{"id":20676,"date":"2021-03-17T05:30:26","date_gmt":"2021-03-17T09:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=20676"},"modified":"2021-03-19T08:23:08","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T12:23:08","slug":"john-blues-boyd-even-after-a-50-year-detour-the-blues-was-still-calling-part-2-of-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/17\/john-blues-boyd-even-after-a-50-year-detour-the-blues-was-still-calling-part-2-of-3\/","title":{"rendered":"John \u201cBlues\u201d Boyd: Even After a 50 Year Detour, the Blues Was Still Calling (Part 2 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One<\/a>…<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cShe had grown up in Pompano Beach, but she left there, gone to New York City and married,\u201d Boyd recalls. Dona Mae was up North some 15 years before leaving her husband, returning to Florida and moving back in with her mother. \u201cWhen I came to Florida, I was young,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cI turned 19 in 1964, shortly after Muhammad Ali beat up Sonny Liston.\u201d<\/p>\n

When they first met, \u201cDona Mae was waiting tables at a place called Club Clover,\u201d Boyd recalls. Florence Ali\u2019s Club Clover was a very popular hangout, and one of few minority-owned (much less female-owned) establishments in the area.<\/p>\n

Boyd and Dona Mae moved in together almost immediately. \u201cWe were living in an apartment; hadn\u2019t been too long built,\u201d he recalls. \u201cMuch nicer than anywhere I had ever lived. The house I grew up in wasn\u2019t bad but, it was a wooden slave house. This was cement and plaster and all; it was a nice place.\u201d Boyd and Dona Mae shared the apartment with Junior and another of Boyd\u2019s friends, Johnny Earl Hall. \u201cWe paid the rent together,\u201d he says. \u201cWe worked for $7 a day picking tomatoes, which was better than working in that bean field!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Meanwhile, Dona Mae had left some loose ends back up north. \u201cShe still had to get a divorce from her husband,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cLots of crazy stuff happened. He said he was coming down to Fort Lauderdale to put a bullet up my ass!\u201d On that phone call, Boyd had a ready reply for Dona Mae\u2019s estranged husband. \u201cOkay, you come down here, but you must remember one thing,\u201d he told the man. \u201cWhen you get here, you can\u2019t be going back to no New York. Because if you come here fucking with me, I\u2019ll kill you!\u201d<\/p>\n

Dona Mae\u2019s husband was suitably intimidated, and he never did show up in Florida. Boyd laughs heartily as he recalls his final phone conversation with the man. \u201cThe last thing he said was, \u2018I will tell you what: you\u2019ll never marry her, \u2018cause I am not going to divorce her.\u201d\u2019 I said, \u2018Well just think of me fucking your wife every night!\u2019 He never did come down from New York and put that bullet in my ass. I wasn\u2019t worried about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1978, John and Dona Mae decided to leave Florida. \u201cI took her to Greenwood to introduce her to my mom and everybody else,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cThen we went to Chicago and stayed with one of my sisters for about six weeks, and then we went on to California.\u201d The couple settled there for good. Boyd had already joined the roofers union when still in Florida, and he found that in San Francisco, the wages were quite a bit better. \u201cThey were making three times the money I was making in Fort Lauderdale,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was the best Dona and I had started doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boyd would stay in the hot tar roofing trade for nearly forty years. And \u2013 following in the tradition of laborers of previous generations \u2013 he sang while he worked. \u201cWhen I was doing roofing all of those 40 years up there on the roof, they\u2019d say, \u2018John, bring out one of them blues for us,\u2019\u201d he recalls with pride. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018Okay, when start to feel like, it I will \u2026 later.\u201d But his coworkers rarely had to wait long. \u201cI\u2019m swinging a hard tomahawk all day, and singing,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWay back about 2003, I got my [roofing] contractor\u2019s license right here in Redwood City,\u201d Boyd says. But he had to give up the business. \u201cI retired because Dona Mae got sick,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter 39 years of us being together, I had to take care of her for the next ten.\u201d Dona Mae\u2019s kidneys failed, and she refused dialysis treatment. \u201cI had to push her in a wheelchair and everything else,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cShe died in 2014 at 9:25 p.m. on a Friday night. We had her funeral a couple of weeks later.\u201d<\/p>\n

It had only been after retiring that John Boyd got serious about rekindling his long-dormant interest in music. \u201cThe first time I put a band together and started to sing somewhere was at the British Bankers Club,\u201d he recalls. That was April 5, 2009.\u201d And even though Dona Mae was already quite ill, she was very supportive of John\u2019s musical aspirations. \u201cShe just loved me, and we loved each other,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cShe supported me in every way she could. Every time she heard that someone was looking for a blues scene or whatever, she told me. And then I went and talked to the people, and they hired me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boyd landed a regular gig at the British Bankers Club in Menlo Park, a short drive from his home in Redwood City. \u201c[Club owner] Lance White hired me, and I stayed there for two years and seven months before he lost his license\u201d in 2012, Boyd says. In addition to original songs, his repertoire included songs from Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Turner; both of those singers influence Boyd\u2019s own vocal style and delivery. During our lively interview, the conversation is peppered with impromptu Boyd vocal interludes, snatches of songs like Harris\u2019 1949 side \u201cDrinkin\u2019 By Myself\u201d and Turner\u2019s \u201cFlip, Flop and Fly\u201d from 1955.<\/p>\n

As he performed more and more around the Bay Area, Boyd inevitably connected with guitarist and producer Christoffer \u201cKid\u201d Andersen. \u201cKid introduced me to a lot of people that he knew, and Jim Pugh happened to be one of them,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re all friends now.\u201d About a year after Dona Mae\u2019s passing, Boyd felt ready to put all his energies into music. \u201cSo I went with Kid to Norway; we worked and made some money,\u201d On that trip, Boyd says he also \u201csaw a little bit of England and Germany. And that\u2019s when I started to become known.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boyd says that the band for some European dates included acclaimed bassist Jerry Jenmmott (profiled in Living Blues<\/i>\u2019 November\/December 2019 issue) and longtime B.B. King drummer Tony Coleman. \u201cYou might as well say I brought that house down,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cWe were singing for 8-10,000 of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seemingly making up for lost time, today Boyd says that he\u2019s written many more songs than what can be heard on his 2016 debut The Real Deal<\/i> and his latest, What My Eyes Have Seen<\/i>, both produced by Andersen at his Greaseland Studios in San Jose, California. \u201cI had already written about 135 of them that are in Kid\u2019s computer,\u201d Boyd says. \u201cI\u2019ve got a lot of them; I have written 17 more songs in my book that I have in front of me right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

On his The Real Deal<\/i> debut, ten of the album\u2019s 13 songs are Boyd originals. Following the adage \u201cwrite about what you know,\u201d Boyd\u2019s songwriting approach leans heavily in a self-referencing direction. Songs like \u201cThe Smoking Pig\u201d tell the story of a place where Boyd worked, and many love songs \u2013 like \u201cWhen Your Eyes Met Mine\u201d and \u201cThat Certain Day\u201d focus on Dona Mae, the love of his life.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue\u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from Part One… \u201cShe had grown up in Pompano Beach, but she left there, gone to New York City and married,\u201d Boyd recalls. Dona Mae was up North some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,41,49],"tags":[4478],"class_list":["post-20676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blues","category-interview","category-new-release","tag-john-blues-boyd","cat-9-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20676"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20698,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20676\/revisions\/20698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}