Eddie Kirk/The Hawg Part 1/The Complete Stax-Volt Recordings 1959-68/Stax
Eddie Kirkland/Love Don’t Love Nobody/All Around The World/Deluge 1992
Eddie Kirkland-Christine Oldman/Our Love So Beautiful/Where You Get Your Sugar?/Deluge 1995
Eddie Kirkland-Foghat/In My Dreams/Last Train Home/Foghat 2010

No one really knows what caused 87-year-old bluesman Eddie Kirkland to U-turn his old Ford wagon smack in front of a Greyhound bus, east of Homosassa. He played the last show in his 82-year performing career – a private corporate cigar gig – and left Dunedin Brewery’s parking lot at 1 a.m., Feb. 27. “Eddie never stayed in motels. Always slept in his car,” said guitar man Sarasota Slim, who provided Eddie’s backup band that night.
Eddie’s manager, Hedy Langdon, tried to explain the man’s addiction to the road. “Eddie couldn’t think till he got on the road. He would stop at a rest stop, close his eyes, then just get up and start driving until things came clear to him. The road was his life.” If so, then Eddie must have noticed he was going south on Highway 98 instead of north to his home in Macon, Ga. First break in the median, the man they called “Gypsy of the Blues” whipped the wagon around. It was 8:30 a.m.

The Greyhound pushed the mangled mess 200 yards. The radio was playing full blast as passengers pulled the dying man from the wreck. “Loud radio,” said Hedy. “That’s Eddie. Just being himself.”
Two guitars were shattered. No big deal. “Once we played Jannus Landing in the ’80s and he felt his guitar was too light,” remembers bassist Vinnie Seplesky. “So he got another guitar, tore the back off it and nailed — not taped , not glued — NAILED it to his guitar. And the show rocked!”

Any stereotype of the classic American blues artist wilts next to the life of Eddie Kirkland, who spent over 30 years hanging around St. Petersburg’s healthy blues scene. Born in Jamaica in 1923 to a 12-year-old mother, he grew up in a lowdown shack, working with his mother in the Alabama cotton fields. “She always paid me, even though I was just 5,” he told me back in 1983. “That’s how I learned business.”

He spent his nickels on harmonicas and his boyhood playing “for the old black folks at the Dothan train depot. I’d be down with a crowd of people, singin the blues, dancin’ for ‘em, doin’ hambone,” he remembered. “I’d come back with the money in my pocket. ‘Workin’ age of 5, man!”

If he heard music late at night, Eddie would climb out the window and go to it. He would return in the morning light to a mother who tolerated a son who could play the guitar with his tongue or a beer bottle and do back flips off the porch without missing a note.

Eddie left home at 12 to join Silas Green’s Minstrel Show, where he met Diamond Teeth Mary Smith. Five years later, he found himself working by day on a Ford assembly line and by night in the streets of Detroit, where he met legendary blues rocker John Lee Hooker. Eddie was Hooker’s bandleader during the early ’50s. The two had a rocky relationship; Hooker made the exuberant Eddie sit down in a chair to play. The ferocious stomping lion that was Eddie Kirkland was too much competition for Hooker, who finally left Eddie at Milledgeville’s Shady Rest Club and took off for Europe in 1955.

Depressed, Eddie sat at the Shady Rest bar sipping a coke (he did not drink alcohol) and was confronted by a drunken patron waving a gun. Eddie pulled his knife and the attacker died at the bar. Eddie’s first single, “Done Somebody Wrong” (later recorded by the Allman Brothers) was charting. The judge told his mother that when a man comes down from Detroit and kills a local Georgia boy, he’s GOT to do time: three years’ hard labor on the Georgia chain gang.

After prison, Kirkland moved to Macon, where he began working with Ruth Brown, Little Richard, Ben King, Little Johnnie Taylor. He toured with Joe Tex, Joe Simon, Sam & Dave and recorded albums with Wayne Cochran’s Band and Booker T’s MGs. Finally, Otis Redding hired him as bandleader.

In 1970, with another hit record, “The Hawg,” soaring up the charts, he took the stage at Eatonville, GA and turned to give his drummer a signal. A bullet from a madman’s gun went through the back of his head and came out between his eyes: “It was a black club. Some dude walked in the door shouting. First bullet hit me. Second bullet hit a lady sitting near the bandstand. Killed her. Right there Bam!”

Seven days in a coma and, amazingly, no brain damage, but complications from the injury plagued Kirkland the rest of his life. He covered the scars in his head with a signature turban. Of course, he ignored doctor’s orders and began to play in blues shows all over the Northeast, gaining the attention of Don Kirshner, New York Times critic Robert Palmer, Rolling Stone magazine and Mick Jagger, who invited Eddie to open a few of the Stones’ U.S. shows.

In the early ’80s, an old station wagon, with a TV and all manner of antennas, amps, guitar cases and blankets rolled up to the Stuffed Pepper on Central Avenue. In a town filled with bluesy characters with names like Rock Bottom, Diddy Wah Diddy, Reverend Boneshaker and Little Juke, he jammed with and thrilled them all. “Musicians would try to be polite and suggest that he might be out of tune, but wouldn’t exactly say that. We might say, ‘Ah, Eddie, what tuning is that?’ and he would say, ‘Spanish,’ said Sarasota Slim. “He had another one he called ‘Vegetable.’ I think it was an open D!” [Photo above left right of Kirkland with Jon Puhl at Dave's Aqua Lounge in May, 2005; photo by Stephen Roake.]

“Eddie always told us, ‘You got to scatter your minors.’ We didn’t know what it meant, but we all say it to this day,” says harp master T.C. Carr.

During his last years, there were numerous awards, hospital stays, (open heart surgery) and, in 1998, more tragedy: Eddie’s beloved 15-year-old daughter Monica was raped and murdered in Macon, a crime unsolved. Still the “Road Warrior” kept traveling, still flipping off stages in his 80s, even writing and performing two cuts on Foghat’s 2010 CD.

“There is no way that he could retire. Getting out on that road was something he had to do. It was born in him,” said Hedy Langdon. “He said he would play until his bones were brittle and dust. He could not retire.
“Only a Greyhound bus could take him down. Isn’t that the blues? Had to be a Greyhound. Nothing else could have stopped Eddie Kirkland.”

Eddie Kirkland, one of the original Blues men still bringing himself and the Blues direct to the people. Kirkland, who was born in Jamaica, raised in Alabama from the time he was two till he went off with the Sugar Girls Medicine show at twelve. His teens brought him to Indiana, eventually settling in Detroit. There he polished his Blues to recording status. He toured and recorded with John Lee Hooker for seven and a half years. They made a solid team before parting in the 60's.

Kirkland moved to Georgia, where he was bandleader for Otis Redding. Continuous road tours had him working with Ruth Brown, Little Richard, Ben King, Little Johnnie Taylor and many more greats. In 1962, Kirkland recorded "It's the Blues Man" for Prestige, reissued by Fantasy as a Blues collector's item. Kirkland's hit the "Hawg" recorded by Stax/Volt label earned him national celebrity. The "Hawg" is now available on Atlantic records.

In the early 70's employment for Blues men was hard to come by, but faithful individuals such as Peter Lowry sought out Kirkland and is credited for bringing him back into the circuit. With Lowry and his Trix label, Kirkland recorded "Front and Center" and "The Devil and Other Blues Demons", now available from 32 Blues. At this time Kirkland spent twelve years in the Hudson Valley. There he reinvented his sound, giving his Blues that unrelenting dance beat that has named him the "Energy Man". It is during this time that Kirkland appeared at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, and toured extensively, introducing the Blues to remote areas in Wyoming, Montana, Maine, Turkey, and Greece.

1980 brought a recording by JSP, "Pick up the Pieces", by which Fantastic Records issued the single by the same name. 1983 gave Kirkland a Pulsar recording, "Have Mercy", that has been reissued on Evidence. A meeting at Lincoln Plaza in Massachusetts with Randy Labbe began an association that would produce three albums and many touring dates. "All around the World", on which Hooker appears. "Some Like it Raw", a live performance, and "Where you get your Sugar?"

Kirkland's recording career is difficult to follow, many companies have recorded him and sold his recordings, but his records refuse to be shelved, waiting for the times to catch up to a sound that has never set still. A sound that is like himself, strong, ever creative, sincere, and always living the Blues, demanding to be heard.

Kirkland continues to tour, forty-two weeks of the year between the States and Europe, earning him the title "Gypsy of the Blues". Recently, he recorded his music for Telarc; "Lonely Street" in 1997 and JSP; "Movin On", in 1999. Still any success Eddie Kirkland has enjoyed he has created for himself. His relentless grit, talent, strength of writing, love of entertaining, and devotion to the Blues keeps this man providing a show that should not be missed by anyone!