Acoustic stringman to Midge Ure, JC Grimshaw at Totland © The Grimshaws

1990s Menu

The research for Isle of Wight Rock, the book, made us new friends and opened our ears to a diverse range of Island musicians. To complete our trinity of interviews of blues based musicians Vic King visited Poet's Cottage on Saturday, May 7th, 1994 to talk to the Grimshaws.

A visit to Poet's Cottage

Vic King meets the Grimshaws

Way back in the eighties Angelina and her brother Jean Claude Grimshaw abandoned techno rock for the earthy charm of acoustic based music. Island residents Pete Hogman and Dick Taylor's roots were in the electric South Side Chicago blues whereas their younger soulmates have returned to the circus and vaudeville circuit tunes of the the 1880s, early 1900s. Whatever your preference the blues is alive and kicking all the way from Cephas Howard's Arreton Barn to Ventnor's Spyglass Inn.

Until America's depression wiped them clean, medicine tent and minstrel shows "barnstormed from settlement to township to plantation, from Florida to Fort Worth, from North Carolina to New Orleans and from Missouri to Mexico." (Story of the Blues by Paul Oliver). A line of 'classic' blues singers trod the boards in those dusky tents lit by the pale light of gasoline lanterns. The weaker singers sought the megaphone but Gertrude Ma Rainey would holler over a rough jazz ensemble, a jug band or a blues guitarist. Blind Blake neatly picking out impeccable ragtime piano tunes or the poignant strident slide of Tampa Red. Whilst Ma Rainey stayed queen of the tent shows the younger Bessie Smith rose to 'Empress of the Blues' across America's black theatre circuit.

A century after Bessie Smith's birth, successive generations continue to pick up the torch to light up their own performances. In the sixties it was Janis Joplin who substituted Bessie's brawling, gin swilling image for hard drugs and paid the price. A few thousand miles East, and a quarter of a century later, Angelina Grimshaw is returning to the source. Whilst Janis Joplin welded her blues drenched wail to pyschedelic rock, Angelina leans towards the acoustic purity of the late and very fine English blues singer Jo-Ann Kelly.

Angelina's voice mines the nuance and swagger of the great American blueswomen from Bessie Smith to Memphis Minnie. Her step is lit by the guitar picking, bottleneck stinging style of her brother JC. A set from their Root Sap duo is far from a dry history lesson. If you close your eyes you can almost smell the kerosene lamps.

Angelina and JCs love of acoustic music that stretches from the blues to all kinds of Carribean influences flows from their parents home, Poets Cottage. Vic King received a warm welcome from John Rufus Grimshaw and Sue Kim Grimshaw when he visited at short notice one Saturday in May of 1994. These are his impressions that day:

"John Lytle had unfortunately been forced to call off our planned interview that morning so I arrived in Ryde with no fixed plans. I rang Angelina and explained the situation. 'I'm in the middle of doing something, but come around for coffee, and we'll sort it out,' she invited. When I arrived an indie band were busy recording upstairs and when Angelina needed to rejoin the recording session she said 'Dad will chat to you for hours.'

J Rufus Grimshaw unfolded how his children came to draw their fire from early American blues music. J. Rufus, had grown up on a soft fruit and poultry farm at Swanmore in rural Hampshire.

"Early on I always remember it being Spring and Summer. There lovely old appletrees. My father would be walking around in his serviceman's trousers. He was a Bohemian square. Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee almost sums up my childhood, although I didn't have a sister. I had aunts. Sadly then we entered into this attitudal winter, an early to bed, early to rise work ethic."

John Rufus described how he recently returned to a Swanmore Village School re-union. Much had changed:

"The men were soberly dressed in jumpers, ties and slacks, the more material side of life seemed important to them. I turned up in a straw hat with daffodils in. Your life is every time that you've gone for a walk in the country, or smelt a rose."

The harsh reality of life in the country clearly reflected on the manner which John Rufus brought his own children up. "I thoroughly encouraged JC. I tried to base his childhood on how I would have like mine to have been. He was in rags and tatters with an excellent train set."

Angelina and JC grew up with the benefit of their father's musical influences:

"I was brought up on an extremely heavy diet of English folk clubs. I was influenced by people like the Watersons, Martin Carthy, Pentangle and Steeleye Span. I used to sing them to sleep with folk songs when they were kids. I would go up at 7.30 and still be there at 10.30.

I used to sing traditional folk songs like the Herring Song, John Barleycorn, Byker Hill and Jones' Ale, that was the ultimate, their actual song. They never went to bed without that song. If I wasn't around Kim had to sing it to them. They would get upset if she got the accents wrong in the folk songs even at that age."

John Rufus met Sue Kim in Bognor where their first child Angelina was born. "We got bombed out of our flat in the middle of the season. We then moved to Leicester where JC was born. Kim ran a restaurant there and I used to sing in the folk clubs in Leicester. My intention was to get out of Leicester as soon as possible. We were heading for Cornwall when we came to the Island in 1975."

John Rufus tales highlighted how his children had gravitated from rock'n'roll to acoustic music:

"JC got into music from the age of nine. It gave me the opportunity to go back to rock'n'roll. I bought a lot of early rock'n'roll stuff like the Coasters. I didn't have the opportunity to listen to records when I was that age. Although Swanmore was an upper middle class area we didn't have electricity in the village when I was a boy and there we didn't have a record player.

I bought JC records. He was coming out of heavy metal and Dire Straits by the age of fourteen. I had bought him his first guitar, an acoustic small bodied Honer at the age of nine. At the age of eleven he had an Antara acoustic. He was very intelligent. He didn't want to go on to the electric too early.

The following year for his twelth birthday I bought him a Music Man Sabre 2. It cost £500, a bloody fortune. He was at Bishop Lovett school at the time. He used to have 'JC Grimshaw plays a Music Man 2' in red letters on his Harrington jacket. Angelina had an electric guitar, a Fender Telecaster when she was fourteen.

JC was playing guitar all the time. He liked Dr. Feelgood, Jethro Tull and Dire Straits. While still playing the electric guitar he was looking for something new. He started to play a mixture of skiffle and jazz. He took to it like a duck to water. He learned so fast. The first song that he wrote 'Leaf On A Tree' was written two days after he got the guitar.

JC incorporated music into everything at school, into essays and into Religious Education. He would write about characters from the Bible like Paul being on the road. He was 13 and a half when he first saw the Unity Stompers at Priory Bay. It was an absolute charge. He worked out how to play Jardah by Kid Ory. He said 'This is better than rock'n'roll.'

The first group that JC was in was the Swinging Shitbuckets and then the Blue Kazoo Combo who were a great influence on JC and Angelina. I bought JC a banjo. We would go out to folk clubs at the Liberal Club, Sloop, Anglesea, Simeon Arms and the Partlands Hotel. Keith Newnham and the South Wight Spasm Band were another big influence. They linked together skiffle and jazz, everything JC was working on."

At high school JC had led JC and the DA's, later followed by Sabre Wolf, Midnight Soldiers and Dan Damage. From this came the multi-talented Chuff Train Hot Dogs which featured a host of great players. In the mid eighties while everyone else was synthesising away JC and Angelina had a whole mess of different influences in their melting pot. Folk, skiffle, blues, jazz and Hawaiian music pulling them father from the banal mama heartbeat.

By now Angelina's raw, earthy, vocal style had been honed during, her time at Southampton and Cheltenham Universities. The bring your guitar and get up to sing pull of the folk clubs inspired their direction.

"They discovered jug band music through Keith Newnham, just as jug bands themselves had been discovered by musicians blowing beer bottles to see what sound they made. With JC the blues came from the bottleneck rather than the bottleneck came from the blues, he was obsessed with the bottleneck."

From the start of the 1990s JC and Angelina formed a duo called Root Sap which would be augmented by Jake 'Shabby' Rodrigues. In January, 1994 JC and Angelina formed a Cajun band called The Dance Preachers which featured Angelina Grimshaw vocals and guitar, JC Grimshaw mandolin, guitar, ukulele, Jake 'Shabby' Rodriques accordian, banjo, harmonica, vocals, Paul Armfield bass and vocals, Chris Phillips drums and percussion. Angelina Grimshaw explained:

"There's lots of self penned stuff and traditional covers, good timey lyrics. We've added our own interpretations. My dad J Rufus Grimshaw has written most of the stuff.

The Root Sap duo, JC and myself remains the main outfit. We started it two years ago. We're playng a mixture of blues, country, jazz and Hawaian music. We focus on this for survival. There are some offshoots. There's going to be an amalgamation with Michael Messer, a blues slide guitarist from Slough and a Bracknell band called the Kennett Sheiks for a gig in Bracknell. It will be all national instruments. Root Sap will also be combining with the Mike Messer Band, we haven't got a name for that combination yet. It will be blues with a different slant, maybe slightly more commercial. I don't know what's going down yet. It will be all original stuff. There are a lot of things bubbling away. Michael has got a lot of connections."

Angelina hopes to play on a session dedicated to the late Jo-Ann Kelly. Kelly was one of Britain's finest and neglected blues singers. She played benefits during the 1970s for the great blueswoman Memphis Minnie whose belting style is lovingly recalled when Angelina sings Chauffer Blues.

"I am hoping to do a track on a Jo-Ann Kelly tribute album. She passed away three years ago. People like Bonnie Raitt have also been asked. It will be for charity, and it depends on funding. There's no real deadline for it. I am also hoping to go to Switzerland in August. A TV crew are going to be brought in and I would like to do four Blind Willie Johnson numbers in a cathedral. I've sent off a demo tape."

Angelina's energy and commitment, like her brother Jean Claude's remains solid. One minute contemplating Jo-Ann Kelly tributes, the next revealing a penchant for religious singer Blind Willie Johnson who probably died forgotten after traversing the southern states of America sixty years ago with Blind Willie McTell.

"Dad is into early jug band music. It's homing into things. Michael (Messer) has collected some stuff, it's all part of the research. I like early jazz, Django Reinhardt, barrel house singers, Vaudeville jazz singers. I haven't dabbled too much with Billie Holiday yet.

We try to keep the management on our own level. It's amazing how much you can do on your own back. We pick up a lot at festivals. People there run blues gigs on the mainland. We go out with our package and they take us on. We've just come back from a Festival in Dresden. Buddy Guy's brother Phil Guy was playing. We were the only UK band there. There were lots of local East German bands. People there really appreciate things. They seem to have more respect. It's very healthy there, more of a scene. Things get triggered off, agents come up from bigger German festivals. I think that we're beginning to get better now we're older. As well, unplugged music is becoming more accepted. People realise that specialising in these styles we are not necessarily freaks against nature.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Bessie Smith's birth. I went up to a tribute gig in Burnley. We did a session in a pub, all Bessie Smith songs. Her bith date was April 15th, when we were in Dresden so I did something there to mark the occasion. She had the right voice, she has an edge. Every time I hear her music I get shivers up the spine. She was one of a kind, such a natural voice."

How did you hear about Bessie Smith?

"It just happened. I heard Beryl Bryden on the Island. Friends lent me albums. It just mesmerised me. I couldn't understand the words and pronounciations at first. You than start to trace other things, what they were going through. The main ingredients are feel and application. It's releasing something that's down there that you can't put it down as sentences, it comes out as a song. It's honest, uncomplicated music to do with emotion. Having said that, I don't want to be a carbon copy of Bessie Smith. I'm not living in the twenties and thirties, I'm a nineties girl. It's about making the music grow, not letting it stagnate.

Not many people know about this music. I've got a bit of a commitment to it. It's a good springboard. Jo-Ann Kelly's not around anymore, it's important for me to promote and develop it. It's very personal. My own writing is not flowing in that early Blues feel, it's going more country. I've got an old vocal technique. If you listen to someone like Bonnie Raitt she's got a down home voice. I've got the grit and gravel voice. I have to extend what Bessie Smith was doing into what's going down now."

Vic King interviewed John Rufus Grimshaw and Angelina Grimshaw (Saturday, 7th May, 1994)

Since this interview was conducted JC Grimshaw and Jake Rodriques have auditioned for Midge Ure's backing band going on the road with the Scottish singer as a trio. Midge's joke when he introduced the band on stage was that they were named the wrong way around. Grimshaw fitting Jake's Norman Wisdom dress sense and Rodriques apt for JC's oriental cum New Mexican persona. JC booked Midge Ure for a gig in 1996 at the Medina Theatre which was a sell out.

See the Catalogue section of the main menu for a list of albums on the Grimshaw's Village Bike label.

1990s Menu