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Lady Pearl duets with Raymond Lemmon.

Guitarist Blankenship, a teacher in the Irving school system who's been playing with Lady Pearl for nearly two decades, believes that since the early 1990s, white audiences have been reluctant to frequent black clubs for fear of gangs and the crack cocaine subculture -- although both problems have greatly diminished in recent years.

To that concern, Don O. responded, "I have never been in a black blues club where I felt unsafe. Just the opposite. I have always felt welcome. My money is green just like everyone else's, and that is the only color the musicians and club owners are worried about. Now going to and from the car can be another matter. You have to be aware of your surroundings, just like anywhere else."

Said one musician, "I've seen a lot more stuff go down in white clubs -- mainly fights and ignorant drunks -- than in any of the black blues clubs I've been in. A friend of mine had his guitar stolen out of his car in front of the Red Star (just off West Seventh Street) at James Hinkle's wedding reception."

In general, it seems that the allure of that universally coveted green Don O. alluded to gives musicians more incentive to cross the color line than audiences, who prefer to frequent clubs in their own neighborhoods. That sentiment is easily understandable to the black musician who recalled setting up to play in a club while white patrons watched a Cowboys game. "Every time they saw Emmitt Smith, it was 'That nigger this, that nigger that.' Either they didn't see us there, or they didn't care."

Back on stage at the Swing Club, Lady Pearl is working her magic.

Her guitarist brother Ray Reed plays and sings in a rough-hewn style that contains echoes of classic players from Lightnin' Hopkins to Freddie and B.B. King. Bassist Quincy Brown and drummer Weldon Giles lay down a solid, unobtrusive foundation. Brown also sings backup, except on Junior Parker's "Driving Wheel" when he steps up to lead vocalist. Two white musicians, guitarist Blankenship and former Robert Ealey keyboardist Jeff "Hot Hands" Dennie, round out the band.

"We started out with Jeff when he was about 15 years old, and he couldn't even go into clubs," Lady Pearl recalled. "So I started telling people that he was my son. They would look at me real funny and I'd just go, 'Well, he looks just like his daddy!' But he could play, and we started letting him practice with us, and he picked up as he went. That's why he knows our stuff so well -- he's been doing it since he was 15, and I think he's about 33 now."

Guest vocalist Sang'N Clarence, a recording artist who does most of his stage work out of the area, gives a tour-de-force performance, testifying like a sanctified preacher (albeit with more, um, adult subject matter on his mind and an off-the-wall sensibility in his heart) even when the sound system temporarily fails him. He segues from the venerable "Stormy Monday" into his own "Rocket N My Pocket," including an extended discourse on a popular sexual practice.

Most astonishing of all is Lady Pearl's daughter, Miss Kim, who shakes her stuff like a young Tina Turner while belting the blues (never has the line "like my back ain't got no bone" from "Rock Me Baby" been so vividly depicted) and alternately doing the funky dog and high kicks that make her look like a cheerleader for a blues football team. The show reaches a climax with mother and daughter onstage together, as they paraphrase the chorus of rapper Nelly's "Hot in Herre" smash, "It's getting hot in here / Gonna take off all my clothes," and incorporate this bit into Kim's version of the Aretha Franklin hit, "Baby I Love You."

From 1987 to 1997, Lady Pearl sang at Rayford's Place at 1100 Retta Street in the Riverside area. That club, she said, had the potential of bringing white and black blues fans back together, but that magic was never realized. The club "turned into almost like a Bluebird," she said, "until they killed [Howard Maddox], and it never was the same." Maddox, co-owner of Rayford's, was a longtime veteran of the club business who'd also owned a place on the West Side in the '70s. He was ambushed by a 16-year-old boy who waited on the roof of the club with a high-powered rifle. The youth, at his trial, claimed to have mistaken Maddox for someone else.

At various times in the 1980s and '90s, Lady Pearl owned or managed both the Swing Club and the 40-50 Club. "We'd squeeze a little old band in there every Sunday, and the little place was just packed," she said.

In the early 1990s, through photographer Peter Feresten, Lady Pearl received a grant from Texas Folklife Resources in Austin to teach blues singing. Feresten also made a tape of her that got her into the Austin blues festival. "I went there three years straight one time," she said. "It was so beautiful there. They just show you so much love."

In nearly 40 years of performing, however, Lady Pearl has never had a recording released. That may soon be remedied: Don O. recently recorded a set of Lady Pearl's at the Swing Club.

Lady Pearl sees the prospects for black and white blues audiences coming together as remote. "People say it's going to change," she said, "but I don't think it'll ever change."

Then again, for the past year, the Fort Worth "white blues mafia" has started making the scene at the black clubs: folks like Don O. and Wes Race, expatriate Midwesterner/poet and former road manager for Hound Dog Taylor. (Race has recited his poems over the BTA Showband's backing at the Swing Club and other venues.) Musicians Hinkle and Smith show up, as do Johnny Mack, Mitch Palmer, Paul Byrd, Tony Dukes, and Jay Lewis (a Keys Lounge jam-night regular who's been playing blues since 1961 and was a personal friend of Freddie King's) and several Southwest Blues correspondents. It was this influx that led Lady Pearl and her band to make some forays into the mainstream blues clubs.

There were 30 white faces -- mostly musicians -- in the Swing Club last Super Bowl Sunday, when Lady Pearl hosted a tribute to the late Johnny "Guitar" Watson. It featured Hinkle, Smith, Byrd, and a sizable Austin contingent including Fort Worth native and ex-Fabulous Thunderbird Mike Buck. A similar Swing Club tribute to Freddie King is scheduled for this Sunday, while another, dedicated to slide guitar legend Elmore James and headlined by Anson Funderburgh's frontman Sam Myers, is planned for late November. Whether or not the fans will follow remains to be seen.

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