Blind Joe :: The Man
He's a Devil of a Joe
The following is a shortened summary and re-writing of the chapter of the same name by Gayle Dean Wardlow and Stephen Calt in the excellent book Chasin' That Devil Music by Gayle Dean Wardlow (Backbeat Books, 1998, pp.170-180). Refer to this book (see links section) for find out how to purchase an unabridged copy. Note that the full text in this book was itself a reproduction of the original Blues Unlimited article (no 146, Autumn/Winter 1984, pp.16-20).

Gayle Dean Wardlow in bank vault holding a treasured Paramount 78 record
Introduction by GDW
The posthumous rediscovery of Blind Joe Reynolds, whose real name was Joe Sheppard, required three years of the most intensive tracking I ever did. In 1965 H.C.Speir said he found Blind Joe at a lumber camp a few miles above Lake Providence. Blind Joe (he was not known by his last name) was well remembered, but all informers were wary of a young white man asking about a blind blues singer who, it turned out, had served time in both Louisiana and Arkansas prisons. Blind Joe had left Lake Providence shortly after WWII with a big fat woman guide, who had beaten the hell out of him on a street corner during a dispute over tips that he suspected she had stolen. I was to hear of two more "Blind Joe's" in the Louisiana Delta, one of whom was solely a sacred singer. After searches of Tallulah and other Louisiana Delta towns, I tracked a Blind Joe who played on the streets of Monroe, Louisiana's fourth largest city who had been seen playing outside a café there. This was 1967 and the café owner said that Blind Joe still lived in a little community just south of Monroe. When I eventually found the house later in 1968 it was boarded-up and I learned that Blind Joe had died. When I found his nephew and played him the Reynolds recordings, he said, "That's old Joe. That's my uncle, that's old Joe." (Aside: Recall that there existed a tense civil rights climate in USA in the 1960's resulting in many potential sources being reticent to divulge any information to a white man, especially one from "out of town" - thus making tracking pertinent information difficult and time consuming). Interestingly, Joe Sheppard (his real name, not Reynolds) was the only bluesman surviving from the classic prewar period who was actively playing an electric (not acoustic) guitar in 1967; that same year Cream with Eric Clapton included their version of Blind Joe's dynamic 1930 Paramount piece "Outside Woman Blues" on their album "Disraeli Gears" (Atco SD 33-232).

"Anything "bad" was Joe," recalled Jack Brown, a store owner in Monroe, Louisiana, who was "raised up together" with Blind Joe. "Yes sir; anything 'bad' was Mister Joe …" Despite his own respectability, Brown was titillated by the unsavory qualities that often shocked Joe's other neighbors. "Oh, Joe was somethin'!" he said not long after the singer's death in 1968. "He's a devil of a Joe."

But the devil was something of a fabulist. Using falsehood and evasion for both his own amusement and protection, he left contradictory accounts of his past. Thanks to his well-known wariness of the law, his associates had to even guess his proper surname, as he changed identities often. "Blind Joe Reynolds" was just one of several aliases. "His name was Joe Sheppard from his birth," insisted Jack Brown. "I don't care what anybody tell you."

With similar finality another neighbor scoffed: "His real name wasn't no Sheppard." Joe's nephew from Monroe, Henry Millage, gave real credence to this doubt. "Before he put his name into Sheppard he was 'Joe Leonard.' And after he got on the run - you know, got into a little trouble … then he changed his name over to Blind Joe Sheppard." Blind Joe once divulged to Millage's wife, Bess, that he could never divulge the nature of the trouble that prompted his changes of name. To judge by his self-admitted crimes - the alleged shooting of an uncle, and of one white man - it must have been formidable. He certainly wasn't ashamed of his 'rap sheet,' which included two penitentiary terms. Jack Sewell, who knew him personally in the 1960's, said, "If he'd been in jail he'd tell it, if he'd been to penitentiary, he'd tell it; he didn't care ... Maybe his woman cared, but he didn't care."

It was as Joe Sheppard that he was buried. He sometimes adopted the surname of a stepfather, Eddie Madison, even after his mother had re-married. As with his rightful name, Joe's age and birthplace were often changed with the telling. A Monroe fiend, Arnella Strickland said that Joe was born in 1904 in Tallulah, Louisiana, but his death certificate gives his birthplace as Arkansas in 1900. Tallulah, where he was raised as Joe Sheppard, lies 20 miles west of Vicksburg on the banks of the Mississippi River and numbered 3,300 people in 1930.

Joe's musical career began in Vicksburg during WWI when he was (according to Brown) "eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty years of age." Two local guitarists who only "rapped" (strummed) their instruments - Louis Martin and a man known only as "Hey Willie" - were among his earliest tutors.

"Joe would be right there with 'em," Brown recalled. "After he commence to learnin' good, then he would get one of 'em's box, and he would play his part." When he had no guitar to play he would add percussion to their efforts with his own washtub. "He wasn't too good then but he was learnin' then," was Brown. A fiddler known as "Deaf John" sometimes joined the trio.

Although "not too many" traveling minstrels ever passed through town, according to Brown, those who did all added something to Joe's growing repertoire. "He stay there with 'em, tryin' to learn what he could, offa what they doin'. He listened and then he sang the same songs …" (tactfully only after their originators had left town). By the end of WWI, word of Joe's musical prowess had spread from Tallulah to a desolate nearby town known as "Kansas-Kansas," where he frequently entertained railroad workers for tips. One of these local listeners, Jack Sewell, reminisced: "Ain't but one man I would stop and hear his music before I do Joe's. And that was the man that was teachin' him."

The anonymous teacher was an itinerant guitarist who stood "right at fifty," twice Joe's age. He was a brusque taskmaster. "If Joe didn't have a tune like he wanted it he'd stop him quick, say now, 'Get Right!'" recalled Sewell. This tutor never addressed Joe as "Sheppard" but as "Joe Madison," "Joe Reynolds," or "Willie Reynolds." (There was a tiny community named Reynolds just a few miles north of Tallulah from where Joe may have taken his name).

Marital and religious bonds held no charm for Joe. "He tried to get all the women he seed and all that they had," Jack Brown recounted. "Never knew Joe to go to church much. If he did, he'd be off from the church arguin' and cussin' and raising sand." Episodic shooting scrapes and what Brown termed "much devilment" punctuated his days in Tallulah.

In the early 1920's his career was temporarily foreclosed by Arkansas authorities (more likely arrested by Louisiana authorities who then turned him over to Arkansas authorities), who arrested him in Tallulah and carried him off to Pine Buff penitentiary at Cummins. "He mighta been stealin'; anything," Brown said. "When he come back, he rest hisself up; then he came ramblin' round through the country bein' 'bad' as usual." Once released from prison he then lost his sight. "Brudell Scott shot his eyes out with a shotgun," recalled Brown who witnessed their shootout in Tallulah some time between 1925 and 1927.

"They's drinkin' and got drunk and got to cussin' and arguin'. One broke to get his gun, and the other 'un had his gun hid out there at the edge of the woods; he went and got his gun. And he's hidin' behind a tree … and Joe happened to peep out too quick. When they carried Joe to the hospital and Joe got healed up where he could kinda get about, Joe left there," Brown said. "He didn't stay up in there no longer after this shootin' come up." (Seems that without his sight Joe felt vulnerable to local enemies so left quickly afterwards).

Asked if Joe ever contemplated revenge on Scott, Brown laughed: "No, hell, no." Joe later told Bess Millage that his blinding was accidental, that his brother had done the deed with a shotgun as he attempted to try and make peace with the brother and another (unknown) man. Joe also took pains to avoid another disaster by learning to shoot a pistol at audible targets. He not only publicized his expertise, but took to displaying a .45 pistol as a conversation piece, Brown recalls.

The years in which Joe adjusted to his blindness are obscure. Summing up his life as a vagabond, Bess Millage said, "I'd say you can't pronounce where he ain't stayed. He used to go all over the USA."

In search of musical audiences, he traveled the same territory as other deep Southern bluesmen, such as Mississippi's Skip James. Within the span of a few months in 1926 James saw him perform at a black cabaret on Memphis's North Nichols Street, as well as on streets of Sun, Louisiana, a small riverside town near Bogalusa.

A year or so later Joe cropped up briefly in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the company of a 25-pound woman. She collected their earnings from passersby in a clay water jug through which he sputtered out a tuba-like accompaniment to his songs.

By now Joe had become a blues "professor" himself with at least two local protégés, whom he groomed as bottleneck guitarists. "He went home and got him some bottles himself," Sewell recalled. "And told them, say: 'Now if y'all wants me to teach you, put them bottles on your fingers.'" Joe's own bottleneck slurs greatly impressed Sewell: "Look like to me it would 'talk.' He was makin' it 'talk' …. I ain't heard none of 'em played no better than him, and I heard a lotta musicians."

Early in 1929, Jackson talent broker H.C.Speir ventured into a sawmill camp barrelhouse about three miles south from Lake Providence and heard Joe's playing. He was sufficiently impressed to invite him to Jackson for the purpose of arranging a recording session. Shortly after Joe arrived he was dispatched by train to Grafton, Wisconsin, where in February 1929 he cut four sides for Paramount Records as "Blind Joe Reynolds." (Speir said he had heard of Reynolds' talents from some of his other artists who brought him news of singers he should seek out. He said it was either "Bo Carter or Charley Patton who told me about him." Hence his willingness to travel to Lake Providence to seek him out.)

More than 35 years later his friends and relatives in the vicinity of Monroe still had little inclination to discuss his reason for adopting a recording pseudonym. However Henry Millage said: "He told me that he was makin' records, but he wasn't usin' his real name 'cause he was on the run."

Fewer than five copies of Paramount 12927 have been found to date. The first was discovered in rural Georgia in 1963 by collector Jeff Tarrer, who later sold the record to New York collector Bernie Klatzko. Gayle Dean Wardlow found a copy of Victor 23258 in 1965 in Charleston, Mississippi.

When these recordings were found they immediately established "Blind Joe Reynolds" as one of the outstanding artists of his recording era, a maestro with a seemingly original sense of timing and phrasing. His lyrics delivered in a raucous rasp were no less astonishing.

Though on the run, Joe tried his best to be available for recording. Periodically, after his first session, he would dictate letters to a female traveling companion who mailed them to his discoverer H.C.Speir. The letters were inquiries about future recording prospects. Eight months after his initial session, his efforts were briefly rewarded by Speir (who remembered 'feeling sorry' for the man), who sent him to a makeshift Victor studio in Memphis. Another four sides resulted, two of which were never issued.

Reynolds apparently spent time in Vicksburg, and very possibly the fat woman described as his "wife" who begged for him may have been from that river town. According to Bess Millage, both Third Street and Goose Hill, names in two song titles, were in Vicksburg.

A decade of wayfaring, with alleged interludes at the Mississippi State penitentiary and also the town of Leland, Mississippi, followed his fruitless session. Around 1944 he returned to Lake Providence with his pudgy companion and rented one of five or six run-down apartments that constituted the upstairs of Chink's Boarding House, a block from the town's main street. Its ground floor was a combination café and beer hall and Joe often played for tips on its front steps.

On a spring day around 1947, Joe and the same woman were seen ambling down U.S.47, which runs south out of Lake Providence. They never returned. On June 30 he presented himself at the American Foundation for the Blind on West 16th Street in New York City. After being legally certified blind Joe was handed a book of travel coupons that enabled him to ride free on buses and trains in the company of a sighted guide. He left no home address and had no further contact with the agency for many years.

He soon turned up in the small town of Bastrop, 40 miles west of Lake Providence. There he gave a succession of house parties and, according to Arnella Strickland, "used to have two women stayin' in the house together." This story soon became a local fable: "I heard everybody say that," remarked Jack Brown.

Arriving in Richwood in 1957, an outlying area of Monroe, Joe quickly set about impressing his neighbors with his personable roguery. "He's still talkin' 'bad' talk, like he's a 'bad' man, you know," recalled Brown who had himself settled there on the south side of town and operated a small grocery store where later Reynolds would sit and sing for his boyhood friend from Tallulah.

Upon the death of one of his alleged two "wives" he formally married the remaining wife who would not disclose her name to the author, She had first met Joe as he played blues on the streets of Monroe. "A little boy was leading him," she remembered. "He's 'round about ten years old."

Though she became Joe's new guide there were times when he fended for himself, as when he leveled one of his .45s at a dog that snipped at his feet during one street concert. A single shot obliterated the animal and established the point that Blind Joe was nobody to tangle with.

His debut at Brown's store was marked by a public boast relating "how he preached for money." Brown elaborated, "He go different places you know, with his blues singin'. And it wouldn't work out too good; he'd get hungry and broke, then he'd 'change' and tell the folks God sent him to preach. I'm tellin' you right - Joe was somethin'!. I wish you coulda see Joe."

Some time in 1950s or early 1960's Reynolds switched from acoustic guitar to electric. Sources in Bastrop say he was playing such when he lived in a small paper-mill town in northeast Louisiana, some 35 miles north of Monroe. His favorite song in the 50s was "Louisiana Blues" by Muddy Waters.

His presence on local welfare rolls made it impractical for him to perform on town streets, which gave credence to his self-woven myth of musical retirement. BY the mid-1960's he not only had a new electric guitar to supplant his outmoded acoustic one but also a chauffeur to supplant his travel coupons, which he replenished in 1965. The diver, his nephew Henry, took him to such places as Shreveport, Jackson, Greenville and Pine Buff where he played on the streets, and also to Natchez where he posted himself outside the gates of a lumberyard and entertained employees as they changed shifts.

Neither he nor anyone else had any idea that he had become the last active prewar blues minstrel of any historical importance. His few contemporaries were either dead, retired or living "folk" exhibits who played occasional concerts for middle class white audiences. None were active tradesmen working in their original musical environment, as Joe was. It is doubtful that Joe was even remotely aware of the blues' new respectability or of his own status as the composer of a minor hit record in England.

On a Sunday evening in 1968 he capped a visit to the Millages with a performance of "Outside Woman Blues," set to electric guitar. On the same night he was disabled by a stroke and removed to a Monroe hospital. Two weeks later, on March 10, 1968, he died of pneumonia.

"He died actin' bad," Jack Brown said with a grin. "He died actin' bad."

Joe's remains lie in the Richmond Gardens Cemetery on the outskirts of Monroe. It was perhaps to protect his widow and the several bastard children he was said to have allegedly fathered that, in the first year after his death, his neighbors were to remain reticent about speaking of him too openly (with the exception of Jack Brown).