Hastings Street Grease

	Detroit Blues Is Alive!!

Volume 1 - BS-110D

Volume 2 (BS-111D)

"...as primal and ragged as anything...a menacing brew..." - David Whiteis, Living Blues "...Kirkland's fine numbers illustrate the [album's] success in turning back the clock.....his approach is joyfully anarchic and raw with emotion..." - Tom Hyslop, Blues Revue "..this collection is a  mandatory purchase for all blues fans.  This is the best collection of Detroit blues I've heard since the 1960s..." - Andy Griggs, Real Blues

Hastings Street was the center of African American culture in Detroit from the 1930s through the early 1960s and these albums capture some of the greatest bluesmen from  that era in a collection of new recordings.  Volume 1 was released earlier this year - to give you an idea of what it's all about here are some pictures of the musicians, a history of blues in Paradise Valley and John  Cohassey's excellent essay on what it was like on Hastings Street.

The musicians on Hastings Street Grease include Eddie Burns, Eddie Kirkland, Howard Armstrong, Willie D. Warren, Harmonica Shah and Detroit Piano Fats.  Leon Horner and Duke Dawson make up the rhythm section and guitarists Emmanuel Young, Jessie Blades and Joe Mitchell put in some wild licks.  These recordings are all new, but in the classic style of 1950s Detroit.

	An essay on Detroit and its blues follows, if you'd like to read the liner notes to Volume 1 of Hastings Street Grease by Detroit cultural historian John Cohassey click here.

	You can download the following essay (along with some of the photos on this page)in Adobe Acrobat format here.

They called it Paradise Valley, in Detroit's Black Bottom.  It was a 66 square block area on the near east side of Detroit's downtown and from the 1920s on it was  where the vast majority of the African American population of Detroit lived.   By the 1940s it was teeming with the new immigrant blacks from the South who had moved north for good paying jobs in factories beginning two  decades earlier on Henry Ford's promise of $5 per day.  The living conditions weren't great: overcrowded tenements and row houses,  but in the center of it all, on Hastings Street, you could find some great fun. And all  the great jazz and blues clubs of Detroit:  the Flame Show Bar, Three Star Bar, Forest Club.  And you could also find the great Detroit blues musicians, there too: John Lee Hooker, Big Maceo Merriweather, Bobo Jenkins,  Baby Boy Warren, Calvin Frazier, Boogie Woogie Red.  In the 1940s and 1950s Detroit became Blues' Second City, after Chicago.  The Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland  and Milwaukee was driven by the economic opportunity of the growing industrial requirements of the nation and the continual repression of blacks in the South.  In the 1920s in Detroit the average wage for blacks was 54  cents/hour compared with 26.5 cents/hour in the South and there was an increasing need for labor in these northern cities.  The eastern European immigrant labor pool dried up after World War I and the only cheap supplemental  labor force that could easily be found was in the black south.  Northern companies sent labor agents to Mississippi with free rail passes and promises of guaranteed jobs and the Chicago Defender, America's largest black  newspaper, editorialized about the economic opportunities and freedoms offered in the North.  Detroit's African American population grew from 5,500 in 1910 to 40,000 in 1920 and skyrocketed to 150,000 in 1940 and 300,000 in  1950.  Unfortunately racism wasn't strictly a southern province and housing was segregated in the North with blacks and other ethnic groups relegated to certain districts within the cities.  Black Bottom was one of the  oldest sections of Detroit, with many of the houses dating from the 1860s and 1870s and they were already rundown by 1910.  The grand row houses and hotels of the 19th century were chopped up into small boarding houses and many of these dwellings were without plumbing and kitchens.  There were, in fact, some 35,000 outhouses in Detroit at this time.  Perhaps because the living accommodations were so poor in Paradise Valley, the streets, bars, poolrooms and 10 cent movie houses were jammed with people.  People went out to Hastings Street on Friday and Saturday nights to be seen, whether they were in formal attire at the Cotton Club or just strutting along the street. On Sunday there would be a crowd on Hastings at Rev. C.L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church. But in the nighttime, in clubs and on street corners, the blues was alive. Unlike Chicago, before World War II there weren't any record labels in Detroit, so many of the musicians performing in the area went undocumented.  Later, in the 1950s a handful of local labels came into being.  The  most well known, and only one that achieved distribution beyond the region was Joe Brown's Fortune Records.  But there were other entrepreneurs like Joe Von Battle and Bernie Besman who created small labels and recorded some  of the vibrant music of Detroit at the time.  Von Battle's Joe's Record Shop was somewhat of an institution of its own on Hastings and later on 12th Street: it was a place to hang out and maybe your band could be recorded in his back room.  Fortune, Sensation, JVB, Staff, Big Star, Prize, Hi-Q, Von were Detroit's labels.  Small and mostly without wide distribution, these labels captured the blues of Detroit. The only blues musician to rise to national prominence from the Detroit blues arena was John Lee Hooker.  Hooker in Detroit was like Muddy Waters in Chicago – a dominant and distinctive musician – but unlike Muddy, Hooker's  idiosyncratic style didn't allow imitators and, perhaps as a result, there wasn't a particular Detroit blues style.  But John Lee Hooker and his music remained the touchstone for all Detroit bluesmen. The music on Hastings Street Grease gives the listener an opportunity to hear the blues of Detroit from this explosive time period.  The tunes are all new material, recorded in 1998, but played by the men who were integral to the Detroit blues scene of the 1940s and 1950s.  Eddie Burns and Eddie Kirkland both came to Detroit from the South in the 1940s and, at different times, were prominent members of John Lee Hooker's band.  Burns originally played harmonica with Hooker, but later picked up the guitar and is mostly known as Eddie Guitar Burns both inside and outside of the Motor City.  Kirkland, too, is accomplished on both guitar and harp, but has an earthier style. Detroit Piano Fats, as he relates to us in "Hastings Street Revisited, Part 1," got his start with Hooker at the Club Carribee in Paradise Valley.  Fats' reminiscences pay tribute to the Detroit Count and his two parts of the "Hastings Street Opera," and stand as  heir to the great piano tradition of Big Maceo , Charlie Spand, Will Ezell and Boogie Woogie Red.  Emmanuel Young and Leon Horner also played with Hooker at various times. Willie D. Warren didn't move to Detroit until the 1970s, after living many years in Chicago where he created the blues electric bass guitar part in Otis Rush's band.  Since his arrival, Warren has become an important figure to all younger bluesmen in town. The remaining musicians on Hastings Street Grease, Harmonica Shah, Joe Mitchell and Jesse Blades are from the next generation of Detroit bluesmen, direct descendents  of  the music of those pioneers of Blues' Second City.  Their music  shows that, in fact, the blues haven't changed  in Detroit at all.  Today Hastings Street is no more, lost to urban renewal and a six lane expressway in the early 1960s, its music, the real Detroit blues, in all its  rawness, intensity and honesty are documented - as never before - on these two volumes of Hastings Street Grease.

	If you have any comments, questions or even want to know our sources (okay, we know that this is not a scholarly forum, but we do have some friends who are into that sort  of thing so we're offering them just to show we didn't make it all up) please e-mail us.

Eugene Foster, known to many as Detroit Piano Fats, recorded his first sides as a leader Hastings Street Grease Vol. 1 & 2. Fats was a longtime  sideman in the Detroit blues scene, including a lengthy stint with John Lee Hooker in the infamous Paradise Valley.  Fats passed on to better things on February 22, 1999.  We miss his piano skills, his humor  and the authentic warmth of his personality.

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