Barrellhouse Chuck And The All Star Blues Band
The Sirens Records SR-5104
Wall Street Journal
by By Nat Hentoff , Jan. 3, 2007
Wall Street Journal
"Barrelhouse Chuck Goering Keeps the Blues Alive"
by NAT HENTOFF
January 3, 2007
For two weeks, the children at the Braeside elementary school in Highland
Park, Ill., near Chicago, had been listening to Barrelhouse Chuck Goering
play the piano, sing and tell stories about historic blues masters he'd
known. He'd come, a teacher explained to the Chicago Tribune, "because we
wanted to show the kids the roots of American music." At one point, a
9-year-old said: "I didn't know any of those famous names he talked about.
It was like they were keeping a secret from us." And another youngster,
brand new to the blues, added, "I really like the songs."
Those lively teaching moments took place three years ago, but Barrelhouse
Chuck -- still keeping the blues alive every way he can -- told me in
December that recently he'd been at another elementary and a high school, in
Rockford, Ill., when a seven-year-old told him, "The notes you play on the
piano sound so sad to me."
" Well," he told her, "you feel a lot better when you play those notes.
That's what the blues is about, making you feel better to get them out."
Mr. Goering, born French Canadian and raised in Worthington Ohio, is, he
notes, "75% Cherokee." But since he first heard a recording by Muddy Waters
when he was nine years old, the blues became part of him. From his teens on,
he worked as a blues apprentice in largely black clubs in the South and then
in Chicago, learning from such classic mentors as Sunnyland Slim, Little
Brother Montgomery, Pinetop Perkins -- and Muddy Waters.
As he made the blues his own, Mr. Goering earned his professional name,
Barrelhouse Chuck. In Debra DeSalvo's invaluable book "The Language of the
Blues" (Billboard Books) -- based on interviews with many classic blues
bards -- she explains: "A bar where whisky is served straight from a barrel
is called a barrelhouse. The up-tempo blues that developed in these
establishments came to be called barrelhouse, and those blues sped up the
dancing."
Listening often to 48-year-old Barrelhouse Chuck's CDs, "Got My Eyes on You"
and "Prescription for the Blues" (www.thesirensrecords.com; also at
Amazon.com), I want to dance, though I don't know any steps. And his singing
reminds me of stories jazzmen used to tell me about rambunctious rent
parties. But he can also make his "sad notes" tell the kinds of stories that
later became known as "soul music."
The Sirens label is a passionate avocation of Steven Dolins, a tenured
professor of computer science at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. Like
Barrelhouse Chuck, Prof. Dolins has been drawn to the blues since he was
very young, and his way of helping keep the blues alive is through his
record company.
In his notes for "Prescription for the Blues," Prof. Dolins tells how
Barrelhouse Chuck became so deeply steeped in the blues and -- as I've found
out, talking to Chuck -- such a vivid storyteller about the pantheon of
blues makers and shapers he's known off as well as on the stand. Writes
Prof. Dolins: "Chuck would show up at his heroes' gigs, sit in and socialize
with them. He not only trained with these musicians, he would also chauffeur
them, live with them and ultimately care for them. He became their family.
His recollection of special times with Little Brother and Sunnyland are
vivid, hilarious and at times bittersweet."
For example, I was telling Barrelhouse Chuck how moved I was by his singing
of the poignant "School Days" (on the "Got My Eyes on You" CD) by Floyd
Jones, one of the original Chicago bluesmen, who could be found on Sunday
mornings singing at the open-air Maxwell Street Market.
"I knew Floyd," Chuck told me. "I saw him just before he died in the
hospital. I held his hand, saw him in the casket and I buried him. But his
music stays with me."
Chuck believes that the blues he's lived can stay a living music if enough
young people, who can't have the mentors he did, can feel those sad and
barrelhouse notes. In the schools where he's told and played his stories,
the children encouraged him about the future because they clearly "do open
up to the blues."
Of his gig at the elementary school in Highland Park, Chuck recalls with
pleasure that he was very glad no one there "was trying to tell me about rap
music compared to the blues. The kids took it all in. It's like they weren't
spoiled by the garbage of today on the radio."
Those two weeks of blues at that school were generated by Prof. Dolins,
whose daughter was, at the time, in second grade there. He figured his
daughter, too, needed to be educated in this roots music. "At home she hears
blues all the time but mostly listens to Britney Spears."
There is a growing number of blues-in-the-schools programs around the
country, but Messrs. Dolins and Goering feel strongly that there ought to be
many more. Barrelhouse Chuck brightened when I told him that on Dec. 7, when
the president announced the recipients of the annual Presidential Medal of
Freedom -- the country's highest civilian award -- B.B. King, an American
blues legend, was on the list for his "distinguished service" to the nation
-- and, I would add, the world.
In 1999, jazz critic Peter Watrous wrote in the New York Times: "The wells
that gave rise to so much American music have seemingly dried up. Blues
culture is dead." But that same year, John Burnett of National Public Radio
reported from the Mississippi Delta, the deepest fount of black blues, about
a 64-year-old auto mechanic and blues guitarist, Johnnie Billington, who'd
become the Johnny Appleseed of the blues in the area's schools. At the Rosa
Fort Middle School, he had put together a blues band; and as the youngsters
played a slow blues, Mr. Billington pointed to a kid: "You see! He's feeling
it, see!"
Barrelhouse Chuck tells me he'll accept any invitations he gets to go into
classrooms. "That's where the future of this music is." It's too bad that
Clear Channel and other corporate radio chains and stations have no playing
time for Barrelhouse Chuck.
Copyright © 2005 The Sirens Records, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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