Our series on unsung Houston heroes continues.
This is the second in an occasional series on overlooked Houston music legends.
Like many other brilliant Houston artists who passed through the storied Duke/ Peacock labels, Clarence Hollimon left behind a broken trail of music. Attribution on many of those old recordings was scant, so he never got proper credit for what he recorded in the ’50s and ’60s.
Though nicknamed Gristle, Hollimon was a dexterous player capable of slipping in and out of blues, jazz and R&B with ease. And his career — unlike so many others — suffered from a lull before he enjoyed a beautiful second act as half of a duo with his wife, the great singer Carol Fran.
Still, there exists no onestop shop, a Hollimon anthology that speaks to the genius of one of the greatest guitarists ever produced by Houston, a city that has turned out a formidable number of notable guitarists.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how far his reach was,” says blues historian Roger Wood, author of “Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues. “But he was respected by jazz cats as well as blues players.”
I queued up a mix of Hollimon’s work over the span of an hour or so and was awed by what I heard. He plays solos on three songs — “Stomp House Blues,” “G.G. Shuffle” and “Jumbo” — from “Horn of Plenty,” a 1992 album by saxophonist Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters. They’re perfect little compositions within the composition and bluesy to the marrow. Here, Hollimon is like an archer, with each note smoothly delivered, pointed and perfect. The gentle twang he ekes from his guitar on “G.G. Shuffle” suggests he easily could’ve played on a ’60s Nashville session.
On Bobby “Blue” Bland’s classic “Two Steps From the Blues” album, Hollimon shows great range in the blues ballad form. His piercing notes open “Little Boy Blue” before he falls into a loose call and response with Bland that melts into a buttery, mellow vamp.
And YouTube yielded a rough but mesmerizing live take on Freddie Hubbard’s “Povo.”.
Born in 1937, Hollimon grew up in Fifth Ward. A self-taught guitarist, he took to the instrument quickly and was gigging around the city as a teenager. He dropped out of Wheatley High School in the mid-’50s and started playing with the Bill Harvey Blues Orchestra. Work with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown led Hollimon to Don Robey who enlisted the kid to play recording sessions by day and live-music venues by night. Producer Joe Scott kept Hollimon in regular rotation for Duke and Peacock sessions, switching him and Wayne Bennett in and out between tours.
By the mid-’60s, Hollimon’s reputation caught notice outside of Houston. Steve Tyrell recalls taking him to New York in 1965, where Tyrell took a job with Scepter Records.
Tyrell refers to their trip as “total ‘Green Book’ (expletive). He knew where it was safe to stay, so he took care of the hotel rooms.”
Scepter’s big star at the time was Dionne Warwick, and Hollimon ended up playing on some of her sessions as well as recordings by Chuck Jackson.
Hollimon returned to Houston and continued to work with Robey’s artists on the Duke/Peacock labels. But he felt pulled beyond blues, gospel and R&B. He worked regularly with the great jazz saxophonist Arnett Cobb and was close friends with Don Wilkerson, a brilliant reed player.
Hollimon endured his own struggles, and as a result, his output in the 1970s thinned. But in 1983 he married Carol Fran, a powerful blues singer/ pianist from Lafayette, La. As half of the duo Fran and Hollimon, his second act proved fulfilling. He made some great recordings with Lavelle White, with whom he’d worked decades earlier.
“He sounded great on those records,” says singer and pianist Marcia Ball. “He played in such a distinctive way, with those little jazz figures that would slide in.”
But most of his later work was as half of Fran and Hollimon. The duo possessed an uncanny telepathy that made them an international draw. They made three albums between 1994 and 2000, when he died at 62 after a short illness. Following his death, Fran returned to Lafayette, where she still lives at 86.
Tracing Hollimon’s work underscores the problems with our music-streaming present: Only one of the Fran and Hollimon albums is on Spotify, and only one of the two records made by Gaines that feature his guitar can be found there. But scratch around YouTube or a record store (when they open again) and you can find lovely little pieces of music made by a guy known as Gristle.