Guitar Shorty: The long haul

Forty years later, Guitar Shorty's finally getting his props

By Newt Briggs

Sixty-five-year-old men should not be able to do a front flip with a 10-pound electric guitar in hand. Nor are they supposed to rip out fret-scorching blues riffs that put even the most hellbent young bluesmen to shame. The first is a biological mandate; the second an artistic platitude. Guitar Shorty defies them both--although he has to be careful with the acrobatics nowadays. As he's fond of noting, "It ain't the fall that gets you. It's when you hit the ground."

The last time Shorty hit the ground was almost a decade ago at a hole-in-the-wall blues club in the Midwest. Even after his sixth encore, the audience was still calling his name and clamoring for one last look at his trademark jump, jive and wail. So Shorty--always the showstopper--got up a head of steam, streaked across the stage and leaped into the air. The only problem: He snagged his foot on a monitor cord and crashed to the floor.

"I guess I got a little too excited," Shorty says. "That was my finale. After that, I went back to the dressing room, and I fell down on the floor and cried like a baby. Man, I was hurtin'."

He didn't find out that his shoulder was dislocated until two days later when he went to the doctor. The incident forced Shorty--who started playing professionally with Ray Charles almost 40 years ago--to re-evaluate his on-stage tumbling act. "I've got to watch myself," he says. "Sometimes, I'll still do a flip if I feel it. And I always get down on one hand, throw the guitar behind my back, play with my foot--you know, make it a real spectacle."

It was exactly these antics that carried Shorty to victory on "The Gong Show" in 1978, when he snatched first prize for performing "They Call Me Guitar Shorty" while standing on his head. These days, he's not sure if it was a highlight or lowlight of his music career, but he knows it was better than wrenching on cars for a living. He turned to that trade in the early '70s, after someone stole his guitar.

"It was the first Strat I ever owned in my life," says Shorty. "I'd just gotten it out of the shop, and they did a beautiful job--new neck, new parts, the works. I mean, it was nice. And then it was gone."

Broke and without the tool of his trade, Shorty went to work for some friends who owned an auto shop. For the next two years, he lived his own personal blues song. "I still had my amplifier, but that was it," Shorty says. "I'm telling you, it was a monster, but I pulled it off. And now I'm back in it."

Not only is he back in it, he's on top for maybe the first time in his life. After laboring in obscurity behind the likes of Charles, Willie Dixon, Sam Cooke and T-Bone Walker, Shorty has staked his claim to stardom with this year's Watch Your Back--a rip-roaring blast of Chicago blues that blends the soulful throb of Albert King with the barrelhouse two-step of Bo Diddley. Released by old-school blues stalwart Alligator Records, Watch Your Back has lodged itself at the top of Soundscan's blues chart and isn't showing any signs of faltering.

"If you check me out, you'll see I'm not just a blues guitarist," Shorty says. "I'm not going to sit up there on a stool and strum on an acoustic guitar. I'm going to run around, make some noise, really put on a show for the peoples."