PHILLIP WALKER "GOING BACK HOME" Source: LIVING BLUES MAGAZINE Date: 02/2007 Writer: Lee Hildebrand

WATTS UP? PHILIP WALKER’S JOURNEY FROM LOUISIANA TO SOUTH CENTRAL L.A.

A lot has changed in South Central Los Angeles since Phillip Walker settled there nearly a half century ago. He had come in search of recording opportunities, and those he found—and continues to find. Work performing in clubs dried up long ago, however, and the area has been plagued by gang violence since the Bloods and the Crips made gangbanging famous back in the ’70s.

“When I came in ’59, the windows wasn’t barred up,” the Louisiana-born, Texas-bred bluesman says while sitting on the front porch of his modest tract home on a quiet, tree-lined street. “You could sleep on the front porch, but not anymore. The gangs and the crime have risen too much. It’s everywhere, but this is the heart of some of the crime areas.

“I’ve moved all around the city, but this is the nicest place,” he adds as an ice cream truck drives by in the late afternoon.  “I’ve been here about three years now. I’ve been in this particular part right around here, from Slauson on back up to 103rd, for the last 45 years.

“This is South Central, the heart of Watts. This is Watts. That’s 103rd Street at the next corner there. You take it on down across Central Avenue, that’s the heart. That’s the real deal.” 

The area was known as Watts when Walker moved there from El Paso in 1959, but the term has fallen from currency. “I guess people didn’t want it to go down as Watts after the Watts riots, so they named it something else and built a new medical center and stuff like that,” Walker adds. “I guess they wanted to eliminate the bad vibes.”

The singing guitarist feels unthreatened by his surroundings, however. “It’s just gangs against gangs, young folks going with crazy stuff amongst themselves,” he explains. “I sit on the porch here; I don’t have no problem. I walk to the store; I don’t have no problem.”

Walker is dressed all in black: shirt, bell-bottom slacks, boots, beret. It’s as if he’s in uniform to go to a gig—except there hasn’t been a gig for Walker in Los Angeles in a very long time. Every now and again he’ll land a booking in nearby Sherman Oaks or Long Beach, but not in L.A., where the onslaught of disco was as devastating to the local live music scene as the Bloods and Crips were to the streets of South Central. 

         “There’s not many places here to play, not around the city, not anymore,” he says. “That’s a mystery to me, how it just went down the tubes. When I first got here in ’59, there was a joint on every corner where they were playing blues or playing whatever. And all of a sudden it started to dry up. I noticed in ’65 that the clubs were going down the tubes fast.

         “There wasn’t but two clubs I could do a lot of blues in: Moore’s Swing Club at 118th and Main and Jefty’s at Avalon and El Segundo. I could sing a lot of blues in those two clubs during the ’60s and most of the ’70s. At other clubs, they started spinning the records and the record jocks took over. Bands wasn’t needed anymore.”

Walker currently has two bands: a quintet comprising himself, bassist James Thomas, drummer Aaron Tucker, trumpeter Joe Campbell, and a saxophonist, and an octet made up of the same musicians plus keyboardist Leon Blue and two additional horn players. Walker uses the big band, as he calls the larger group, mostly for gigs in Europe, although it can be heard on the CD Live At Biscuits & Blues, recorded at the San Francisco club on 2002 by M.C. Records. It is also featured on a CD titled Live In Paris that he released two years ago on his own Gilkey label and that is available only at his gigs.

Neither band plays on Walker’s latest album, Going Back Home, his debut for the Delta Groove Productions label in Van Nuys, California. Instead of the modern urban blues sound that has characterized most of Walker’s recordings over the past 38 years—many of them produced by Bruce Bromberg for the Vault, Fantasy, Joliet, Playboy, Rounder, and HighTone labels—Going Back Home presents him in musical surroundings that hark back to earlier blues idioms.

Walker’s rendition of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ Don’t Think ’Cause You’re Pretty, on which his impassioned tenor voice is augmented only by Rusty Zinn’s acoustic guitar, Al Blake’s Rice Miller–inspired harmonica, and the incessant thud of Richard Innes’ bass drum, is about as downhome as anything Walker ever committed to disc. The interplay between Walker’s guitar and Fred Kaplan’s piano over the steady four of Jeff Turmes’ upright bass and Innes’ brushes on snare on Fulson’s Mama Bring Your Clothes Back Home brings to mind Fulson’s famous SwingTime sessions with Lloyd Glenn. Rob Rio plays piano on other selections and brings a flavor of Champion Jack Dupree to Dupree’s Bad Blood and to Happy Man Blues, a composition by producer Randy Chortkoff that borrows its melody from Dupree’s Junker’s Blues. Going Back Home also offers a couple of tunes by Lonesome Sundown, with whom Walker first recorded when both were playing guitar for Clifton Chenier and, years later, for a Bromberg-produced album by Sundown that was issued on Joliet, then Alligator, and is currently available on HighTone. Other songs include Percy Mayfield’s Lying Woman, Ray Charles’ Blackjack, and Frankie Lee Sims’ Walking With Frankie.

Walker’s incisive lead guitar is featured on most of the CD’s selections. Zinn, however, plays rhythm guitar throughout and lead on three numbers. He trades choruses and fours with Walker on Lay You Down, a hard-driving shuffle penned by Chortkoff.

“We didn’t have but one rehearsal session before we started to go in to cut this stuff,” Walker says. “Apparently Rusty has listened to the material more than I had listened to it, and he had gotten most of these old people’s styles down. It would have took me more time to listen to it and rehearse it and get into it. Rusty was more into that right away than I was.

“I was really happy with the material Randy came up with,” Walker adds. “A lot of it fitted me just fine, so I wanted to get off into it. I was really open to it. Whatever they came up with, I said, ‘Hey, let’s work it over. Sounds good to me. Let’s see if we can make it work.’ I prefer doing some of the old stuff.

“Randy wanted to kind of strip me down, from the modern thing to kinda the old-type stuff. They kinda took the coat off me and put me back on the old stuff. I think I did pretty good on the old stuff.”
Phillip Walker was born on February 11, 1937, on a farm in Welsh, Louisiana, in the heart of Cajun country. “That’s why I got one ear in zydeco and one ear in Texas blues, ’cause I’m Louisiana-born,” he said in a 1997 Living Blues interview with John Anthony Brisbin (LB #131). One of a dozen children of Malvin and Viola Walker, he grew up working on rice farms, at first in Welsh and, beginning in 1945, at Lover’s Lake, Texas, between Port Arthur and Beaumont. When he wasn’t harvesting rice, driving tractors, or herding cattle, young Phillip enjoyed playing baseball and roping wild horses. “We’d get a herd of young horses and break ’em, ride ’em, just like the real rodeo guys,” he told Brisbin.

Walker played harmonica early on but switched to guitar when he was about 14. His initial inspiration was Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose 1952 hit Give Me Central 209 he heard over WLAC. Other early favorites included John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, Gatemouth Brown, and B.B. King. Several up-and-coming pickers in the Beaumont/Port Arthur area—Lonesome Sundown, Long John Hunter, and Lonnie “Guitar Junior” Brooks—also captured young Phillip’s fancy. (In 1999, Walker joined forces with Hunter and Brooks on an Alligator album titled Lone Star Shootout.)

The budding guitarist was only 15 and so green that he could only play in a couple of keys when Clifton Chenier offered him a gig. The accordionist had recently moved from Opelousas, Louisiana, to Port Arthur. The job would last three years and eventually thrust the teenage guitarist into the thick of the national rhythm-and-blues scene of the mid-1950s. 

“I didn’t have no experience,” Walker admits. “Back in those days, the bandleaders could train a guy to play what they wanted him to play. I was a good guy to train. I hadn’t been playing maybe a year, a year and a half. I’d been struggling with the guitar. I used a capo. I can play in all the keys now, but back then, whatever key he would tune up on, I’d pop that capo on there.”

“He was versatile,” Walker says of Chenier. “He could play that zydeco, but he could play the blues on accordion, too. He didn’t go too far out of Louisiana, but he had the entire state sewed up at that time. You couldn’t bring nobody in there and outdraw him. He played big nightclubs and ballrooms that’d hold a thousand, two thousand people. He could fill those ballrooms with just me and a drummer and hisself. He was so strong in that area till most of the blues people couldn’t come in ’cause he’d kill ’em. If he’d throw a dance anywhere within ten miles of these people, they didn’t have no crowd; he had the crowd. That’s why they called him King of the South.

“He was playing a lot of zydeco, the first year and a half after I joined him. Things didn’t really get into the blues field till they finally got him out of Louisiana. An office out of Dallas, Texas, signed him and put him under contract to book him. In ’55, when we organized the seven-piece blues band, he got into the mode of the blues. He sung everybody’s stuff. He didn’t play much zydeco. He would play a few [zydeco] songs throughout his dance. He’d have the big band just lay out, and just him and the drummer and me, we’d do a couple of zydeco tunes.”

 Chenier had made his recording debut in 1954 for Elko Records, a little label that producer J.R. Fulbright ran out of his house in South Central Los Angeles. Fulbright next brought Chenier to Imperial Records and then to Specialty.

Walker traveled to Los Angeles twice in 1955 to record with Chenier for Specialty. In April, they recorded Ay-Tete-Fee and Boppin’ The Rock, among other songs. They returned in September, this time with Lonesome Sundown added as the band’s second guitarist, for a session that included All Night Long and Opelousas Hop. A third Specialty session was held two months later in Dallas. Before the band broke up, probably in late 1956, Walker also recorded with Chenier for Checker and Argo in Chicago (with Etta James singing background vocals) and for Zynn in Crowley, Louisiana.

“I was thrilled to death,” Walker says of his first recordings with Chenier. “I was 17 and a half, going on 18.” He recalls that Bumps Blackwell was in charge of the Specialty sessions in L.A. “Bumps was a pretty good guy to work with,” the guitarist recalls. “He knew what he was doing, and he could get a record out there on you.”

During their trips to Los Angeles, Chenier and his musicians stayed at Fulbright’s place. ”It was an old two-story house at 830 West Adams,” Walker remembers. “If you get one of those original [Elko] records of his, you’d see that big old house on the label.”

They appeared at Five-Four Ballroom in Los Angeles and at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco during their trips west. “We’d be on shows with other acts,” Walker recalls. “We used to team up with people. I’ll tell you a guy who was popular then, had big records out back in that time—Roscoe Gordon. They would package Clifton with people like Roscoe, and then we stated to back people like Lowell Fulson and Etta James. He was always packaged with a known artist that had big records. Cliff didn’t have no big-selling records out there at the time. This is where he got a lot of his exposure from, really.” Chenier would sing and play covers of current R&B hits early in the show, Walker explains, then leave the stage and let his band accompany the other performers.

“Etta would drive down from L.A. to Dallas, Texas, ’cause we was booked out of the Howard Lewis Productions office there,” Walker says. “He was the agent who booked all of Texas. Howard got to be bigger than Don Robey, but Robey was the biggest guy back in that time. I gathered that those two guys couldn’t stand each other. They was characters, really.

“In the mid-summer, we played 41 one-nighters across the country. This was ’55 or ’56. Etta had just come out with Good Rockin’ Daddy. She was with Modern Records out of Culver City there. We would back Etta and Johnny “Guitar” Watson. They didn’t carry bands with ’em. The office would book ’em through the record company here. They’d catch the Greyhound bus down to Dallas and hook up with the band for a rehearsal there. The place was a ballroom, and they had a booking office in the front of it. We’d rehearse the show there at the Empire Room and take it across country.”

When Chenier played the Apollo Theater in 1955 on a bill that included Screaming Jay Hawkins, the Harlem audience was taken aback by the sight of a black man playing accordion. “That was kind of a strange thing with that accordion,” Walker recalls. “It was not too cool! You had to be careful, man, because those people would bring tomatoes and lettuce in their pocket books. If you was a sour act, they’d throw tomatoes at you. They didn’t throw nothing at us, but they didn’t fall out of their seats. We escaped the tomatoes and lettuce.”

Walker describes Chenier as “a hard-working, fair guy” who paid his musicians union scale. When the band broke up, supposedly because of the leader’s aversion to air travel, the guitarist moved to El Paso, Texas, and organized a band called Little Phillip and His Blue Eagles. “We was working six nights a week,” he recalls. “I played the Chuck Berry and Fats Domino–type stuff.” 

He also renewed his acquaintance with Long John Hunter while in El Paso, and the two men began performing together at the Lobby Inn across the border in Juarez, Mexico. “We had a little put-together band,” Walker says. “Believe it or not, we had some Mexican guys who could play some pretty damn good rock ‘n’ roll. We had a Mexican piano player and a Mexican drummer, and, man, we would really be kicking. If there wasn’t six or ten fights a night, it was a bad night. They was rowdy. We were on a big, high stage.”

In 1959, J.R. Fulbright reentered the picture. “I was looking for a recording opportunity,” Walker explains. “J.R. came though El Paso and said, ‘Do you want to come to California and make some records?’ I just got in the old car with him, and we drove on in.”

Backed by a rhythm guitarist and drummer, Walker recorded four songs for Elko in 1959, of which Hello My Darling, with lyrics by former Chenier drummer Wilson Semien, is most notable. “It was a very primitive Texas-style thing,” Walker says the song. (All four tunes have been reissued on the Wolf CD Elko Blues Vol. 1.)        

“He operated out of his house,” Walker says of Fulbright. “It wasn’t a studio. He had a couple of pretty-good mics, and he had, I guess, one of the best two-tracks you could buy. He would bring a band in there with those couple of mics and two-track machine, and he would cut a record on you.”

Although Fulbright had dealings with several larger independent labels, including Imperial and Specialty, Elko Records itself was a quintessential cottage industry. “He was against big record companies,” Walker says of Fulbright. “This is why he’d make his own records, press up maybe a thousand or two thousand, and put ’em in the trunk of an old car. This was the jukebox era then. He would leave here and go all the way through the South, through the West, all the way to the East Coast, putting those records on jukeboxes. This is the kind of producer he was.”

Not surprisingly, neither of Walker’s two Elko singles came anywhere close to being a hit, but Walker didn’t complain. “It helped me get some gigs, and it kinda put the name Phillip Walker out there in a small way,” he says. “I wasn’t just a sideman anymore. The name got around a little.” Walker also recorded as a sideman for Elko with Elmon Mickel, a singer and harmonica blower also known as Driftin’ Slim and Model T. Slim, among other monikers. 

In 1961, Walker married Ina Beatrice Gilkey and began using her as featured vocalist with his band. He billed her as “Bea Bopp.” “I molded her into a singer, and we had a little Ike and Tina–type thing going on around here for nine years,” Walker says. They recorded two singles together, including a duet rendition of Fats Domino’s Goin’ Home, issued them on their own Gilkey label, and sold them at their gigs. Even after he emerged as a solo artist in 1969 with producer Bromberg, she continued writing songs for her husband and contributing harmony vocals to his recordings. Ina Beatrice died from cancer in 1991.

Walker and his wife had a soul band that performed mostly hits of the period. “I was doing stuff by Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, all the Top 40 guys,” he explains. “I would do six or seven blues out of a whole show of 20 or 30 tunes. At some clubs, I didn’t do any.”

At Moore’s Swing Club and Jefty’s, however, Walker would do plenty of blues, and at Moore’s he and the band frequently backed such headliners as Lowell Fulson, Etta James, Percy Mayfield, and Joe Turner. (Years later, Walker and his band would record albums backing Fulson and Mayfield, and Fulson contributed three previously unrecorded compositions to Walker’s 1984 Rounder album Tough As I Want To Be.)

The course of Walker’s career changed drastically, from being a local club musician to becoming a blues artist of international renown, when Bromberg entered the picture in 1969. The fledgling producer, who had already cut an Elmon Mickel single for Kent and an album for Milestone, was aware that Walker had played guitar on an earlier Mickel single for Elko. Bromberg asked Mickel to introduce him to Walker. After hearing Walker and his band backing George “Harmonica” Smith at Jefty’s, the producer convinced the guitarist to focus on the blues aspect of his repertoire.

“I said,” Bromberg recalls, “‘We’re gonna make some blues records,’ and we did just that.”

Besides cutting a series of brilliant singles and albums by Walker over the next two decades, Bromberg used the guitarist and his band on sessions by Johnny Shines, Eddie Taylor, Ted Hawkins, and Lonesome Sundown. After ending his association with the producer, Walker went on to make albums for Blacktop, JSP, Alligator, and Blue Ace, as well as for his revived Gilkey label.

At age 69, Walker is still living in South Central, singing and playing with more soul and authority than ever, and looking for the right recording opportunity. With Delta Groove Productions and Going Back Home, he feels he’s found it, even if it did involve taking a few steps back stylistically in order to move forward to the next level in his career.