At 7:30 PM on Friday, May 17, The Flying Monkey is honored to bring the venerable Delbert McClinton to the Monkey stage. Delbert is known as a legend among Texas roots music aficionados, not only for his amazing live shows, but for his ability to combine country, blues, soul, and rock & roll as if there were no distinctions among any of them. New Hampshire’s own Dusty Gray Band will open the night. Tickets for this concert start at $45.
Delbert McClinton doesn’t write music for kids. Nashville writer Michael McCall put it this way: “Delbert’s raspy, ferocious voice carries in it the history of American popular music. There’s the down-home rhythm and testifying punch of gospel-based R&B, the aggressive snarl of the blues, the mournful rumination of honky-tonk, the jaunty spirit of swing, and the up-front sexuality of early rock and roll. Texas in general and Fort Worth in particular have long been a major source of the music that binds us all — blues, jazz, Western swing, rock and roll, R&B, country — and musicians there were expected to play most of it and make people dance to all of it.”
“I used to play a thing called Blue Monday Night,” McClinton said. “We were the only white band on the show at the Skyliner Ballroom in Fort Worth. It would be Bobby Bland and Junior Parker. And God almighty, it was just great!…I was at the right place at the right time and knew it.” The lessons weren’t wasted, and in 1960 his cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s Wake Up Baby became the first song by a white artist to be played on KNOK-AM, Fort Worth’s great blues station.
His press release implies that most of the legends are true: Touring England in 1962, he was pestered by a kid in a young British group to show him harmonica licks, and if you listen to the Beatles’ Love Me Do, you’ll hear it; he played in a rough joint owned by Jack Ruby, now famous for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald; and bluesman Jimmy Reed did indeed once throw up on his new Shure microphone, which he took home and cleaned with a toothbrush and kept right on using. There are a lot more, as one might expect after 40 years on the road, more than a person would want to talk about, but he could sit down and write songs about them, and he has.
“I’m an acquired taste in that my kind of music’s not for little kids,” McClinton says. “It’s adult rock and roll. I write from the sensibility of the people I knew growing up, and I grew up with all the heathens, the people who went too far before they changed and tried to make something out of their lives. There are a lot of beautiful colors and sad stories and much-deserved joy in that.”
Tickets to the Delbert McClinton concert are $45, and $55 for premier seating. For more information on upcoming shows or to purchase tickets call the box office at 536-2551 or go online at FlyingMonkeyNH.com.