Photo Jack Pine





Jim Brewer was the most influential blues singer and guitarist on the North Side when I was growing up. The first time I saw him play was probably about 1956. He played every Wednesday night at the No Exit Cafe on Main St. in Evanston. In those days everybody was into the folk thing and my dad would periodically take me around to thecoffee houses and folk rooms and occasionally a Josh White or Segovia concert. Mostly Josh White, who my dad knew. We’d do the Chances R, the Roué, and the Gate of Horn, and then swing back to Evanston to catch Jim. The man was the most down-home, least polished amazing player I’d ever seen. He did the real, down blues...the old story tunes, accompanied by the most poignant, rocking acoustic guitar imaginable. He was a dance band. Only we didn’t know it. I’ve never heard anyone else do Po Kelly Blues, and Jim was the first person I heard play Highway 61. His playing was always electrifying.He used all the fingers on his left hand and played that Mississippi river basin right hand style where his thumb would chunk at the chords while he played melody with his first finger. Way simple. Try it.

When I got into high school and had friends with cars, the Exit was the place to go. It was a classic coffee house with a giant, noisy Pavoni espresso machine. They served coffees, teas, waters, cold cut sandwiches, and various cakes and pastries. No liquor. All the folkies played there and you might catch Michael Bloomfield playing bluegrass, or Odetta, or Judy Pine, Art Thieme, Larry Rand or maybe even Muddy Waters down from doing a folk gig at Northwestern checking out the babes. All this was cool but Jim Brewer was on a totally different plane. He was blind. He knew tunes that nobody else knew. He was a stunner of an instrumental virtuoso.

Jim was from St. Louis and had been a street singer there. He still performed on Maxwell St. with some folk doing religious music. He liked to end his night with I’ll Fly Away. He was a big guy kinda wide around the middle but not in any way fat. He was dark brown and had a strangely boyish demeanor. In the winter he’d wear suit coats over his white, open collared shirt. He was very kind and I never saw him cross with anybody though people could get a little condescending or patronizing when dealing with him. Jim had an aw shucks persona that I thought hid a lot. After the Knave broke up in early ‘67, I was living in Rogers Park and the Exit had moved up there too. I spent a lot of time there and lot of time with Jim. I was playing at the Exit by then both paid on the weekends and at the open mike night on monday. I spent hours talking to Jim, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee. He showed me anything I asked him. Here Howard, you do it like this...no man, like this here. He was always selling his guitar and we, the local players were always buying him another one. In those days flat-top American guitars were cheap. Jimmy played Harmony Sovereigns, Gibson J 45’s and J 50’s, a nice Regal and eventually ended up with a Martin D 28.

His wife didn’t like him playing the blues, so we had to go down to the ghetto to pick him up and sneak him up to the north side. He was a very different and shy person. Steve Goodman tried to take Jim out of town to do the festival scene, but Jimmy really want to leave. He felt like he had it good, I guess. In ‘70 or ‘71 a Viet Nam vet named Gary tried to set up an electric band for Jim. I played lead, a black guy named Steve Jones played rhythm, Karen Tafejian: piano, Al Goldberg: bass and Vince Blakey, another african-american on bass. It lasted a very short time. By early ‘72, I had moved to Paris and traveled for the next five years or so, in Europe and then Central America and the Caribbean. I’d come back to Chi on an irregular basis; make as much money as I could, and leave again. I always kept in touch with Jimmy.

Sometime after the mid seventies I came back to find that someone had broken Jim’s hand. He was doing the mess around with a neighbor lady and her sons had gone over and beat him severely. It broke my heart to see him playing with the little finger on his left has sticking out useless at a 45 degree angle to his hand. But he kept after it. It must have been 1980 or so; I was already some years in Colorado, when Peter Steinberg, erstwhile owner of the No Exit and longtime friend, called to tell me Jim had died. An absolutely unique voice went out of the world. He taught me to reach into myself, deep, and pull out the feelings behind the tunes, no matter whose. And he taught me no good ever come out a fly. I think about Jim always and hear him playing whenever I play the blues.