Singing the blues keeps Crockett’s Camp Street Cafe lively
On a cold Saturday night in Crockett last week, the Camp Street Cafe & Store just off the courthouse square was a warm and welcoming refuge. Behind a heavy wooden door, the fadedred sheet-metal building was, as usual, a gathering place for old and young, black and white, locals and out-of-towners. They come each weekend not for the food or drink, but for the music, whether its rhythm and blues, Western swing, country or folk.
“We try to have a real cross-section of styles,” said cattle rancher and longtime musician Pipp Gillette, who, with his brother Guy, founded Camp Street as an acoustic-music venue in 1998. A genial, soft-spoken man whose cowboy hat rarely leaves his head, he’s been making music for more than half a century.
Crockett, in the piney woods about 120 miles northeast of Houston, is a long way from New York City, where the Gillette boys grew up. As teenagers they loved
the Beatles. They also
formed a rock ’n’ roll band, with a young lead singer named Diane Hall, Guy’s fellow student at the Neighborhood Playhouse, an acting school in Manhattan. Later, she took her mother’s maiden name, Keaton.
Diane Keaton and the Gillette boys remained friends, even though their paths diverged drastically. The soon-to-be-famous actress headed to Hollywood (after Woody Allen saw her in the stage version of “Hair”), while the Gillettes stuck with their music, a path that led them eventually to their East Texas family roots.
Mom married actor
Their mother, Doris Porter Gillette, grew up on the family ranch near Lovelady, about 14 miles south of Crockett, and in the Lovelady mercantile store her parents owned. After graduating from high school in 1941, she moved to New York to study fashion design. Working at a vegetarian diner, she met an aspiring actor from Minneapolis named Guy Gillette. Doris and Guy married in 1942; their first child, Guy Porter, was born in 1945, Pipp in 1946.
Every summer the family would either drive or take the train back to the family ranch, where the boys fell in love with the cowboy life. The elder Gillette, who eventually gave up acting, would go on to become one of New York’s most accomplished portrait photographers, but he also documented the family ranch visits. (A collection of Gillette photographs of ranch life has been collected in a beautiful book called “A Family of the Land,” with text by Andy Wilkinson.)
Guy and Pipp were working cowboys before they became musicians, and it took them awhile to combine the two enthusiasms. In the early days they were playing mostly folk music in bars, clubs and coffeehouses like the renowned Bitter End in Greenwich Village. Gradually, they realized that what came naturally to them was what you might label roots music. They were drawn to country blues riffs from the black experience, to cowboy ballads and chuck wagon songs, old-time country music with roots in the Appalachian highlands.
Down at the ranch
In the late 1970s, they inherited their grandfather’s ranch, in operation since 1912, as well as a block of old, rundown buildings that had been the center of Crockett’s African-American business district. They had always intended to come back to Texas some day, but, as Pipp said, “some day doesn’t always come.”
The ranch had been neglected. Fixing it up and getting it back into production became the impetus for the brothers to make their East Texas stand. They were in their mid-30s at the time.
The old building they transformed into the Camp Street Cafe had been a grocery store, cafe and barber shop during the day, a juke joint and gambling den ’round about midnight. Moonshine flowed.
The Gillettes hoped to bring that era back to life (sans moonshine). In honor of the legendary blues musicians who performed in and around Crockett in years past, they commissioned a life-sized statue of Sam “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins, who sits guitar in hand in a vacant lot across the street. (“He took his music from Camp Street to Carnegie Hall,” the inscription reads.) The Gillettes envisioned Camp Street Cafe as a place where people gathered to listen to great music produced by musicians from around the world.
Still making music
“What we had in mind were the Greenwich Village coffeehouses where we played,” Pipp told me last week. “We remembered them fondly as the great musical experience of our lives. It just doesn’t get any better than that, as performer and as audience.”
Pipp at 67 is still making music, with no plans to slow down, despite losing his brother to cancer last fall.
“My wife and I are just trying to keep it all going,” he said. “We’re still doing the ranch the same way, still trying to run the cafe the same way. I’m performing now alone, and I’ll just keep doing it.”