Tin Pan Alley - Curtis Jones

Curtis Jones (August 18, 1906, Naples, Texas – September 11, 1971, Munich, Germany) was an American blues pianist.
Jones played guitar whilst young but switched to piano after a move to Dallas. In 1936 he relocated to Chicago, where he recorded between 1937 and 1941 on Vocalion, Bluebird, and OKeh. Among his best-known tunes from these recordings were the hit "Lonesome Bedroom Blues" and the song "Tin Pan Alley". His Decoration Blues though unissued at the time, was recorded John Lee Sonny Boy Williamson in 1938 and was highly influential. World War II interrupted his recording career, which he did not resume until 1953, when Al Benson released a single of his, "Wrong Blues"/"Cool Playing Blues", on Parrot, featuring L. C. McKinley on guitar.

Jones's first full-length album appeared in 1960 on Bluesville, by which time he had become a noted performer on the Chicago folk music scene. A solo album appeared in 1962, but by that time Jones had moved to Europe, where he spent the rest of his life, apart from a couple of years living in Morocco. He made further albums in the UK; the last in 1968 when visiting with the AFBF was produced by Mike Vernon with Alexis Korner on guitar.

His first instrument had been the guitar, and he liked to play a number or two on his records and in personal appearances.

Jones died in Germany from heart failure in 1971, at the age of 65.
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Alan Balfour thoughtfully contributed the following invaluable info:
‘The Lonesome Bedroom Blues’.” Jefferson no. 124 (2000): p14-15.

It’s lonesome in my bedroom, just me an’ myself alone
It’s lonesome in my bedroom, just me an’ myself alone
I have no one to love me, each night when I come home

A room without a woman, is like a heart without a beat
A room without a woman, is like a heart without a beat
Seem like every woman I get, always wants to mistreat me

So began the plaintive lyric of a 1937 blues which was to produce from the black
record buying public of the day a measure of adulation and fame for the then,
unknown, Texas blues singer Curtis Jones. The song, “Lonesome Bedroom Blues”,
was to remain in Columbia’s catalogue until the demise of the 78 rpm record in the
late fifties eventually to become a “blues standard” in the repertoire of a new
generation of bluesmen and their white copyists. The originator, despite various
attempts by enthusiasts to promote and re-record him in the sixties, was to die a
forgotten, sad and embittered individual.

One of seven children Curtis Jones was born on August 18,1906 in the
sharecropping community of Naples, Cass County, Texas. His early child hood was
much the same as that of other black children of the day; as soon as he was able he
was working in the fields, but in Curtis’s case his time came quicker due to the death
of his mother in 1912. By the time he reached his teens he had suffered sufficiently
from the sharecropping regime - “Sometimes you have a good year and sometimes a
very bad year. In my father’s condition all of his years seemed very bad. The kind of
shelter was a tumbled down log cabin where you had to stuff the walls with rags in
the winter season to keep from freezing to death”(1) - and fled to the big city of
Dallas. Once there he used the guitar technique he had been teaching himself as a
child as a basis for playing the organ or piano at a variety of local venues. Eventually
meeting up with pianist Alex Moore, with whom he claimed to have recorded “about
1925”, but this session, if indeed it took place, has yet to be identified.

In 1929, Curtis Jones left Dallas working his way through the Mid and Southwest
via Kansas City, then travelling to New Orleans where, it would seem, he married a
girl called Lulu Stiggers and finally joining various performing troupes en-route to
Chicago. Arriving there in 1936, he formed his own group and began playing at rent
parties and in Southside joints or bars. Soon he was spotted by Vocalion talent scout
Lester Melrose, who had been responsible for getting recording contracts for many of
the great names of the day, including Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and Washboard
Sam. Melrose arranged a recording session on Tuesday 28th September 1937, and
accompanied by Willie “Bee” James on guitar and Fred Williams on drums, Jones cut
four titles of which only “Lonesome Bedroom Blues” and “You Got Good Business”
were released. The former title was apparently written as a eulogy for his wife, who
had recently died and was an astounding race hit, so much so that another Chicago
label, Bluebird, “kidnapped” him for a recording session the next month, releasing the
sides under the pseudonym of “The Texas Wonder”. Over the next five years Curtis
Jones was in the studio on no fewer than twenty occasions, recording some hundred

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titles, the majority of which were songs concerning life’s dispossessed, unique in
lyricism and imagery; the entire output finally being made available on four compact
discs (Document DOCD 5296-99). Little of this prolific body of work, however, was
to prove as popular as “Lonesome Bedroom Blues” although he did have passable
sales with “Highway 51 Blues” and “Bull And Cow Blues”. The recording company
even teased out of Jones a “Lonesome Bedroom Blues No.2” and “I Feel So Good In
My Bedroom” in an attempt to get as much mileage out of the tune as possible.
Ironically one of the unissued items from Jones's first session of 1937, “Decoration
Day Blues”, was recorded the following year by harmonica player John Lee “Sonny
Boy” Williamson and became forever associated with him rather than Curtis Jones.

Outside of his studio work, he played club dates with a band which comprised
tenor, trumpet and drums - a line-up which, Jones revealed in later years, he preferred
to the setting of guitar and drums he was forced to work with in the studio. Ironically,
the only side he cut for Melrose with a trumpet in the line-up (played by Punch Miller
who had recorded with Big Bill Broonzy) was never issued. However, by 1941 Curtis
Jones’s record sales were on the wane and, coupled with a disagreement with
Melrose, led to Jones working outside of music in unspecified day jobs. During this
hiatus in Jones’s recording career Texas based pianist Mercy Dee Walton made his
debut on record in 1949 with “Lonesome Cabin Blues”, which bore more than a
passing resemblance to Jones’s “Bedroom” in its opening line of, “So lonesome in my
cabin, just me an’ my telephone” and similar melodic structure; Walton further
reworked the song for Specialty as “One Room Country Shack” three years later.

It wasn’t until 1953 that Jones recorded again. Bronzeville Record Manufacturing
Co., a company formed by disc jockey Al Benson, had released on the Parrot label
recordings of jazz and swing musicians like Coleman Hawkins and Herbie Fields.
Curtis Jones was Parrot’s first bluesman (later they recorded Albert King and J.B.
Lenoir) but the four titles he cut failed to bring him any renewed recognition and he
had to be content with playing local club dates for the next few years whilst living in
depressed and wretched circumstances.

In 1958, blues enthusiasts Bob Koester, Dave Mangurian and Don Hill located
Curtis in a run down hotel in Chicago. Through their efforts and that of Jacques
Demetre who traveled from France the following year to interview Jones for the
French magazine “Jazz Hot”, the interest of the New Jersey based record company
Prestige Bluesville was aroused, and in 1960 they took him into a New York studio
with a trio of jazz musicians and a blues guitarist. The resultant album, “Trouble
Blues” (BVLP 1022, OBCD 515), managed to capture Curtis’s vocals superbly but
his piano was swamped by the accompanying organist, and only the five minute
instrumental title track showed anything of his old pianistic prowess. However, the
recording succeeded in bringing him back to the public eye, albeit that of a white,
highbrow coffee house audience, and he secured a regular Tuesday night spot at the
Blind Pig in Chicago as well as a concert at Illinois University. On January 12th and
27th 1962 he was recorded by Bob Koester for his Delmark label which produced the
album “Lonesome Bedroom Blues” (DL 606) that Koester’s aptly described in a
sympathetic liner note as, “Texas styled blues, played and sung by a desperate, almost
forgotten man, writing, singing and playing for a few friends...”.(2)

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Three days later, at the instigation of fellow pianist Champion Jack Dupree, Curtis
Jones was on a plane to Zurich, Switzerland. From that moment on he became, like
Dupree, a Eurobluesman eventually making Paris, France his base. He toured France,
Belgium and Germany where, at Koblenz in January 1963, he appeared in concert
with a variety of other expatriate jazz and bluesmen to celebrate "Americans In
Europe"; a concert which was subsequently to appear in its entirety under that title on
an Impulse double album (LP 1037). Later that year Curtis was in London with the
Chris Barber and his band performing at the many jazz and blues venues throughout
the town, a good number supporting a very young Madeline Bell.

In November 1963 Curtis Jones, guitarist Alexis Korner, bassist Jack Fallon and
drummer Eddie Taylor got together for producer Mike Vernon in Decca’s West
Hampstead studio to record his third album, "Curtis Jones In London" (LK 4578).
The choice of material tended to reflect the music he had been playing for his
European audiences, numbers like Percy Mayfield's perennial, “Please Send Me
Someone To Love”, or the self-penned instrumental, “Young Generation Boogie”,
which leant heavily on Ray Charles’s instrumental “Rockhouse” and “Syl-Vous Play
Blues” sung and played very much in the Memphis Slim vein; even down to Slim’s
habit of attempting French phraseology. At that session Jones revealed an unexpected
talent with his guitar accompaniment to “Red River Blues” and “Skid Row” echoing
Big Bill Broonzy’s picking in his latter years.

Curtis Jones spent the next two years in North Africa, mainly Morocco, then toured
Spain, Greece and France, finally settling in Paris in 1966 where he made his home.
In 1968 he was part of the American Folk Blues Festival which toured Europe and
when the package visited England Mike Vernon yet again took the opportunity of
recording Jones. Vernon has since owned to the fact that the session was one of his
most difficult due to Jones’s embittered outlook on life and fickle temperament. An
album was released on Blue Horizon, appropriately entitled “Now Resident in
Europe” (7-63207), but it seemed to get lost in the plethora of other blues product,
failing to get the promotion, sales or acclaim Jones obviously thought it worthy of, as
he made clear at the time. Curtis Jones then returned to Europe, spending the
following three years working concert or club dates across the continent, using
Germany as his base but died unexpectedly from a heart attack at the Schwabinger
Krankenhause in Munich. He was buried nine days later in a Sozialgrab (pauper’s
grave) at the Perlacher Forst Cemetery. Eight years later his grave was
unceremoniously sold because no one had paid for its upkeep.

Curtis Jones never did enjoy the acclaim or recording contracts that fellow pianists
Memphis Slim, Jack Dupree and Willie Mabon found abroad, but even if the man
himself has been forgotten by the current generation, thankfully his original
compositions live on through the recordings of others.

Alan Balfour

(1) Interview with Neil Slaven R&B Monthly 2, March 1964
(2) Notes to “Lonesome Bedroom Blues” Delmark DL 606, 1965
Further Reading:

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Demêtre, Jacques & Chauvard, Marcel: “Land Of The Blues: Chicago” Jazz Journal,
August 1960
Demêtre, Jacques & Chauvard, Marcel: “Land Of The Blues”, C.L.A.R.B, 1994
Demêtre, Jacques: “Curtis Jones" Soul Bag 143 & 144, Summer/Fall 1996
Hill, Don: “Curtis Jones And The Texas Blues" Cadence, May 1987

Koester, Bob: “Lonesome Bedroom Blues” Delmark DL 606, 1965
Oliver, Paul: “Curtis Jones In London” Decca LK 4587, 1964
(Reprinted as “Lonesome Bedroom: Curtis Jones”; Blues Off The Record, Baton
Press, 1984)

Pearlin, Victor: “Curtis Jones: Complete Recorded Works In Chronological Order”
Vols. 1-4 Document DOCD 5296-5299, 1994
Slaven, Neil: “Curtis Jones" Jazz Monthly, January 1964
Slaven, Neil: “Curtis Jones" R & B Monthly 1–6, February 1964-July 1964

Stewart-Baxter: Derrick. “Curtis Jones" Jazz Journal, March 1960
Vernon, Mick: “Those Arab Blues: Curtis Jones In Morocco" Blues Unlimited 39,
December 1966

Wilmer, Valerie: “Curtis Jones In London" Jazz News And Review, December 1963