asleep on the bus and his dad carrying him home in his arms. And he remembers going fishing “seven days a week in the summertime.” The good times also included a strong religious upbringing. The Scotts were members of a pentacostal sect headquartered in Memphis. Isaac’s dad eventually became a minister of the Portland affiliate. Music plays a major role in the pentacostal church and Isaac’s mother exposed him to the music of such groups as the Five Blind Boys whose original leader, Archie Brownlee, influenced black musicians like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. His mom had other records too — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. Isaac says, “On Saturdays my folks used to go into town. I’d stand and watch the car leave and then I’d run in and sneak and play Lowell Fulsom. I got caught a few times but they never said nothin’, they just smiled. They got the message, ‘Hey, we gotta let whatever is in him come out.’” Even then Isaac knew he had blues music in him. He says he dreamed of having his own band. But the early good times didn’t see Isaac through his youth. His mother fell ill and he had to stay home from school to take care of her. She died when he was just 16 and her passing hit him hard. He and his dad grew apart. What he had left was the religion and the music. He combined them and started his career. Scott’s first professional gig was in the early ’60s when he was just 18. He played guitar behind the Portlandaires, a regional gospel group. By 1965 he had moved on to touring across the West with a minister from Denver, Rev. Charles Johnson. Scott says, “We went from town to town to revival meetings. I was solely dedicated to that kind of life — I was meeting the standard. We went to sanctified meetings and it was just get down, get down." The religious music experience intensified for Isaac when in 1967 he joined his childhood mentors, the Five Blind Boys, as guitarist. His horizons broadened as they traveled across the country and through the South to churches and school auditoriums. He says, “We used to ride down the highway in the middle of the night and one of them would strike up a song. All the rest of them would just fall in with that harmony. You could feel the whole car like it was a pressure cooker. Your hair would actually stand on end. It was quite an experience.” It was the big-time gospel circuit. After the Five Blind Boys, there was his first professional singing, a stint with the Golden Eagles Gospel Singers working out of Portland and then a reunion with Reverend Johnson in Oakland. There in the Bay Area where the blues are plentiful, Isaac took a break from playing gospel and began to listen and practice while he worked odd jobs doing Isaac recalls the good times. He remembers falling asleep on the bus and his dad carrying him home in his arms. And he remembers going fishing “seven days a week in the summertime.” janitorial work. By early 1974, Isaac was ready to perform again — but with a few changes. He was switching gears from gospel to blues and he moved to Seattle where there was a smattering of a scene. In July of 1974, Portland blues guitarist Tom McFarland was playing in a dive on Seattle’s First Avenue strip — the Boulder Cafe, where go-go girls in sleazy costumes did the bump and grind and hustled drinks. Mark Dalton (currently bass player with the Slamhound Hunters and Blues Rockers) recalls one night when Isaac’s uncle was in the club. The uncle called Isaac on the phone, held the receiver up to the band so Isaac could hear them, and said, “come on down.” Scott did and McFarland handed him his guitar. Dalton says that even though Isaac was playing gospel licks, “he was immediately incorporated into the blues scene.” The transition to blues was easy for Isaac partly because he took the gospel music with him. “I ain’t never got rid of it because to me that’s where my music comes from. I’m not up there preaching Jesus and him crucified but it’s just something about that background. I can just reach and grab that certain little bit of extra power.” But the gospel scene had also brought a certain amount of disillusionment. Scott says, “People have taken so many things out of that book and read it the way they want to understand it. And they go and put their sign up. I think you gotta be for real with your own self first and then the rest of it will work.” Being for real for Isaac meant taking his music from the revival tents into the bars. During Scott’s early blues years (’74- ’78), the scene in Seattle was fluid and funky. The clubs were mostly low-rent operations, the drinks were watered down, and money for the players was definitely small potatoes. There were only two working blues bands in town — McFarland’s and harp player Junior Earl’s. But there were twenty or so musicians who were up for gigging with little or no advance notice and always willing to sit in. The audiences consisted of sailors and dock workers who’d spend whole days and nights and all their paychecks in the clubs. There were also a few leftovers from the Seattle beat generation and a small group of hard-core blues fans. It was the right environment for a player to experiment and develop a style. Isaac first played the Place Pigalle — known as Pig Alley to the musicians. It was nationally recognized for its well- stocked jukebox and locally known for its urine smell and bohemian atmosphere. It was a dubious cut above the other clubs because the rich went slumming to Pig Alley. Although the personnel changed a lot, Mark Dalton was often on bass. He recalls that Isaac was working through a lot of material ‘from Freddy Dalton recalls one time when Isaac, “without missing a note, squeezed himself into the old phone booth in the club, closed the door and cranked it out while the audience gathered around dancing and laughing" King to Jimi Hendrix.” One tune would last an entire set and the vocals were short or non-existent as Scott searched for his particular groove. He had a long cord on his guitar and would wander out on the back porch to play. Dalton recalls one time when Isaac, “without missing a note, squeezed himself into the old phone booth in the club, closed the door and cranked jt out while the audience gathered around dancing and laughing.” Even though the scene was funky, some pretty spectacular things happened to Isaac during this period. First and perhaps most important for his career as a guitarist was a series of gigs with Albert Collins, who one musician recently called “God’s gift to guitar players.” Collins is the man who lit an electric blues fire under white blues bands like Canned Heat in the late sixties. From 1975 through 1978, Collins spent a lot of time in Seattle. He was traveling alone and would pick up bands in the town he was playing. In Seattle, Isaac was often the man on accompanying guitar. They played places like Hibble and Hyde’s, where the music started at 10 p.m. and went until 4 a.m. Tapes recorded by Dalton during this period demonstrate the workout Collins would give Scott. When the two get together now to talk about old times, they remember the intensity. As they talked this summer, Scott said to Collins, “Remember when we used to be on stage and we’d look up and tears be running? The white boys didn’t understand it. They’d say, ‘What’s wrong?’ Ain’t nothing wrong, but we can feel things ain’t nobody else feel. That’s how I feel my help coming.” Collins grins and says, “That's true, he’s right.” Scott was beginning to let that spirituality come through some hot guitar licks. The word began to spread. Avery young Seattle drummer, Steve Patterson (now Twist Turner of the Chicago blues scene) who sometimes played with Isaac, traveled to Chicago and played some live club and basement tapes for Peter Shertser, who has his own label, Red Lightnin’. Shertser liked the music and in 1977 put the tapes into an LP, Isaac Scott Blues Band, and it was definitely a low-budget record, but it’s still bringing in a little money for Isaac, particularly from the large European blues audience. Then, through the grapevine, the producer of the San Francisco Blues Festival heard about Scott. In the summer of '78, he made Isaac part of the annual festival and put him on Volume Two of San Francisco Blues Festival with an 81/2-minute rendition of McFarland’s “Goin’ Back to Oakland.” After the festival Isaac moved from pick-up band to pick-up band playing the Northwest, did a stint in the Bay Area as guitarist for blues harpist Charlie Musselwhite, and returned to Seattle in 1979, where there was a band waiting for him. He began what has been four years of steady performing, maintaining his own band even through a number of health problems. Diabetes is always with him, but a year-and-a-half bout with tendonitis in his hands cleared up a year ago, just about the time his latest and best album came out. Big Time Blues Man, though roughly produced and mixed, has garnered three and a half stars from downbeat,. was ranked No. 7 on the blues radio playlist for the first quarter of '83 in Living Blues, and just recently has been targeted for European distribution. In no way does it live up to Scott’s depth and power, but it Clinton St. Quarterly 13
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