Bo Carter & the Mississippi Sheiks

The Mississippi Sheiks, the most commercially successful black string band of the pre-war era, released nearly a hundred records between 1930 and 1935.  Their repertoire encompassed a diverse range of black and white rural music, including hard-edged blues, pop music, hokum, white country, and traditional songs.  The group’s core consisted of fiddler Lonnie Chatmon and singer/guitarist Walter Vinson, often accompanied by Lonnie’s brothers Bo Chatmon (who recorded solo as Bo Carter) and Sam Chatmon.  Alongside Charlie McCoy, they experimented with various instrumental combinations and adopted different names, such as the Mississippi Blacksnakes, the Mississippi Mud Steppers, Chatmon’s Mississippi Hot Footers, the Jackson Blues Boys, and many others.  Additionally, they backed artists like Texas Alexander, Alec Johnson, and even Bo Carter on a few of his recording dates.

The Mississippi Sheiks emerged from a string band formed by members of the highly musical Chatmon family.  The Chatmons resided on the Gaddis and McLaurin plantation, just outside the small town of Bolton, Mississippi. Henderson Chatmon, the family patriarch, was a sharecropper of mixed racial origins who had been a fiddler since the days of slavery.  With his wife Eliza, he reportedly had thirteen children, eleven of whom were sons who all possessed musical talents.

From around 1910 until 1928, seven Chatmon brothers formed a string band known as the Chatmon Brothers. They performed at country dances, parties, and picnics.  As Sam Chatmon recounted to blues historian Paul Oliver in 1960:

"We started out from our parents. It’s just a gift that we had in the family. I played bass violin for them, Lonnie played lead violin, and Harry played second violin. My brother Larry played the drums, and my brother Harry played the piano. And my brother Bo played the guitar too, and he even used to play tenor banjo."

Bo Carter

Bo Carter, a blues musician, made his recording debut in 1928, backing Alec Johnson.  Soon after, he embarked on a solo career and became one of the most prominent blues recording acts of the 1930s, recording over 100 sides. Carter also played with and managed the family group, the Mississippi Sheiks, and several other local acts.  He was known for his double entendre songs, recording dozens of risqué tracks such as "Banana in Your Fruit Basket", "Pin in Your Cushion", "Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me", "The Ins and Outs of My Girl" and "Ram Rod Daddy" among many others.

Sometime during the 1930s Bo lost some of his vision, but managed to play gigs here and there as a solo act and with the group, while earning most of his living through farming around Glen Allen, Virginia. During WW II he relocated to Georgia where he got odd jobs with nothing to do with music.

On his landmark trip to the United States in 1960, Paul Oliver came across Bo Carter and recounted the following:

"Sharing a corner in the bare, shot-gun building on South 4th Street where Will Shade lived, was an ailing, blind, light-skinned man whom the occupants knew only as Old Man. By a lucky hunch I guessed he might be Bo Carter and the sick man brightened to hear his name. At first, he could hardly hold down the strings of his heavy steel guitar with its worn fingerboard. But he slowly mastered it and in a broken voice, that mocked the clear and lively singing on his scores of recordings under his own name and with the Mississippi Sheiks, he recalled incidents from his varied life and some of the songs that had made him one of the most famous of blues singers. Baby When You Marry he had recorded nearly thirty years before in 1931 and in the years since he had worked on medicine shows, farmed and begged."

Bo in 1960

As Bo Carter related:

"Well, we called us the Mississippi Sheiks, all of us Chatmons, cause my name’s Bo Chatman only they called me Bo Carter. We toured with the band right through the country; through the Delta, through Louisiana down to New Orleans… …Tell ya, we was the Mississippi sheiks and when we went to make the records in Jackson, Mississippi, the feller wanted to show us how to stop and start the records. Try to tell us when we got to begin and how we got to end. And you know, I started not to make ’em! I started not to make ’em ’cause he wasn’t no muscianer, so how could he tell me to stop and start the song? We was the Sheiks, Mississippi Sheiks and you know we was famous."

'Bo Carter & the Mississippi Sheiks' is a 4 CD set, released in 2011 by the JSP Records label.  This is a nice, but far from complete collection of guitarist extraordinaire, Bo Carter, with and without the Mississippi Sheiks.  There are also a few tracks by Charlie McCoy and Texas Alexander, with Bo.  All tracks were recorded between 1928 and 1940.

For the freeload, what are some of your favorite songs with double entendres?