For many, Hayward is home of West Coast blues
Originally published in the Hayward Daily Review
Terry “Big T” Williams pours his blues out over a swaying crowd, music and sweat rolling off him, green guitar howling.
“I’ll play the blues for you,” he sings, and he delivers on the promise.
The sound comes from the Mississippi Delta, translated and augmented on its way to the West Coast, to Russell City, where a new blues emerged.
Playing in front of Hayward City Hall on Saturday, Williams captures the endpoints of a musical journey espoused by the annual Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival.
“West Coast music is mutt music,” Ronnie Stewart, founder of the Bay Area Blues Society, explains. “It’s a mixture of everything.”
That bloodline includes Mississippi — along with Arkansas and Texas, and Chicago and Los Angeles.
“The rawness of Russell City music…that’s definitely Mississippi,” Stewart says. The rawness is “that real down-home, that real strong rhythm, that real simplicity, 1-4-5 every single song.”
Russell City was a gathering point. It was not a city, but an unincorporated district of Alameda County, now part of Hayward, where music and venues were unrestrained.
“Russell City was a mixture, because the African Americans came from Mississippi, came from Arkansas, came from Texas…and they all got together on the West Coast before they went on to their maritime jobs,” Stewart says. “This was during the ’40s, when West Coast blues was still getting its shape.”
Clubs in that era were basic: “Dirt floors and broken electricity. Amps buzzing, so if you touched the wrong thing, maybe you get grounded,” Stewart says. “No health inspectors, no city inspectors, no nothin’. Just the good, raw blues.”
Williams came out from Mississippi to play in Hayward. The blues are everywhere, he said. The music brings people together, and he sees more resemblance in the sounds of Russell City than the stylistic differences Stewart describes.
“I’ve heard blues in China. I’ve heard blues in Australia. Everybody’s trying to keep it as traditional as possible,” he says. “The blues is bringing us together all the time.”
Russell Kidd, selling T-shirts on Saturday, also feels that connection.
Watching Williams wail on stage, he muses on the music: “It reminds me of the suffering they went through in their early years,” Kidd says. “You can still hear that sound. It reminds me of the suffering I go through in my own life. When you put it to music, it makes you feel good. That means it gives you hope.”
The Hayward/Russell City Blues Festival will continue from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today. The lineup includes Zac Harmon, Johnny Rawls, Vasti Johnson, Mississippi Bo, Harmonica Blues Explosion and Stars of Glory.
Production notes: I tried to keep this video simple: What is West Coast Blues? What does it sound like? Text could give more detail on the history, but I wanted sound to be part of this. I used the newspaper’s Canon camcorder (including a tripod and shotgun mic), and edited in iMovie. It’s still not as polished as I’d like, but I’m more comfortable with the medium now, and editing is getting faster.