Delbert McClinton
A Million Highlights
by Kerry Dexter

Blues was a good part of life in far west Texas in the 1940s and 50s. Tex-Mex, country, roadhouse rock, folk, honky-tonk, and blues met and commingled as people came up from Mexico to pick cotton, passed through on their way to brighter dreams of California, or just explored the wide open spaces of the west. Delbert McClinton was born in Lubbock, a crossroads town where his father worked for the railroads and his mother was a beautician. The young McClinton sought a different path: music. "I think music was just born with me," he said, reflecting on a 40-year career that's seen him teach harmonica licks to John Lennon, share a Grammy award with Bonnie Raitt, and write and perform a basketful of creative genre-crossing country and blues roadhouse songs that still keep musicians, critics, and fans watching for his next move.

"Music isn't something I had to work for," he said. "I had to work because of it. I couldn't help but do it." His first instrument was the harmonica. "I was playing 'She Wore a Yellow Ribbon' and, I guess, Scottish jigs, folk music, and stuff like that when I started," he recalled. "Of course, when I first heard blues, that was a whole new deal.

"Texas has more musical influences than any place else, I think," McClinton said. "I've got a book that made me think about that question, a book by John and Alan Lomax. It shows ethnic influences on music in the United States, where it came into this country from and where it spread to, and it's all color coded. Texas has got more colors indicating musical influences than anyplace else.

"When you think about the history of the country and how people came in, Texas kind of got crisscrossed by every one of them," he continued. "So, being from Texas, I was exposed to a lot of diverse musical influences."

Some of them are not quite what one would expect from a man who's known for rockin' down-home blues. "Of course, the influences on my music took place some time back while I was growing up in Lubbock," he said. "All the way back to Nat King Cole, I guess. All the early jump blues guys, too, Big Joe Turner and all the guys behind the birth of rock 'n' roll, and the early Sun Records stuff from the late 40s and early to mid-50s. R&B stuff, and the doo-wop groups like the Penguins, the Lamplighters. Bob Wills was a big deal then, still is, as far as I'm concerned. And there was Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell and Patti Page..."

McClinton began teaching himself guitar as a teenager, and soon put together his own group, the Straightjackets, who became the house band at Jack's Place in Fort Worth for several years. He considers that early time a highlight of his career.

">From when I was about 19 until I was 23 I worked with a lot of the blues greats because my band backed them up. I think the times I got to spend in the late 50s with some of my heroes, learning; that was great. We played with Howlin' Wolf, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland — and I learned a lot from those guys. It was kind of on-the-job training with people I idolized," McClinton recalled.

He also got another sort of on-the-job training during this time in what's now considered one of his trademark skills. "I learned to play a little bit of piano," he said. "For the life of me, I don't know how or when. Just being exposed to it eight nights a week, I guess," he speculated, laughing. "Just all of a sudden I could play a little bit, and I don't even remember wanting that much to learn how to play piano, although now it's something I love."

This is an excerpt from issue #94.
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