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Project Diary: my West Oakland blues

James O'Brien


Contemporary image of the destruction of West Oakland

Great blues music was recorded in West Oakland in the 1940s. I’m back in the Oakland History Center files, where there are great tho ultimately depressing stories about the heyday of West Oakland’s 7th Street and the surrounding area, the clubs, the lights, the music, the creativity and the pleasure as well as the oppression, the neglect and, ultimately, destruction and displacement. All that history is mostly gone now, buried under a hideous post office building, eight-lane freeways and towering BART tracks. Among the buried was a recording studio and record production plant from the 1940s and 50s, one of the very few in the country owned and operated by an African American, in this case a musician and producer named Bob Geddins. Among those who Geddins recorded in the late 1940s was a blues guitarist, singer and songwriter from Oklahoma called Lowell Fulson. Fulson had been stationed here after enlisting in the Navy during the war, then hung around for a few years after peace was declared. He was from Texas, and like other emigrants from the south who settled in West Oakland during the war, he brought with him a different culture, something rich and new for the west. It manifested in the restaurants and clubs and shops of 7th Street. Perhaps its richest flowering came in the songs recorded by Fulson and others in the recording studio at 7th and Center Streets. The songs, the playing and the sound are stunning: proto-rock and roll, sparkling guitar licks and vocals that sound like another instrument played with expertise and creativity, full of surprises and innovations that you can still hear reverberate today. Fulson wrote some hit songs, for others, including BB Kings very first hit song and the great Otis Redding hit, “Tramp,” one of my favorites. He was around well into the 1970s and played a lot around the Bay Area, including with the great Johnny Otis. I can't seem to get over the destruction -- spiritual, cultural, literal -- of West Oakland. It was perhaps more rapid, more concentrated, on a slightly smaller scale, but it reminds me of the way entire cultures, languages and ways of life, were destroyed by colonization.

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