A couple of weeks after Roy Book Binder was in town, I got a package in the mail. It was a hardcover copy of Dick Waterman: A Life In The Blues, Tammy Turner's 2019 biography of the legendary booking agent. When I rolled up for sound check the day of our show, Roy had been reading it on a folding chair in the parking lot outside his motor home. "I'll send it to you when I'm finished," he'd said. I agreed that if he did, I'd pass it along to someone else when I was done with it.

Waterman was one of three young white guys who "discovered" Son House in Rochester, New York in the early 1960s. But only Waterman went from simply seeking out one prewar bluesman on a whim to becoming one of the most significant non-musician figures in the blues scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a booking agent for House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and several others, Waterman went beyond merely negotiating decent terms for the artists he represented – a significant feat in and of itself. He drove hundreds of miles to take musicians to gigs, put them up at his home, routinely made round-trip flights to escort them to and from festivals, and in the case of House, was instrumental in securing that bluesman's 1965 major-label record contract with Columbia.

Waterman ultimately wound up working not only with prewar-era solo acts but also next-generation artists like Junior Wells and Buddy Guy, plus a young Radcliffe student turned blues aficionado turned rock'n'roll act, Bonnie Raitt.

Which is where Roy comes back into the picture. At some point in the 1970s, Dick expressed an interest in helping Roy out with his career. He gave Roy his number and told him to call in a few weeks, when things might be a little less crazy at the office.

Roy waited, and called, and when he and Waterman spoke, things were still a little crazy at the office – too crazy, apparently, to actually take Roy on as a client. But it wasn't a total loss. In search of an idea, Waterman offered Roy the opening slot on Bonnie Raitt's upcoming tour. 

I'm pretty sure some degree of mayhem ensued, although I didn't get all the details. This was also the visit when Roy told me a story involving Joan Baez, a handmade Panama hat and events backstage at some major festival as I navigated us both through campus traffic with an order of Greek takeout in tow, so I'm not sure I've got all the nuances straight.

People have been writing about Waterman's role as early as Bruce Cook's favorable portrayal in his 1973 book Listen To The Blues, and more recently (and whatever the complete opposite of "favorably" is) in Stephen Calt's notorious Skip James biography, I Would Rather Be The Devil. 

But where Turner's book excels is in communicating the care Waterman took in negotiating the age, race and culture gap between the Southern rural artists the revivalists pulled out of retirement, and the '60s blues fans who flocked to see them. For those of us who've ingested some of the more romanticized details of "the blues life" from liner notes and magazine articles, A Life In The Blues offers a more bracing take on these musicians' second acts in American popular culture, and Waterman's efforts to bring them before the public with equal respect for their art and humanity. 

Whew! As my old friend Giancarlo would say: "hea-VEE!" So now for some licks. 

In last week's Fingerstyle Five live stream, someone asked about walking basslines on the blues, and I wound up explaining a handful of moves like the one in today's Youtube video. This lesson combines walking bass lines with two equally cool things: chord substitutions, and the turnaround:

Walking Bass Line Turnarounds

This month in the Fingerstyle Five, we're working on intros and outros, accompanying a vocal, hot single-note stop time licks, and how to put all of those things together to create a complete eight-bar blues arrangment. Sign up and join us at the link below:

The Fingerstyle Five

More soon,

David