Guitarist/vocalist Walter "Lightnin' Bug" Rhodes, also known as "Little Red Walter" and "The Brown Bomber" was a frequent visitor to Wilmington before his terminal heart attack at age 50 in the early '90s. Bug, whose theme song, "Lightnin' Bug," had been written for him ( "... if you hear me buzzin', cousin, heist your window up / I'm gonna shine my light / Put some lovin' in your cup ...") by Don Covay("Do the Pony," "Long Tall Shorty," "Chain of Fools," "Sookie, Sookie," etc.), had peaked as lead guitarist for Wilson Pickett on the tours that introduced "In the Midnight Hour" to the world. A Southerner, he was subject to ancestor worship, and had given up the road to take care of an aging mother, after whose death he too care of a half gallon of vodka every day for three years, virtually destroying his liver before hitting bottom. On the way back up, he found his third wife, who traveled with him in his last years on the road and answered, logically, to the name, "Honey Bee."

In those days, Blues Society of the Lower Cape Fear members hosted road players in order to make it possible for clubs in our little town to be able to afford their performances, for the hotel accommodations which would otherwise have been necessary were beyond the reasonable budgets for local venues. Bug and Honey Bee always stayed with Ed and JoAnne Crowe out in the suburbs at Silver Lake, where Bug was able to indulge his three main passions -- fishing, smoking pot, and playing the blues. They'd come into the bus station with a boombox and a cardboard suitcase and call my office, and I'd get somebody to pick them up and start looking for a guitar for Bug to use during that night's show, for his own instrument was usually in the pawnshop back in Hamlet, North Carolina. Within a couple of hours, he'd be out on the Crowe's dock with a cane pole, hook baited with a piece of hot dog, catfish on his mind, a reefer in the corner of his mouth and an extension cord running from the garage into the guitar amp by his side.

By this time in the visit, Honey Bee would be in the kitchen helping JoAnne Crowe get dinner ready, a major undertaking because the Crowes always invited the whole Blues Society over for a jam session and Maryland crab boil when Lightnin' Bug came to town. Once, I was over at the Crowes' house during a Bug/Bee weekend, and I went over to the kitchen sink to inquire of Honey Bee as to the health of Walter's uncle, a weazened old gentleman I'd met once in Hamlet who answered, of course, to the name, "Uncle Bug."

"Honey Bee, how's Uncle Bug gettin' along?," I politely asked in mildly Sandhills-inflected patois.

She heaved a mighty sigh into the dishwashing suds and replied, "Well, LoveWhip, we had to put Walter's uncle in the home last week ... that man love to dig."

I stood the silence as long as I could, but Eternity was never mine to command. "He loved to dig? Was he looking for something? Was he trying to hide something? What was he digging for?"

A dramatic pause long enough for three plates to be rinsed preceded Honey Bee's explanation. "Naw. He was just diggin'. He dug up all my flowers, and he'd dig holes close to the house and Walter would fall in 'em, and sometimes he'd put some of the kerosene in 'em and set fire to it and wander off. One day last week, I looked out the trailer window just like I'm doing right here in this kitchen, and I said, 'Walter, we gonna hafta put yo' uncle in the home. He out there diggin' again and he ain't even usin' a shovel!'"

They thought Walter "Lightnin' Bug" Rhodes had drowned at first, because they found his body floating in a hotel swimming pool in Hamlet a couple of days after his 50th birthday. The autopsy revealed that there was no water in his lungs, though, meaning that the heart attack killed him before he hit the water. He and Honey Bee had left the trailer and checked into the air conditioned hotel for a couple of days' rest just before what was to have been his big comeback tour.

Drink Small was the patriarch of electric blues guitar in this region as long as he wanted the title. He'd been voted the nation's second best gospel guitarist in 1958 and had practiced quite a bit by the time I met him around the beginning of this decade. In addition to being a great guitarist, Drink is a great performer, wearing nice suits onstage and whipping crowds into frenzies whenever he feels like it. Admittedly, he goes through periods of laziness during which his shows become relatively lackluster, but we can't expect all bluesmen to be overachievers, now can we?

I don't know how he ended up with the unique name of "Drink Small." I always meant to ask his parents, Jigger and Shot Glass, but never got around to it. Just kidding. Anyway, Drink's from a small South Carolina town called Bishopville, and he's as superstitious as a gentleman of color born in that place at that time (early '30s) would naturally be. In 1994, he was honored with some sort of national folklife award by the Smithsonian, and he and his rhythm section, Jim Herring (drums) and Blind Jimmy (keyboard bass) attended a cocktail party with the Smithsonian Board of Directors.

There are two basic kinds of magic -- Homeopathic and sympathetic. Homeopathic magic is based on the notion that similar items are related and will be similarly effected by ritual actions consciously performed. Voodoo dolls, replicas of the intended victim of a curse or conjuring, provide a good example. Sympathetic magic relies on the theory that items once connected remain connected. Drink Small's habit of hiding his urine to keep bad-intentioned folks from using it to work a charm against him serves as a good case in point.

.... So there was Drink Small, walking around the directors' lounge in the Smithsonian Institute with a surreptitious beer can brimming with his urine in the pocket of his white suit coat when a big fan from the board came up and slapped him on the back in congratulations for the award ...

The late Johnny Shines stayed at my house once. Johnny Shines shared with Robert Jr. Lockwood the distinction of having actually rambled around the Delta and beyond as a performance partner to Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson is important. Robert Johnson was the first Delta bluesman to write songs with recording in mind, and he laid the earliest foundation for the blues, R & B and rock & roll singles that dominated jukebox and home record buying markets through the seventies. A phenomenal guitarist and apocalyptic vocalist as well, he credited his abilities to a deal made with Satan at a lonely Delta crossroads, where he traded his soul for his musical abilities. Several of his predecessors like Petie Wheatstraw, who billed himself as "The Devil's Son-in-Law" and the "High Sheriff of Hell," made similar claims in rural, Southern black versions of the "Dr. Faustus" tale, but none had so convincing a musical style as Johnson, who also predicted the date of his own death and died under extremely cloudy circumstances ... and Johnny Shines had been his friend.

Mr. Shines was appearing here in Wilmington with a white guitarist named Kent DuChaine, who had cajoled him into absolute trust and out of retirement by falsely claiming to have the same birthday as Shines, an avid believer in astrology. Unfortunately, Shines had been right to retire when he had, because his body was worn out, and he died on tour a few months after I met him.

We were talking at the bar before his show, and I remember Johnny Shines pointing at the neat row of white, ceramic coffee cups lined up on a shelf behind the counter. "You know, when I was travelin' with Robert, we wouldn't play in a joint that had them ol' mugs," he said. "That's what the folks would pour their homemade whiskey in, and they'd get drunk and tear each others' head up with them things."

While still in awe of Robert Johnson's uncanny abilities both as a musician and a dapper man who could sleep in a muddy ditch and wake up spotless with trouser creases intact, Mr. Shines' real blues hero was Howlin' Wolf(Chester Burnette, aka Bigfoot Chester, aka 300 Pounds of Heavenly Joy), whose primitive power and explosive performance seemed more human yet somehow larger than even Johnson's.

.. Written By: Arthur "Love Whip" Shuey