Aug. 15, 1970: Lucky Peterson

 

Here’s treat for Thanksgiving – what might have been the first major article about this artist. Many more articles would be written about him in The News and elsewhere before his untimely passing back in May. 

Aug. 15, 1970 

Lucky Plays the Blues

(And He’s Only 4) 

        By the time the Lucky Peterson Blues Band hits the stage at the Unity Festival in War Memorial Stadium, the pattern is already set.

        Small crowd, big echo, big football field between the performers and the audience. Complete inertia. It’ll take somebody like James Brown to break it and he isn’t due till 9.

        The band shows up about 3 – all wearing the gold shirts and black pants they made an expedition to buy Friday. Bass player Mark Freer, just recruited from Detroit, is fidgety. He’d be happier in jeans, he says.

* * *

AND THEN there’s Lucky. Lucky’s got this red shirt and a white suit with a gold paisley pattern that one of his mother’s friends made.

        Now the thing you have to keep remembering is that Lucky Peterson is a 4-year-old.

        He just happens to be probably the best 4-year-old blues organist in, well, the world. And not just good for his age. Really good.

        Off the stage, he’s just a normal kid. When it comes to talking to strangers, he’s sometimes even shy.

* * *

FINALLY, it’s time to go on. Except Charles Bailey, the organist and pianist, has disappeared. James (Jim-Jim) Mark, the drummer, goes to look for him and Lucky’s father, James Peterson, guitarist, singer and leader, gets mad.

        Charles is found. The band is a little late now and James Peterson, who likes everything to go just right, gives Charles a piece of his mind backstage.

        Emcee Roosevelt Tucker comes out and says: “OK. Are you ready for showtime? Are you ready for a little blues? (Somebody in the crowd whoops.) This is the Lucky Peterson Band.”

* * *

LUCKY stays backstage with the Peterson lawyer for the first couple numbers. His pants are too loose and when he hitches them up, the gold chains on his jacket come unhooked.

        “Where are your kids, Mr. Rabow?” Lucky asks the lawyer.

        “They’re all in California,” the lawyer tells him. “That’s a long way away. Someday you’re going to be going there.”

        The band does some bouncy blues and the afternoon starts to feel a little better.

* * *

“ONE OF MY songs is called ‘Blues Is All I See,’” James Peterson said two days earlier in his club, The Governor’s Inn on Sycamore, where Lucky and the band play five nights a week.

        “I play two kinds of music – slow blues and fast blues. Some Negro comes in here and asks for jazz and I tell him you’re definitely in the wrong house. There’s nothin’ in the world I like more than blues. This is a fact now.”

        Now Roosevelt Tucker comes back and introduces Lucky. Lucky steps out and takes a little bow. Charles moves from organ to piano.

        Doggone, you can hardly see Lucky behind that big organ. They should have turned it sideways. Sounds good, though. Hey, there’s his downward run from that high C.

* * *

“LUCKY started on drums when he was 2,” James Peterson said back in the club. “But when Bill Doggett came in here with his organ, Lucky said he want to be like Bill Doggett.”

        Now James has had a band here for about five years with Charles playing organ all along. He got Charles to help Lucky with the organ and pretty soon Lucky could play every song on the jukebox.

* * *

A YEAR ago, he started playing with the band. And he doesn’t just play the music. He understands it. James will play da-da-da or something and Lucky will fill it in or finish it off.

        In the club, the reaction to Lucky is all smiles. The sort people give when they feel good about a kid. And Lucky puts on a little show.

        There he goes now, except nobody in those stadium stands can probably see it. He climbs up on the bench, sticks his right toe on a note and holds it while he’s playing something else with his hands on the other end of the scale.

        There’s a false start for “Ode to Billie Joe.” Mark the bass player says later he thinks the echo threw Lucky off.

        For some reason, James doesn’t decide to do the song Lucky sings – “When I Grow Up I Wanta Play the Blues.” There’s no mike for Lucky, maybe that’s why.

        That’s the song they were going to New York City to record with Willie Dixon, one of the giants of the blues. Willie Dixon, in turn, will sell it to the record company that gives him the best deal.

* * *

“IN 90 DAYS, this kid should be No. 1,” James Peterson says. “There’s nobody I know this age doin’ what he’s doin’. And if there’s anybody younger, I’d like to know where they are.”

        Willie Dixon heard about Lucky through Sam Lay, a drummer best known to white audiences when he played with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Sam Lay would have been playing with Lucky in the stadium except he’s sick and he’s still resting.

        The set ends rather abruptly with Roosevelt Tucker materializing to say: “Let’s hear it for the Lucky Peterson Band.”

        The band drifts off to the stands and the inertia continues. They have to play the club tonight, but first there’s James Brown. Everybody wants to hear James Brown. He’ll make everything all right. 

And now the box/sidebar: 

Lucky Since Birth 

        Lucky Peterson’s name isn’t really Lucky. But he’s been lucky since he was born Dec. 13, 1965. (* see note below)

        “My wife and I have another boy, 13,” explains Lucky’s father, James Peterson, “and in between we lost four girls. The doctor told us we just couldn’t have no girls. It was the blood or something.

        “So when my wife went to the hospital, I didn’t even call there ‘cause I didn’t want to hear the bad news. I just went out in the street for a while.

“The next day I go down to the hospital and the nurse says: ‘You Mr. Peterson?’ And I say yes and she says you got a seven pound some ounce boy.

“Then she brought him to the window and this kid wasn’t in an incubator and he wasn’t sick. He was perfect. His real name is Judge Kenneth, but I’ve been callin’ him Lucky ever since that day he was born.”

 (* Lucky Peterson’s Wikipedia page lists his birthdate as Dec. 13, 1964. The 1965 date obviously came from his father. Was he wrong?)