Ishman Bracey was born in Byram, Mississippi in
1901 and began playing music when he was a teenager. H. C. Speir,
a talent scout who owned a music store in Jackson, Mississippi, heard
Bracey singing Shaggy Hound one Saturday morning on Mill Street. Speir said,
“That will go over,” and arranged a recording
session with Victor. In Memphis on February 4, 1928, the day
after his friend, Tommy Johnson, cut Big
Road Blues, Bracey recorded Shaggy Hound under the name
of Saturday Blues. Both songs became classics. A couple of years
later, Ishman again recorded, this time for Paramount Records in
Grafton, Wisconsin. Ishman and Tommy along with their friend,
Charlie McCoy, were an integral part of the Jackson music scene for
many years. Late in the 1940s, Bracey joined the church and in
1950 became a preacher. Though he played gospel songs on his
guitar after that Ishman Bracey never again recorded.
Downtown Jackson is noisy late this Friday
afternoon. It's about "get-off" time. We find a
bench for Eddie to sit and perform Ishman's Saturday Blues, on the corner of
Mill Street & Hamilton. The traffic noise makes it difficult
to hear well enough to get the guitar in tune, but when Eddie finally
does, we have to wait for a few four wheeled boom boxes to finish
dancing around the block. We turn on the recorder just as an
airliner passes overhead. Halfway through the recording a slow
moving train rattles past on the tracks the other side of Mill Street.
Naturally we'd thought, like many of the old blues players before
us, that things would get easier when we got into town.
