🥁 This week, Secret History of Chicago Music shines a light on Johnnie Mae Dunson, a drummer and singer known for playing gutbucket blues–an early style of blues largely dominated by men. | ✍️ Steve Krakow👇
“When I was 10 years old, I heard the doctors tell my mama, ‘She won’t live to be 14 years old.’ So my mama got a group of people to come to our house and they prayed for me,” Dunson explained to the. “And I believe at that time God gifted me with the music I have because He knew I wouldn’t be able to do any other kind of work.”
In 1943, encouraged by visiting churchwomen from the Windy City who’d heard her sing, Dunson moved to Chicago. Back in Alabama, she’d taught herself how to treat hair, and to make money she pressed her west-side kitchen into service as a salon. Within a year she was also hanging out at the famed market on Maxwell Street, performing however she could. She remembers taking over the drum kit of veteran bluesman Eddie “Porkchop” Hines.
Dunson was no less formidable as a songwriter. She was known for carrying around a massive notebook of her compositions, and in her late 70s she claimed she could still write 25 songs in a day if left alone to do it. She said she’d written “Evil” for Muddy Waters , and though BMI lists Waters as its author, the blues business famously suffers from more than its share of attribution issues.
In 1992 bluesman Jimmie Lee Robinson, who’d retired from his job as a security guard, tracked Dunson down. By then Dunson’s home was in dire condition, and her health had declined steeply. She’d been in a wheelchair since ’88, and she relied on other people to bring her groceries. At first she was distrustful of him—she was holding a grudge because she’d heard he’d insulted Jimmy Reed, and he had to persuade her she’d been misinformed.
Dunson later mentioned that the benefit jam was the first time she’d left her property in ten years. Her husband Andy Smith had died there in 1991, and she planned to do the same. Sadly, within weeks the city condemned her house and boarded it up with her things still inside—Pollack listed just some of them, including an antique icebox, a pump organ, two sets of drums, a Coca-Cola vending machine from the 1950s, and original copies of more than 600 of her songs.
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