Teen right at home with blues masters

By Cori Bolger
cbolger@jackson.gannett.com

Daniel "Slick" Ballinger sports a fedora and alligator skin dress shoes and calls himself old-fashioned.

And, at 19, he's right.

"He has a little bit of everybody in there," says Clay Wright, who came to Champs Bar & Grill in Batesville Saturday night to hear Ballinger play guitar and sing.

"He's a young guy with an old sound, and there's not a lot of 'em," Wright says. "He can stand with the old folks."

After picking up a guitar as a 15-year-old while living in Raleigh, N.C., Ballinger knew the north hill country blues was his future.

He got his first taste of north Mississippi a year later when his mother brought him for a visit. Then, the following summer, he lived with fife master Otha Turner in his Gravel Springs farmhouse.

He picked peas by day and played house parties and juke joints by night.

" 'When I eat, you eat,' that's what he told me," Ballinger recalls. "We hit it off fast. He was one of the best friends I ever had. When I left, he said, 'Slick, I sure hate to see you go.' He was like my granddaddy."

Turner died last February. A few months later, on the day of his high school graduation, Ballinger packed his bags and left Raleigh for Como.

"It was tough because he was getting older, and he's quite a fine and responsible young man but he was still a child leaving home," says his mother, Darlene Cramer. "It was expected, though. He told me two years before he went to Mississippi that he knew that's where he belonged, he just knew it.

"The people there became like his family, so I knew he had people that cared about him."

Ballinger ended up studying the blues under the best of the best, including Pinetop Perkins, R.L. Burnside, Calvin "Fuzz" Jones and Hubert Sumlin.

"He was askin' me a lot of questions when we were playin' together," Sumlin says from his home in Milwaukee, Wis. "If it was just right, like how young people do. He's young, he's a good musician and his life is in front of him. He's gonna be where he's supposed to be."

But the atmosphere doesn't matter. North hill country still rules.

On stage, Ballinger's band, Reverend Slick and the Soul Blues Boyz, plunge into a long, hypnotic jam with Ballinger plucking his guitar strings in tune to Kenney Kimbrough's drum beat.

When the tempo picks up, Ballinger falls to his knees, then rises and struts to the dance floor, shimmying and shaking with the music.

"When I was a catfish swimming in the seaaaa," Ballinger wails, "All the women be chasin' after meeee..."

At the song's break, band member Terry Bean takes over, sliding his silver harmonica into a haunting, ancient medley.

The bartender leaves his post to watch the spectacle — even in the home of the blues, this type is hard to come by.

"What we're doin' is different," Ballinger explains. "Everybody else be playin' city blues, we playin' country blues."

In the past, the north hill country blues — a raw, primitive style — was rarely embraced or understood outside of Mississippi.

Nationally-recognized bluesmen tended to be urban artists with electrical instruments, explains Bill Ferris, the senior associate director at the Center for the Study of the American South.

That was before Martin Scorsese's blues documentary aired on PBS last year and generated a buzz around the roots of modern day music.

"There has always been a strong interest in traditional country blues," says Ferris from his office at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Now, more than ever, the blues are increasingly visible. Americans are trying to learn more about traditional music, and they're appreciating it."

Such appreciation is reflected in the number of awards Ballinger has garnered over the past two years.

In 2002, he won the solo division of the Cape Fear Blues Challenge held in Wilmington, N.C., and last January, his band took second place honors at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis.

They were the only group to get a standing ovation three nights in a row.

When he entertains at hometown fish fries and Turner's annual picnic, the scene turns electric. Elderly townspeople, who are otherwise quiet and calm, kick up dirt, wave their arms and dance to the music.

Rick Shaw, who met Ballinger in Memphis a few years back, came to one such performance in Como. He was awe-struck.

"It just blew my mind," he says. "They all love him. When he's there, he's like their son. It's something to see and it makes the hair stand up on your arms."

Shaw, from West Palm Beach, Fla., is trying to get his music on the radio to "raise some eyebrows.

"Some people say, 'Oh, he's a phony, he's trying to be black, he dresses like it,' " Shaw says. "But you talk to him and he's about as real as you'll ever find."

On Sunday mornings, Ballinger plays with the choir at the New Salem Missionary Baptist Church in Oxford, a traditionally black congregation.

"From day one I was accepted by different peoples," Ballinger says. "I ain't never had no problem."