Excerpts from Kim Field's Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers

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profile of herman crook from the chapter on country music

Herman Crook (1898-1988)

One Saturday night in the spring of 1988 I stood in the wings of the main auditorium at Nashville’s Opryland and watched Herman Crook go to work. It was ten-thirty—not a particularly productive time of day for most eighty-nine-year-olds—but Crook launched himself from the stage apron with a determined if somewhat halting step and made for the same space he had first filled on another Saturday in July of 1926—center stage at the Grand Ole Opry.

The applause had only just risen up from the seats after a singer’s last tune, and bows were still being taken, but Crook’s seemingly premature entrance had more to do with the deceleration that comes with age than it did with ego. The Opry is a well-oiled machine—television monitors displaying the time down to the second are strewn all over the lip of the stage—and Herman knew from experience that his early departure from the wings would give him just enough time to reach his microphone before Roy Acuff, host of the segment of the Opry show, began his introduction of the Crook Brothers band.

Acuff was the living symbol of the Grand Ole Opry’s golden era, but his preamble to the Crook Brothers’ segment was properly deferential; after all, when Acuff came to Nashville to join the Opry’s regular cast in 1938, Herman Crook was already a twelve-year veteran of the program. After a few words, Acuff surrendered the microphone and Herman Crook led his group into an up-tempo instrumental, just as he had done nearly every Saturday night for sixty-two years.

Herman Crook knows his place in history. “I am the oldestman on the Opry and I’ve been there longer than anybody else,’ he told me later in a backstage dressing room. “I play every Saturday night. I never have played on a Friday night,” he remarked, puzzled, as if this oddity had just occurred to him. “They never did ask me.”

The marathon of Saturday-night Crook Brothers shows ended on June 10, 1988, when a heart attack brought down the quiet, courtly mouth organ player who had personally witnessed the entire history of country music’s preeminent showcase. Watching Crook onstage at the glitzy Opryland hall that spring evening, it was almost impossible to imagine that he had been a contemporary of shadowy legends like Uncle Dave Macon, the Delmore Brothers, and DeFord Bailey. In the early days, the Opry had revolved around groups like the Gully Jumpers, the Dixie Clodhoppers, and the Fruit Jar Drinkers. Sixty years later, only the Crook Brothers were still regularly dispensing the unadorned string-band music that had launched the Opry.

Herman Crook seems to have been satisfied with his role as an Opry stalwart. He married the pianist in his first band and settled with her in Nashville to raise seven children. Crook did not depend on music as a livelihood—he worked for many years as a tobacco twister—and his band rarely traveled outside the Nashville area. Despite their protracted history, the Crook Brothers made only a few recordings. After some unsuccessful sides for Victor in the late 1920s (Herman Crook’s verdict was that “they weren’t very good”), thirty-five years went by before the group appeared on a joint album with Sam and Kirk McGhee in the early 1960s. But for more than six decades countless Opry visitors and listeners thrilled to Crook’s prowess as an instrumentalist, and his band’s nonpareil record for job security in a precarious business is testimony to both the group’s high musical standards and to Crook’s talent as a bandleader.

“All of my folks came from up in DeKalb County, about sixty or seventy miles from here,” Crook told me. “We lived in the country. I don’t remember my daddy—he was killed by a tree when I was two or three years old. I’ve been trying to play the harmonica since I was a boy. For about eighty years, I reckon. I had an uncle that played the harmonica, and my older brother Matthew played. You could buy them for twenty-five cents then. We called them French harps.”

Even as youngsters Herman and Matthew were already assembling a repertoire of old-time songs and appearing at local functions and house parties. The brothers played twin harmonicas in unison in a style heavily influenced by the back-bowing techniques of country fiddler, an approach they naturally developed as teenagers that became the trademark of the group the brothers formed in the early 1920s.

The Crook Brothers began making regular broadcasts over Nashville’s WLAC, but they were eventually lured to WSM. In 1925 they became charter members of a new country music program developed for the station.

“When this show first started, it was call the ‘Nashville Barn Dance,’” Crook explained to me. “We played it for two years for nothin’. Back in them days, people thought that if they got to play over the radio, it was really somethin’. Wnen they decided to pay, we happened to be one of the lucky bands they picked out. They started us out at five dollars each for a Saturday-night show. I been on there ever since.”

Matthew Crook turned his back on music in 1930 to join Nashville’s police force. Another Crook—Lewis, a banjoist—joined the band. He was no relation, but his presence allowed Herman to feel comfortable about continuing to bill the group as the Crook Brothers. The group settled into its role as one of the Opry house bands, eventually achieving a collective longevity that dwarfs the extended tenures of such revered Opry fixtures as Ernest Tubb, Minnie Pearl, and Little Jimmy Dickens. The same year a rawboned young howler from Alabama named Hank Williams made his spectacular debut on the Opry, Herman Crook was celebrating his first quarter of a century on the program.

As Herman and I talked backstage at Opryland in the comfortable rehearsal room that the Crook Brothers shared with Little Jimmy Dickens, I mentioned that the spacious quarters were a long way fro the cramped, Spartan dressing rooms in the old Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s home from 1943 until 1974.

“I like the new place fine,” agreed Crook. “It’s a larger place—accommodates more people. And its filled every Saturday night. We have our own lockers and a place to rehearse, and if you want a cup of coffee or an orange drink, it won’t cost you a penny. They treat me all right. I just got a raise last week. I’ve even talked to the big boy—I forget his name, but he’s the owner of everything. I shook hands with hjim and told him, “I’ve been here sixty-two years.’”

Herman was firm about his musical loyalties: “Country music—that’s my kind of music. Good old breakdowns, sacred numbers, and good songs,” Sitting ramrod straight in his chair, he raise dhis voice as Jimmy Dickens’ guitarist and steel player plugged into an amplifier on the other side of the room to work out an instrumental break. “All the years I’ve been on the Opry, there’ve been a lot of changes,” Herman noted as his flinty eyes roved over the electronic paraphernalia. “If I was manager of the Opry, there’d be a change in it. I’d be just like George D. Hay [the manager of the Opry broadcasts during the 1920s and ‘30s]. I wouldn’t have a drum on that stage at all on Saturday night. A drum is just somethin’ with a lot of noise—ain’t got a good sound to it at all. George Hay didn’t want a drum and he didn’t want no electric instruments. He just wanted the pure, down-to-earth country music on a guitar, banjo, fiddle, harmonica and a piano. You want no kind of a horn.”

Satisfied that his point was well taken, Herman described his current working arrangement with the Opry as his band members began to arrive and unpack their instruments. “We just do two turns a night. We play breakdown numbers for the square dancers. Every once in a while Roy Acuff will call me up there to play a solo number—‘Lost John’ or ‘Amazing Grace.’ I just stand out there and do the best I can.

“The harmonica’s the only instrument I play. I get as much music out of that as others get ou[t of what they play. The harmonica is good for playin’ breakdown numbers and for playin’ chokin’ numbers like ‘Lost John.’ You can make a tune sound pretty lonesome on the harmonica.”

Occasionally, a sideways gleam would surface in Crook’s eyes as and his sly, backwoods humor would surface. Fifty-seven-year Opry veteran Lewis Crook was introduced as “the youngster that plays banjo for me.” Fiddler Earl White chuckled—he’d obviously heard all of this before—as Herman solemnly outlined his impeccable moral credentials: “I’ve never had a drink of beer or whiskey in my life. Never smoked a cigarette in my life. I never used a curse word in my life. I’ve never touched a woman besides my wife. Of course”—here he leaned forward with the punch line—“I am a Crook.”

About fifteen minutes before he was due onstage for his slot on the second Saturday-night show, Crook made his way backstage, accepting the hellos of stagehands, fans, and musicians as he took his customary spot in the wings near announcer Gram Turner’s lectern. “I’m not in the Country Music Hall of Fame, but I should’ve been,” Herman stated purposefully as he eyed the progress of the show. “They got one of my harmonicas that I gave ‘em. My goodness, if anybody deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, I oughta be in it—anybody that’s been around as long as I have.”

Moments later Herman was standing in the spotlight with a Hohner Marine Band in his palm as Roy Acuff informed the audience that the elderly gentleman to his left was the all-time Opry veteran. Then Herman Crook’s unerring harp filled the hall as he led the Crook Brothers band into “Sally Goodin”—a tune he had mastered before the Archduke Ferdinand was bushwhacked and all the able men in DeKalb County had gone off to the First World War—and the stage quickly filled with a pack of high-stepping square dancers,

Two months later I spotted Herman Crook’s obituary in the Sunday newspaper. That night I replayed the tape of the conversation we’d had that night in the Opry rehearsal room.

“I’ll be ninety if I live until next December second,’ Crook said at one point. “I ain’t as good a man as I used to be, but I still have good wind when it comes to playin’ harp. I wouldn’t mind makin’ some more records if I got the chance. It got a letter from a fella way off yonder somewhere who said I was the best harmonica player in the world. I told my wife ‘Boy, he’s coverin’ a lot of territory, isn’t he?’”

profile of kim wilson from the chapter on the blues

Kim Wilson (1951—)

On the rare occasions when Muddy Waters would expound on the topic of harmonica players, the music world listened—as the ultimate groomer of harmonica legends, he was something akin to a divine oracle on the subject. In the late 1970s, Waters began giving unsolicited testimonials about the skills of a young singer and harp player he had crossed paths with at Antone’s, Austin’s fabled blues showcase. Kim Wilson, claimed Muddy, was the finest harmonica player he had heard since Little Walter Jacobs. This stratospheric praise was akin to an official anointment, and a lot of attention was immediately focused on the Fabulous Thunderbirds, a quartet fronted by Wilson and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan

Waters only accelerated the inevitable discovery of a remarkable talent. Wilson’s playing, though solidly in the blues tradition, is so sure, so sharp, and so soulful that it has allowed him to leapfrog issued like race, originality, and musical honesty that have dogged—sometimes appropriately, sometimes not—white blues harpists. During the year I lived in Austin between 1977 and 1978, I saw on several occasions how Wilson’s presence and support could elicit some truly exceptional performances from the likes of Muddy Waters and Jimmy Rogers. When you can hurdle generational and cultural gulfs to inspire musicians of that caliber, you have a rare gift. Listen to Wilson’s playing on Jimmy Roger’s Ludella album and you will know why Muddy Waters was moved to praise him so unequivocally.

Wilson is also a stellar singer, and for several years following Fabulous Thunderbirds’ 1986 top-ten hit, “Tuff Enuff,” his brilliant harmonica work took a back seat to his vocal prowess on the group’s recordings. Success is hard to argue with; blues harp aficianados have consoled themselves with his cameo appearances on efforts like Ludella, the blues tours Wilson manages to make a few times each year despite the T-Birds’ frenetic schedule, and his own solo recordings. The most inspirational blues harp player since Paul Butterfield, Wilson has had a profound effect on the future of his instrument in both rock and roll and the blues.

Interview with Kim Wilson

I was born in Detroit. We moved to California in 1960. My dad used to sing on the radio—he sang with Danny Thomas a little bit. He was good. I played trombone until I was in sixth grade, but I hated that. I grew up on all the Memphis stuff and Motown. I feel like I had good taste before I started playing. I was into music—I was a great air guitar player—and I just wanted to find something that I was good at. I had guitar lessons, but it just didn’t seem right. Around 1968 some friends took me to hear people like Muddy Waters and George Smith, who was living in L.A., and there was a player in town named Matt DiRodio that I listened to. I forget exactly how I got my first harmonica, but I didn’t get in a band until a month after I started playing. I wasn’t any good, but I could sing.

I started doing local things and within a year I was playing with people like Eddie Taylor, George Smith, John Lee Hooker, Luther Tucker, Pee Wee Crayton, and Albert Collins when they came through town.

I as ambitious. I was working a job and trying to go to college, which was no good. All us harp players are crazy; we’re not exactly your all-American work ethic kind of guys. I hated things that were work to me. I finally just said, “Screw this, I’m going to make something out of music or die a wino or something.” I was making something like fifteen dollars a night. At the time, my rent was ten dollars a week, so my sixty-five dollars a week—it was poverty by anyone’s standards—was enough to live on. But hell, I knew that wasn’t going to last.

I was listening to a lot of Little Walter. I was at the stage where things happen really fast. It’s a really fantastic time in your career, in your musical childhood, because everything is like a big, giant discovery. And when you find it out, man, it’s just wonderful. You might happen on five or six different things at once that stemmed from the thing you learned, and it just blows your mind. It really spurs you to go on with it. Hopefully, it happens all through your career, until the end, but in the beginning it’s like walking for the first time, it really is.

The very first record I ever owned was by the James Cotton Blues Band. George Smith’s influence definitely shows up in my playing to this very day. He was also one of the best performers I’ve ever seen in my life. The first time I saw George he was on a show with Jimmy Reed in Goleta. A friend of mine, John Phillips, had the band that was backing up George. John was going to play a couple of songs and then get down when George came on. Before the second set, John came up to me and said, “Hey, man, I want you to play with me.” I couldn’t pass up that opportunity. I was really, really nervous. I got up on stage and I was playing, the crowd was really good, and all of a sudden George Smith just jumped on stage with me and we both started playing. And I swear to God, that’s the only time in my life that I ever remember my knees shaking. I did things that night that I had never done before, just because he was there. He’d walk out in the audience while he was playing and I’d stay up there, and he’d run back and grab me and drag me back through the audience, too. We’d lay down on the floor together and we’d do these synchronized kicks while we were playing. At the end of the night the club owner said, “How about a big round of applause for George Smith? And I don’t know who the hell this guy is, but how about a big round of applause for him, too?” And he passed me fifty dollars. After we got down, George said, “Hey, man, I want you to finish this gig out with me, through the week.” And I said, “Are you kidding?” And he said, “Hey man, I’m for real.”

But any action that happened in Santa Barbara, I had to make. So I went to Minneapolis with a guitarist named Bob Bingham, who was from there, and we put together a band called Aces, Straights, and Shuffles, and within a year, we were one of the main bands there. There was a lot of music going on in Minneapolis, and I could get by.

I got hooked up with Willie Dixon. He heard a studio tape of us and had high praise for it—he said I sounded like Sonny Boy—and he decided to manage us, but he was busy taking care of himself. We got hooked up with some people in Seattle who put a single out on us, but it went nowhere fast. I was having a great time anyway. I was only twenty-one.

I spent a winter in Minneapolis and that was it. Friends had told me that Austin, Texas, had a good scene, and I met a woman in the business who arranged to show me around Austin during a band break. I went down there and met Stevie Ray Vaughan, who was playing a rib joint called Alexander’s. Somebody asked if I could sit in, so I got up on the break with Stevie and Doyle Bramhall, and I did “Juicy Harmonica” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby”—those were my two get-over numbers, you know—and drove the place crazy. Jimmie Vaughan was there, but I didn’t really even talk to him. I just shook his hand and split.

I went back up to Minneapolis and I got a call from Vaughan. I didn’t even know who he was. He said, “Hey, this is Jimmie, man.” I said, “Who?” “Jimmie—you know, from down in Texas. Jimmie Vaughan. I’m thinking about coming up there,” he says. And I said, “Fine, come on up. I got a three-day weekend working with the band at the Caboose in Minneapolis and you can work with us.” And that’s when I really got the chance to hear him. And we talked and talked, and things were really leaning toward Texas because I really liked it when I went down. And the weather suited my clothes. I told the Aces I was going down to California to see my girlfriend, and I split for Texas for one last time to check out the band down there. Everything was okay, so I flew back to Minneapolis, gave the boys a month’s notice, and I hitched a ride down to Texas with all my records and my amplifiers. That’s all I really owned. And Jimmie and I started the T-Birds.

I was making a transition in my playing. At that time I was listening to a lot of Little Walter and a lot of Sonny Boy. I was really making an effort and listening to a lot of records. John Phillips had turned me on to Lazy Lester, Lightnin’ Slim, and Guitar Gable in California, but down in Texas, they were playing it, and Jimmie was great at it. I really started getting into the Louisiana stuff, repertoirewise. I recently met Lazy Lester himself. He’s a great human being, and he plays his ass off.

I saw Big Walter Horton a lot in Texas and later when we started playing the East Coast. As a matter of face, he offered me a job. He offered it to me a couple of times, so he must have meant it. I just kind of took it as a joke. He would say, “I’ll not only teach you how to play harmonica, I’ll teach you how to be a man.” Walter was a really great, caring guy. He was a mean old bastard on the outside, but underneath that he was great.

Muddy Waters was the best thing in my whole life. My musical life is loaded with so many experiences, and I’ve played with every single guy out there, but Muddy, he made my reputation. The best guy ever in the whole world, that I’ve met. He was a god to me, especially when I was younger The first night I met him he offered me a job, and I played with him a lot after that. I used to love it when he’d turn around when I was playing and give this look like, “Jesus Christ, where’d this cracker kid come from?” I used to love doing that to him. Of course he could get my goat anytime.

I would go to his house in Chicago, and he’d hold court in the kitchen, which was like the living room to him. There was always something cooking, a bottle of good wine in the fridge, and he had a little television in there. He’d take me into the living room, take me around. He had all these pictures of the old days. He’d point to them and say, “That’s when they called me the pretty Muddy Waters.” The one thing I regret is not recording with that old man. I guess that’s a very selfish thing to say.”

I saw him in the coffin—I was there. I had to go back and look at him several times, because I just couldn’t believe it. A lot of people came to that funeral. It was weird, because nobody could really cry until later. It took me a long time to even be able to listen to his records. It depressed me so much.

When Muddy Waters talked me up in the papers, that was success to me. To have all those guys that you listened to on records all those years while you were playing, for them to treat you like an equal and put you out there like that with them—that’s success. I really think I’m one of them. In fact, I know I’m one of them. And that may not come off too well in print, as far as my personality goes, but I don’t give a damn, because I am. They made me one of them. I can never pay them back for what they did for me—it’s impossible. But I sure am going to try. I put together short tours with people like Luther Tucker and Buddy Guy. That’s my meat. Just to play with those guys all night long. Not even take the harmonica out of my mouth except for the occasional deep breath. That’s so much fun for me that I can’t imagine the day when none of them are going to be around anymore.

I’m playing so much better now than when I was younger. I guess it’s just maturity—it’s so much less frantic. I rarely put the harp in the rock and roll stuff that the T-Birds do, I wouldn’t bastardize my instrument by playing that stuff. Rock to me doesn’t exist—it’s just a term that was invented for guys who can’t play.

I play the Marine Band. I’ve tried every other one, but I don’t think that any of them really cut it except for the Marine Band. You just can’t get that bite.

I have never felt that the harp is limited—ever. Not for what I want to do. I think it’s the closest thing to you that you can possibly play. It’s the closest thing to a voice. I mean, you are making that sound. I think it’s definitely more of an extension of you than any other instrument. There’s so much feeling to the harmonica, more than any other instrument to me. You can get so much guts out of it—sometimes literally. I’ve had guts fly out of it before.

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