Meet Slim, a man ‘groomed in the womb to play the blues’

WHEN Harmonica Slim plays the blues you can hear a woman sobbing in the rain, alone and full of pain. Music is his voice and it brings strains of heartbreak and remorse to the streets of L.A. where one least expects it: in a movie line, in front of a doughnut shop, aboard a bus, at a busy intersection, in a poetry lounge.

What he wants, Slim will tell you, is to bring to the world the kind of tunes that have been stirring in his soul for most of his 51 years. He calls it the deep Southern blues, the kind they played at the whiskey clubs in the black districts of Oklahoma City when he was growing up.

I heard him in an outdoor street patio of a McDonald’s restaurant in the Crenshaw District, blowing all the grief and loneliness that the blues possesses. You listen to it, head slightly bowed to catch the notes and the memories that flow by like storm clouds at sunset, and only when you look up do you realize it’s daytime and you’re looking out at a stream of traffic that never seems to stop.

His name is Arthur Edward Rogers Jr. At 6 feet 2 and 160 pounds, he’s lanky and solemn and dresses as if he’s headed uptown, wearing a three-piece suit, a white shirt buttoned at the collar and a dark, skimpy-brimmed hat with a feather in it. The reality is, he lives in a car that doesn’t run and exists on the change that passersby drop into a small box at his feet.

I met Slim through a man I wrote about a long time ago, one Calvin Shears, a singer and community activist who goes by the name CaShears. He heard Slim play and got in touch. “Never in my life,” he wrote, “have I heard such power, energy, passion, pain and anger. He was groomed in the womb to play the blues.”

There’s something to that. Slim says his Uncle Will used to come to the house and play the harmonica when he was still in his mother’s womb, and that must’ve been the beginning. He got his own mouth organ when he was 3 and taught himself to play.

It was a time in the neighborhood when, Slim says, “There was a blues man with a harmonica on every corner.” He carried his own instrument in a canvas bag he used when he had a paper route, playing it wherever he went. In his early teens, he’d follow his daddy around to the clubs where the men drank whiskey on weekend nights, and he’d take in up to $10 in donations with his music.

“Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were going neck to neck on the blues back then,” Slim remembers, biting into a fish sandwich. His car, a maroon ’84 El Dorado that he’s called home for the past three years, was parked in a lot on the other side of a concrete wall. “The blues were big when I was a kid. The players didn’t need nothing but a street corner.”

The harmonica became a part of his spiritual physiology, the extension of an inner self that remains the substance of his existence. Without the nine harmonicas he carries around in a shoulder bag, Slim will tell you, he has no life.

By the time he was in junior high and high school, he was playing on the school stages, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a group, practicing in the halls and in the bathroom. He dropped out of school in the 12th grade, and when you ask him why, he just shrugs and says he doesn’t know. One suspects that music was just more important to him than math.

He hit the streets, playing “wherever there was a crowd.” That included sports events and parks as well as theater lines. After a few years, he moved from the neighborhood to the center of Oklahoma City, always neatly dressed and gentlemanly, still playing the bluesy music that caused passersby to stop and crowds of his own to form. Then 33 years ago he came to L.A.

If you’re lucky, you’ll run into Slim on a street corner in the South-Central section of the city, or in Long Beach or maybe Compton. “I play every day somewhere,” he says. The manager of a Crenshaw theater liked his music so much that one night when he was playing out front the manager let him in without paying and allowed Slim to help himself to some of the concession food.

He’s also played at a few small clubs here and there, but nothing big time. He says there was interest once at the House of Blues, but they never followed through. He needs to put his music on CDs so he can get exposure, but that takes money he doesn’t have. It rankles him that others make the big bucks at concerts when, by his measure, “they’re only half as good as me.”

So he works the streets like a wandering minstrel, offering up pieces of his soul in tunes full of tears and regret. I heard him on a day as bright as heaven, but could well imagine that he was playing in a darkened club somewhere, where the patrons were drinking whiskey and the mood was full of memories.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.