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Terry “Harmonica” Bean

An Interview with Frank Matheis, with photos by Rhonda Lewis

Terry Wayne Bean, known to blues fans worldwide as Terry “Harmonica” Bean” resides down in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where he was born and raised as the son of a sharecropper in the hill country of North Mississippi. He is a beloved celebrity in Pontotoc, with his own Mississippi Blues Trail marker. The globally popular blues singer, and former baseball star, plays guitar and rack harmonica in the acoustic true-blues tradition, with the trance-blues hill country and lower Delta influences.

thecountryblues.com was lucky to interview the swift and fiery artist via telephone from Pontotoc, Mississippi on October 25, 2020, when the artist was in a talkative mode, ready with a great long story to tell about himself, his career and his perspectives.

Thecountryblues.com stayed closely true to the words and meaning as tightly as possible. Minor liberties were taken for clarity and organization. Because the interview was long, with multiple intermingled topics, we took liberty to arrange the interview responses by topic, as the bluesman brought out related issues at different times. Minor syntax and tense changes were made for smooth reading.

How he got started in music

I always played music. I guess I was about nine when I started. My daddy, Eddie Bean, was an outstanding bluesman himself. He’d come along with BB King and all. He just didn’t go professional with it. He worked in a tire place in Tupelo, Mississippi called Max Tires, and he played all the juke joints on the side. He didn’t teach me. None of us children were taught to play. That’s the way it was with Mississippi blues guys: the parents played and then we were raised up around it so much that we just inherited it like that. I was just already in us. I started out on the guitar. When they would go to work I would get the guitar out and play around with it.  But the way it was back then for us kids at that time, if you were caught messing with their instruments you would got a whupping for it. But we would just sneak and get that stuff and play anyway. They would still find out we had it, because if it weren’t sitting in the corner right or a string broke on it or something. But, anyway, it all worked out.

 

Getting Going on the Harmonica

The harmonica came later on, because in this area where I live, the hill country guys and the Delta guys, they were very particular about their music. The blues is a serious kind of music in the state of Mississippi. If you play Mississippi Delta blues and then you played Northeast Mississippi Hill blues, they always had a conflict about that. The Delta guys played open-tuning and slide and harmonica, but the hill country guys they were into guitars and drums. I started to play the harmonica when I got be about 13. My daddy was going to the juke joints and some of them guys would be playing the harmonica, and one of my brothers got one to play with. But he couldn’t play it.  I started messing with that thing and got pretty good on it. But my grandfather, Rossie Johnson, wouldn’t allow us to play anything around here, because that was for the Mississippi Delta guys. So, I was stuck with the guitar.

After my baseball career ended, I went to work in a furniture factory called Ashton Lane, making recliners. I got a lot of trouble with child support and I just wanted to play the blues. So, I just started. I got the harmonica and the guitar going together.

One time my band didn’t show up. A friend of mine, Mr. John L. Watson, was an outstanding bluesman also from Marlboro, Mississippi. He passed on now – and he always told me, “Terry, why don’t you just start playing by yourself? You blow harmonica and you play guitar. Only just put the two together.” But I always knew what my granddaddy and them all said, “Don’t mix the two together.” They all passed on now, so I did put them together and it worked out well. So, I do Mississippi Delta harmonica style and I also do the Northeast Mississippi harmonica style too.

 

On Chicago Blues, Hill Country and Delta Blues

There are just two different styles of music that they didn’t want to combine, the Hill Country style and the Delta blues style. Muddy Waters headed to the city back in the ‘40s and formed this big blues band up there in Chicago, which combined together the hill country blues and the Mississippi Delta blues. They formed this thing they call Chicago blues today. I know that as a fact, because I’m from down here, and all these blues guys from here went up there. Here, a lot of great bluesmen like my father and grandfather and many others they knew this music. When the Howlin’ Wolf got to the Windy City, that’s when he and Muddy had a conflict about this music. The Wolf wasn’t that jealous of Muddy Waters; he just knew that the music they were playing was really Mississippi Delta, Northeast Mississippi music. The Howlin’ Wolf is from my area. He used to roam this area right here in Pontotoc – him and Johnny Woods and Leroy Foster. There are so many bluesmen from around here. I just had it passed down to me by my parents.  I’m traveled around the world playing blues until this virus come along. I’ve been everywhere, and I’m still going. I’m just passing around this music, the Mississippi Delta and the Northeast Mississippi blues.

 

About Homegrown Music

I come from a big family – 18 boys and 6 girls – 24 siblings in my family – and I’m the third one from the baby boy. But back in that time, everybody took their kids everywhere. They played music on Thursday nights, Friday nights, Saturday nights, Sunday nights – that’s the way it was. My daddy and them all played blues at that time, in the late ‘60s. The juke joints were wide open here in Northeast Mississippi. They were everywhere. Well, I got to playing. My daddy would always get me up and let me play with some of the older people when I was something like 8 or 9 years old. One time I made a whole dollar, and some of my brothers got jealous of it, so I was doing that stuff as a little boy and they wasn’t – so they got a little jealous about this. So, when we got back home and they be playing the guitars and stuff and I’d be wanting to play, they’d get mad at me, so some of them jump on me, run me out the house.

Back in the ‘60s, when I was a little bitty boy, R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough used to come here to my dad’s house, where I am right now because I’m living here now. They lived about 50 miles north of me, and they had that style of hill country music. Down in this area and down below me is another style of it. There’s several different styles of hill country music, just like it was for the Mississippi Delta blues. In this area, in Northeast Mississippi, you had the great Johnny Woods, the harmonica player, in Como, Mississippi. You had Mississippi Fred McDowell, Jessie Mae Hemphill. In the area I’m in, you had Booker White, Big Joe Williams – so many guys, like my family, that didn’t go professionally because they didn’t want to take a chance on playing professionally. They didn’t think they would do well playing music for a living when they left the cotton fields. They just played in the juke joints and worked day jobs in these cotton gins and factories, tire factories and stuff like that. Because when they left the fields they went to the tire stores, recapping tires back in the early – late ‘60s and early ‘70s. My daddy worked there about 30 years, and one of my brothers that left the field, he worked there 45 years. He just retired from that.

I am tickled to death to play. Everywhere I played I have had a big response from this. I put it to you like this: I have 18 brothers and I was the one selected to do this from my grandfather and my father and all. Not the other boys – it was me – they picked me to carry it on: “You – this will do something for you.” It’s like magic.

 

On Blues and Gospel

My daddy played the blues in a church, which they call gospel music, but it ain’t nothing but the blues with a new name – you understand? He calls it gospel music but it’s not gospel at all. There’s no such a thing as gospel music. It’s blues music that’s left the field and went to the juke joints – and then when they left the juke joints and went to the church on Sundays it changed names, because it couldn’t be called blues music. So, they called it sanctified music or holy ghost music. It ain’t nothing but the blues with another name. That’s all it is.

 

Playing Baseball

I played baseball here in Pontotoc, Mississippi, as a little boy. I started playing ball by myself outside the barn we had out here at that time – just playing. And they got me into liking to play baseball. They would have these ballgames around, out in the yard and stuff – and I got very good at that. The next thing I know I’m getting a lot of attention in that. They had the Negro League baseball players around here at that time.There were fields everywhere, because that’s what they done all Saturday and Sunday – play baseball. And me, being 12 and 13 years old, I got to play with grown people and I played well. I done a lot of them and this developed me into this player. I play ball left-handed and right-handed, manage to do 2 or 300 miles left-handed, 93 or 94 miles an hour right-handed. It didn’t make no difference – it was just a natural thing for me, because I was a natural at that. It was just something that I didn’t have to learn to do. It was already there. I played high school here in Pontotoc, Mississippi. We won the state championship in 1980, and from ’78, ’79 and ’80, I had Cincinnati Reds looking at me, the Kansas City Royals, and the California Angels. In 1980, right after that – I was drafted right out of high school. But then, my cousin bought a motorcycle and asked me to ride with him. I did and we had that motorcycle wreck that cost me my career. It was just an accident, but my grandfather always said, “Son, it wasn’t – no such a thing as accidents.” My grandfather Rossie Johnson was a good bluesman himself. He told me, “Son, there ain’t no such thing as accidents; it’s just life. You are good at that stuff, but that ain’t what the good Lord had in plan for you. You play that blues and it will do something for you.”

 

On International Success and Surviving the Pandemic

Well, after my motorcycle accident, I went back to playing music and I worked in a furniture factory while playing music on the side. Then, it just dawned on me to play music full-time. And it took off well. That’s how I started and how it ended. And I’m still going. At this particular time, before the pandemic, I was all over the world. Germany and Spain, Colombia, South America, Brazil. I think often of going back to Africa, Sweden, and Italy. Oh, man, I had some big years in this since I left the furniture factory in 2008. I was already traveling around the country before I retired from the job traveling in and out of the country then. In 2008, I went full-time into music and I’ve been everywhere. But since this year, 2020, was going to be one of the biggest years for me until this pandemic happened. It just shut everything down. But, I feel like it’s going to come back. It’s going to take a minute, but it’s going to come back. I’ve been getting calls from all over still for next year – to just do what I’ve already been booked for this year. We’re going to have to wait and see. I’ve been doing some private gigs. But it didn’t fix a lot of stuff, so I had to go back to the factory and work here in this town at a furniture factory until this virus is over. I hadn’t worked in a factory for almost 15 years because I played music for a living. Right now, I’m back in the factory. I just did a Pinetop Perkins homecoming last week – two weekends ago – you know, Pinetop Perkins, the King Biscuit, they shut that down for this year in Helena, Arkansas, and then the Pinetop Perkins – they would be that following Sunday, and I called to do the Pinetop Perkins homecoming and I was tickled with them, that the people were there at that thing – it was at least 25 people there and they come in from Wisconsin and all over the – Ohio – they drove down for that. I was tickled to death by it.

 

His Philosophy About Blues

Blues is one thing. Rock ‘n’ roll is another. It is a branch of the blues tree. If you’re going to have a blues festival, let’s have a blues festival.  Mixing up blues and rock music has got a lot of people confused on this. It’s been like that for many, many years. When people hear the blues and say, “Oh, I don’t like the blues” that means you ain’t hearing it right. When you hear it right, you gonna like it because it’s going to make you do something. You’re going to listen to it. You don’t have to dance to it. It’s going to make you listen. It’s got that grab to it like that. They’ve got the music all mixed up and stuff and it’s got people all confused – they don’t know what’s what. Blues rock is not the blues. The blues is a serious, serious, serious kind of music. Black people –they understand it. I say, look, if you are going to have a blues festival – get the real blues people. That’s how I look at it.

I represent my state. I go to other countries, or to D.C. or New York or wherever, I going to represent Mississippi. I’m going to talk about my state first. I played in Prague in the Czech Republic. The guy wanted musicians from Memphis. He said ,  “Mr. Terry, we know you’re from Mississippi – but just tell the people you’re from Memphis.” I said, “I can’t work like that. No, I got to tell people I’m from Pontotoc, Mississippi. I’m not from Memphis, Tennessee. I’m from Pontotoc, Mississippi, and I represent Mississippi in Prague.” That’s how I had to do it, man. It went really well. “Oh, you’re not from Memphis, Tennessee?” “No, I’m not. I represent Mississippi, not far from Memphis, Tennessee, but I’m from Mississippi.” Why would I do that? If I go to playing you can tell that my accent, my way of playing is not from Memphis, Tennessee. But it’s all good. That’s the way I try to keep it, man. I got to do it that way. I don’t know no other way to do it. I get lots of bookings by myself, because I tell these stories and they’re real. They’re real stuff, man. And I got a good blues band. Sometimes people want me – it’s funny how that works. I might play a whole year, Terry just solo – just me. And then the next year everybody tells me they want a band.

Blues, is a black man’s music. It’s a made-up thing, and it’s got a lot of stuff done in it in code, stuff that they couldn’t’ say. They would sing it out – a way of it being a code. Muddy Waters for instance – when he sang, “I just can’t be satisfied, my woman treat me this away, she treat me that away, I just can’t be satisfied.” He wasn’t talking about the woman. He was talking about when he left Stoval Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi and went to the city and worked with Chess Records, he found out that he left one plantation and went to another.They couldn’t say what they wanted to say, so they had to sing it in code. It’s all with the blues guys all the way down the line like that. Man, that’s got to be something else. I know this because I come from a blues family that done all this stuff. A lot of them wouldn’t go play the music for white people because of it. They want to keep it to themselves.

Memories of Elvis

Mr. Bean enjoys driving the North Mississippi Hill Country dirt roads with his old pickup.

Now blues music is all out there now. You take the great Elvis Presley – his family lived five miles on other side of me. My grandfather Rossie Johnson knew him well. They would eat pinto beans, cornbread at my grandfather’s house. Elvis got to go to all the juke joints where the black people went to. You understand? They knew him very well.

In 1968, I was 7 years old. We didn’t have a television in our house, so my daddy and their friends – all the black people in this area where I’m living right today – they went and bought a television because they wanted to see the white boy Elvis Presley play the blues. I know it to this day. They took that TV together and watched Elvis do a documentary up there, and it made a lot of the black people here mad about it, about him playing our music that Elvis stole these black folks’ music and made a lot of money off it. Black folks know it’s their music and they didn’t get nothing.

My grandfather, Rossie Johnson, knew this boy Elvis. He said, “This boy has done a good thing for the black people. Elvis, he made a lot of money doing this, but you got to look at this: He carried the black folks’ music around the world one time.” He made a lot of money off it. But he put black folks’ music on the map, so they can make some money off of it now. Before Elvis done that, black folks’ music wasn’t allowed to be played on the radio. My grandfather praised Elvis for doing that. It opened the door for black people. You take the great Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf both – they were playing for just black people. But, after Elvis took the black folks’ music and carried it around the world and the European people got into it, then that started bringing black people over to Europe.  So, it’s done a good thing for them. You follow me? But it made a lot of black people mad about it also. So that’s how a lot of them still feel now. They won’t play outside of their community.

 

About his Own Style and the Roots of the Blues.

I have a lot of tourists from all over come here to my house, from Germany – everywhere. I carry them around to show where all the juke joints used to be and places like that, Northeast Mississippi, Mississippi Delta – it’s amazing. I do like playing the blues. Music brings people together anyway, but blues music – it’s for everybody. It’s for everybody. And when you hear the blues it comes at you all kind of ways. It gets you in all kinds of ways. I write my own songs and I do other folks’ songs, and I also do mixed style. The other guys would do this song like this here. The hill country guys would do the song another way. R.L. Burnside would do a song and I may play the same song but it’ll have a different sound to it. The sound came from the area that they live in.

I’ve been to Africa five times. The music that we’re playing here in America, the blues, is really not American music. They call blues because it came out of the Mississippi Delta and Mississippi. But it originally comes from Africa. I already knew that from what my grandfather talked when I was a bitty boy. By me going to Africa, playing this music, I found out that a lot of those people over there came to me and said, “Look, that blues music – this style you’re playing, it’s from my village. This style here is from that village.” I was in West Africa. Ghana, Zaire, all across Africa. The Africans knew and said, “This is very similar to what we play.” I heard the guys play over there. They like James Brown. I understood it very well, man, because I’m a big fan of James Brown, you know, and I listened to him way back. They hear Africa in that music – they call it funk, but it ain’t nothing but African music – the groove, that’s all it is.

When they brought the black people from Africa as slaves to this country, these people from different tribes, they didn’t know one another, so they made certain sounds and they started communicating together like that. They’d make certain sounds, playing drums and beating on something – they were finding each other through rhythm. It’s what they had to do. They had to change their own language to learn to speak the language over here the best they could. They didn’t know anything about the guitars and stuff. They picked it up when their master throwed it away or something they would get it and pick around with it, and make their own sounds, what they were used to over there. It started forming this blues music. Black people understand this. It all had special meaning in the communication. When the women sang with the real high voices – the high cry meant something and communicated a certain thing. Or when you hit a certain note to express a feeling. They understood that sound. BB King was a great guitar player, but he could grab you with one note with the feeling. He grabbed you. Muddy Waters, when he played the slide – oh, man, it went all over you. They understood – they feltl that, where you’re coming from and where you going with it. It’s there. It ain’t just people doing something fancy– you understand? Howlin’ Wolf – oh, man, even the great preacher, was strong, but when they put the blues music behind him it made him more even powerful. It’s the feeling – the blue note feeling that you get – that hits you to the soul. A lot of the music they play today – it sounds good but it doesn’t have that feeling. They don’t have it.

His own Mississippi Blues Trail Marker.

 

On Getting His First Break

I paid my dues, playing on street corners for eight years for nothing. I played on street corners until one time, 2001, two guys came from Parma, Italy, looking for Mr. John L. Watson in Helena, Arkansas. They came to me, asking me if I knew the man. Yes, I knew him. They wanted to know was he playing at the festival today.  I said, “I don’t know. I had been here since Thursday playing on the street corner. He might come here. They didn’t find Mr. John Watson. I was back on the street corner on Saturday, so they came back to me and asked again. “Well, if you haven’t seen him he must not be on the festival.” I said, “Well, would you like meet him? Then you’ll know what the man looks like.” They never met him – they just liked his music. I said, “After I finish here on the street corner today about 6 o’clock. I’ll take you to meet the man.” They followed me to his house in Marlboro, Arkansas. I was just taking a chance John would be at home, and he was. That’s how I started. So, they booked John Watson in Parma, Italy the following year, and they brought Harmonica Terry Bean along. That’s how it started for me. After that I started getting booked everywhere – word of mouth.

 

Memories of Grandpa

Once I said to my grandfather, because I grew up around all this stuff, “I don’t like the blues, Grandpa.” He would say, “Son, John Brown…” (there were so many of us, he didn’t know any of our names so he’d just call everybody John Brown. Everybody had one name, John Brown, John Brown.) …“You don’t have to like it. You just play it and let somebody else like it.” And you know I thought that was funny. But it worked out just like that. Man, I’ve been all over and I’ve got fans everywhere –it’s amazing.  Baseball would have made me a lot of money here in America – but the blues took me all over the world. After my grandmother died, my granddaddy’s friends used to ask him, “Rossie, won’t you get married again?” And he’d say, “What in the hell I’d want to get married and get another wife when the next-door neighbor’s got one?” That didn’t make no sense to me, but I understand it very well now what he was saying.

 

On White People Playing Blues

I’ve been down to Midtown Manhattan a couple of times. Once a lady asked me, “Terry, why is it that white guys are playing the blues. Why is that?” Because the black people are not into the blues. It ain’t that they can’t do it – they’re just not into it, for several different reasons. One of them is that they don’t want to give it out. That comes from other black people talking to them about this music. Some don’t play because they don’t need for the white people to be stealing our music. All right, that’s one reason. Another reason is you’ve got the Christian people, the church folks, raising all this trouble, saying that you’re going to go to hell listening to that no good blues music, it’s devil music and all that kind of stuff. That’s why some don’t do it – another reason. And then, the third one is they want to make a lot of money. A lot of black folks want to make a lot of money right now from making music, and you’re not paid well enough to do blues. Well, you got to pay your dues first. I mean, I talk to a lot of the young blacks playing music and say “Look, you have to pay your dues first. For all the blues fans that I have and everybody else: I don’t have a problem with whatever race people is playing the blues. I don’t. The blues will never die because maybe black people aren’t playing it, but it will never die because you have white people playing it, you’ve got Indian people playing it, you’ve got Spanish people playing it, you’ve got Japanese people playing it – it will never die. But black people may not play it for 20 years, but it ain’t dead because it would be like black people and the blues are like Johnsongrass – it may die over here, but it will pop up over here.

 

About his Guitar and Harmonicas

I play an electric guitar sometimes but the one I’ve got now is a Gibson Chet Atkins acoustic. It’s got a battery in it, and I’ve been playing that thing for the last 20 years now? Chet Atkins designed that guitar. I also play an acoustic guitar, but I’d rather Chet Atkins, because it’s got the wide strings on it, because I’ve got fat fingers and everything. I’m not what you call a fancy guitar player or a fancy harmonica player. I just wanted to be who I am. I play all kinds, often the Hohner Special 20. It’s not what you play, it’s how you play it. My granddaddy said, “Now, when you blow that thing, if you ain’t blowing it right you’re just making a bunch of noise. You got to blow it right, son. When you play that guitar and when you pull on that string, it’s got to mean something, son.” Yes, you can feel something. It’s got to mean something when you pull that string it’s got to be saying something. If it ain’t, you’re just making a bunch of noise. If you’re going to blow the harmonica and you’re going to blow that thing, you’ve got to make it say something.

 

On Being Independent and Free

I’ve done two records with Wolf. But, I’m my own man. I don’t have no agent at all, but this is the problem I’ve been running into with these people, like when I go to these different countries to work for these folks, or they call me and I go. A lot of times these people bring me in these places and I do a concert for them and then other people want to book me also. I don’t have a booking agent. I just have contact people. Anybody can book me, because my grandfather, Rossie Johnson, said this also, said, “John Brown, it’s all right for you to go out there and play for these people, son, but don’t you let these people put you in no shackles.” They did tell me that. You let them have half of you, and you keep half of you for yourself. And that’s why I never signed nothing. I just work for whoever. I’ve had several big wheel people that come and talk to me about – “Terry, you have done really well,” because they have been following all the places I’ve been, because I have agents just on word-of-mouth. “But if we sign you on with us, we’re going to be upfront with you. You can’t be your own man anymore.” And I don’t like that. I have to be me. So that’s why I’m still like I am. I made a pretty good living doing this, but the big majority of it to me is I’m getting to do what my father and grandfather and them didn’t get to do, and they passed it down to me, and I’m sharing it around the world, sharing it with everybody, because I ain’t one of them kind of people that think that the blues is just to be for black people. The blues is for everybody — everybody and everything that lives has the blues. The blues actually comes in all kinds of ways, but expressing the blues – black people are at the top of the line on that, because they’re living it anyway. My grandfather put it this way, “Son, there’s all kinds of music out there, but if your music ain’t got no blues in it you ain’t got no music at all.” And I believe that, yes, sir. That blues is good music.

 

About the Young Black Musicians Coming Up

There is Christone “Kingfish” Ingram – a young man I’ve known for many years, when he was a little bitty boy. There were about 15 of those little boys down in Clarksdale at that time. Out of those 15 there’s three of them doing well – that’s Kingfish, Big Eddie and Lee Williams the drummer. I do talk to a lot of youngsters from the Mississippi Delta, even up here, white and black, but mostly my people, young men, you’re doing all this stuff. Another great young player is Jontavious Willis. Pay attention to these young players. They are really good.

 

On Racism

I’ve run into this stuff everywhere I’ve been, but it’s like this for me: I ain’t never had a problem with it. I always thought it was just something stupid. I’m sick of that. Everything’s fine with me. Everything. I am overwhelmed with people. I am loved everywhere I go – that’s what it seems to me. I understand people do have their problem but if you don’t like me because I’m a colored man or I don’t like you because you’re that color, well, my granddaddy used to say, “Son, you run into all kind of people.  Many don’t like you and you may not like them. It ain’t done anything to them, ain’t done nothing to you. If you’ve got a problem with that then the problem is your own self. It’s your own self. Because when you come in this world you don’t have that in you. You pick this up from people. Everywhere I went I’ve been welcomed with open arms and celebrated. Everywhere I’ve been – everywhere, man. I am tickled to death. I have no hate in me whatsoever for anyone, of nobody. If I’m a happy person, and that’s the way it should be. And my granddaddy again said, “Son, if you ain’t got anything good to say about somebody, don’t say nothing.”

 

About the new Album

The new CD is titled ‘From Hill Country to Mississippi Delta Blues’ by Terry “Harmonica” Bean and Super Chikan (Slide guitar and vocals). Wolf Records 2020.

I write my own songs and I would just say that I got a lot of songs in my head right now too to put on that next CD. I’ve just done one, me and Super Chikan, in Germany with Wolf Records. The guys finally sent us a copy of those CDs, but I had never heard it. I don’t listen to my own music. We got a lot of compliments on it. They really like it. I just record it and that’s it. That’s it for me. I don’t listen to my own self. I listen to other people, but not myself. If I write a song, you know the story has got to have a beginning, a middle and an ending. The music also has also got to be that way. It’s got to tell a story, both of them – the music and the song also.

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