Juneteenth Revisited

From the 1970s to the early '90s, Juneteenth at Miller Outdoor Theatre was the largest free blues festival in the world and one of the city's marquee live music events.

Thousands of people, young and old, black, white and brown, would come to the park and drag coolers and blankets up Hippie Hill to celebrate the end of Texas slavery with whole weekends full of top-line local and national blues and zydeco. As one legend after another took the stage following one of frequent MC Skipper Lee Frazier's colorful introductions, fans would pass around bottles, smokes and other goodies deep into the summer nights.

The word "legend" gets thrown around a bit too loosely, but check this out: The event, which was hosted by local jazzman and educator Lanny Steele's SumArts organization, hosted Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, Milt Larkin, Marcia Ball, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins and the Icebreakers, Rockin' Dopsie, Buckwheat Zydeco, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, "Texas Flood" composer Larry Davis, Lavelle White, Big Walter Price, Koko Taylor, old-time Deep Ellum piano great Alex Moore, Taj Mahal, Roomful of Blues, and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown.

And that was just in 1983, as Jim Sherman recollected in Steele's obituary in these pages in 1994. In other years, guests included Sippie Wallace, Bobby "Blue" Bland, R.L. Burnside, Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson, Stevie Ray Vaughan with Lou Ann Barton, Professor Longhair, Roosevelt Sykes, Texas Johnny Brown, Joe "Guitar" Hughes, Pete Mayes, Big Mama Thornton, and Clifton Chenier, not to mention every local of note.

Juneteenth's spiral toward history's dustbin began with Steele's death in 1994. At the same time, many of the principal artists of the '70s and '80s Juneteenths were also aging or dying off. And as if the loss of the festival's driving force weren't bad enough — and Steele's stewardship of the event was Herculean — God and man seemed to conspire to start nudging the event towards the grave the very year he passed.

A heavy rain coupled with the Rockets' run toward the city's first-ever pro sports championship (I'm not counting the Oilers' AFL titles) saw to it that the attendance in 1994 was lower than it had been in years. The Rockets' repeat in 1995 led to another shaky turnout. Former Press contributor Sherman said those shows were surreal. "There were only at most 150 people in the audience to see Johnny 'Clyde' Copeland," he recalled. "But those that were there were the hardcore — when he did 'My Baby's Got a Black Cat Bone' everybody in the audience knew the words and sang loud. It was the closest I've ever been to church at a blues show."

By 1997, when I moved back to town and attended for the first time since moving away in 1988, the festival was a shadow of its former self (despite a strong lineup that included R.L. Burnside and a who's who of the local scene).

And this year, Pat Jasper of the Surviving Katrina and Rita Project and Mark Lacy of the Houston Institute for Culture are co-presenting a concert called A Gulf Coast Juneteenth.

Jasper says that this Juneteenth is a new spin on the Juneteenths of yore. For one thing, it's not focused exclusively (or even primarily) on the blues. Instead, it draws from 350 miles of I-10 and takes in New Orleans's ReBirth Brass Band, zydeco/Creole music masters Geno Delafose and French Rockin' Boogie, and Fifth Ward blues royalty in singer Trudy Lynn and red-hot, Louisiana-born, Houston-bred guitarist Sherman Robertson. Also, a trio of other guest performers singing zydeco, R&B and gospel songs composed for the occasion.

"We want to look at other really important African-American roots musics, and really important Gulf Coast traditions," she says. "All of these musics are kind of talkin' to each other."

Jasper, along with the mayor's office (which is heavily involved in this gathering), hopes the festival will help brand Houston and assist in fixing the Bayou City in the national consciousness as a Gulf Coast city. "Everybody's talking about the Gulf Coast, but they don't usually think of Houston," Jasper says. "People think New Orleans, or they think the [Mississippi] Delta, but they aren't thinking Houston, and I think we have to reclaim that ­status."

"What this is all about is reminding people that these three regional musics are alive and well and right under our nose," Jasper continues. "They are part of this region, and part of celebrating ­African-American culture is celebrating this incredible legacy of music that enriches people's lives right and left in this part of the world. We do take it for granted."

Amen to that...But a lot has changed since the glory days of the Juneteenth Blues Festival, in both Houston and the wider world. Precious few of the greats listed above remain among us, and musical tastes in both the black and white communities have undergone sea changes.

As the late poet/professor and one-time Juneteenth organizer Lorenzo Thomas put it in a memorable 2000 essay, directly after reminiscing about the glory days of the Juneteenth Blues Festival: "Soon the mode of the music had changed. 'Look at the map of Texas and see where Houston's at,' chanted a new group of performers. 'It's on the border of Hard Times.' Three young men using the handles Mr. Scarface, Willie D and Bushwick Bill styled themselves the Geto Boys and — on the local Rap-a-Lot Records label — introduced a new style of music and spoken word poetry called 'gangsta rap.'"