* * *
Cedar Falls - There was once a certain kind of blues music. It had its roots in New Orleans, surrounded by the energy of people and jazz and Louis Armstrong, but tempered by heat and that slow steadiness of southern country living. Into this environment came Eddie Bowles, taught to be useful in every endeavor and work hard. But he loved playing blues and jazz on homemade instruments with his siblings until his parents caved and got them proper instruments. Bowles, who died in 1984 at the age of 100 in Cedar Falls, taught several musicians in this area along the way, but led a simple life in North Cedar, working odd jobs and staying largely out of the limelight. This history has been reconstructed thanks to archival information from "The Courier", the now-defunct Cedar Falls Record, the Cedar Falls Historical Society and various acquaintances and friends of the late musician.
Born in Lafayette, La., in 1884, Bowles eventually studied under the greats - including playing in a couple orchestras and with the great Armstrong at the turn of the century - and married in Louisiana in 1911. He might have stayed in that environment forever, becoming one of the greats himself. But he wasn't making enough money to support himself and his wife. In 1914 or thereabouts, lured by the prospect of work, he found himself in Cedar Falls. The city needed people knowledgeable about paving to put in the first brick streets, and Bowles had that knowledge. He was paid $7.50 per day for the work. "'Take you out of the mud and put you on pavement' - I remember him saying that," said Phil Nusbaum, a musician who played often with Bowles in Cedar Falls. Once the streets were done, Bowles did any other kind of work there was to do: He's been a cook, a railroad foreman, a barrelmaker, a fruit peddler, a tree trimmer and an auto mechanic. He worked at John Deere for 22 years.
He told "The Courier" in a 1984 article celebrating his 100th birthday he got his work ethic from his father, who he said told him: "Don't be a one-armed man." Rosemary Beach, the former executive director of the Cedar Falls Historical Society, also recalls Bowles saying that when she interviewed him. "What it meant was (Bowles' parents) didn't want anybody who didn't know how to do lots of stuff," she said. Bowles told the Record in 1978 he was taught to be humble. "My mother raised us to learn to respect other people, so we would be respected," he told the Record. Beach recalled respect helped Bowles, a black man, get a foothold in the overwhelmingly white, mostly Danish community of Cedar Falls more than 100 years ago. To Beach, who said she barely saw any black people back then, that spoke volumes. "The businessmen of Cedar Falls liked Eddie so much that they paid for his wife's ticket from the South," Beach said. "That's one of those stories that resonates with you." His wife, Sarah Blanche Bowles, and he lived in a small, one-room house on the north side of the Cedar River in Cedar Falls nearly all of their lives. When Bowles wasn't working, he was taking care of Sarah, who was frequently ill, by many accounts, though she lived to be 95. There is no record of them having children.
Most in the Cedar Valley who remember Bowles, however, are musicians who remember the man who could pick out blues songs on his guitar, all from memory, all night long. "I can play until midnight tomorrow and never play all the things I know," he told the Record in 1978. Rick Chase, a musician who also took several photographs of Bowles for The Courier decades ago, remembers Bowles' playing style: "old-style blues, finger-picking blues, kind of like you'd hear from any of the old Southern masters." Nusbaum said Bowles was a "two-finger picker," which was a different style than many musicians were used to hearing or seeing. "His repertoire was the popular dance-hall music of the day," Nusbaum said. Bob Long, also a musician, said Bowles was fond of wearing bib overalls and remembers Bowles playing blues at the Cedar Falls Folk Festivals in the early 1970s and on various stages in the area, playing solo or with musicians like Rush Cleveland, Steve Turner and Jim Price.
The few audio and video recordings that exist of Bowles' playing depict a slow, swaying, finger-picking 12-bar blues style. In the "Eddie's Blues" or "Bowles' Blues" recording - Bowles never got around to naming it officially - Bowles chews on the lyrics in that way that comes with being nine decades old, but his melody stays in perfect pitch, high and clear like other Mississippi Delta blues recordings from the early part of the 20th century. "He played a kind of Ragtime finger-picking style on some numbers, and more of a blues finger-picking on others," historian Art Rosenbaum, who interviewed Bowles in the 1970s, said in an interview with a blues blogger. Musicians came to appreciate what they called his unique style, though Bowles didn't think he was so different. "That used to be how they all would sit down on the stage and sing the blues," he told an interviewer in an early 1980s audio recording. "You'd sing a piece and say something, and somebody else would say something and put something else in there - that's the way the blues was 'compilated.'
"You'd go to say something, 'Yeah, so and so and so,' and then you stop over here, 'Yeah, so and so and so and so,'" Bowles said, singing it. "That's the way that went, all the time."
(Amie Steffeneicher - "Paving the way: Brought to lay brick, Eddie Bowles taught a generation of blues musicians")