Champion Jack Dupree - I'm Growing Older Every Day [SLP4040]

Champion Jack Dupree is a colorful personality and a blues artist of wide appeal. As an entertainer he is outstanding; he has a wry turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humour, which is extremely engaging. His amusing verses and funny commentaries, his slightly sick imitations of speech defects and skilful parodies of other blues singers, while highly diverting, can be a little self-defeating, for sometimes Jack Dupree is thought of carelessly as an "act" rather than as a moving and original blues singer. But such he is. On a previous occasion, with the release of 'The Best of the Blues' (Storyville SLP 4010) the biographical facts of Dupree's life were outlined. It isn't necessary to repeat them here: still less so because much of his experience is reflected in his blues. Jack Dupree's blues songs are often autobiographical - he is himself his own best subject. From the tough years of his parentless childhood, from the many threads of his life as a hobo, a migrant, a casual labourer he has woven his blues. They are the strongest evidence of the imprint of environment on the work of a creative blues man. Jack Dupree's humorous blues are the inventions of a man whose wit has helped him triumph over adverse conditions; his slow and sombre compositions are statements of circumstances that have left wounds that have been slow to heal. In these years of a long and painful struggle for integration there is little doubt of the meaning and significance of his words when he sings: People looked at me in the street, Yes they watch me from my head to feet, They used to watch me as I go by, Lord I wonder what's on their mind, I say "Oh Lord, I haven't harmed nobody" But they seem to hate me just the same. I say "Lord, Oh Lord, have mercy on po' me" People have spit - spit in my face, They have done me everything wrong, They have called me all kinds of names they say "N****r, keep on goin" Well, in my heart it be so full, Lord, I don't know in the world what to do, But I say Lord, oh Lord, have mercy on me. and when he talks against a slow blues and says "I even had kids to throw dirty water in my face...scoop it up off the street and their mother and father standin with 'em and I look at 'em and had to smile, and say to myself: Lord have mercy, what have I done..." he speaks for every Black who has suffered humiliation and has been forced to accept it.