In 1932, Tampa Red made the following request, Let Me play With Your Poodle. Sam ‘Lightnin’” Hopkins reiterated the appeal some ten years later. More recently, in 1997, the title track of one of Marcia Ball’s CDs was named after this playful plea. The old Tampa Red tune even appears on the brand new Duke Robillard CD that came out on the 20^th of September. This song is just one example of a long tradition of what is sometimes referred to as hokum blues.

Hokum blues was very popular in the twenties and the thirties, and its historical roots go back to the minstrelsy in the 19th century. This style of entertainment featured “double entendres” or hidden references to either racial or sexual subject matters. This expression was more often than not couched in a humorous context and was performed much to the amusement of audiences in theaters or in the street. Hokum was a way of dealing in a euphemistic and humorous manner with different forms of racial questions or sexual types of behavior.

After the great depression hit in 1929, leaving a desolate economic and social desert, one could have expected that blues would be a medium by which the hardships of life would find its expression. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly, some blues artists sang about it, and Blind Boy Fuller for instance, used a lot of his songs to communicate about the hardships he suffered as a blind man in the thirties. The general tone of blues in those days remained as it was before. The music dealt with personal pain and joy, with the love for a woman, and the pain when she leaves or deceives. The undertone was very often sexual and the wording of the sexual connotation was sometimes soft and sometimes could be quite overt.

Blind Boy Fuller had a repertoire of which hokum was a substantial part. Samual Chambers, in his ‘The Country Blues‘ standard book of 1959 paints a scene of people gathered around a phonograph listening to Fuller’s music trying to guess in a kind of game what he really meant by his words. Sometimes however, it was not too hard to guess when he sang, I Want Some of Your Pie, Sweet Honey Hole, or even GetYyour Yas Yas Out which was the inspiration for the title of a Rolling Stones album that came out decades later.

Fulton Allen, who would eventually go by the sobriquet Blind Boy Fuller, was born into a large family sometime between 1907 and 1910 in North Carolina. The eastern portion of the state is part of the larger Appalachian region of the United States. This rugged, isolated and impoverished region of the country was home to many African-Americans. The region became an important breeding ground for the blues.

The folk music of Appalachia is a unique mix of European (Scottish, Irish) and African influences which, because of its geographical isolation, had developed its very own characteristics. Banjo music occupied an important place in it, and it is said that the roots of the Appalachian blues can be traced back further than the Delta blues. The Piedmont finger picking style of guitar playing is a very common feature of this particular regional blues form.

Blind Boy Fuller has become one of the iconic figures of the Piedmont blues style. He absorbed the style he heard from musicians around him such as Gary Davis, Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell and transformed it to create a distinctive personal style of his own. His amazing guitar playing made of him one of the last of the popular blues artists before the start of World War II.

His life was very short, but he lived it intensely. Very little is known about his early youth. He taught himself how to play the guitar, and at a young age, moved with his father from Wadesboro to Rockingham, North Carolina after his mother’s death. He was not born blind, but became totally blind by 1928. His blindness forced him to give up manual labor as a way of making a living. He went out on the street to play his guitar. It was at this time he started playing house parties as well.

The street life helped him to develop his craftsmanship further and he met a fellow musician, later known by the stage name Sonny Terry. Terry was an impressive harmonica player whose style fit perfectly with Fuller’s way of guitar playing. It’s kind of ironic that the two met each other as Sonny Terry himself was nearly blind when they joined together. They eventually started living in the same house as friends.

In 1935 he was noticed by a white talent scout who brought him and his friends to record in New York. His visual handicap was cleverly used as a marketing tool and he performed for the first time as “Blind Boy” Fuller. In his short recording career of only six years his music was recorded on more than 135 sides. His combination of styles and masterful guitar finger-picking work contributed largely to the broad audience he acquired. It was the time of the party blues.

The intense life he lived, abundantly oiled by hard liquor, presented its bill in the first year of WW II, when kidney failure and bladder problems stopped the sound of his guitar and voice forever. His death certificate mentions the date of February 13^th, 1941 and lists his occupation simply as “musician”.

Editor’s note: On September 20^th an album was released by Old Hat Records out of Raleigh North Carolina entitled, Barbeque Any Old Time: Blues From The Pit 1927 – 1942. This incredible collection of rare recordings from that period features many tunes from the Piedmont school of the blues. All the songs on this record are fine examples of Hokum blues as well. In this album you will find the song, I Crave My Pig Meat by Blind Boy Fuller that was recorded on July 12, 1939, at the height of his short, but fruitful career.