SLIM HARPO by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

THAT’S LIFE

For much of the late 1950s and early 1960s, James Moore must have been uncertain how his career in music was going to develop. There were periods of success interspersed with times when bookings were difficult to get, and there was the segregated nature of the music venues to consider. Locally, he would still play at clubs for white patrons across east and west Baton Rouge, particularly the Glass Hat on North Boulevard in the east part of the city, as well as the black clubs in west Baton Rouge where he had first started. He found the white clubs and his forays out to white college campuses across the South more rewarding, both financially and, often, in terms of encouragement. William Gambler helped drive his stepfather to gigs but reflects that the African American audiences of the day were not enough to support a bluesman’s life: “They would listen to it and dance to it, but as far as going out and supporting the black blues men, they didn’t really do it. We struggled for a long time with the music because he wasn’t making a whole lot of money. He was making more than he was making on the construction job, more than a dollar an hour. I’m real proud of him, but when I was growing up, I was saying to myself, ‘I wish he could go get him a job like everybody else.’ Of course, I didn’t tell him that!”36

What James Moore did do was to continue with his trucking business, starting with one and eventually having three vehicles to transport anything from farm goods to construction materials and scrap. William said: “Charlie Reed in Mulatto Bend, that was Slim’s cousin, Charlie ran some trucks, and he may have helped Slim with his. But Slim didn’t have any partners in that. Slim had two trucks of his own, a big one and a bobtail, flat bed. He would pay people to drive for him. When he was away this other guy would drive.”37 Two years after his big hit record, Slim was still essentially a part-time professional musician.

Nevertheless, by 1963, the Moore house on Thirty-Sixth Street was rebuilt and enlarged. On February 18, 1963, the State-Times listed the building permits granted the week before, including “James Moore, 906 N 36 street, brick ven [sic] residence, Peerless Homebuilders, contractor, $7000.” At the house in 1990, Lovell remembered, “I’ve lived here since 1948. It was a frame house, wooden house, first. Then James had this one built, the brick house, in ’63. It was after he started with the truck business, hauling scrap iron, and that’s why we’ve got two driveways. He used this for the car and the other one for the truck. We’d go as far as Bogalusa loading up scrap iron, he’d get paid by the load.”38 It would not have been easy to miss the twin-business Harpo house in those days, not least because, as musician Jesse Kinchen described: “Slim had a trailer,

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