In Restvale Cemetery in the southwest suburban village of Alsip, a tree with two gnarled trunks juts from the ground in a stark Y. In its shadow, in two unmarked graves about 20 yards apart, lie blues musicians Joe and Charlie McCoy, brothers who died in Chicago 60 years ago.
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Musician and self-employed Web developer Arlo Leach, who moved from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, last year, became enamored of the McCoys while teaching a class on jug bands at the Old Town School in the early 2000s. (It had started out as a class on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, but once he saw how much fun everyone had building and playing a washtub bass, he changed tack.) One day local bluesman Eric Noden subbed for him and brought in “Oh! Red,” a tune by the McCoys’ late-30s group, the Harlem Hamfats. The students loved it, and Leach caught the bug too. He was captivated by the McCoys’ blend of raucous irreverence, blues emotion, and citified sophistication, and soon he became a committed advocate of the whole genre. “A lot of people don’t have a lot of respect for it, because it’s kind of seen as novelty music,” he says. But jug bands, the McCoys in particular, were much more than that. “There’s a lot of variety that you don’t find in some of the more typical blues artists. They did straight-up blues, they did ragtime stuff, and they did things that didn’t really fit into a category. Just by following those guys’ careers, you can get a sampling of most of the styles of prewar black music.”
A visit to Restvale shortly before he left town for Portland drove home for Leach how poorly the McCoys and the swinging blues style they helped popularize had been treated by history, and he resolved to do something about it. “It just really touched me,” he remembers, “that Joe and Charlie were both buried, not right next to each other but like 20 feet away. I knew that they’d played together throughout their whole career, and to me it was just really sweet that they were both buried together as well.”
The McCoys left their mark on a wide range of artists. Louis Jordan’s jump-and-jive blues style, which came into its own in the late 30s, owes a clear debt to the Hamfats’ rough humor and polished musicianship. Western-swing bandleader Bob Wills covered Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s 1930 cut “What’s the Matter With the Mill” in 1936, and Muddy Waters remade it as “Can’t Get No Grindin’” in 1972. Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman had a national hit with 1942’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?,” based on a 1941 Lil Green version of a Joe McCoy song the Hamfats had recorded in 1936 as “Weed Smoker’s Dream.” (Jessica Rabbit sang it in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit.) And Led Zeppelin resurrected “When the Levee Breaks,” another tune by Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy, in 1971. Jug-band music also influenced the entire blues genre known as hokum, a good-humored mix of slick musicianship and silly double entendres (“Let Me Play With Your Poodle,” “It’s Tight Like That”). Pioneered by Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey in the late 20s, by the early 30s it was the dominant Chicago blues style.
Mandolin workshop with John Hasbrouck Sun 10/3, 1-2:30 PM, $25.
Body percussion workshop with Sule Greg Wilson Sun 10/3, 2-3:30 PM, $30.
Guitar workshop with Chris Walz Sun 10/3, 3-4:30 PM, $25.
