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Some blues joints: the 40-50 Club, the Bluebird, and the Swing Club.

An exception was Bruton, the son of a white jazz musician who'd played with black musicians like local saxophone legend Red Connor. "After the Beatles came," he recalled, "I couldn't wait to get old enough to go play in the black clubs where the real stuff was. I took refuge in Como." He recalls another budding guitarist and blues enthusiast, the son of wealthy liberal parents, who insisted on transferring to a predominantly black high school.

The mixing began to flow both ways in the 1970s. A vibrant integrated blues scene sprang up around Robert Ealey and the Bluebird. There, young and old black folk rubbed shoulders with TCU kids (and their parents, who might have remembered seeing the Straitjackets back then) and white blues freaks, a peculiar subspecies of record collector marked by their slicked-back hair, dark shades, soul patches, and funky hats. Besides various units fronted by Ealey, relative upstarts like Bruton's band the Juke Jumpers, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and Stevie Ray Vaughan played there, and plenty of high times were had.

It was a familial, inclusive scene, and, more than anything else, it was the product of Robert Ealey's extroverted persona. "He was a big personality," said guitarist-vocalist-bandleader James Hinkle, who became close friends with Ealey after visiting the Bluebird as a teenager with mentor Freddie "Little Jr. One-Hand" Cisneros, an occasional Ealey sideman.

"He was a welcoming presence who created a safe space for blacks and whites to get together and enjoy the music," agreed David Blankenship, who discovered blues as an 18-year-old classical guitar student and went on to tour with Johnnie Taylor's band. "At the Bluebird, you might occasionally have heard virtuosic playing, but it was really irrelevant. The music was really about making contact with people, about Robert connecting with the audience."

The end of that era came in the early 1980s. Bruton recalls the night. "The Juke Jumpers were playing, and we saw someone shot to death right in front of us. A lady was high on wine and Quaaludes, and she got upset with another lady and shot her in the back while she was trying to run out the door. You never saw so many BMWs peeling out of the parking lot. When the police came, [Juke Jumpers singer-guitarist] Jim Colegrove was still there and he pointed her out to them. She was just sitting there having a drink. No one wanted to turn her in. It turned out she had a warrant from somewhere in East Texas for doing the same kind of thing. After that, we started concentrating on Dallas."

Ealey moved on, too, keeping a big presence in the white blues community by opening a club downtown and even promoting his own annual blues festival in Sundance Square. He recorded albums for the Amazing, Topcat, and Black Top labels.

Wes Dixon joined the Fort Worth blues scene in 1979, after retiring from the Navy. He had a band called the Blues People with Ealey and guitarist C.B. Scott for a time, and they were regularly featured at Caravan of Dreams for a couple of years. "Robert could sing anybody's song," Dixon said, and Scott was one of the best at playing behind Ealey. Dixon recalled one time when they played John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun," the song that provided the name for Ealey's '50s band. "We played that song, and the whole place started shaking," said Dixon. "After we were done, Robert said, 'Don't play that song when the club is this full -- it'll fall down!'"

Throughout the 1990s, Ealey toured Europe. By the time of his death in 2001, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the local scene, appearing everywhere from the Bedford Blues Festival to the Flying Saucer downtown to the AIDS Walk in Trinity Park. Young Fort Worth blues-rock bands that have little in common with early Texas bluesmen still cover Ealey's "She's a Rocket."

After the Bluebird's demise, the white blues scene blossomed, in a modest sort of way. A handful of blues clubs sprang up catering to predominantly white audiences. J&J's Blues Bar, a small 200-capacity room, opened in 1985 and earned a national reputation, booking touring acts as well as the cream of local talent. Elsewhere, local bands worked bread-and-butter gigs, and novice and veteran musicians alike showed their stuff on jam nights. In this line, Fort Worth boasts rooms like the Keys Lounge on Westcreek, a cozy neighborhood bar where bassist-vocalist Bobby Counts and his band Count Blue have had a residency for several years; the Black Dog Tavern downtown, where guitarist Holland K. Smith, an intense 12-year Navy veteran, holds down the Wednesday night blues slot; the Captain's Den on Calmont and its doppelganger the Poop Deck on West Seminary.

The two sets of blues-makers, black and white, mix and match all the time. But their audiences seldom make the transition.

Blues fan Jack McGee is one of the sparse number of local whites who show up at the predominantly black blues clubs. "I just happened to be in the Swing Club at closing time" one night a few weeks ago, he said, and happened to hear about the first Stop Six Blues Festival, planned for the next day. The event was unheralded in any of the local press. McGee showed up, along with about "200 people and four horses," he said. The music, by Sang'N Clarence, Little Jimmy, and Big Jack & the Conspiracy Band, was "great, but the sound was lousy, and they could have done a better job of promoting it."

That lack of publicity contributes to the relative obscurity of some of the black performers and venues. "Even when the bigger soul blues artists come through, the white blues community often does not hear about it," said Don O. "They may get some mention on KKDA-AM or on KNON's morning R&B shows, but other than that, the main advertising is posters and flyers in clubs and shops in the neighborhood. You don't see adverts for these shows in the Fort Worth Weekly."

To remedy this situation, McGee recently created a Blues Shows in the Metroplex web page (www.greendesk.net/blues.htm), focusing on "the soul/R&B and black club scene." Don O.'s web site is also invaluable (www.geocities.com/bluesdfw ), acting as a comprehensive gateway to all things blues in the Metroplex.

The differences extend beyond fame versus obscurity, and the ethnicity of the fans. Black blues, which KNON features on its morning blues show, are "more vocal-oriented. More soul- and R&B-oriented and less guitar-focused," Don O. said. "If you go to a blues jam in a black club, you'll hear one band with 17 singers. In the white part of town, you'll hear 17 guitarists." The songs in black clubs often feature risqué lyrics in the manner of Clarence Carter's "Strokin'," Barbara Carr's "Bone Me Like You Own Me," or X-Man's "Love Potion" -- a blues tradition that dates back to the 1920s. The focus is more on gospel-trained pipes (and, in live performance, on entertaining) than it is on musicianship and precisely executed solos.

The social dimension is more complicated. Some black performers feel they've been discriminated against in white clubs. Lady Pearl said she recently lost bookings at a mainstream blues club after some of her fans brought bottles of liquor into the venue. (Many black blues clubs have beer-only licenses, and patrons are accustomed to bringing their own liquor.) The club's management justified the decision by saying that they feared running afoul of TABC regulators and didn't want to have to hire extra security or subject one performer's fans to special scrutiny. NEXT »

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