Fans Return Gift of Music in Blues Memorial

Pee Wee Crayton was a slightly built man with a stage manner so modest he would seem out of place before an audience were it not for the heaving rhythms and high-pitched emotion his fingers could pull from the strings of a guitar.

“He was the nice man of the blues,” said a fellow musician, one among the 350 admirers who went to a concert in Van Nuys Sunday in honor of Crayton, who died July 25 at the age of 70.

Crayton’s memory and a tradition of holding benefits for the families of performers who have braved the financial rapids of a life in the blues brought about five local bands and 10 soloists to the Valley Club on Sepulveda Boulevard. They volunteered their music, 7 1/2 hours of it.

The event started at 6 p.m. and ended when performances of one of Crayton’s most famous songs, “Blues After Hours,” fulfilled its title. Energetic musicians lent an extra measure of intensity both to that 1949 Crayton hit and such others as “I Love You So” and “Texas Hop.”

Bringing the Music Close

Several of the performers turned to the table at the front of the club’s vast interior and sang or played directly to Crayton’s widow, Esther. Joe Houston, a saxophonist, stepped down from the stage, paused in front of Esther Crayton and then wove a thread of blues cadenzas through the audience. He stopped at every table, taking the music as close to as many people as possible, a goal that Crayton’s widow said was her husband’s:

“He always used to say that God gave him a talent, and the music was playing through him to the audience. He was the medium. He was a giving man, of music and himself.”

It was Crayton’s memory that gave the musicians their audience Sunday. Interviews with many who attended revealed that they had come to hear Crayton’s music, or at least the brand of guitar blues they identified with his name.

One musician after another, asked about his connection to Crayton, recalled a favorite concert or a kindness. “He’s the only blues guitarist I know who, when leading a band, would give another guitarist solos,” said Terry De Rouen, who played guitar in one of the many bands that Crayton led over the years. “He gave you a chance to shine.”

Sunday’s event was sponsored by the Southern California Blues Society, which is run out of the San Gabriel Valley home of its president, Jack Miller. The nonprofit society, which claims 1,000 members, was begun three years ago at the encouragement of disc jockeys on KLON and KPFK, two stations that play a lot of blues. The society has sponsored concerts in clubs in West Hollywood and Hollywood, but this was the first of what Miller said will be a series of experimental concerts in the San Fernando Valley.

“We just don’t know what kind of audience we’ll find out here for the blues,” Miller said.

“Here it’s a Sunday night and it’s, what? 10:30 at night? Look at all the people who are staying for this,” said Ed Archer, vice president of the society.

Such memorials usually have a practical side for the families of musicians who have tried to wring a living from the blues. “All proceeds from door will be used to pay the balance of the funeral and hospital expenses,” said a flyer that announced the event. But Esther Crayton said the flyer overstated her family’s need and that she had been able to pay bills for Pee Wee Crayton’s hospital stay after his July 20 heart attack and for his funeral.

“Pee Wee wasn’t destitute,” she said. “But he was far from being wealthy and the money went to help the family.”

Learned Guitar ‘Overnight’

Pee Wee Crayton taught himself to play the guitar “overnight,” said his widow, two years before he made his first hit record in 1949. He’d wanted to play guitar since he was a child and, when he was about 8, had made himself a facsimile of one by stretching string over the open side of a cigar box. He dabbled with a trumpet he was given to play in elementary school. It broke when his sister knocked it off a hook on his bedroom wall. The next instrument he owned was a guitar he bought in 1947, with $125 he saved working in shipyards in the San Francisco Bay area.

“He always said it just came to him right away, naturally,” said Esther Crayton of her husband, who did not read music. Not long after he bought the guitar he introduced himself to the famous blues guitarist T-Bone Walker, who was playing at a club in San Francisco. The two grew close and T-Bone became Crayton’s mentor, Crayton’s widow said.

By 1949, Crayton was himself performing in clubs. He was discovered that year by a Los Angeles record producer, Jules Bahari, who, like so many others, was running a studio in a garage--Esther Crayton said she believes it was in North Hollywood. “They were recording in this garage-turned-studio. And Pee Wee was just fooling around after the session and Jules said, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ and Pee Wee said, ‘That’s just something I’m feeling,’ and Jules said, ‘Let’s get that,’ and that was ‘Blues After Hours.’ ”

‘Dry Blues Years’

Tony George, Pee Wee’s manager, called the 1960s and most of the 1970s the “dry blues years,” and mostly blamed the Beatles for the neglect. Crayton drove a freight truck in Los Angeles for 15 years until 1982 to supplement his living from music. There has been a blues revival the last three years, according to officials with the blues society. Pee Wee made what George refers to as a “comeback” at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1982, and started getting steady bookings again that year.

“He was a musician, but he was also my devoted husband,” said Esther Crayton. “That’s why I feel so empty. You know how it is in show business--you do what you have to do. Like at his funeral, I got up and gave his tribute, and then I went home and I fell apart. I’m here tonight and, when I go home, I’ll have my moments.”

Then she smiled broadly as the singer on stage looked right at her and held a long high note that was most definitely the blues.