Dave Milsap
LivinÂ’ the blues in real time
He didn’t exactly plan things out this way, but Dave Millsap has forged a career in music so striking that — one of these days, anyhow — his hometown of Fort Worth seems bound to regard him with the same awed reverence it reserves for Bob Wills, Van Cliburn and Delbert McClinton.
Not to suggest that guitarist-composer-singer Millsap expects reverence from his audiences. A bluesman likes to watch a crowd let itself get loose and limber.
“Yeah, I like to see ’em come unhinged,” he affirms. “Kind of lets me know we’re doin’ right by ’em, up there on the stage.”
Millsap has been dispensing such a wealth of freewheeling entertainment value since the middle 1970s — starting out as an uncertain-of-himself accompanist to the pioneering blues-harmonica player Blind Sonny Terry, and evolving to a state of self-possessed assurance through a combination of big-time apprenticeships and hometown bands.
At 50, Millsap has combined the native-son devotion with an international profile, touring with his own ensemble at every opportunity but basing the operation in Fort Worth while becoming, in the process, a favorite entertainer at such venues as Bass HallÂ’s cabaret-styled annex, McDavid Studio, and the Ridglea Country Club. He registered sharply in 2003 as headliner for the Jewel Charity Ball, setting an unprecedented groove for that formal occasion.
A return engagement at McDavid Studio is scheduled for March 18.
Such highfalutinÂ’ establishments might not have known what to make of MillsapÂ’s music a generation ago, when he was holding forth with Johnnie Red Latham & The Roosters in rambunctious joints such as the New Bluebird Nite Club in Como and The HOP, along West Berry Street. But times change and tastes broaden, and Dave Millsap has held the course with his double-bladed roadhouse boogie and introspective, country- and gospel-flavored rock. Long enough for those broadening tastes to catch up with it, at any rate. The namesake patrons of McDavid Studio, David and Stacie McDavid (see the Business Press, Feb. 6), are as well known for their fondness for down-home music as for their corporate and philanthropic involvements.
If there is a nostalgic appeal at work here — and many of Millsap’s enthusiasts have been tracking his orbit since the 1980s — it is handily matched by dawning interest from a younger audience. It helps, in that regard, that Millsap’s high-schooler son, Richard Millsap, has joined the lineup on drums.
Yes, and there is room here for a Full Disclosure Disclaimer: Dave Millsap and I go ’way back as players on the blues-band scene — even worked together on a couple of live-performance albums, when he was 27-going-on-18 and I was old enough to know better than to be hanging out ’til all hours in those shotgun-shack barrooms and backstreet juke joints.
Millsap, an artist of rare depth of feeling, has long since moved his act uptown — meaning the bigger leagues of blues-rock — what with an extended hitch as lead guitarist with the Lubbock-born and Fort Worth-bred soul singer Delbert McClinton (and a Grammy Award nomination to show for their collaboration), and a lasting association with Ray Sharpe, one of this town’s first national-breakout rockers of the 1950s. These, among any number of others, including the Memphis guitarist Steve Cropper, of Booker T. & The M.G.’s, and Bobby Whitlock, of Eric Clapton’s Layla ensemble.
Millsap represents a family deeply invested in the spiritual and political life of Texas. His late father, the Rev. Richard E. Millsap, spent almost 30 years as senior minister of Overton Park United Methodist Church, whose rock-of-stability permanence in the Southwest sector owes a great deal to the familyÂ’s friendship with the late rancher and Overton-area developer Cass O. Edwards II. DaveÂ’s siblings are Austin-based political consultant Mike Millsap, political-science professor Richard Millsap of Texas Christian University, and Margaret (Mrs. Craig) Dearden of Fort Worth.
“I might have gone off in some more conventional direction, myself,” Dave Millsap reflects, “but the music had me under its spell from the beginning.”
And how did Millsap’s father respond over the long term to this son’s immersion in roadhouse blues? Well, the Rev. Mr. Millsap telephoned me once at my newspaper office to say, “Thanks,” for some kind words I had published about The Roosters’ début album, in Texas Jazz magazine. I could only read a certain pride into his tone.
Dave Millsap explains the initial attraction: “It was the old-style hymns — people singing real loud, y’know, and hitting those rich, soaring harmonies together, trying out new notes and rhythms, just because they could — that hooked me, to start with, and my Dad was always the loudest singer in any bunch, almost like a blues shouter. If you sang alongside my Dad, you had to have yourself some pipes, I mean!”
A grandmother taught piano and passed the interest along. A grandfather played guitar, along with a harmonica, Woody Guthrie-style, in a rack braced around his neck.
“I used to couldn’t wait to get my hands on that guitar,” Millsap recalls, “which usually meant I had to wait ’til I was alone and nobody else was around to want to be playin’ it.”
Athletic interests proved a greater distraction, for a while. His high-school years found Millsap becoming one of the stateÂ’s pole-vaulting standouts, with track-and-field scholarship offers accumulating like nobodyÂ’s business. So what happened, there?
“Yeah, well, I tend to go full-throttle into anything that interests me,” says Millsap. “And the whole athletics scene became a consuming interest, that last year in high school. It was a karate match that cost me my chance to become some kind of great athlete — blew out a knee so bad that it took years, man, I mean years, of surgery and rehabilitation. Recovery wasn’t as swift a process as it has become nowadays, y’know.
“So I threw myself into the guitar — not the electric guitar, not yet, but the plain-old acoustic guitar. Had it in my head that I was going to become the next James Taylor.”
A flirtation with college life, including a hitch at the University of North Texas, proved no match for the sudden understanding that there was a living, sort of, to be earned on the coffeehouse and honky-tonk circuits.
“The first time you make some jack playing some music, it just ruins you for anything more formal or patient,” he explains. “So I drifted for too long a while. Out to Los Angeles, where I bunked at [the University of Southern California] — not as a student, but as a kind of stowaway in an athletic dormitory. Spent a stretch in Colorado, then in East Texas, where I met up with Sonny Terry.”
Terry (1911-1986) was a pacesetting bluesman from North Carolina and a prolific recording artist (often with the guitarist Brownie McGhee) whose career ranged from the Depression years beyond the folk-music revival craze of the last century.
“It was in a little club in Nacogdoches that I met Sonny Terry,” recalls Millsap. “I played a few shows as a warm-up act. Then Sonny’s driver had to leave, to go back to Philly to visit his sick mother … so Sonny asked me if I would drive him around in his white Cadillac until his driver got back. We would sit in his hotel room, and Sonny would sing, play his harp and stomp his feet while I tried to mimic how I thought Brownie McGhee might be playing. I recorded a few of those nights, and I was pretty awful — just didn’t have much of a grasp of what the blues is all about. Sonny was great, of course, and he’d sing all these songs and help me along. He must’ve thought, ‘This white boy will never be a blues-guitar player.’ I don’t know whether I was prepared, at the time, to appreciate the experience.”
Ask Ray Sharpe about Millsap’s abilities, and the composer of the perpetual blues-rock hit “Linda Lu” (1959) will reply: “I don’t believe there ever was a time when Dave Millsap couldn’t make a guitar stand up and walk!”
While sojourning in East Texas, Millsap also had found a keen influence in a near-contemporary, John Campbell (1952-1993) — a Shreveport guitarist who had begun mastering the instrument as a distraction from his recovery from a drag-racing accident.
With the guitar-as-therapy quotient in common, Millsap and Campbell struck up a friendship that “was probably more inspiring to me than it was to John,” says Millsap. “I mean, I had plenty to learn and nothin’ to teach, and here was this blazing, rabid, acoustic-guitar guy who played the blues as though it was in his genetic make-up. So I was all set on fire by the prospect of learning the secrets of the guitar — if I could find the key to unlock the thing.”
Back home in Fort Worth during the waning 1970s, Millsap found himself plying the acoustic-folkie shtik in one room of a club — say, the long-gone Blossom’s Upstairs/Downstairs in Arlington Heights — while Jim Colegrove and Sumter Bruton’s thoroughly electrified Juke Jumpers commandeered the rockin’ good times in the main hall.
“Got jealous, I did, I guess you could say,” Millsap says, “and it’d wear on me even worse when I’d head out to the Bluebird, down in Como, and see how the bands out there’d have all those wild times entirely under their control.”
A crisis was simmering. The boiling point came when Millsap began transferring his grasp of the acoustic guitar onto an electric model. A partnership with fellow guitarist John Latham led to the formation of Johnnie Red & The Roosters, which began alternating with the Juke Jumpers on weekends at the Bluebird.
“And this development, now — well, it was almost like church all over again for me,” says Millsap. “I felt free to play as loud as I needed to, and I could try anything to see if it worked.”
The larger connections with Ray Sharpe and Delbert McClinton, often in league with Fort Worth guitarist James Pennebaker, followed suit. The 1989 Grammy nomination, in the Best Contemporary Blues category, acknowledged McClintonÂ’s Live in Austin album for Alligator Records.
“That was an important bit of recognition for Delbert and us boys,” says Millsap. “Delbert’s record labels over the long haul had assigned him full-time studio musicians for his accompaniment, but here was the proof that Delbert’s own road band could make the Grammy Awards sit up and take notice.”
Millsap began a featured-artist career in earnest with the Nothing But Troubles CD-album (2002), employing an elaborate family-and-friends backup ensemble. His follow-up disk, Feeling Lucky (2005), uses a simpler framework of accompaniment — the better to re-create the sound in a nightclub setting — and ventures beyond rhythm-and-blues material into country-Western and gospel-influenced touches. A third CD in progress, he says, will take on more of an autobiographical slant.
“Then, I’m looking at the idea of a regional tour — Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, like that — as kind of a prelude to tackling a European tour, maybe next summer,” says Millsap. “You kind of know, instinctively, how well the Europeans appreciate our kind of home-grown music.
“But you don’t realize just how much they appreciate it all until you get over there, like when I first hit Belgium with Delbert and the bunch, and see that they admire the sidemen, and know their accomplishments, as much as they admire the name-brand headliners.
“So that’s something to look forward to,” he adds. “Meanwhile, I’m just grateful to know that I’ve still got an audience in my own hometown.”
On the Web: www.davemillsap.com.
Dave Millsap & Friends at McDavid Studio
Date: 9 p.m. March 18
Place: McDavid Studio, 301 E. Fifth
General Admission: $20
Reservations at: www.basshall.com/hallseries.jsp
Dave Millsap is a recurring presence in Michael H. PriceÂ’s forthcoming memoir Daynce of the Peckerwoods: The Badlands of Texas Music (Music Mentor Books of England). Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net.
