Jerry “Boogie” McCain, the Alabama-born blues harmonica player, has died at age 81. He was best known for a double-sided 1960 hit, “She’s Tough”/”Steady” — the A-side of which was later redone by the Fabulous Thunderbirds.
Tinsley Ellis, the Atlanta-based blues guitarist, posted condolences on his Facebook page — prompting a discussion of that career-making cover tune. A Jerry Boogie McCain Memorial Page has already been added to the social media network, as well.
Heavily influenced as a player by Little Walter (in particular, the 1952 Checker records hit “Juke”/”Can’t Hold Out Much Longer”), McCain’s lyrics often had a sharp narrative heft: “I don’t like to write a song,” McCain once said, “just to be writing a song to make some money. I must tell a story. I have to tell a story.”
His first recordings were for Trumpet Records in Jackson, Miss., in 1953 — under the name Boogie McCain. Those two tracks, “East of the Sun” and “Wine-O-Wine,” led to a stint at Excello where he developed a more urban, amplified harp attack between 1955-57. There, he recorded “The Jig’s Up” and “My Next Door Neighbor.” His subsequent work with the Rex label, which included “She’s Tough,” eventually drew the attention of the Thunderbirds’ Kim Wilson — serving as a key stylistic influence.
Over the years, McCain also recorded for Columbia Records’ Okeh imprint in 1962 (appearing Music Row mainstays Floyd Cramer, Grady Martin, and Boots Randolph on “Red Top” and “Jet Stream”); and for Shreveport, Louisiana’s Jewel-Paula Records (including “728 Texas (Where the Action Is),” a reference to the label’s street address) between 1965-68. There followed a long fallow period in the 1970s and ’80s. (“I guess people must have thought that I had disappeared off the face of the earth,” he once said.) But by the 1990s, McCain had stormed back, this time with a long-term working partnership with Ichiban — a stint that included the albums Blues and Stuff, Struttin’ My Stuff , Love Desperado and American Roots: Blues. More recently, McCain was featured in Rhino Records’ Blues Masters Volume Four: Harmonica Classics, alongside his old hero Little Walter, as well as Jimmy Reed, Junior Wells and George “Harmonica” Smith, among others.
Rejuvenated, he would play the Chicago Blues Festival of 1990, and also made stops at the Mississippi River Blues Festival, Birmingham, Alabama’s City Stages and Huntsville, Alabama’s annual Down Home Blues Fest.
It was quite a journey for McCain, who grew up in the grip of rural Deep South poverty: “We was po’, po,'” McCain said. “When he was younger, my father was a sharecropper that worked a mule to death in Talladega. That’s where the race course is now but then it was a cotton track. In fact, he might have plowed it, too.”
A canny improvisational performer, McCain would often make up songs on stage — something that made replicating setlists difficult. “People see me the next time I play and say, ‘sing that song,'” McCain once recalled, “but if I don’t write it down, it’s gone.”
Throughout his career, McCain was known for his cutting wit and his tough anti-substance abuse stance, as well. Concert favorites included “Ain’t No Use for Drug Abuse” and “Burn the Crackhouse Down.” Bill Dahl, the well-known roots writer, subsequently praised McCain’s “irreverent wit and a social conscience rare on the contemporary circuit.”
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