Blues Locations – Georgia – Macon

Themed Photo Gallery and Information: Macon, Georgia

Background

Macon, officially Macon–Bibb County, is a consolidated city-county located in the U.S. state of Georgia. Macon lies near the geographic center of the state, approximately 85 miles (137 km) south of Atlanta, hence the city’s nickname “The Heart of Georgia”.

Macon was founded on the site of the Ocmulgee Old Fields, where the Creek Indians lived in the 18th century. Their predecessors, the Mississippian culture, built a powerful chiefdom (950–1100 AD) based on the practice of agriculture. The Mississippian culture constructed earthwork mounds for ceremonial, burial, and religious purposes. The areas along the rivers in the Southeast had been inhabited by indigenous peoples for 13,000 years before Europeans arrived.

Macon developed at the site of Fort Benjamin Hawkins, built in 1809 at the fall line of the Ocmulgee River to protect the community and to establish a trading post with Native Americans. The fort was named in honor of Benjamin Hawkins, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southeast territory south of the Ohio River for over 20 years. He lived among the Creek and was married to a Creek woman. This was the most inland point of navigation on the river from the Low Country. President Thomas Jefferson forced the Creek to cede their lands east of the Ocmulgee River and ordered the fort built. (Archeological excavations in the 21st century found evidence of two separate fortifications.)

Fort Hawkins guarded the Lower Creek Pathway, an extensive and well-traveled American Indian network later improved by the United States as the Federal Road from Washington, D.C., to the ports of Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana. A gathering point of the Creek and U.S. cultures for trading, it was also a center of state militia and federal troops. The fort served as a major military distribution point during the War of 1812 against Great Britain and also during the Creek War of 1813. Afterward, the fort was used as a trading post for several years and was garrisoned until 1821. It was decommissioned about 1828 and later burned to the ground. A replica of the southeast blockhouse was built in 1938 and still stands today on a hill in east Macon. Part of the fort site is occupied by the Fort Hawkins Grammar School. In the 21st century, archeological excavations have revealed more of the fort’s importance, and stimulated planning for additional reconstruction of this major historical site.

As many Europeans had already begun to move into the area, Fort Hawkins was renamed “Newtown.” After the organization of Bibb County in 1822, the city was chartered as the county seat in 1823 and officially named Macon. This was in honor of the North Carolina statesman Nathaniel Macon, because many of the early residents of Georgia hailed from North Carolina. The city planners envisioned “a city within a park” and created a city of spacious streets and parks. They designated 250 acres (1.0 km2) for Central City Park, and passed ordinances requiring residents to plant shade trees in their front yards.

The city thrived due to its location on the Ocmulgee River, which enabled shipping to markets. Cotton became the mainstay of Macon’s early economy, based on the enslaved labor of African Americans. Macon was in the Black Belt of Georgia, where cotton was the commodity crop. Cotton steamboats, stage coaches, and later, in 1843, a railroad increased marketing opportunities and contributed to the economic prosperity to Macon. In 1836, the Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Wesleyan College in Macon. Wesleyan was the first college in the United States chartered to grant degrees to women. In 1855, a referendum was held to determine a capital city for Georgia. Macon came in last with 3,802 votes.

During the American Civil War, Macon served as the official arsenal of the Confederacy manufacturing percussion caps, friction primers, and pressed bullets. Camp Oglethorpe, in Macon, was used first as a prison for captured Union officers and enlisted men. Later it held officers only, up to 2,300 at one time. The camp was evacuated in 1864.

Macon City Hall, which served as the temporary state capitol in 1864, was converted to a hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers. The Union General William Tecumseh Sherman spared Macon on his march to the sea. His troops had sacked the nearby state capital of Milledgeville, and Maconites prepared for an attack. Sherman, however, passed by without entering Macon.

In the twentieth century, Macon grew into a prospering town in Middle Georgia. It began to serve as a transportation hub for the entire state. In 1895, the New York Times dubbed Macon “The Central City,” in reference to the city’s emergence as a hub for railroad transportation and textile factories. Terminal Station was built in 1916.

Macon is the birthplace or hometown of musicians (amongst others):  The Allman Brothers Band, Lucille Hegamin, Otis Redding, Little Richard.

Source: Wikipedia

 

Lucille Hegamin

Lucille Nelson Hegamin (November 29, 1894 – March 1, 1970) was an American singer and entertainer and an early African-American blues recording artist.

Lucille Nelson was born in Macon, Georgia, the daughter of John and Minnie Nelson. From an early age she sang in local church choirs and theatre programs. By the age of 15 she was touring the US South with the Leonard Harper Minstrel Stock Company. In 1914 she settled in Chicago, Illinois, where, often billed as “The Georgia Peach”, she worked with Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton before marrying the pianist-composer Bill Hegamin. She later told a biographer, “I was a cabaret artist in those days, and never had to play theatres, and I sang everything from blues to popular songs, in a jazz style. I think I can say without bragging that I made the ‘St. Louis Blues’ popular in Chicago; this was one of my feature numbers.”

The Hegamins moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1918, then to New York City the following year. Bill Hegamin led the band accompanying his wife, the Blue Flame Syncopators; Jimmy Wade was a member of this ensemble.

In November 1920, Hegamin became the second African-American blues singer to record, after Mamie Smith. Hegamin made a series of recordings for Arto Records and then Paramount in 1922. One of her biggest hits was “Arkansas Blues”, recorded for Arto and released on many other labels, including Black Swan. She recorded one of Tom Delaney’s earliest compositions, “Jazz Me Blues”, in 1921, and it went on to become a jazz standard. She subsequently played theatre dates but did not tour extensively.

Lucille Hegamin lived at the Shuffle Inn in Harlem from November 1921 to January 1922. On January 20, 1922, she competed in a blues singing contest with Daisy Martin, Alice Leslie Carter and Trixie Smith at the Fifteenth Infantry’s First Band Concert and Dance in New York City. Hegamin placed second to Smith in the contest, which was held at the Manhattan Casino. Then from February to May of that year she toured with the African-American musical revue Shuffle Along and this was the second of three companies. In the first company Florence Mills had the same role with the same musical revue.

From 1922 through late 1926 she recorded over forty sides for Cameo Records; in this association she was billed as “The Cameo Girl”. After her marriage to Bill Hegamin ended in 1923, her most frequent accompanist was the pianist J. Cyril Fullerton. In 1926, she recorded with Clarence Williams’s band for the Columbia label. She sang with a band that was led by George “Doc” Hyder in 1927 for a show in Philadelphia. Further into the decade she performed in further revues with Hyder that were staged in Harlem theaters.

She performed in Williams’s Revue at the Lincoln Theater in New York and then in various revues in New York and Atlantic City, New Jersey, through 1934. In 1929 she performed on the radio program Negro Achievement Hour, on WABC, in New York. In 1932 she recorded two sides for Okeh Records.

About 1934, she retired from music as a profession and worked as a nurse. She came out of retirement in 1961 to record four songs, accompanied by a band led by Willie “The Lion” Smith, on the album Songs We Taught Your Mother, for Bluesville Records. In 1962 she recorded Basket of Blues for Spivey Records. She performed at a benefit concert for Mamie Smith at the Celebrity Club in New York City in 1964.

Hegamin died in Harlem Hospital, in New York City, on March 1, 1970, and was interred in the Cemetery of the Evergreens, in Brooklyn, New York.

Hegamin’s stylistic influences included Annette Hanshaw and Ruth Etting. According to Derrick Stewart-Baxter, “Lucille’s clear, rich voice, with its perfect diction, and its jazz feeling, was well in the vaudeville tradition, and her repertoire was wide.” Like Mamie Smith, Hegamin sang classic female blues in a lighter style, more influenced by pop tunes, than the rougher rural-style blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who became more popular a few years later.

Source: Wikipedia

 

Otis Redding

Otis Ray Redding Jr. (September 9, 1941 – December 10, 1967) was an American singer, songwriter, record producer, arranger, and talent scout. He is considered one of the greatest singers in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Redding’s style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s.

Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, and at the age of 2, moved to Macon, Georgia. Redding quit school at age 15 to support his family, working with Little Richard’s backing band, the Upsetters, and by performing in talent shows at the historic Douglass Theatre in Macon. In 1958, he joined Johnny Jenkins’s band, the Pinetoppers, with whom he toured the Southern states as a singer and driver. An unscheduled appearance on a Stax recording session led to a contract and his first single, “These Arms of Mine”, in 1962.

Stax released Redding’s debut album, Pain in My Heart, two years later. Initially popular mainly with African-Americans, Redding later reached a wider American pop music audience. Along with his group, he first played small shows in the American South. He later performed at the popular Los Angeles night club Whisky a Go Go and toured Europe, performing in London, Paris and other major cities. He also performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

Shortly before his death in a plane crash, Redding wrote and recorded his iconic “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” with Steve Cropper. The song became the first posthumous number-one record on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts. The album The Dock of the Bay was the first posthumous album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart. Redding’s premature death devastated Stax. Already on the verge of bankruptcy, the label soon discovered that the Atco division of Atlantic Records owned the rights to his entire song catalog.

Redding received many posthumous accolades, including two Grammy Awards, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In addition to “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” “Respect” and “Try a Little Tenderness” are among his best-known songs.

Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, U.S., the fourth of six children, and the first son, of Otis Redding, Sr., and Fannie Roseman. Redding senior was a sharecropper and then worked at Robins Air Force Base, near Macon, and occasionally preached in local churches. When Otis was three the family moved to Tindall Heights, a predominantly African-American public housing project in Macon. At an early age, Redding sang in the Vineville Baptist Church choir and learned guitar and piano. From age 10, he took drum and singing lessons. At Ballard-Hudson High School, he sang in the school band. Every Sunday he earned $6 by performing gospel songs for Macon radio station WIBB, and he won the $5 prize in a teen talent show for 15 consecutive weeks. His passion was singing, and he often cited Little Richard and Sam Cooke as influences. Redding said that he “would not be here” without Little Richard and that he “entered the music business because of Richard – he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock ‘n’ Roll stuff… My present music has a lot of him in it.”

At age 15, Redding left school to help financially support his family; his father had contracted tuberculosis and was often hospitalized, leaving his mother as the family’s primary income earner. He worked as a well digger, as a gasoline station attendant and occasionally as a musician. Pianist Gladys Williams, a locally well-known musician in Macon and another who inspired Redding, often performed at the Hillview Springs Social Club, and Redding sometimes played piano with her band there.[9] Williams hosted Sunday talent shows, which Redding attended with two friends, singers Little Willie Jones and Eddie Ross.

Redding’s breakthrough came in 1958 on disc jockey Hamp Swain’s “The Teenage Party,” a talent contest at the local Roxy and Douglass Theatres. Johnny Jenkins, a locally prominent guitarist, was in the audience and, finding Redding’s backing band lacking in musical skills, offered to accompany him. Redding sang Little Richard’s “Heebie Jeebies.” The combination enabled Redding to win Swain’s talent contest for fifteen consecutive weeks; the cash prize was $5 (US$44 in 2019 dollars). Jenkins later worked as lead guitarist and played with Redding during several later gigs. Redding was soon invited to replace Willie Jones as frontman of Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, featuring Johnny Jenkins. Redding was then hired by the Upsetters when Little Richard abandoned rock and roll in favor of gospel music. Redding was well paid, making about $25 per gig (US$222 in 2019 dollars), but did not stay long. In mid-1960, Otis moved to Los Angeles with his sister, Deborah, while his wife Zelma and their children stayed in Macon, Georgia.

Source : Extract of Otis’s early life from Wikipedia

Full Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Redding 

 

Georgia Historical Markers

See Confederate Memorial Day image below.

 

Photo Gallery

Georgia Music Hall of Fame (to the left).

 

An early photo of Otis Redding and Steve Cropper

 

Sculpture of Little Richard.

 

Tubman African American Museum (as at 2009).

 

The famous photo of Harriet Tubman.

 

Tapestry celebrating the Douglas Theatre.

 

The new Tubman Aftrican American Museum – almost built.

Click here for more information about the new museum.

 

We were privilaiged to be allowed into the Douglas Theatre.

 

A forthcoming attraction – our very own Michael Gray on booksigning tour (see also Atlanta entry).

 

Otis Redding Statue next to the Ocumulgee River.

 

Rose Hill Cemetery.

Click here for more information on Rose Hill Cemetery.

 

Loking back at downtown Macon.

 

Duane Allmon and Raymond Berry Oakley graves enclosed in the railings.