Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
ON THE TRAIL OF MY HEROES
Aretha, Elvis, Louis Armstrong – Jools Holland visits the places that shaped them into legends in a fascinating new show
Jools Holland has played some grand pianos (in every sense) in his time. Few have given him a more powerful feeling, though, than the rickety old Joanna he teased back to life in New York recently. He says there was something spine- tingling about knowing this instrument’s history.
‘It was quite a thing, knowing his hand had touched the keys,’ he says. ‘I was shy about touching it, as if I should be asking its owner if it was all right. That’s how it felt. Nothing had been changed since the days when he was in there, so it was really personal.’
The piano belonged to Jools’s alltime musical hero, Louis Armstrong. It sits in Armstrong’s modest front room in Queens, in a house that is now a museum. What struck Jools was how low-key the decor was. ‘It reminded me of my great- aunt’s front room – the good room that was only used a few times a year. It was last done up six months before he died on 6 July 1971. It’s a sort of 1970s fashion, but still quite beige, with echoes of the 1950s, as if they didn’t want to be too modern. It was really moving to be in there.’
Jools started to play – Armstrong’s music, of course, accompanied by young trumpeter Joseph Boga – and the place came to life. His own early years came into focus too. ‘It reminded me of my grandmother’s piano, the one I learned to play on and still have.’
The encounter came about on a road trip he took across the US to find out more about the lives of his musical icons. The jaunt, which has been turned into a radio series, is part musical journey, part architectural discovery, part pilgrimage. And Jools – a confessed musical nerd – is quite a tour guide.
‘Jazz is America’s most important artistic invention of the 20th century. The whole of jazz – jazz, gospel music, blues – was invented there. And it’s given us most of what is popular music today,’ he says.
There are epic moments in the series, such as Jools playing Armstrong’s piano, but also bizarre ones – such as listening to what he was having for dinner on a particular day.
‘ That was very funny,’ Jools admits. ‘He obsessively taped his own voice around the house, even while he and his wife were having dinner. He was talking about the little cabbages on the plate. Turns out they were having Brussels sprouts.’
Jools’s trip also took him to the South, where he walked in the steps of Elvis, visiting the shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, where the King was born, as well as the tourist- trail option of Graceland, his Memphis mansion.
‘The shack was much more moving. It’s a shed, really, with two rooms, old furniture and no fridge. You could feel the atmosphere.’ In both homes, Jools was shown round by people who knew Elvis. ‘But the people at his birthplace are older, in their late 70s and 80s. It brought it home that in 20 years we won’t have the people who’ve touched the hand, if you see what I mean.’ A fascinating pitstop came in Clarksdale, Mississippi, ‘a tiny town, down on its luck, that hasn’t really changed since the 1950s. They have original juke joints [music bars] where people play. It’s a mixed crowd now, black and white, but in many ways nothing has changed.’
Yet in the 1930s, Clarksdale was the epicentre of the blues explosion. ‘[The blues musician and composer] WC Handy lived there. Muddy Waters grew up there. We went to the site of his shack. Mississippi is a pretty poor place. I’d never seen the Delta before, and I didn’t understand how enormous, flat and desolate it is. There’s nothing but backbreaking work, the enormity of these huge cotton fields.’
Jools visited the town’s Riverside
Hotel, which used to be the hospital in which the blues singer Bessie Smith – one of the most influential musicians of the 1920s and 30s – died after a car accident in 1937. It was sold and turned into a hotel in the 1940s, and jazz and blues royalty such as Sonny Boy Williamson and Duke Ellington would stay.
‘Aretha Franklin, when she was a tiny little girl, travelling with her father through the south preaching, would stay there,’ says Jools. ‘You can see all the rooms, they haven’t changed.’
Obviously, Aretha has particular resonance. Jools has worked with pretty much everyone who is anyone in the music industry, but has always said that Aretha Franklin was the one that got away. ‘She never liked to fly so we couldn’t get her on the show,’ he says, referring to his long-running BBC2 music show, Later… With Jools Holland. Now he never will.
‘She was alive when we recorded this series, but there was still something affecting about seeing where she was born in Memphis, because you can feel the place in her music. When you listen to her early recordings, when she was just 14, you are tapping into this enormously rich social history. The kitchen table where she was born, the church where she first sang, where her father was the preacher. You listen to them and you think, “Blimey. That poor kid.” But you only get a handful of people who have that level of talent. It’s rare.’
Had Jools been broadcasting back then, would he (known for showcasing new talent) have recognised these icons as future legends? Who knows, he says. ‘No one at the time knew that Louis Armstrong was going to be a legend. Or Elvis, any of them.’ That’s why going back to before they were legends is so potent, he adds.
Does it change his appreciation of the music? ‘It adds more layers. You listen to a piece you think you knew, and you find more in it every time.’
‘Knowing Louis had touched the keys made it really personal’