Johnny Shines went deer hunting in Alabama one day, and it got him thinking about the blues.
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Not too many years ago, Shines’s own career was in danger of being forgotten like an abandoned baby. In the mid-50s, after having recorded some of Chicago blues’ most magnificent sides for the J.O.B. label, he found himself broke and disgusted with the sordid intricacies of the music industry. He pawned all his equipment–about $3,000 worth–for $100, tore the ticket up, and threw it on the floor. He was through.
Ten years later, a pair of British blues fans talked him into coming back. The “blues revival” was in full swing, and a new generation was ready to embrace Shines and his contemporaries as irreplaceable American cultural treasures. This time around, Shines found that he could play the blues and keep his finances and dignity intact.
“Then she’d tell her brother what to sing back, and her brother would sing back to him. That way they communicated with each other. But you always had somebody, a Judas in the bunch. And somebody told the master what was happening. So he told them, ‘Don’t sing those songs, they’re blues! And if you sing those blues, you’ll die and go to hell and burn in fire and brimstone forever!’ And I know when I was a boy, a young man caught whistling the blues, a girl’s father didn’t allow him in their house.”
