(Left to right)  James Campbell, Beauford Clay, two unknown men and Pomona College student Bill McCulloch in Nashville, 1961. (Photo by Donald Hill)

Between 1958 and 1961, Don Hill and Dave Mangurian, two college friends from southern California, traveled around the country several times recording and interviewing street, folk, blues, country, and jazz musicians, ranging from well-known to obscure.  Many of their recordings were made in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas.  

This year, nearly 50 years later, the Grammy Foundation awarded a $40,000 grant to Hill and Mangurian to digitize their reel-to-reel analog field recordings, catalog the collection, and find the artists or their heirs for permission to donate the collection to the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, which is working with them to help preserve the recordings.    

Five of their recordings were made in the Memphis and Nashville areas.  They include the Memphis Jug Band, electric blues band Fred Moten and the Crowns, John Moses and Maude Rainey, all of Memphis, and Nashville street singers Blind James Campbell and Cortelia (C.C.) Clark.

Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band playing washtub bass outside his Beale Street apartment in Memphis, 1961. (Photo by Donald Hill)

For more than 40 years, the Hill-Mangurian tape recordings languished in storage boxes in their homes.  In 2002, Hill and Mangurian each received separate calls from people wanting to use some of their recordings — Wade Walton’s music for a PBS civil rights documentary and interviews with Muddy Waters, Meade Lux Lewis and Speckled Red for a public radio series on rhythm and blues called “Let the Good Times Roll.”

“We always knew we had historic recordings,” said Mangurian, “but these calls made us realize people wanted access to them.”  

The inquiries prompted Hill and Mangurian to inventory their tape collections.  The two met at Hill’s house in Oneonta, N.Y., the summer of 2004 to listen to the tapes.  

“We recorded everything on a consumer quality Wollensak tape recorder,” said Hill.  “But we had the good sense to use a professional microphone from the beginning.  When we played back our tapes through good speakers, the quality was amazing.”

Mangurian said the most difficult part of the project “is locating heirs to the people we recorded. Many of the musicians were old when we recorded them, so few are alive now that we know of.”

While Hill was an exchange student at Fisk University in the spring of 1959 and on another trip in 1961, he recorded Blind James Campbell (harmonica and vocals) in Nashville along with Campbell’s friends Beauford Clay (fiddle and guitar), Lloyd (George?) Bell (trumpet) and William Ball (guitar and vocals).  Robey Cogswell, director of folklife at the Tennessee Arts Commission, often watched them playing in front of the Masonic Lodge on Broadway and 7th and in front of the Tennessee and Paramount movie theaters on Church.   

In 1963, these musicians released an album, Blind James Campbell and His Nashville Street Band, on Arhoolie Records. They remained popular and respected enough for the record to be reissued by Arhoolie on CD in 1995, but their whereabouts and heirs are unknown.

The only known biographical information about the group is on James Campbell. He was born Sept. 17, 1906.  At 30, an accident in a fertilizer plant left him blind and he started the Nashville Washboard Band.  As described by Jason Ankeny of the All Music Guide to the Blues, they were a “a loose-knit aggregation which consisted of guitar, mandolin, lard can (or tub bass), and a washboard; they honed their skills not only on the streets but also at area parties, typically playing to white audiences but also sitting in at black roadhouses.”

Ankeny describes their music as a “blend of blues, jazz, old-time, skiffle and jug band music; while their material is traditional, the presentation is anything but, with a tuba taking the place of bass guitar and Campbell’s gravelly voice going lower and deeper than either.”

Cortelia (C.C.) Clark died in a house fire in Nashville in 1960.

Also while at Fisk University, Hill recorded the much-loved Cortelia (C.C.) Clark.  A magnetic performer, Clark played guitar and sang blues-folk tunes at Fifth Avenue North in front of the Woolworth’s while selling shopping bags.  In 1966, he won a Grammy for Best Folk Performer for his album “Blues in the Street,” beating out Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary and Leadbelly.  Two months later, he took up his post on the street again.  

In November 1960, while Clark was filling a kerosene heater at his home at 934 Jefferson St., it exploded, engulfing the house in flames.  He died in a hospital burn ward Dec. 24, 1969.  Family members who attended his funeral were his wife, Lou Ella Collier, and his cousins, James Fork, E. D. Fork and Joe B. Fork, all of Nashville.  There is no known contact information for any of these family members.  Cortelia’s record album was re-released on CD in October 2004.

Don Hill (left) and Dave Mangurian in front of Pomona College radio station KSPC in 1961, where they had a radio show and played many of their recordings. (Photo owned by Donald Hill)

In the summer of 1961, Mangurian and Hill traveled back to Clarksdale, Miss., to drive Wade Walton, a blues singer they had discovered on their 1958 trip, to New York City for a commercial recording session they had arranged with Prestige Records.  But before Walton could leave, Hill and Mangurian were jailed in Clarksdale on “suspicion” of being civil rights agitators, released two days later as “crackpots” (according to the police report) and told to “get out of Clarksdale by sundown.”  

They drove to Memphis.  While waiting for Walton to meet them, they found members of the Memphis Jug Band, which included Will Shade, Gus Cannon, Laura Dukes, Catherine Young, Mary Mitchell and Charles Hicks, living near Beale Street and recorded them. They played guitar, banjo, ukulele, harmonica and washtub bass and popularized jug band music in the 1920s.  The Rooftop’s recording of Cannon’s song “Walk Right In” became a huge hit in 1963.  The importance of Will Shade and Gus Cannon is well documented, which may make their heirs easier to find.  But there is no information on the other band members that Hill and Mangurian recorded.  

Also, while waiting for Walton to arrive from Clarksdale, Hill and Mangurian recorded Fred Moten & the Crowns – an electric blues band with guitar, harmonica, bass, drums, and vocals – at the studio of the famous WDIA radio station during a broadcast in the summer of 1961.  On the recording, you can also hear announcements made by legendary WDIA radio DJ Nat D. Williams.  

It is unknown if Fred Moten and the Crowns were a band on tour passing through Memphis or a local band with Fred Moten being a member of Memphis’s very musical Moten family.  During an interview with the band the musicians were asked their names.  The harmonica player called himself “Brook Benton,” but this name was probably a pseudonym.  

While in Memphis, they also found and recorded urban blues musicians John Moses and Maude Rainey.  No information about these two musicians or their heirs has been found.    

Mangurian recorded Arkansas-born pre-blues performer Roy Brown when he traveled to St. Louis in 1960 to take guitar lessons from him.  Brown was born April 20, 1875, the son of a preacher.  When he was seven, his family moved to Butler County, Mo., just across the Arkansas border.  

Brown and his sister learned to play guitar from their father, and they accompanied him when he played violin in church.  Brown’s father was said to have died in October 1950 in Poplar Bluff, Mo., at the age of 104.  No reference to his father’s church has been found nor has any obituary been found which may lead to finding Roy Brown’s sister or her heirs.  

Brown traveled to St. Louis for the World’s Fair in 1904, and then traveled throughout the Midwest for years before settling in St. Louis.  Mangurian and Hill recorded Brown again in 1961 singing and playing old timey music from the late 1800s and early 1900s on his guitar and kazoo at his St. Louis home.  A CD titled “Cowboy Roy Brown” was issued by Delmark Records in 2007 from old tape recordings discovered in St. Louis.

Don Hill (left) and Dave Mangurian listening to their historic tape recordings in Don’s home studio in Oneonta, N.Y., 2004.  (Photo by Luz Mangurian)

Mangurian went on to become a respected photo journalist covering Latin America and now lives in Bethesda, Md.  Hill is Professor of Anthropology and Africana and Latino Studies at SUNY College at Oneonta and a renowned expert on Caribbean calypso music and folklore.  

(Anyone who has any information on the above performers or their heirs should contact Linda Griggs, who is assisting in obtaining permissions for the Hill-Mangurian music preservation project. Call (212) 777-9837 or email Linda@lindagriggs.com.)