Getting Lucky in Costa Mesa : At 26, He’s a Veteran Bluesman Building a Name for Himself After Fleeting Child Stardom
It has been 20 years since Lucky Peterson scored his first and only hit. The fact is, he can’t even remember much about it.
But this is no hard-luck story of an old veteran trying to come back from a fog to recapture his fleeting moment of glory. When Peterson’s song, “1-2-3-4,” peaked at No. 40 on the Billboard R & B charts in 1971, the artist was 6 years old.
Now 26, Peterson, who plays tonight at the Newport Roadhouse, is a blues veteran who is building a name for himself as a young contender with two recent albums and more than a decade of steady touring behind him. His brief fling as a child star makes for some cute stories, but the adult Peterson can point to an even more impressive and unusual hallmark: his ability to pull off, as the title of his latest album puts it, the “Triple Play”--fronting a band as a singer and performing adeptly as the lead soloist on both guitar and organ.
Peterson had the good luck to be born the only son of James Peterson, a blues guitarist who owned a nightclub in Buffalo, N.Y., that regularly booked such top-of-the-line talent as Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor.
Speaking over the phone Thursday, Peterson said he was lucky to have been born at all.
His mother, Jarnelle Peterson, had given birth to three girls before he arrived, and each had died at birth or in early infancy. Peterson said doctors told her not to risk a fourth attempt.
When Mrs. Peterson became pregnant with a son, “I stayed in there and hung in there, and I came out living. Both of us made it. They said, ‘They’re lucky, lucky to be living.’ ”
As a small boy, Peterson lived in blues heaven. The stars who played his father’s club would stop by the house for dinner, and sometimes their instruments became the toddler’s toys. Peterson said he was about 3 1/2 when he was drawn to an organ belonging to blues bandleader Bill Doggett.
“(Doggett) took me off the organ, and they say I had a fit,” Peterson said, recounting family lore about events he can’t remember himself. “He put me back on it, and I calmed down.”
By the age of 5, the child prodigy had turned into a novelty recording act, produced by family friend Willie Dixon, the legendary Chicago blues man. Peterson said he doesn’t remember a great deal about those sessions, or about the whirl of concerts and television appearances that followed when “1-2-3-4” became a hit. He does recall being on “The Tonight Show” and asking Johnny Carson whether he could play drums with the Tonight Show band.
“Buddy Rich was on the show the same time I was,” Peterson said. “I remember him (joking) that he was going to put me in a duffel bag and throw me in the river” for the crime of following in Rich’s footsteps as a child prodigy. “I guess I was considered dangerous.”
After his fling as a child star, Peterson settled back into a more or less normal routine, except that he got to stay up late some nights playing in his father’s club.
Peterson became a touring blues musician at 17, when Little Milton Campbell recruited him to play organ in his backing band. After three years with Little Milton during which he served as the guitarist’s bandleader and warm-up singer, Peterson took a job in Bobby Blue Bland’s band that also lasted three years.
At 24, he hooked up with a Florida-based blues producer, Bob Greenlee. The partnership has spawned two albums, “Lucky Strikes!” and “Triple Play,” both on the Chicago blues label, Alligator Records. They showcase Peterson as a strong singer whose soulful style can recall Robert Cray, Gregg Allman or the Huntington Beach blues stalwart, Walter Trout.
Peterson, who lives in Dallas when not on tour, said he began to take the guitar more seriously before his first album came out because he knew it would be easier to be a dynamic front man slinging a guitar than stationed behind a keyboard. On stage, he said, he splits time equally between the two instruments.
“I just started playing more guitar and never really practiced. I’m not the practicing type,” he said. “I play a lot, and I figure that is practice enough for me.”
Peterson cites Little Milton and fellow Bland sideman Wayne Bennett as sources for his clean, lean, stinging guitar style, along with Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray.
Cray has set a pattern for advancement by a young blues player: First win respect with releases on an independent blues label, then hook up with a major label and take a shot at the mainstream pop market.
“I look at it a little bit as a blueprint,” Peterson said. “(Cray) made it possible for everybody that’s out there to do it. But I’m going a little different route. I’d like to (have commercial success), but I’d like to take it in a little jazzier direction than he does.”
Peterson said he has begun courting major label attention for his next album. For now, he said, the plan is to “keep touring, get my name known better. I’m on the road constantly. Eventually, by being in the right place at the right time, I’ll get to the top.”
Lucky Peterson and Silent Partners play tonight at 9 at the Newport Roadhouse, 1700 Placentia Ave., Costa Mesa. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 650-1840.
