In his book, the Frankfurt author Martin Feldmann invites you on a journey through time into the world of the blues.

The Frankfurt author Martin Feldmann invites you on a journey through time into the world of the blues.

When Wade Walton gets the blues, the barber at his “Barber Shop” in Clarksdale, Mississippi, pauses, puts his harmonica to his lips, and plays. At the end of August 1986, a customer from far away Frankfurt sat on Walton’s chair to have him shave him with a sharp knife: Martin Feldmann. Sachsenhausen discovered his love for the blues as a student. He later traveled in his footsteps all over the USA. He has now written a book about these trips and encounters with musicians like Wade Walton.

“Further on up the Road: Traveling to the Blues” is the title of the book that Feldmann, who worked as an editor for the Frankfurter Rundschau for almost 30 years, wrote in German and English during the pandemic. The approximately 500 rare pictures and memorabilia that can be seen in it document a world that has long since ceased to exist. Wade Walton’s hair salon closed in 1999, and the blues musician died a year later. “His Bluesville LP ‘Shake ’em on Down’ from 1963 is a collector’s item,” says Martin Feldmann.

Feldmann heard the blues for the first time in 1972 in the youth room of his friend, the Frankfurt sound engineer Joschi Schröder, who has since died. “Joschi had recorded some songs from ‘Fathers and Sons’, a double album by Muddy Waters from 1969, on Südwestfunk with his tape recorder,” he says. After that, this genre of music would not let him go.

As a young man, Feldmann, who came from Olpe in Sauerland, made five trips to the USA in the 1970s and 1980s, to places where the blues lived: Chicago, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Memphis and New York. Always with him: his camera. This is how he managed to make unique recordings of musicians like Eddy Clearwater, who made a name for himself as a representative of Chicago blues. “He was nicknamed ‘The Chief’ because he sometimes wore a chief’s feather headdress during his performances. Among his ancestors were Cherokee,” explains Martin Feldmann.

With some musicians it was not just an encounter. African American culture promoter Tina Mayfield, wife of composer and singer Percy Mayfield, wrote him letters and cards from Los Angeles.

Pictures from Feldmann’s bulging archive appear again and again in trade journals, for example in the US magazine “Living Blues”, and he has already shown a selection in seven exhibitions, the first in 2014 at the Kulturbahnhof Mörfelden. In addition, from 2012 to 2019 he published a “blues calendar” that was coveted by fans.

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At some point, however, just publishing pictures was no longer enough for him. “I also wanted to tell the stories about the pictures,” he says. He won over the Frankfurt musician and blues specialist Klaus Kilian, who, like him, belongs to the Frankfurt blues regulars’ table, to edit his book. Its members meet regularly in a pub to chat.

Frankfurt and other German cities can also be found in the book. Feldmann also traveled around Germany and the Netherlands for the blues. One of his favorite pictures was taken when Chicago blues icon Buddy Guy performed at the “Sinkkasten”, the legendary Frankfurt jazz and blues club, whose history Feldmann researched as a district historian for the Polytechnic Foundation. “When Buddy Guy was performing, two boys happened to be sitting at the edge of the stage, one was wearing a Eintracht sweatshirt,” he says.

Another passion has also left its mark in the book: Feldmann’s love of traveling to the South Seas. There, too, he encountered the blues. albeit one with a Hawaiian touch.

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