Aging Musicians Find Their Blues Heaven

Snow is coating the red-brick church with an icy blanket, but inside a husky man in a black fedora is sizzling as he leans into the microphone:

“Ho-o-old on baby,” he wails, “don’t mess around.”

His harmonica whimpers. His voice softens.

“You get too hot,” he purrs, “I’m going to cool you down.”

“Wild Child” Butler is singing the blues again, the same music that has nourished his soul since he was a dirt-poor dreamer in the fields of Alabama 50 years ago. This night, he’s in church.

But it isn’t a church anymore. It’s a recording studio.

And with apologies to Oz, this isn’t Kansas anymore. This still is the land of wheat and cattle, but this little town on the prairie also is becoming a haven for gray-haired musicians who come here to play the blues--and save the blues.

It’s all the idea of Chad Kassem, a 37-year-old transplanted Cajun who arrived at a halfway house in town 16 years ago to kick drugs and booze. He did. Then he switched addictions: He built a music empire that includes Blue Heaven Studios, a renovated church where he preserves the sounds--and stories--of a rapidly aging generation of bluesmen.

“We want the most authentic, real blues guys,” the boyish-looking Kassem says in a Louisiana drawl that is perpetually notched up a few decibels. “We’re really trying to concentrate on those older ones who might not be around much longer. We like to record people who are underappreciated.”

So the old-timers travel by bus, by car, by plane to a town some have never heard of, to fill the 73-year-old Gothic church with the mournful whine and liquid twang that many brought from the Mississippi Delta long ago.

Their faces are creased like worn leather satchels. Their fingers are calloused from decades of plucking guitar strings. Their eyes are weary from long years of long nights on the road.

But their voices still burn. The times they sing about are still hard. The lost dreams are still fresh. The women, of course, are still fickle.

“Blues is the facts of life about the human condition,” Butler says. “Blues don’t have no color. If you don’t sing it, you still have the right to feel it.”

And no one feels it like the folks who lived it.

That’s where Jimmy D. Lane, Blue Heaven’s music director, comes in. Kassem hired him because Lane knows the blues scene from the inside out--and is trusted by those who are part of it.

Lane moved from the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up listening to his father, Jimmy Rogers, a guitarist who teamed up for a time with Muddy Waters.

Rogers died in 1997, but not before he recorded one last time, with his son. Lane came away from the experience realizing there was no time to lose if other bluesmen were to be captured on tape.

“When the last of these guys passes away, this is the only way we’re going to have to hear the music played the way it should be,” Lane, 37, says. “My generation isn’t going to be able to recreate the same sound. You can play letter-perfect notes, but you don’t have the same feeling.

“We didn’t have the same type of life that they had,” adds Lane, who travels the world with his own blues band. “I have never picked cotton a day in my life. I never had anybody standing over me with a whip and gun.”

But “Wild Child” does remember that life.

Born George Butler outside Montgomery, Ala., he already was singing the blues by age 5. He learned to play the harmonica upside down--something he still does today.

His nickname came from friends of his 13-year-old mother who would visit when he was a baby, watch him slide across the floor and grab their legs, refusing to let go. “This boy’s wild!” they’d shriek.

Like many blues musicians of his day, Butler hopped a train north to the big city (Chicago, for him), escaping a life of stoop labor: He picked corn, sunrise to sundown, $1.50 a day, in the sweltering Alabama heat.

He demonstrates how he’d grab two rows at a time, rocking from side to side, grasping at imaginary stalks with meaty hands, humming a tune that made his work go faster: “As soon I get broke . . . my baby don’t want me no more.”

At 12, Butler was itching to move on. He wrote his first song about it. Fifty-one years later, he still remembers the words.

“I’m leaving here early in the morning,” he sings, eyes closed, sitting in the church basement.

“Peoples, I’m about to go out of my mind.

“I’m going to find me some companion”--he pauses a long moment--”even if she’s deaf, dumb, crippled and blind.”

His moon-shaped face beams with a gold-toothed smile.

At 63, Butler, who took a long bus ride here from his home in Windsor, Ontario, is among the younger Blue Heaven recording artists.

Henry Townsend, age 90, recorded here in 1999, leaning on his cane to navigate the church stairs when he arrived from St. Louis. But his voice still had the gritty magic it did when he first recorded--in 1929.

David “Honeyboy” Edwards is 84. At Salina, he marked one more milestone in his career. The Chicago bluesman, who has recorded on 78s, 45s, 33s and CDs, made his first DVD.

Weepin’ Willie Robinson, 73, first stepped before the microphone in the late 1950s, but had never recorded on his own until he came to Blue Heaven.

“You see all these people singing and they’re leaving something behind,” Robinson says. “I just wanted to look back and have somebody remember my name 50 years from now.”

When his CD, “At Last, On Time,” arrived at his Boston home, he was speechless.

“It’s kind of like a kid who ain’t ever had a piece of candy in his life and he finally got one,” he says with a husky laugh. “It’s the greatest feeling ever--you can’t describe it.”

Many of Blue Heaven’s artists are acquaintances of Lane, who grew up in a home where Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other legends were regular visitors. Over the years, Lane also has worked with rock greats inspired by the blues--Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards.

But unlike the Rolling Stones--who took their name from a Muddy Waters song--the old-timers who played in juke joints, smoky clubs and roadhouses never made millions. Many worked as cabdrivers, security guards or factory workers to put food on the table. Often, they were shortchanged and, in some cases, cheated outright by promoters or record companies.

So it’s natural some hesitate when they’re asked to record again.

“Of course, they’re going to have reservations, they’d be fools not to,” Lane says. “Hey, I was living with a man who was ripped off as well.”

His father’s financial troubles still are fresh in his mind. “I remember a time,” he says, “when we used to go to bed hungry, man.”

Kassem works out financial arrangements before the musicians arrive. Once they do, he caters to their every whim: family-style gumbo and crawfish etouffe dinners. Pingpong and pool tables. Lounges for napping.

Kassem’s philosophy is simple: Make them happy; they’ll sound good.

He has always been a music fan, back to his Louisiana childhood when he started getting high at age 10. After drying out in Kansas, he worked as a cook and turned his record-collecting hobby into a business, buying, selling and trading hard-to-find albums.

Acoustic Sounds is a growing mail-order business--with 32,000 customers worldwide--that sells CDs and albums.

Kassem also has his own label, Analogue Production Originals, and has released 10 CDs on it. He has 10 more in the can. And Blue Heaven is producing DVDs that feature recording sessions and musicians telling their life stories.

Every CD also is released as an LP; Kassem believes vinyl has a more natural sound.

Kassem’s biggest obstacle is that he does not have a distributor so all recordings are released on his label, which limits his market to mail-order and his Web site (www.-acousticsounds.com). He hopes to change that.

But his focus remains the same: artists who travel the byways of music where the major labels rarely go. “A lot of the people recording blues are doing it strictly on what they think they can sell,” he says. “They’re forgetting about the guys who created this music.”

Kassem is convinced there’s an audience for them.

“This music is classic,” he says. “It’s just like Beethoven. It ain’t going to change. It’s going to be here 50 years from now.”

And he’s determined they be recorded with the best possible sound.

He has poured more than $600,000 into the studio, hiring top-notch engineers, installing vintage (1940s) microphones and recording in analog sound, which he prefers to the digital format. He also added one distinctive touch--the stained glass window above the altar features three jamming blues musicians.

But Kassem’s biggest asset may be the building itself.

“When he called me and asked me to come out and look at this church, I thought it was going to be a little church in the prairie,” says Dave Baker, a New York sound engineer who has worked at Blue Heaven.

Instead, he found 45-foot ceilings braced by walnut beams, and rows of oak pews that seat 400 for concerts.

“Technology alone isn’t going to do much for you,” Baker says. “You need space.”

Space was the reason Kassem bought the former First Christian Church in 1996 for $45,000. He needed storage room for his mail-order business. But soon he realized that the building had terrific acoustics. The studio followed, though it has yet to make a profit.

But if it takes a while to break even on his recordings of senior bluesmen, that’s OK with Kassem.

“We’re doing something for them,” he says, “something for music--and something for history.”

The night after Butler recorded, another musician sat down in front of the church altar.

Jimmie Lee Robinson was making his third recording for Kassem.

The tall, pencil-thin Robinson looked more bluegrass than blues, decked out in denim, black cowboy hat, bolo tie, turquoise and silver-trimmed boots, spurs and a gleaming Western belt buckle the size of a ham sandwich.

But there was no disguising the distinctive growl of the 69-year-old singer who helped give Chicago its reputation as the birthplace of the urban blues.

“I lo-o-ove that woman better than I do, do, do myself,” he howled, his spurs ca-chinging as he tapped his foot.

“You got something momma, make a preacher boy lay his Bi-bi-ble down.”

Kassem watched from the control room at the back of the church. His head bounced to the beat; his legs, in sweatpants, jittered.

“Jimmie Lee’s a tough customer,” Kassem said during one of the many breaks in the session. “But when he comes up, it’s in the groove.”

High praise, and Jimmie Lee Robinson returned it when he was done.

“He’s trying to take the blues out of the grave . . . to bring it to the world and give it its true value,” he said. “I was born to be in this place.”