Before Fred Clayton had a guitar, he played “a stick with a string on it” — a “giant twig” curved and strung like an archer’s bow. He strummed along to the music his mother put on: blues musicians like Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, and Elmore James.
Clayton was born in Birmingham, Ala. in 1958. His mother regularly hosted friends after work. They’d ask Clayton to dance for them, and he’d oblige, his stick guitar a prop to play with. “They’d throw me nickels and pennies,” says Clayton. “I’d save those coins, go to the corner store once a week, and buy myself a lollipop.”
Those were his first gigs. Now Clayton is known as “the Blues Man of Cape Cod.” On Saturday, April 5, Clayton will sing and play a real bass guitar with his band — which he calls “Fred Clayton and the Guitar Slingers” — for Wellfleet Preservation Hall’s Welcome Spring Dance Party.
The band includes Keb Hutchings, a 2020 Nauset High graduate, and Alex Pashoian on guitar and Christian McCarthy on drums. Saxophonist Peter Murray will join for this gig. Clayton is lead vocalist and bassist.
“We don’t just play blues,” he says. “We play jazz, funk, soul, improvisation.” Their sound is “tight,” he says. But there’s plenty of room for everyone. “We’re able to play our own souls and feelings and grooves into the music.” He calls it “voicing your opinion.”
Music has been a constant in Clayton’s life. When he was 11, he and his mother moved from Birmingham to Boston. There Clayton, wide-eyed, watched his cousins rehearse with their funk and soul bands. Without his own instrument, Clayton skipped school — “they called it ‘playing hooky,’ ” he says — to noodle on bass guitars at a music store downtown.
At three o’clock each day, he’d take the train to the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts: a school, now closed, founded by Elma Lewis in 1950 to provide arts education for underprivileged kids. Clayton had free one-on-one guitar lessons with a teacher, Walter James. Those were the only lessons he attended regularly.
“Back then we had truant officers,” says Clayton. Eventually, his mother found out he’d missed a significant amount of school, he says, and “she cracked down.” He ended up as a ward of the state, and the Dept. of Youth Services (DYS) moved him to Amherst where, at 17, he completed his GED at UMass.
There he met drummer Max Roach and saxophonists Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, who became his mentors; they helped him develop his technique on the bass guitar and later the upright bass. Brown helped Clayton get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that enabled him to commute to New York City weekly for lessons with bassist Bill Lee.
After getting his GED, Clayton worked with kids who were in the DYS system. He studied juvenile justice at UMass but never graduated. With the encouragement of his professors, on May 15, 1992 — Clayton will never forget the date — he made the decision to go to Europe.
“I sold everything I owned, except for my bass guitar and my clothes,” he says, “and I moved to France.” He lived in Paris for 15 years, playing to survive, “busking on the Metro, performing in the streets.” He played for commercials and leased some songs to Nestlé.
Clayton says he’s always had a band. In Paris, it was called Fred Clayton and the IRC — the “international rhythm connection.” They played together for 10 years and put out two records. Clayton got married in France and had three sons, all of whom, now grown, live in Boston.
In 2006, finding it harder and harder to make it in an increasingly nationalistic France, Clayton moved his family home: to Hyannis for five years and then to West Yarmouth, where he currently lives. Clayton gigs all over the Cape, organizes the annual Summer Sounds Concert Series at Aselton Park in Hyannis, and runs a blues jam every Sunday at O’Shea’s Olde Inne in West Dennis. About the jam, which opens with his band but is open to all players, he says, “You’re gonna leave happy.”
For Saturday’s party in Wellfleet, the band will mostly play blues but also rock, soul, some standards, songs by Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett — whatever he thinks the audience will enjoy.
Clayton and McCarthy have played together for a decade. “In a good band,” Clayton says, “the drummer and the bass player always lock in together.” He and McCarthy are a dependable rhythm machine, but still sensitive, dynamic, human. When the guitarists take turns on solos, they sound like elaborate declamations.
Music has a gravitational pull, Clayton says — it pulls people closer. Through the blues, he’s formed connections around the world. Though he’s done with traveling far and wide to perform, “a real musician never quits,” Clayton says. He sees himself “sticking with the music and riding off into the sunset.”
It hasn’t been an easy road. “My story is real long,” says Clayton. But hardship is where real music comes from, he says. “If you’ve been sheltered all your life, you’ve never had to work for anything, you’ve always had everything you want, then you don’t feel the pain. You can buy all the guitars in the world, but you won’t understand the music.” You’ve got to pay to be able to play the blues, he says. “It’s called ‘paying your dues.’ ”
Clayton recorded an original song in 1995 about exactly that, titled “Keeping the Blues Alive.”
“Well, I was born on a farm,” it starts, Clayton’s deep voice easy as a warm day, “way down south in Alabama. Man, it was a hard life. Sure as hell paid my dues.” Later in the song, the band drops down, and Clayton sings like he’s talking: “The blues brought me here. The blues brought me there. Well, I know the blues could take me anywhere.” A line in the chorus repeats: “I was born with the blues.” Then the band relaxes into joyful improvisation.
“Authentic sound comes out of the true feeling of a soul,” says Clayton, “when you have something to say.”
Blues Man Group
The event: The Fred Clayton Band plays the Welcome Spring Dance Party
The time: Saturday, April 5, 7 to 10 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: Free
