Guitar Shorty Coming Up the Hard Way

Coming Up the Hard Way
by Ron Weinstock

When David “Guitar Shorty” Kearney performs, one not witnesses an ardent performance of modern blues, but also showmanship and a stage act that stems from his days working with such R&B legends as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Guitar Slim. Guitar Shorty’s band, Central Avenue, deftly backed him as he walked the floor of Tornado Alley, serenading the audience at their tables. He delighted the audience with his raspy vocals and  his chicken scratching attack which has his guitar echoing his vocals. Later, during his song, “It’s a Hard Road,” he came off the stage to serenade the audience again and then he walked out of the club and strolled a half block from the club without losing a beat on his radio equipped guitar. After his return to the inside of Tornado Alley, Shorty continued to dazzle the audience before executing a flip on the dance floor without a break in his solo. After a few more numbers, including a version of “Hey Joe” (recorded by the half-brother of his first wife, Jimi Hendrix), he returned with more theatrics, reworking Guitar Slim’s “Just Got Into Your Town,”playing with his teeth, and playing behind his head before executing a couple more flips. After two hours of gritty, soulful singing, and scorching guitar solos, he fiinally left the stage, playing “Star Spangled Banner’ and other songs unaccompanied and carefully controlling feedback as his band packed up.

After the set ended, a fan engaged Shorty backstage in a conversation, and told Shorty that it has been about twenty years since he last saw Shorty playing at the Soul’d Out, a club on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. They chatted about the owner of the place, and how it flirted with disco in the eighties, and how the owner should go back to the blues. Shorty’s fan kidded him about not doing a flip off the stage and Shorty replied that he didn’t want to hit the dancers on the floor. We chatted for an hour and a half, although there was a technical glitch for part of the taping. As we chatted, Terence McArdle joined us and contributed a number of insightful questions. A few months later when Shorty played Fleetwood’s in Alexandria, Virginia, I had the chance to talk some more with him, double-check some facts and fill in gaps.

David Kearney was born in Houston, Texas in 1939. He grew up Florida after his parents broke up and both moved to the Sunshine state. His father lived in Orlando and his mother moved to Kissamaree. It was his uncle, Willie Quarterman (now a minister in White Plains, New York, known as Reverend Lane) who started him playing music, and buying him a Sears Silvertone guitar as a youth. “He put the guitar in front of me, sitting on his left knee and took my hand and put them on the strings, and he’d show me how to chord the strings and stuff. He’s strum the guitar and let me see what it sound like.” His uncle also was a major influence on him vocally and recalls how his uncle “Turned the church on.”

Seeing his interest in music. David's grandmother had him receive formal training from a man her remembers as "‘Wash.' I never did get his full name. He was the Wash, a little short guy who was left handed but played the guitar right handed.” Wash had David go through the lessons in Numbers One and Two of the Nick Maloloff (?) guitar instruction books. He would have David go through the material, but David picked up up playing the music quickly. Wash, as a result, told David's grandmother to call whenever David needed any help. Learning to read music and varlous aspects of musical theory served to provide him with a musical grounding and prepared him for the experiences of the ensuing decades.

David remembers hearing blues on the radio, and was a John Lee Hooker fan growing up. One of the first tunes he played was Hooker’s “Boogie Chillum.” David kept practicing and learning guitar and when only 13, he was good enough to gather the attention of band leader, Walter Johnson, and his promoter, Dewey Richardson. Johnson ran a big band and shows in the area with a home base at the Club Royal in Tampa. Johnson and Richardson went to David’s grandmother and received her permission for him to play.

David became part of the band, although initially they had him pretend to play. Gradually, as he got more proficient, he actually played. One weekend, the promoter got up and told the audience that they had a great showman, Guitar Shorty, who would be featured the next weekend. David got anxious that week, and practiced, not wanting to be shown up by the "newcomer. Somewhat nervous because of this Guitar Shorty, David was playing and the promoter announced that Guitar Shorty would be later featured. Finally, when David was playing, Guitar Shorty was announced, and no one came out to the stage. He was still in disbelief when the promoter pointed to him as Guitar Shorty, and it wasn’t until members of the band took him out front that he accepted the fact that it was he who they had been talking about.

Dewey Richardson gave him the name Guitar Shorty. “Dewey was like a father to me, in a way, because he took a liking to me. After he gave me the name he told me, he said, ‘Now it’s gonna be a lot of people  gonna ask you to change that name. Lot of producers.. You get record companies gonna want you change. Don’t change the name. You keep it. Plus it will bring you you good luck.’ And I’m not kidding, it had brought me good luck.”

Still a young man, Guitar Shorty went to Chicago in 1957 with his manager Pawn Shop Lewis, and a singer, Clarence Jolly, to record for Cobra/Artistic. Shorty didn’t know anything  with his manager, Pawn Shop Lewis. Shorty didn’t know anything said, ‘Make sure you call.’ "Next day, I got up. I kept looking at that card. I really wanted help ‘cause I was trying to learn something. Around 12 o'clock, around noon, I called him. And he said, “OK. I'll tell you what to do. You got any  money on you?’ I said, ‘Not too much, but I got some.’ He  said, ‘Forget about that Just catch a cab. The address is on that card, have him bring you down there.’ And I went  down there. he was outside waiting on me. Paid the cab driver, took me inside. He had one helluva layout.  He said, ‘Now, stay with me awhile. I’m gonna  straighten you out.’” Following Preston’s advice, Shorty said “I’ve been in the martial arts for about thirty-five years That’s what you see out there.  That’s how I got it. Now I don’t hurt myself."

The days of touring with Ray Charles and Guitar Slim provided ed Shorty with valuable experience but the others “were making the money.” At the time he was with them, Guitar Shorty was playing the Silvertone guitar that he had as a kid. He “wasn’t making enough money,” to buy a new one. After Shorty left Guitar Slim in Thibideaux, he hooked up again with Sam Cooke who was travelling through Louisiana and came out to California. At the time, the Pilgrim Travellers were part of the troupe. “I just got to California just when the group broke up.”

Moving gave him another chance to record. “When I finally got there, Bob Tate and his sister Doris, they all moved [to Los Angeles], got some money together. They took that Silvertone I had and that amp; went to a pawn shop and got me a strat and got mea super reverb amp. So they got that for me. That was the first Fender that I ever owned, that they just gave to me. I had a Telecaster for a little while. I didn’t really like it. Then I started working around the area of LA. I worked at Moe’s Swing Club, ... I worked in a place called ‘the Veterans Club. I was working there five nights a week. They had gambling, everything. Man the police come in there. They have the cats in cables instead of chains instead of handcuffs. And walked them down through the audience with them right on out the door. Let everybody see it. But the people never stopped coming. They started packing  the place every night. There after I worked there for awhile, and things started getting real bad, obviously I got scared so I quit.

In Hollywood, Shorty worked at the Talespin with a guy named Sid Galloway for about a year and a half which was long enough for Charlie Reynolds to catch him at the Talespin, “Next thing I know, Bob Tate had got to him some kind of way. Talked him into recording me. That's when he had Flash Records. That's where the pull came from. He say, ‘Guitar Shorty. I want to record you.’ That’s where I recorded A Hard Life.”

After he had recorded that song and other sides (with Tate on bass), Shorty joined Big Jim Wynn who previously had led his band behind T-Bone Walker. Wynn was getting ready to go to Vancouver. British Columbia, In Vancouver they played the New Delhi. “We were there for two weeks. Guy that owned it, his name was Leon Baggery, and he really liked the group.” Big Jim had to go back to L.A. for business, so Shorty told Baggery that he’d like to stay.

Baggery took Shorty under his wing. “That guy sure looked after me like I was the family.” Having someone like Baggery around was a great help, particularly since it could be real difficult for an American to get working papers in Canada. “What he did, he got me a month, a month-to-month visa. And I stayed there and I stayed so long,
they told me I had to go ‘cross the border and come back. Then I could do it for another three months. That’s how I stayed there: I did that, man, over six years. I stayed there, right in Vancouver.”

During those years, he was playing rock and rhythm and blues. “I was playing hard metal stuff and I was doing a little bit of soul like Otis Redding would do and doing some of T-Bone Walker's stuff. Kept me busy, butI got tired of that too. What happened was, I really started looking at things, it was time to get out.” Shorty recalls Barry Gordy coming out to see Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. “He saw me, but he  actually came to see them. That’s where his mind was focused on. He told me, he said, “Shorty, I’ll be back and listen to you again. ... He never came back. So I got to think about it. I said, it’s time for me to get out of here. That's when I left.”

 Shorty left Vancouver for Seattle in  1963 where he stayed until 1970. He married Jimi Hendrix's stepsister, Marcia, in 1965 after she got pregnant with their daughter, Tammy. Shorty remembers seeing Hendrix in L.A. before the Experience years. “Yeah I saw him then, but it never dawned on me. He didn’t excite me or anything. ‘Cause that time Jimi was just trying to learn, learn things about his guitar, So when I Went to Seattle, I played in Seattle and around Vancouver, I didn’t find out “bout this till after I married Marcia, and then he told me. He used to go AWOL just to watch me. ‘It really was a blast to watch you. Now since you in the family, I can tell you I really learned a lot from you Shorty.” Every time he came to town, Hendrix and Shorty would jam together in Hendrix's father’s basement.

Asked about his first impression after he first heard the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Shorty recalls, “When I heard it, I knew it was him. But there was a lot of other people didn’t know who it was. That was exactly what they said. They said, ‘What in the hell is that? Where did he come from?’ And it was a long time before the blacks would even accept him. By the time they started accepting him, he’d gone. He went to New York. He turned New York around. But that’s where he had his bad experience at. He was ‘bout ready to give it up. And the dude took him to England.” He still remembers the last time he saw Hendrix. “I mean, he was out of it. He was upset cause his family came in, so his dad went to see him, he grabbed his dad, put his arms around him and just cried like a baby. Told him he was sorry, he had a problem and just had to work it out. And after that we didn’t see Jimi no more alive.”

Guitar Shorty plays to the audience at JVs in 2019.

Shorty left Seattle after Hendrix’s death, arriving in L.A. in early 1971. Staying in Vancouver may have helped him escape from personal problems but it also meant he couldn’t cash in on his new records. “This is a Hard Life took off. No one knew where I was. I didn’t find out anything about ‘till I came back in. I came back in 1970, when I came back I found out about that record.” Other bad luck hit him. He moved into an apartment in a motor home in Anaheim, California. He went to Las Vegas for a weekend and “I got back, all the pictures of me and Jimi, all the places I ever played in my life, the whole history of me, everything, you know. Somebody broke in the place and stole the stuff. ... That’s when I had that strat, my amplifier, all my promotional stuff on me, everything.

“So then I was really uptight cause I had no job, no instruments, nothing. And just lucky I met this guy named Vincent Battista, Italian guy. He had a warehouse, hauled lumber and stuff. He took a likening to me when I was playing, when I was work ing in Orange County at a place called the Wild Goose. That's where I worked. A lot of motorcycle guys used to come out there. So he told me. He called me David. He said, ‘David, I know how things are when the chips are down, boy. I got a job for you man. You can work and get your money together, buy another guitar and amp and stuff. I'll help you.’ If it hadn’t been for that I don’t know what I do. I would probably have gone back where my mom was. But through him sticking by me, like he said he would, that’s how I got back on my feet, working in a warehouse. And after that I started working all over L.A. area and down by Riverside, back in little jobs, back in Vancouver. You know fly in and out ...” He toured throughout Canada, playing Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, back to L.A. and then down to Mississippi.

In 1984 he was run over by a car and one leg was injured. It is still swollen today. After he got to the hospital, the doctor checked him out. “Didn't break my leg or anything but had pulled, pulled the muscles here. I remember wrestling with the car, remember that much and as I was wrestling with the car, all up here, all the way, all the way back up here. I could feel a thing just say popping and the doctor say that was a muscles, ligaments type of thing. I asked him, ‘How long will it be you think before I can really start working again.” He said, ‘You're looking at from 6 months to a year.”

Despite his determination, it would take longer to recover. “I could walk pretty good but I wouldn’t do the flip. I tried it one night at the Holiday Inn in Los Angeles, right across from Knotts Berry Farm, from Disneyland Inn. Hurt me so bad when I got up.I managed to get up and turned and landed on my feet. I couldn't move. I had to stand there and play. So I made my mind right then I not gonna do it more soon.” It wasn’t until 1988 that he got full use of the leg back. “They told me 6 months to a year. It took me till 88. That’s where I started coming back.”

Shorty became friends with Tina and Percy Mayfield. With respect to Percy he recalls, “We got real close. He wrote two songs for me. I never saw them, “cause he died before we got a chance to even work on them. Then I called Tina one day and asked Tina about the songs. She said, ‘Shorty, I'll see what I can do. I don’t know if I can find them or not but I'll do whatever I can, try to find them for you.’ Never found the tunes. So anyway I'm scuffling, still trying to make it, doing everything I could. All kind of odds and ends jobs and stuff. So Lowell Fulson told her of a place I could go overseas. Cause he had been talking to some people over there. Behind (Between?) her and Lowell Fulson is how I managed to get overseas. When I arrived overseas, that’s why I am where I am right now. Because that record I did over there for JSP. Yeah, after that, when I got that W.C. Handy Award, the thing took off.” .

Shorty recorded in England with Otis Grand’s band. He had been touring with Grand at the time. While the album pushed his career, he wasn’t satisfied with it “cause I know we could have done it better. I even talked to JSP about it. I ttold John [Stedman]. Isaid, ‘John. I don’t like doing an album like this, man. It’s not right. We should spend some time on it.’ He was in a hurry to get me out of there. I said ‘Man, you're gonna be sorry.’ He called me up about two months ago [May 1994] and apologized.

Shorty’s record for JSP opened a lot of eyes and ears to him, and led to Black Top’s Hammond Scott locating him. Shorty recalls Hammond Scott telling how he had been looking for Shorty for a long time, but couldn’t get a number on him. “But you know how it is. Lotta of musicians, entertainers, if they find out you're a record producer or you in some kind of limelight, and they ain't gonna to give another artist's number, cause they gonna want to try to get their thing in. So that’s what what was happening.” It was Dan Jacobs, who lives in Long Beach, California, who located Shorty for Scott. “Called me, soon as he hung up from Dan Jacobs and he talked to me like he'd been knowing me all my life. He does that right now. He said, ‘I been trying to catch up with you for the longest Shorty, and I finally caught you. He said, "This is Hammond Scott from BlackTop.'"

 Here is a video of Guitar Shorty playing "Hard Life."

Shorty’s Black Top album, “Topsy Turvy” has made him a lot more familiar to blues fans around the world. His guitar playing shows a variety of inspirations, notably Guitar Slim and Jimi Hendrix, but the output is pure Guitar Shorty. Like Hendrix, he uses various tools including a wah wah pedal, plunger and the delay to create various effects. “You got to know how to do that though, cause if you don’t, it sounds like a bunch of noise. You can overplay it. If you overplay, might as well turn it off. It took me awhile to learn how to handle that.”

One tune on “Topsy Turvy” he is particularly proud of is his version of “(I Love You) More Than You'll Ever Know,” which he took from his major vocal influence as a singer, Donny Hathaway, Other influences include his uncle, Willie Quarterman, Willie John and B.B. King, “but the cat that I really like was Donny Hathaway. That was a cat that, that dude could really sing. You ever heard him? ... That cat could get down. That’s why I did “More Than You'll Ever Know”, on that CD and I got lot of compliments on it. They said I was the first one who did it after Blood, Sweat and Tears.” Hathaway recorded it, and Shorty acknowledges his impact. “I did it so that had Donny Hathaway been living he would have liked it the way I play it and I tried to sing it the way he would have sung it.” Other Hathaway songs that Shorty includes in his repertoire include “In the Ghetto,” and “I Believe To My Soul” which Hathaway recast from a RayCharles original. “Donny Hathaway. He’s got it. It’s not like Ray Charles (hums tune) It’s moving. … The way Donny did, it was a major and minor thing, the way, the way he did it. Ray Charles was strictly minor.”

Shorty’s band, Central Avenue, provides  him with solid, tight backing. They open up with some blues and a touch of funk. Among  the members of Central Avenue is guitarist Terry Joseph DeRouen, a New Orleans native who has played with Etta James, Big Mama Thornton and Joe Turner, and recently recorded behind Lowell Fulson for Bullseye Blues. Tony Taylor handles the keyboards, Howard Deere from Lubbock, Texas is on bass and Paul Michael Lopez is the drummer. DeRouen and Deere both ” take vocals while warming up an audience. While they have not been on his albums, Shorty is hoping to be able to use them on at least some of his next album. “I got a few things that I'm gonna do. I got one tune called “What is the World Without a Woman.” That's one I got. And then I' got another one I wrote called “What Are We Gonna Do Now”, and what else I got. I wrote a tune called “Santa Cruz.” I can’t think about all the stuff I git written out.”  Whatever he records, it is certain to be an album for blues lovers  wait for. Hopefully, we'll get a taste of Central Avenue in the studio in addition to the Black Top studio crew.

This article appeared in the Winter 1994 National Capital Blues Quarterly, a short-lived publication of the DC Blues Society.

Here is his recording of “(I Love You) More Than You'll Ever Know.”