Cary Baker first met Blind Arvella Gray almost 35 years ago, when he was a budding blues enthusiast attending high school in Wilmette. “I was 15 and one day my father took me down to Maxwell Street,” he says. “There were a lot of street musicians playing at the time, but as soon as we happened upon Arvella, I stopped dead in my tracks. There was something about him that harkened back to field hollers and country blues, stuff you didn’t hear even back then.”
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Gray was born in Somerville, Texas, in 1906, but thanks to his penchant for embellishment, not much else about his life is known for certain. His real name was either James or Walter Dixon, and he claimed that in the 1920s he’d worked for a circus and driven a getaway car for Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang, among other things. He lost his sight in the early 30s, but it’s hard to be sure how–sometimes he said he’d been hit with a shotgun blast during a botched grocery-store holdup, sometimes that he’d been wounded in a fight over a woman at a brothel. Apparently the incident, whatever it was, also cost him the first two fingers on his fret hand. “That’s why he was able to play with a slide, but couldn’t do intricate fingerpicking stuff,” says Baker. “But whenever I asked him about how it had happened, he told the story differently every time.”
Gray had self-released three singles in the mid-60s and been featured on a few compilations, but at that point he hadn’t put out an LP of his own and was willing to accept help from anyone who wanted to give it–even a suburban teenager. Baker knew of a Wilmette label called Birch Records, owned by Dave Wylie, that specialized in prewar country artists, including veterans of WLS’s National Barn Dance like Patsy Montana and Lulu Belle & Scotty. “So I rode my bike over there one day and asked him if he wanted to record Blind Arvella Gray,” says Baker.
In 1984, Baker moved to Los Angeles and went to work for IRS Records. In the mid-90s he founded the PR company Baker/Northrop, and last year he moved on to start a new firm called Conqueroo. Wylie, who was working for the Marshall Field’s books department, stopped releasing new material on Birch in the early 80s, though he continued to re-press old titles and license them to reissue labels like Bear Family; he retired from Field’s in 2003. Meanwhile Gray’s scant recorded output became increasingly hard to find–only six of his songs had ever been released on CD, including two on the 1999 sound track disc for a 1964 Maxwell Street documentary called And This Is Free–and by 2000, copies of his LP were fetching more than $100 apiece when they turned up on eBay. “One day last fall I thought, You know, no one has ever reissued The Singing Drifter, and someone really should,” says Baker. “I should. But I didn’t have a label. But I’ve worked in the record business 21 years and knew enough people to get one started.” To get Gray’s album out on CD, he and his wife, Sharon Bell, launched Conjuroo Recordings last month.
