A WAFB reporter's earnest attempt to interview the eccentric delta blues musician Scott Dunbar, on his front porch in Lake Mary, Mississippi. Used by written permission.
As featured on episode 13 of Low Profile with Markly Morrison, available at: www.lowprofilepodcast.com/scot...
Most people with a general interest in music history have probably heard some authentic blues music. Names like Robert Johnson and Leadbelly conjure grainy images of artists translating their own experiences in the days of Jim Crow and segregation, the great depression, and the dawn of atomic power. These recordings would become the soundtrack to an era, and a blueprint for what would become rock and roll.
By 1970, American Blues music had evolved quite a lot from its humble roots to something global, with a slew of white, british artists, paying tribute to, or appropriating that sound, depending on who you ask. During this later period, just a few blues artists carried on playing in the traditional blues sound conceived in the Mississippi delta region some fifty years earlier.
One such artist was a self-taught musician from Mississippi named Scott Dunbar, born in 1904.
If you haven’t heard of Scott Dunbar, it might be due in part to the fact that he defied the stereotype of the rambling blues musician. He had a family to feed, and he did it the best way he knew how- farming, and working his own business as a guide for tourists on fishing trips. All this was keeping him busy enough not to go from town to town playing at ”Juke joints.” Rather, he kept his performances and his music career local.
Scott made a few recordings on 1950s and 1960s blues compilations, and one full-length record simply titled “Scott Dunbar From Lake Mary,” named for the small fishing village where Scott lived and worked, just off of Highway 61. The album came out in 1970 on a small New Orleans record label called Ahura Mazda and barely caused a splash at the time of its release. About thirty years later, the Mississippi-based label Fat Possum Records gave the album a second life, to the delight of a few unsuspecting music fans.
But Scott’s place in the canon of Blues History is all but forgotten, and very little information about him is out there.
According to his obituary in the Woodville Republican, he’s quoted as saying “He made his guitar out of a cigar box and a broomstick and some old screen wire when he was eight and played it like a violin.”
There aren’t any recordings of that, but this is a recording from 1977, in which a Baton Rouge, Louisiana news reporter from WAFB-TV attempts to interview Scott at his Lake Mary home. The strange little noises here are the sound of the video camera starting up between takes.