in my opinion, deserves to be more nationally known than he is.”
So what would it take to turn this local treasure into a national or international act? Monaco says Pooch needs to release at least two more solo recordings and invest in a publicity machine to promote them in order to establish himself nationally.
But producing and marketing a single recording can run well into five figures, an expense Monaco himself largely absorbed in producing Pooch’s debut recording.
“Now for Willie, we need to find investors.”
Tony Monaco says, “He’s ready to go for another record. But I did my part. Now it’s time for the community to do their part.”
Willie Pooch and The Upsetters have also talked about making a trip to Europe to gain exposure. Gregory says this might just be their ticket to success.
“Sadly, America is probably the worst place for a blues performer to make a living. It definitely helps your reputation over here if you’re able to do tours in Europe.”
If Willie Pooch does get to Europe, maybe he’ll get to see a Parisian sunset like the one on Luther Allison’s postcard.
Meanwhile, he’ll keep singing the blues at joints like The Canabar. It’s a good bet those blues will be happy ones.
“The whole story of singing the blues is being happy.”
Jennifer Hambrick works for WOSU-FM where she hosts “The Classics with Jennifer Hambrick” Sunday afternoons at 3 on 89.7 FM.
© Copyright 2008, WOSU
The cold wind and heavy rain blew across Lake Erie Saturday afternoon. It pelted and drenched me before I could make my way from the parking lot to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I was in Cleveland to see the tribute show for guitarist and inventor Les Paul at the PlayhouseSquare Theatre. I had never been to the museum and wanted to see the exhibit dedicated to the master.
by Sam Hendren, WOSU Reporter
Arnold Steinhardt, First violin