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In 1930, a small boy sat on a hillside in the F.T. Valley, learning the blues from his convict friend after the chain gang put down Dicks and shovels for the evening. A half century later, those same blues opened doors to the White House for John Jackson.
ihe county’s most famous musical son, Jackson is a featured performer today at major blues and folk festivals across the U.S. and around the world. His style is traditional, the real, authentic, old time sounds born two hundred years ago from the sorrows of slavery. Muddy Waters left the country and took his^music to the city’s smoky cfubs where it picked up electricity and sophistication. Other bluesmen drifted to St. Louis and New Orelans where their down and out stories metamorphasized into jazz. John Jackson kept his roots in the country, preserving the rural heritage of the blues for another generation.
He was born in Rappahannock in 1924, one of 14 children in a family ^here mother, father, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins played guitars, fiddles, banjos, harmonicas— anything that would create music.
“My father used to make penny whistles for us. He’d cut a piece from a sapling, heat fence wire in the stove ’til it was red hot and then poke it through and cut finger holes.” The little penny whistles may have lacked true pitch and tuning but they worked well enough for the Jackson kids to tootle songs, magic that John is at a loss to explain.
Chain Gang Blues
As musically oriented as the Jackson family was, a stranger started John on the road to the blues. “A convict who used to tote water from our spring got me interested. I must have been around four or five ’cause he was working on the first black-topped road in the county down through the F.T. Valley and they finished in 1932—before that, all the roads around here were just dirt. When I’d see Hap coming, I used to take my father’s gujtar and meet him at the spring. We’d sii down and he’d play a while.”
The county was thirsting in the grip of a severe drought and the Jacksons had one of the few water sources still flowing. People came for miles, on horseback, in wagons, on foot, to fill their buckets and jugs. ,
Hap regularly drew water for the road gang. “When I first saw him, he had a chain
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