A Lifelong Gig of Playing the Blues

When Harvey Blackston packs his harmonicas, buffs his shoes with Vaseline and heads off to play the blues, he leaves more than the little house next to the railroad tracks in Watts. More than his late wife’s grandchildren and the mangy dogs on the porch.

He leaves what the years have crafted--a 69-year-old with diabetes and sleep apnea, a widower who walks with a cane.

Back will be Harmonica Fats, roaring in a gravelly voice, blowing his harmonica and gliding smoothly on stage.

“That’s my split personality coming on,” says the retired machine operator.

Fats, who never took a music lesson, has been playing in Los Angeles for more than 40 years. His original down-home style and animated mien have made him legendary in the South Los Angeles blues scene.

Today, Fats mostly plays with his partner, guitarist Bernie Pyle. The two play electric sets backed by a band at clubs and acoustic sets at bookstores. He is among performers scheduled to play at the Watts Summer Festival on Aug. 16.

Once Fats is blowing, his eyes open wide and his knee starts hopping. His massive hands and face make his instrument look as small as a stick of gum. “I’m known as 320 pounds of the blues,” he jokes between songs at a Borders bookstore. Fats says he sees nothing unlikely about a lifelong blues man playing at a mauve stucco strip mall in Long Beach.

“I do it for the simple reason that a lot of people can come there, and bring their kids where they couldn’t bring them to a club,” he says in his native Louisiana drawl.

But Fats hasn’t always played such tidy gigs. He started humming the blues while he was blocking cotton at his grandfather’s farm outside Shreveport, La.

His mother was unmarried, and Fats was raised by his grandparents. His grandfather bought him his first harmonica before Fats was old enough to know his own age.

“Each year he bought us shoes,” says Fats. “We saved the shoe boxes for Santa Claus to put whatever Santa Claus bought in that shoe box. Every year it was a harmonica.

“My brother and uncle--my uncle was one year younger than I was--would mess theirs up right away. They’d get all dirt in there and everything else. But I always kept mine.”

Telling his story over catfish sticks at Jacob’s Cafe in Los Angeles, Fats sells a few tapes to fans on the side. He and an old friend laugh hard, realizing that both their grandfathers were “jackleg” preachers--unordained ministers--with giant hands that struck fear into children.

Fats moved to Los Angeles with his aunt in 1946--a time when many poor Southern blacks were migrating west to find industrial work. Real estate covenants, later made illegal, funneled them into South L.A. Three weeks after arriving, Fats found a job at U.S. Gifts and Paper Co. in South Gate.

Fats was intrigued by the jazz culture that had been thriving around Central Avenue since the 1920s. At night, he often strolled over to Gibson’s in Watts, a gas station and restaurant with a dance hall upstairs. There, he watched in awe as Clifton Chenier played the accordion.

“He was one of the greatest zydeco players,” says Fats. “Until he died he was the king of it. But he also played blues on that accordion.”

In 1956, Fats and his friend, Cleveland Waylon, who had been rehearsing for two years, packed up his Chevrolet and set out to find a gig. They found one at a nicer honky-tonk club on San Pedro Street called the Tango Club. Once they started to play there was little room to stand, says Claudie M. Cosby, Fats’ best friend since their childhoods.

“Harmonica Fats could come and sit in on a Sunday afternoon jazz session and commandeer the room,” says Don Blackshear, who managed a club called Page Four where Fats used to play.

“Everybody knows him. He’d have the place packed.”

Since then, Fats has played major blues festivals around the country. He has appeared in commercials, including ones for Miller Light, Doritos and Harley Davidson. He has recorded songs with the Beatles, Lou Rawls and Bobby Darren and played one of his tunes in the Oliver Stone movie “The Doors.”

But fame and fortune never quite arrived for Fats.

“Back in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, he missed a lot of opportunities,” says Blackshear. “He wasn’t getting good guidance.”

Cosby said she felt that Fats’ good nature and lack of education him made him an easy target for unscrupulous promoters.

“I used to tell him to get an attorney,” says Cosby. “He would say OK, but he wouldn’t do it.”

To pay the bills, Fats has worked a day job for most of his life. He was a wheel sander at a toilet seat manufacturing company in Lynwood and a mechanic in Long Beach. And in 1975, he began an 18-year stint at Clorox as a machine operator.

Bernie Pyle remembers when Fats showed up to play every night after a full day of work.

“He’d play until 1:30 and he’d have to get up at 4 a.m.,” he recalls. “There was never any holding back. Never any feeling that he was saving himself for something.”

Though some of his songs seem light, his blues tell the story of a struggle, Fats says. They’re about working in the fields of the South, about racism, poverty and hard living in Watts. Telling the stories is a temporary release from the struggle.

“His style isn’t an educated style,” says Cosby. “It’s a style of a poor boy trying to make it.”

Today, iron bars guard the windows of Fats’ home. One broken-down chair sits in the living room. The linoleum is coming up in the kitchen, showing soggy particle board beneath.

It wasn’t this way before his wife died, he notes.

Johnnie Tillmon-Blackston was the first chairman of the National Welfare Rights Organization and a well-known activist most of her life. She married Fats in 1979.

“She was the first person that loved me,” he recounts. “That I knew. We traveled. We went on cruises.

“And she understood my music. She understood the blues better than me. She always wanted to know what would I be thinking about when I was writing these different tunes.”

When diabetes disabled her in 1990, Fats quit his job to take care of her. She died five years later, after having a foot and five fingers amputated. “To a person who just passes by and sees him, they wouldn’t know he’s still grieving for his wife,” says Cosby. “All he does is play that harmonica and stay at home. He doesn’t go out. He doesn’t have a social life.

“Johnnie was his whole life.”

Now, Fats devotes all his energy to his harmonica playing. He and Pyle have released three albums and they play all over the state.

“That’s what he’s living for,” says Cosby. “That’s why he’s playing so hard. [His only] energy comes from loving to play that harmonica.”