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Ray Flangin -- some say he's the godfather of Fort Worth blues.

At first, she said, she was cowed by people's reactions to a woman playing guitar. "I kept my back to the audience. ... I wouldn't look at nobody," she said. But her confidence grew. Eventually, she realized it was too tough to sing and play guitar at the same time. "We hooked up our own band, and I started singing all the time, and I never went back to messing with the guitar a lot.

"We'd play little clubs like I play now, beer joints," she continued. "The first club I played was in Mistletoe Heights, called Henrietta's Place. There was another club over there called Ginger's, and that was our Sunday and Wednesday spot. Then we played Friday night at Beaver's Place, and Saturday night we were at another little club called May's Hot Spot on Terrell. We'd play at little private clubs where people paid their dues when they had their annual anniversary celebrations.

"Then after we got better, we played Chicken in a Basket, the Silver Dollar Café, the Piccadilly, Rayford's Place, Gentry's, Miss Wilson's, the Silver Slipper, the Dragnet Club over in Arlington, practically every little club around here. There was a lot of clubs at that time, and a lot of bands. Freddie King would be up at the Silver Slipper, Z.Z. Hill, Johnnie Taylor, Joe Simon -- it was just like it is now with all of the fellows that come around; that's the way we were, at that time. They got big later, but at that time, they were just like us."

That was in the 1960s, when the blues were still important in the black community -- before first soul music, then disco, and later hip-hop usurped its dominance. Most of the performers who played the black clubs of that era were obscure then and are forgotten now. Besides Ealey and Wilson, both of whom garnered substantial white audiences, few of them ever recorded, and many of them have ceased performing.

If Ealey is remembered fondly by the black music community, it's still true that, as Lady Pearl said, he was "never as popular among blacks as he was among whites. Part of it was because, if you listen real close to one of his records, he wasn't singing about anything. He'd sing a song different every time he did it. Now, he could get up and play with anybody, because he'd just make his words up as he went along. They didn't rhyme or anything."

White fans might not know, but during the years of his success, Ealey was hardly the only game in town. Talk to the black bluesmen and women, and they call up names like Big Ronnie Bivins, Ray Flangin, Bobby Gilmore, and Shirley Daniels.

Big Ronnie Bivins, the singer in the Peter Feresten photo on the cover of this year's Aug. 15 edition of the Fort Worth Weekly, died onstage in 1986 in an Evans Avenue club. "He was more of a soul singer, like Bobby Bland," guitarist Wes Dixon recalled. "I met him when I was playing with C.B. Scott. I didn't really know him, but everybody wanted him to sing. So he took the mic and sang two songs, then he said, 'I won't do another song because this band isn't paying me shit.' I told him, 'I don't know you, and I didn't ask you to sing. You sit your ass down.' I met him again a month or so later, and we got to talking. I gave him a ride home, and that's when I found out that he was a heart patient."

Several veteran local blues fans and musicians name Ray Flangin as the real godfather of Fort Worth blues. "He was running the 40-50 Club at the time I met him," Dixon said, "but he had a day job at Holiday Lincoln-Mercury. He was kind of a throwback. He played my kind of guitar. He'd play songs like 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain,' but he'd do them so they sounded like Lightnin' Hopkins. Or he'd play a Guitar Slim song." Flangin is still a regular at the 40-50, but he performs only infrequently.

Dixon also spoke of Bobby Gilmore as a pivotal figure in Fort Worth blues, widely regarded as the best guitarist of any kind ever to emerge from the city (or perhaps the second best, after Cornell Dupree, depending on who you talk to). "Bobby could play anything," agreed Bruton. "He could play like George Benson if he wanted to, but he was really a blues player." More recently, Gilmore has performed with Kenny Traylor and appeared on a couple of anthologies for the JSP and Beach Ball labels, but it seems that business dealings or relationships with other musicians have left a bad taste in his mouth, and he's dropped off the scene.

Dixon recalled another guitarist, Shirley Daniels, as having "a peculiar style. No one else sounded like him ... although I didn't think he was really outstanding." Bruton has an explanation for why Daniels sounded so distinctive: "What he was doing was playing early soul guitar." Today, Daniels works in a hospital, doesn't smoke or drink, and plays only in church.

The 40-50 Club at 1009 Fabons Street sits next to a boarded-up restaurant, and it's hard to believe that you could fit a set of drums in the tiny space, let alone a full band. The club no longer features live music, but signs advertise upcoming blues shows in other clubs. The atmosphere is like a house party, with patrons dancing the dirty boogie and yelling to one another from across the bar while the waitress collects dollars to feed the very hip jukebox, which features tunes ranging from '50s blues and '60s jazz-funk to contemporary R&B.

The 40-50 is typical of black clubs that used to offer live blues. Most now employ DJs or rely on jukeboxes.

Black and white jazz musicians started playing together in Jacksboro Highway joints in the early 1950s, and there were a half dozen white bands like the Straitjackets (fronted by Delbert McClinton) playing blues in the days before the British Invasion. But young white musicians didn't start to invade the Fort Worth blues scene in force until the late 1960s. Some were inspired by British rock bands like the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Yardbirds, who based their music on black American blues styles.

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