Cranston guitarist gets the Blues

Posted 8/27/14

By someone’s reckoning, August is Rhode Island’s official Rhythm & Blues Heritage Month and the Rhode Island Rhythm & Blues Preservation Society, who we suspect declared August R&B Month, held …

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Cranston guitarist gets the Blues

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By someone’s reckoning, August is Rhode Island’s official Rhythm & Blues Heritage Month and the Rhode Island Rhythm & Blues Preservation Society, who we suspect declared August R&B Month, held their 6th annual Rhythm & Blues Heritage Month Festival on Sunday.

The Met Café in Pawtucket wasn’t overflowing with attendees, but event organizer Rick Bellaire said there was enough enthusiasm and support to carry the festival for another year.

“I’m pleased at the turnout,” he told the small group of smokers clustered on the deck outside the Met. “There are still lots of people who love this music.”

The festival opened with Phil Pegg and his band Dreamcatcher, who, in a gesture of recognition to the younger people who came, played some of the more mainstream rock and pop that his band does so well. But it was the older players who make up the R & B Preservation Hall Band that most people came to see.

While the band members looked to be of a certain age, when they started playing, they sounded as vigorous as the teenagers they were when rhythm and blues captured their imaginations in the 1950s.

Bassist Max Whiting, saxophonist Randy Ashe, guitarist Paul Dick Willner and drummer Fred Morrison gave free and easy renditions of some of the classic songs of that era when jump blues and electric guitars were beginning to sound like what would become rock and roll. Paul “Sweet Pea” Williams came alive with what was a new sound given to traditional blues by amplifiers and the built-in microphones called pickups that made the electric guitar a laboratory for new sounds that seem so ordinary now.

What was impressive and a constant throughout the afternoon was the versatility and scope of Phil Pegg’s music, which blended well with the other musicians but stood on its own when it was Pegg’s turn to solo. He seemed far too young to get this old-time music that is collectively called rhythm and blues but encompasses so much of what would become popular music in the following decades. Yet, in its infancy, music journalists were at a loss as to what to call the new idiom.

According to popular accounts (and the Encyclopedia Britannica online), the term was coined by legendary record producer Jerry Wexler, when he was still a journalist editing the bestseller charts at the trade journal Billboard. Black popular music was called a variety of things, like Harlem Hit Parade, Sepia and Race music among them, and Wexler was looking for a term that seemed less demeaning to its makers and listeners. The magazine officially adopted rhythm and blues in 1949, after using the term in its copy for several years. But the music was stubbornly varied in its style and anything from Afro-Cuban to Country Blues was filed under the rubric of R&B. Most consistently, it incorporated jump blues from small bands like Louis Jordan, and singers like Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, who worked with Count Basie’s small groups. Boogie Woogie was an element and piano continued to figure largely in the music with performers like Ray Charles and Fats Domino, who began to bend the music into popular tunes. Straight pop songs, instrumentals and jazzy Latin-tinged compositions were included. “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia seems to nod to all of those influences but is very certainly rhythm and blues. In any event, Phil Pegg traces his evolution to those R&B roots.

“What I like about those early R&B records was the space they contained,” said Pegg in a subsequent interview. “There were very few instruments and not a lot of production. They gave a musician lots of room to move around.”

By the time Jerry Wexler went to Atlantic Records in 1953, there was a solid market for the music and Amet Urtegun and Wexler began to incorporate jazz musicians into recording sessions and the technical quality of the recording was improved. Many jazz purists are surprised to learn that many jazz musicians, including greats like John Coltrane, made extra money playing on R&B records.

Wexler and Ertegun worked closely with Clyde McPhatter of the Drifters and other influential R&B artists, but outlier record companies like King Records in Cincinnati, Chess and Vee Jay in Chicago played pivotal roles in the spread of rhythm and blues. Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis was making “race” records before Elvis came along. Ironically, one of Elvis’s first hits was “Hound Dog,” which had been recorded several years earlier by Big Mama Thornton, one of the early women of R&B. For a while, R&B and rock and roll were almost interchangeable. Doo-wop vocals, Little Richard, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters shared airtime with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent and other performers. The distinction between rock and roll and rhythm and blues was not hard-and-fast. The age of the crossover artist evolved and black groups from Motown and the British kids who listened to rhythm and blues as kids began to share the bestseller charts.

Phil Pegg came of age as these idioms evolved and you can hear those influences in his playing.

“My father was probably the reason I am a musician,” said Pegg. “He [Lynn Pegg] gave me a guitar when I was very young and I’m told you couldn’t get me to take my hands off it. It was a Roy Rogers guitar.”

Pegg has a picture on his smart phone that was taken at a Salvation Army daycare center of himself and his cousin Wayne Amado on drums.

“I played with Wayne for 40 years,” he said.

It was the blues that became Pegg’s specialty and he continues to think of himself as a blues man. Pegg was born in South Providence and moved to East Providence but his father’s love of the blues went with them. Phil continued to play the guitar, and to practice.

“By the time I was a teenager, I was good enough to play in clubs,” he said, but neglected to name the clubs that hired an underage musician to work in their drinking establishments, even if the statute of limitations would immunize them.

“I listened to Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, all the acoustic country blues people, but it was Jimi Hendrix who had the biggest effect on me. Hendrix was the man.”

Pegg said he was a bit humbled when he got to Howard University and began to study jazz.

“I was from Providence, Rhode Island,” he said, as his eyes widened. “These guys were from big cities, where they have four or five radio stations that played jazz. They knew all about bebop and jazz history and I knew so little.”

All of that experience shows when Pegg takes the stage these days. He usually works with a vocalist, a bass player and a drummer, but on Sunday he managed to make his band, Dreamcatcher, sound much bigger than it is.

“It’s all in the way I arrange the music and the way I use the knobs on my guitar, to change the tone, and the use of a pedal, for delay and a little distortion,” he said. “You get the illusion of horns and other instruments.”

Pegg left college and kicked around the music business for many years, but the needs of his family and constant hustling to find gigs made it tough.

“There are so many talented people out there and so little available work,” he said. “Things like DJs, karaoke and recorded music make it hard to find places that want live music. Even people in Las Vegas, where I was offered a job, have to scrape by, making $180 a night, if they find work. Unless you are with a big show, you can’t make a living there.”

Pegg always had to take other work to make ends meet and that lead him into catering.

“I started working for White Glove Service, putting together people for events at places like Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet,” he said. “I got to be good at that and was doing events at Brown University when I was offered a job doing it for them. They started an idea of keeping as much money at Brown as possible and hiring me to do food services was part of that. I love the idea of security and the benefits for my family. I’m the catering operations manager and I’ve been there 13 years now.”

Pegg said the flexibility of the hours lends itself nicely to his music-making. The job provided the means for his house, and the education of his three daughters, Natalia, Elizabeth and Aria.

“In seven years, I’ll be eligible to retire,” said Pegg. “The kids will be all off on their own and I will be free to go on the road and play my music.”

He and his wife anticipate the empty nest syndrome and plan to sell their Cranston house with hopes of finding a smaller place.

As for the music that inspired him and continues to hold his attention, he sees a real future in the blues.

“The blues and R&B may go in and out of fashion,” he said. “But young people discover the blues and it comes back every time. It ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

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