A lifetime of blues

By Steve Sanders, countyreporter@laurelleadercall.com

July 01, 2007 02:40 pm

— Imagine the youngest of 14 children, the son of a Stringer sharecropper, playing his blues music to crowds of thousands in Italy and Switzerland. That’s a long way for someone who came up the hard way, cutting crossties and timber, building a railroad across Lake Ponchartrain and working at sawmills, all before he was 15 years old.
L.C. Ulmer returned to his home in the Currie settlement near Ellisville Wednesday night following a week-long tour of blues festivals in the two countries Thursday night.
“It was a reaction I never seen before,” Ulmer said. “They were hollering, dancing. There were other bands there, but most of them left after they heard the blues. I was on the high stage, started playing at 6:30 that night. It was jam-packed and they were hollering and cheering me on. They wanted to hear the blues. They gave me the thumbs up, and I gave them the thumbs up back. I couldn’t speak their language, but when I did that, it was like I was communicating with them. That and singing the blues. I was supposed to only play for 30 minutes, but the next group saw how much the crowd liked my music, and I played til almost 8.”
He played five nights of blues festivals in Switzerland and at the Roots and Boues Festival in Parma, Italy. He toured with the Taylor Grocery Band of Oxford. Justin Showah of the band is Ulmer’s manager.
“The Taylor Grocery Band played (in Parma) Thursday night, and Friday night was my night,” Ulmer said. “Willie King played, and then I played for over an hour. There were cameras everywhere in the audience, taking pictures. There were folks there who flew in from London and Japan to see the show. Somebody from Japan said they wanted to set up gigs for me in Japan. I said that’s fine with me.”
Within the past year, Ulmer has played at Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale several times, after an interview with Roger Stolle, producer of Mississippi blues singers and owner of Cathead Delta Blues and Folk Art in Clarksdale, and with the help of Jimbo Mathus, a performer and proudcer in Clarksdale. Ground Zero, co-owned by actor Morgan Freeman, a Clarksdale native, showcases blues singers from Mississippi and from around the country. “Roger put me in the paper and put me on the Juke Joint Festival (in Clarksdale) last year.”
After playing for nearly 70 years (he’ll be 79 in late August), he is finally being recognized for his talent as a blues singer and writer. He performs only songs he has written. “I don’t want to mock nobody,” he said.
Ulmer has also played at the Saenger Theater in Hattiesburg in a relief concert for Hurricane Katrina victims, at Pasta’s Pub in Laurel and has made numerous appearances at the Shed in Ocean Springs.
Chase Holifield, 15, of Ellisville, played with Ulmer at the Saenger. Holifield takes guitar lessons from Ulmer, who also teaches harmonica, keyboards, kazoo and fiddle.
Ulmer began playing guitar when he was 9. He would take his father’s guitar off the wall, try to play what he heard his father and others play, and would gently put the guitar back in the same place so his father wouldn’t find out he had been playing. He began cutting crossties with his father in the 1930s, and bought his first guitar for $9 at Lott Furniture Co. in Laurel. His father heard him play, and said, “You been playing my guitar.”
“Well, I got my whoopin’ because I wasn’t supposed to mess with his stuff,” said Ulmer.
He stayed at home during World War II on his father’s farm, since he was the only son left at home. He helped his parents, Luther and Mittie Ulmer of Stringer, later of Moss Hill, raise a big vegetable garden to help with the war effort. “We’d work in the garden all day, wash the vegetables in the creek all night and load them in the boxcars, like Mr. Roosevelt asked people to.”
He would listen to the Grand Old Opry on the radio on Saturday nights, and learned to play by listening to people like Bill Monroe and Little Jimmy Dickens. But the first person he heard play after his father was Jimmie Rodgers, known as the Singing Brakeman, of near Meridian.
“I wasn’t no more than 4 or 6, and he would come down from Meridian and him and my father would set on the porch and play, and drink whiskey,” Ulmer said. “The son of the plantation owner my father worked for had a still way back in the woods, and Jimmie Rodgers would come looking for whiskey. They’d play on the porch for days, and when the whiskey ran out, he’d go back home.”
In 1949, Ulmer made a slide from stainless steel, and still uses it on his guitar today. In 1955, he went to Holbrook, Ariz., where he found a job as head jaintor the Motoaurant, a 24-hour motel with a nightclub, on Route 66. He played with many famous musicians at the nightclub, including Elvis Presley, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Brook Benton, Nat King Cole, Fats Domino and Louis Armstrong.
He lived for a brief time in California, and later moved to Joilet, Ill., where he stayed for about 30 years, before moving back to the Ellisville area in 2001. He had various jobs in Joilet, including driving a tow truck. At night, he would go into Chicago and play some of the clubs there, but mainly he played in Joilet.
“I was the one in Joilet the singers from Chicago would come see when they came to town,” he said.
He played with blues legends like Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Koko Taylor and Jimmy Reed.
But in all those years of playing juke joints, and growing up with whiskey stills nearby, he never drank. “I never did drink, smoke, chew tobacco, dip snuff or gamble,” he said. “I never found time for it. God gave us our lives to treat well. I’m in good health by the help of God and his will. I’m still mowing yards for folks and I still work.”
He credited a lot of his music to Blind Roosevelt Graves, a man who used to play and sing on the sidewalk in front of Lott Furniture. “He played on the corner and I would sit by him, and help him around town,” Ulmer said. “A lot of my church songs came from him.”
He remembers when singers like Peewee Crayton, Louis Jordan, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker used to play in Laurel. “But I was too young to go in and hear them, so I just stayed outside and listened.”
With no gigs currently set, Ulmer is enjoying being back in the home he bought in 1983, but only moved to five years ago. He plans to put some songs on CD along with Chase Holifield this summer at a recording studio in Ellisville.

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