Alumni
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Shades of Blue
A friendship forged out of a lifelong passion for music leads to a Grammy win for blues guitarist, songwriter, and producer Scott Shuman '78.
By Victoria Tilney McDonough
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| Scott Shuman '78, pictured here in his Falls Church, Virginia recording studio, produced a Grammy-winning album that featured his friend, legendary blues musician Henry James Townsend, playing with Pinetop Perkins, Honeyboy Edwards, and Robert Lockwood Jr. (Photo by Dayna Smith) |
In the summer of 1974, at age 18, weeks away from kicking off his freshman year at Lake Forest, Scott Shuman '78 found himself backstage at the Belleville, Illinois Folk Festival. He asked one of the musicians if he could play his guitar, then started in, his fingers taking over. He played a few licks and then, from behind him, someone said, "I hear you."
It was Henry James Townsend, the sexagenarian Delta bluesman, whom Shuman had seen earlier on stage playing like nobody's business. The Mississippi-born Townsend, sitting there, Buddha-like, in a derby and tuxedo, had been making records since the 1920s. On acetate.
Shuman smiled, and swallowed hard. "Could I play with you sometime?"
"How 'bout tomorrow?"
That was the beginning of a 30-year friendship that would not only shape and define Shuman's career as a musician and producer, and later culminate in a Grammy Award win, but would also bring him closer to his own soul. "Henry was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. He was like a Zen Master, truly. I have never met anyone who was more present, more 'there' in his life," Shuman says. "And as a musician, he would just start playing stuff that made my hair curl."
Shuman can't remember when music wasn't the driving force behind his actions. He had a ham radio station when he was 11 and started electric guitar the year before. He played in a blues band in high school, begrudgingly having to sit out for six months after breaking his wrist. "I pursued music savagely," Shuman says. "I wanted to perform so badly."
During his freshman year, when he wasn't in his American studies and music theory classes, he took full advantage of the Chicago music scene. "I met all sorts of blues players in clubs and dingy dives on Lincoln Avenue and on the South Side," Shuman says. "We'd hang out, jam, then jam some more. I couldn't get enough. Maybe I was a bold, ballsy kid or just stupid but somehow, I'd simply ask to join in, and there I'd be, playing with some serious bluesmen."
Shuman took a year off between his freshman and sophomore years to pursue his music in St. Louis and then in Macon, Georgia, where he played with the likes of Charlie Daniels and the Allman Brothers.
He spent another year and a half at Lake Forest, but then returned to St. Louis, where he'd spent so much time playing with Townsend. "I guess you could say that at that time I felt I needed to move onto the 'St. Louis School of the Blues,'" he says.
Years flew by and Shuman immersed himself in the rhythms and the slow, loose sounds of the blues. For more than a decade, he "burned up the road" with his R&B band, the Jackson Street Allstars, almost 200 nights a year. He wrote songs, recorded albums (many with Townsend), and started producing. He and Townsend sometimes played gigs together, often when they weren't booked. But even when apart, they were always in touch. "He was like a father to me, and he played a huge role in my career," says Shuman, who has a journal from the decades he spent with Townsend and other bluesmen. Each page is crammed with advice he was given, ideas, and stories. "Henry would always tell me: listen, be still, feel people's pulse."
In the last decade or so, Shuman has put most of his creative energies into his studio, located in Falls Church, Virginia. An admitted workaholic, his discology exceeds 400 albums - from Celtic and Israeli music to Indian chants and, of course, the blues. He hosts the live television performance series BB Presents: The Best of the Blues, directs music television, and masters for Time Life Music, among other projects. Over the years, he has worked with hundreds of artists - from Bela Fleck to Chick Correa.
As a producer, Shuman realized that what he'd learned at Lake Forest was kicking in. "I interview musicians about their craft on BB Presents, and I found that I had this foundation of knowledge from my American studies and music theory classes. It was an incredible realization, almost like a tangible cause and effect," he says. "It's been there all this time, that knowledge, that base; I think it just became more applicable for me as a producer."
On February 10, 2007, his career culminated when Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen Š Live in Dallas, which he produced, won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album. The album was recorded three years before, when four living blues legends - aged 89-94 -took the stage of the Majestic Theatre. Like old friends reunited, doing what only they could do, Henry James Townsend, Pinetop Perkins, Honeyboy Edwards, and Robert Lockwood, Jr. stopped time.
It saddens Shuman that Townsend died before the album won, but he is planning a tribute album and will include some of the musicians Townsend mentored - Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, and Shuman himself. "I miss Henry everyday; he's in my soul. And the legacy he left behind is profound. Every time I pick up a guitar, I can feel him with me."
Victoria Tilney McDonough is a freelance writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.