As soon as Booming, The place Are the Blues in San Francisco Now?
“A lot of the blues legends were living here around that time,” Davies said. “Etta James, Charlie Musselwhite and Elvin Bishop were here. Bonnie Raitt was in Marin, and she did so much to help revive Charles Brown’s career.
“But it wasn’t just the scene here. Traveling was easier. When I started touring with Charles, we did a lot of concerts and festivals, and it seemed like there were three tiers. There were the stars who got paid the most. The middle tier — Charles was in that group. And the local artists. That middle tier is gone,” she said, along with the post-World War II generation of innovators. (Now 86, guitar legend Buddy Guy recently announced a farewell tour in 2023.)
A shifting center of gravity
The infrastructure that sustained the scene has also all but disappeared, with nothing arising to fill the void left by the end of the San Francisco Blues Festival, a major annual event that ran from 1973-2008. The city’s dwindling Black population is another challenge, but the story is similar all over the region. Oakland long boasted a more vital and influential blues scene than San Francisco, anchoring an East Bay soul archipelago that stretched from Richmond and Berkeley out to Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, and almost all of the clubs and joints that once hosted the blues are gone.
Still, the music’s inextricable roots in Black culture continue to manifest in various guises. The Dynamic Miss Faye Carol provides an essential link to the glory days of the East Bay scenes wherever she performs (like her Black Women’s Roots Festival, Nov. 27 at Freight & Salvage). Oakland blues vocalist Terrie Odabi has carved out an international career over the past decade, and some of the Bay Area’s best jazz vocalists, like Kim Nalley and Tiffany Austin, make a point of including blues as an essential thread in jazz’s elastic fabric. The Little Village Foundation label, created by veteran blues keyboardist and John Lee Hooker sideman Jim Pugh, has boosted the careers of several Bay Area blues artists, like Mumbai-born harmonica player Aki Kumar.
Meanwhile, the music’s center of gravity continues to shift away from San Francisco. Yoshi’s keeps blues in the musical mix, with shows like the Nov. 21 Bay Area Harmonica Convergence. Norwegian-born San Jose guitarist and recording engineer Kid Andersen has turned his Greaseland Studios into the top spot for Bay Area blues acts to document their music (while working hand-in-hand with Little Village). San Jose’s Poor House Bistro just relocated — literally the entire building — to Little Italy, to make way for Google’s massive new downtown development. Blues great Angela Strehli’s Rancho Nicasio is an important outpost in the North Bay, while the biggest blues bills tend to take place at Vallejo’s Empress Theatre.
“It’s the same thing in Seattle,” Cray said. “There used to be a bunch of clubs in town. Now we always hit the outskirts, where there might be the theaters and some of the clubs. We’re not downtown in places where it used it happen.”
In San Francisco, Myron Mu has kept The Saloon in North Beach, the city’s oldest venue, in business presenting blues seven nights a week. The city’s premiere club, Biscuits & Blues, still hasn’t reopened since it was forced to shutter in 2019 by a persistent plumbing problem and an ensuing legal struggle with the neighboring Jack In the Box — but that might finally be coming to an end, said owner Steven Suen said. More than optimistic, he sounded downright philosophic about a musical tradition born out of a need to find solace and communal release in hard times.
“The blues as a form of music will never die,” said Suen, who was born in Hong Kong and ended up buying the club after he started managing the venue in 2006. “People keep going back to the roots, figuring out how that music comes about. It will always have a place. It’s not a popular thing, but once people experience it they’ll find something special.”
