You started playing music pretty early...
You know, I grew up in an all-black neighborhood in Detroit where negros had come from the deep South to work in the steel mills. Everybody tried to get out of the cotton fields [of the South] and the coal mines and all of them came into Detroit, along with, as you probably know, all the blues legends—Muddy Waters to Howlin' Wolf, Al King to John Lee Hooker to BB King. I got to learn from the real cats.
What's your favorite guitar for playing slide?
Silvertone. Yeah, man, this morning first thing I did when I woke up was grab that old Silvertone and start playing some bottle music.
I'm just learning how to play slide and man, it's a whole different world.
Can I tell you? Man, I have all these old anecdotes that I learned from the old blacks. Can I tell you one of the things the old guy who taught me slide told me? He said something really interesting. He said, "you know, depending on who gonna teach you, the white folk might say 'hey look, put the slide right here, and get the note like that, but I'm gonna tell you something... you don't never play slide like that. You don't look at the fret. You don't look at nothin', and you play slide by the sound, not by where the bottle is."
I've been listening to your stuff and the blues that you play seems completely, totally authentic.
It don't get more authentic than that.
Yeah, a lot of people play the blues and it's just—they just seem like a bunch of honkies.
Well, I don't mean to be rude, and even some of the famous cats—and I'm not going to name names—learned from [listening to records.] Not me, I learned from the real cats, and I grew up with the real cats, and I'm still living with the real cats.
You met those cats just because you grew up around them?
You know, the cat that's still alive who was Howlin' Wolf's guitar player, that's Hubert Sumlin. In my opinion Hubert Sumlin is probably the most important living blues guitar player right now because he really was with those cats and he can still play really great electric blues, and I'm always so honored when I play with him, and he's also kinda like a father to me... Hubert is going to be playing my black father in this movie called Prince of Pistols that we're doing with Sony in Louisiana in July.
What's the premise of the movie?
Well, it's kind of a true story of a guy [who] used to get into the hall records in these old courthouses and he'd falsify the records and demand land that belonged to black people even though they owned it, and he was involved in a lot of treachery, murder, and conspiracy and stuff. A lot of the people that he did this to were old blues cats and it's the story of him doing it to the wrong guy that's connected to me, because I married the daughter of one of these old blues cats. He ends up killing the old blues guy and his daughter, and I have to get together with some of the people we grew up with and make it right.
So it's blues and action at the same time?
Yeah, of course. What you think?
