Bob Musgrave called this morning with the sad news: Chuck Nevitt, the 59-year-old founder of the Dallas Blues Society and the man who rediscovered and recorded a handful of local blues greats who'd become forgotten footnotes, has died. Facebook is filled with heartbroken farewells from Dallas and Austin bluesmen stunned by his sudden departure.
Mike Flanigan calls him "the Clifford Antone of Dallas." Adds Pat Boyack, "I hope he gets the respect he deserves for putting out some of the most important blues records of the '90s and representing Dallas. The man knew his stuff and was passionate about it. "
"No one promoted the blues in Dallas more than Chuck -- ever," says Musgrave, who was playing guitar around in local blues clubs long before he appeared as getaway driver Bob Mapplethorpe in 1996's Bottle Rocket. Dallas, he says, is a city infatuated with pop culture -- the temporary, the fleeting. Not Nevitt. When it came to the blues, "Dallas' indigenous sound," says Musgrave, "Chuck was one of the very few people trying to make something happen."
"We're all still in shock over it," says Brian "Hash Brown" Calway, who first met Nevitt at the long-gone Nash Street House juke joint near Lemmon and Inwood back in 1983. Calway and Nevitt spoke at least once a day -- including Saturday morning, just hours before Chuck's wife Sharon found him dead in his easy chair, likely the victim of a heart attack. "It's really a shocker," says Calway, "really a sad thing."
When Nevitt and Calway first shook hands, Chuck was driving a Yellow Cab and spending his free time poring over microfiche at the downtown Dallas library, looking for ads and articles in local black-owned newspapers showcasing musicians time had forgotten. That's where Nevitt discovered Zuzu Bollin, the Frisco-born bluesman who'd recorded a few songs in the early 1950s -- among them the immortal "Why Don't You Eat Where You Slept Last Night" released on Torch in 1951 -- and seemingly disappeared.
Most folks thought Bollin had died, but Nevitt went looking for him anyway. Calway says sax legend Buster Smith told Nevitt he was still alive; a Buddy staffer told him where to find Bollin -- in a State-Thomas flophouse, a crack-addicted pants-presser at a dry cleaners who'd become a shadow of a shadow of his former self. Nevitt moved Bollin into an apartment on Prescott Avenue near Lemmon Avenue, in a complex Nevitt was managing. Calway also lived there; so too bluesman Jim Suhler and others.
"We had our own community right over there," Calway says. "But he didn't want it to be just a blues 'club.' He wanted it to be more than that. He said, 'I want to create something that will have a lasting effect,' so he decided to have the Dallas Blues Society record label, a for-profit label -- which is a misnomer when it comes to any blues label. That got the whole ball rolling."
In 1989 Nevitt took Bollin to Sumet-Bernet Studios, gathered Roomful of Blues-man Duke Robillard and some local all-stars (Hash Brown, Sumter Bruton, Doyle Bramhall and jazzers Marchel Ivery and David "Fathead" Newman) and recorded Texas Bluesman, Bollin's first-ever full-length record. It remains one of the greatest records ever recorded in Dallas, regardless of genre.
Bollin died a year after its release, in October 1990, of lung cancer. In his book In Search of the Blues: A Journey to the Soul of Black Texas, former Dallas Morning News-man Bill Minutaglio wrote that "Chuck Nevitt lost a friend" when Bollin died ... "and all of his money." He swore he'd never invest his heart, soul and wallet in another musician; he couldn't afford to. But then, through his photographer-videographer-partner Scott Ferris, he met Henry Qualls from Elmo, Texas, and broke that vow. The result was Blues from Elmo, Texas, released in 1995 to universal critical acclaim. Qualls, who played Dallas regularly before his death in 2003, was as close to a time machine as any blues fan could ever get.
Nevitt released other important records too -- Big Al Dupree's Swings the Blues, also in 1995; Denny Freeman's A Tone for My Sins, which came out two years later and is now long out of print; and Johnny Moeller's Johnny's Blues Aggregation in 2001. He also recorded with Doyle Bramhall and his boy, but all that remains of those sessions are a few minutes leaked to YouTube.
"He did it because he loved it," says Calway of his late friend. "He didn't do it to make money. His main aim was to put out some good records that would stand the test of time."
