It’s ironic that the American blues was often more appreciated in Europe than in the country that gave it birth. By the 1960s, interest in the blues was in full swing in Europe, in part spurred on by strong interest among English and German youths. One catalyst was the American Folk Blues Festival, which brought rotating ensembles of American blues players to tour Europe as an annual event beginning in 1962. Two young German promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, brought the musicians to Europe after having established a relationship with Chess Records bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon. The first festival was held in 1962 and continued until 1972.
After an eight-year break the concerts were revived in 1980 and ran until 1985. The tour brought some of the best American blues players to France, West Germany, Scandinavia, England, even bringing the blues to Eastern Europe behind the “Iron Curtain.” Between 1962 and 1970, the American Folk Blues Festival concerts were televised by Südwestfunk, a major German broadcast network, exposing the music to broad audiences. Europeans were treated to an amazing array of musicians: Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Eddie Boyd, Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton, Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Otis Spann, and many more.
The tours were hugely successful as interest in the blues was peaking in Europe, and the touring musicians were treated as musical royalty, celebrated, respected and adored often more so than at home in America. As Lippmann and Rau embarked on the second leg of the AFBF series in 1980, they also founded a record label, L+R Records, in 1979. It was around that time that Lippmann was approached by the German two blues fans: promoter and sound engineer Siegfried A. Christmann and photographer/researcher Axel Küstner. They sought to find previously unknown country blues musicians and collect “field recordings,” musicians in their natural surroundings, much like Alan Lomax, George Mitchell, David Evans or Chris Strachwitz had done a generation earlier, and they suggested funding for a field trip to the USA. The pair packed up an Audiorecord Mobile Unit with Sennheiser microphones and over ten weeks they traveled 10,000 miles all over the States to record some old-time blues. The duo reported using 180,000 feet of audiotape, which culminated in issuing 14 LPs under the series Original Field Recordings- Living Country Blues USA. Photographer Axel Küstner took hundreds of photos and they interviewed many dozens of musicians. In 1980, they came up to Washington, D.C., where they recorded Flora Molton and her Truth Band, Archie Edwards, and John Cephas & Phil Wiggins.
These young guys made an indelible and powerful mark on the country blues, not just with these important sound recordings, but with the photographs that documented the era and put the spotlight on deserving musicians, some of whom had been previously underserved by the American blues. Their “field trip” documented an important part of the American country blues, and the Washington, D.C., blues scene in particular, and they were among the first to recognize the importance of the local blues scene.
Photographer and chronicler Axel Küstner in his own words:
Right before I was planning on going to the States in the beginning of April, I went to Hamburg, Germany, to watch a blues show. That was on February 14, 1978, and it was the Mississippi Delta Blues Band. The African American promoter Tom Boyd from Palo Alto, California, lined up different musicians and built the Mississippi Delta Blues Band. When I got to the club in Hamburg, Tom Boyd had a few albums with him that he was selling at the show. One of the albums was called the Mississippi Delta Blues Band in Europe, and on the back cover was a lady playing a resonator guitar with a slide and a young African American with a big afro sitting right next to her playing harmonica. I was really interested to know who this was. Would you believe it, when I got to New Orleans right at the beginning of my trip in April of 1978, at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I met this same lady I saw in the photograph just six weeks earlier in Germany on the record cover. She was in New Orleans performing. That was totally amazing to me. It was Flora Molton and her Truth Band, Flora and two young African American men – one played harmonica, Larry Wise, and the other one on electric guitar, Tim Lewis. Flora was singing and playing slide guitar and sometimes a little tambourine. She was shaking or tapping with her feet rhythmically. They weren’t booked for the festival in New Orleans. They just drove down there, introduced themselves to the promoters, and the promoters actually put them in the show– that’s something that would never happen these days anymore. So that was a really funny coincidence of me having seen this photo of Flora on the album cover and wondering who could that lady be and actually coming across her a couple of weeks later in New Orleans. They told me they were from Washington, D.C., and since I didn’t have a precise traveling schedule, I decided to travel up to Washington, D.C. They told me about Archie and the Traveling Blues Workshop and about John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. I was quite amazed that they mentioned a few other traditional blues artists that were living in Washington, D.C., which I was totally unaware of at that time. I knew John Jackson who I had seen a few times in Germany, so I knew he lived somewhere outside Washington, D.C. … I bought a Volkswagen Squareback station wagon and I took off and went straight to Washington, D.C. I got there on July 5th, 1978. That same afternoon we went to Flora’s house while her band did a rehearsal. It was Larry Wise on harmonica, Tim Lewis on guitar, and Ed Morris who played guitar with Flora, who I didn’t know before. It was the first time I met him that afternoon, and Ed turned out to be a good friend. He was an excellent guitar player who had played with Flora since the early 1960s. Then, I stayed with Tim Lewis, who actually was not a full-time musician. He played a little guitar, but he was a film student. He lived in Washington, D.C., in a little brick house in the garden right behind the main building where Ralph Rinzler lived.
I was totally unaware of who he was, and I had no clue. Only years later I discovered that Rinzler was responsible for locating Doc Watson and that he was also the manager of Bill Monroe, who I also didn’t know anything about.
On July 6th, 1978, Tim took me to meet John Cephas. At that time John was not a full-time musician. He was a carpenter working for the National Guard Armory. We went to the Armory building, to his woodworking workshop in the basement, and that’s where we sat down and talked for a few hours. I took some photographs, made some recordings of him, and interviewed him. That was right after I got to D.C., on the second day. John was still in his work clothes. We talked about all kinds of things. That was my first meeting with John Cephas. I got a little about his history on tape– that he had recorded for the Library of Congress and he was talking about the Travellin’ Blues Workshop. On Saturday, July 8th, Tim took me to meet Archie Edwards, who was part of the Travellin’ Blues Workshop as well. We went to Archie’s barbershop – there was nobody in there. The Gaines Brothers were not there that night, as Archie says in the book. It was just Archie, Tim Lewis and myself. I set up the tape machine and he gave me his life history and he played some great music. Archie, I thought, was a very outstanding, creative artist within that traditional framework of East Coast acoustic blues. I Had a Little Girl – was one of his original songs. He played some Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt and told me all about the history of meeting John Hurt. Then he did another original, Saturday Night Hop. Then he did some more traditionals – Will You Remember Me? and Sitting On Top Of The World. He did his original, The Road is Rough and Rocky about meeting John Hurt, and then he played Three Times Seven Blues about during the riots when he saw a little boy break into a liquor store and drink a fifth of whiskey. That was a very original song. I was very impressed with that one.
I still have the whole tape. When I did the album two years later for the L+R Record Company, the liner notes for the Archie Edwards album was just based on that interview.
I stayed in D.C. altogether two weeks and remember meeting Phil Wiggins. We went to the Childe Harold club where Phil played with his band that night. Tim Lewis knew another musician called Willie Lee Baron, and we did some tape recordings, but he was really rusty. I think he was originally from Florida.
I forgot that after we interviewed and met Archie at the barbershop, Archie took us over to meet LeRoy Gaines, one of his buddies. We went over to LeRoy’s home that evening and did some recordings. It was some instrumental piece. I especially remember that I had a camera, a 35mm with a flash attached to it, and he was under the impression that he would be on TV from what I did for taking his photograph and the tape recording. The only time I ever met him was that evening for a brief time– maybe an hour or so.
After D.C., I went to Mississippi and different places…I returned to Germany that October in 1978 and I went back to work at the post office just to make more money so I could travel some more.
It turned out right at that time that Horst Lippmann, the famous promoter who with partner Fritz Rau produced the American Folk Blue Tours – started his own record label, L+R Records. The first album he put out was by Louisiana Red, who I knew very well. I have a good friend in Koblenz, Germany, Ziggy Christmann, who was operating a booking agency in Germany, and he brought over a lot of these guys like Juke Boy Bonner, Louisiana Red and Big Joe Williams. At that time Ziggy was operating the only German blues label, Ornament Records. I wanted Ziggy Christmann to put a Big Joe Williams record out on his Ornament label, so we started working together on the Big Joe Williams album with all the tapes I had made. I played him some of the tapes I had made of Archie, Flora and John Cephas and different other people I met in the States. So, we came up with the idea that it would be great to travel to America and record all these guys I had met in 1978 in professional conditions. Ziggy was a good, self-taught sound engineer who did most of the recordings for his Ornament label. I had first met Horst Lippmann in 1978 at the home of Willie Dixon. So early in the spring of 1980, Ziggy and I arranged a meeting with Horst Lippmann. He was quite impressed with my work and the people I had found. Right at the first meeting he said, “Well, figure out how much money you need for a project like that and you guys can go ahead and do it.” Lippmann was in a very unique position as a fan of the music; and he was financially very well off, so he could afford to finance a project like that. Originally, we planned to record 10 LP albums. That’s how the albums of Flora and John Cephas and Archie came about. I thought those three in Washington, D.C., were very exciting. I was very impressed and they were all really nice people – very friendly. Flora was an exceptionally nice lady, and Archie was very nice. I was a young German 22-year-old blues fan – I mean, it was totally great for me.
… We had a very tight budget for 10 albums, travel expenses and all. I think we offered the artists in D.C. $500 for each album. I don’t know what we paid Larry and Phil, but I remember we paid Archie $500. We said, “Archie, you definitely deserve more money, and we have a tight budget, but that’s all we can afford. Either you go along with it or you don’t.” And he said “We all agreed – speaking about it with Flora and John – we all agreed to do this with you guys because nobody offered us anything before.” He had a point there. Because we gave him the guarantee with all the material there would be albums one year later or so.
In 1980, Horst Lippmann had reactivated the American Folk Blues Festivals. He had stopped in 1972 for health reasons, so there was a gap of eight years. In 1980, he started again and on the next folk blues festival tour in March 1981 he booked John and Phil over to Europe. Without that connection, the albums we recorded, that would have never happened. Phil had lived in Germany – his father was in the Army. For John Cephas, it was the first overseas trip to Europe as a musician. John, Phil and Archie also came over in 1982, as did James Son Thomas from Mississippi, whom we had recorded in 1980 on that trip in Leland, Mississippi. Horst Lippmann told us that Flora Molton was very disappointed that she could not be part of those particular tours at that time. All the others went but not her. But she managed to come to Europe through a German booking agency, Rolf Schubert in Cologne, who booked Flora on a tour in 1987. Eleanor Ellis had started playing acoustic guitar with her, and they both came over. Archie came along, and Charlie Musselwhite the great harmonica and guitar player was with them.
It’s really interesting that of all the records we issued, those of Flora, Archie and John Cephas with Phil, the bestseller was John and Phil, because they went on different solo tours as well. So those records were really selling. Some of the other records did not even sell 1,000 copies, maybe a couple of hundred only. Over a period of two years all these albums came out – 12 volumes and the double album. Two years later, in ‘82, I remember Horst Lippmann telling me, “If you approached me today, I would not finance this sort of project anymore.” So, we hit him at the right time, at the right spot in a way, to do that project. Two years later it would have never happened.
Axel Küstner continues to be active as a blues expert in Germany, promoting blues artists who tour Germany, writing liner notes for a local record label, and as a 78-rpm record collector of various musical genres. His contribution, together with his friend Ziggy Christmann, to the Washington, D.C., blues scene stands not just in the album series Original Field Recordings- Living Country Blues USA, but his photographs of the place and time are an invaluable documentary and a cultural treasure.