FRANK ‘Little Sonny’ SCOTT JR.   –  A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF A MAWXELL ST. ARTIST, ACTIVIST, AND BLUESMAN

By Steve Balkin, Professor of Policy Studies, Roosevelt University, 312-341-3696, February 3, 2003

Email: mar@topicbox.com

 

Frank ‘Little Sonny’ Scott Jr., also known as the Supreme Mayor of Maxwell Street, was born on a plantation in Montgomery Texas in 1927.  He started working at the age of five as a water boy, becoming musically inspired by listening to the work songs of the sharecroppers in the cotton, corn, and watermelon fields, and also listening to his grandmother, Lucy Wilkerson, sing in Church.  Then he went on to sing country and western songs because that was all he heard on the radio.     

 

After he got out of the Navy, at the end of World War Two, he learned blues on the streets of Houston by watching Lightin Hopkins and by getting instructive help from his musical Uncle, Elijah Fair, who was blind and played church songs and blues on the street. This was in the neighborhood nicknamed “Pearl Harbor, because of all the cuttin and shooting there.”  The first instruments he played were Jews Harp and the harmonica.  

 

In 1948 he left Houston and traveled throughout the South doing such things as working on a rice farm in Appaloosa Louisiana, driving a Caterpillar and hauling logs in West Memphis, Arkansas, and singing spirituals in quartettes in Indiana and Missouri. From there he moved to Detroit to work for Briggs Manufacturing, making auto bodies.    

 

He came to live in the Maxwell Street area in Chicago, by Jefferson and Maxwell Streets, in 1950, and played harmonica and drums and sang blues on the streets there with local Maxwell Street blues musicians such as Porter (drummer and singer), Little Cornell (guitar and singer – he sang like John Lee Hooker), Sonny Cooper (singer), and Freddie King (guitar and singer). 

 

Frank 'Little Sonny' Scott Jr. is a blues musician, singer, songwriter, the inventor of the Blues percussive House Keys, and a self-taught artist. He, along with Jimmie Lee Robinson and Freddie King, formed the band, The Every Hour Blues Boys in the early 50s.  A few years ago, Mr. Scott recorded with Jimmie Lee Robinson for the acclaimed CD, The Lost American Bluesmen, and is playing guitar on two recent CDs for Maxwell Street Blueswoman and legend Johnnie Mae Dunson. In the 1990s, he, Dunson, and Robinson (recently deceased) became among the most active members of the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition, playing awareness-raising jam sessions down on old Maxwell Street with Chicago Blues musicians such as Mr. H, Bobby ‘Top Hat’ Davis, Little Scotty, Dancin Perkins, David Lindsey, Ruby Harris, John Primer, Piano C. Red, Bobby Too Tough, Jody Noa, Sugar Baby, Iceman Robinson, Lajune, Little Sambo, Harmonica George, Jumpin Willie Cobbs, the Motivation Band, The Cut Rate Band, Barkin Bill, and many others.    

 

Influenced by the work of  two other Maxwell Street self-taught artists, Tyner White (environmentalist and inventor of the Stratazooki) and Johnnie Mae Dunson (Blueswoman and folk art cane builder), Mr. Scott has long created art work about Maxwell Street including his famous Maxwell Street crosses and the Juketown Community Blues Bandstand.  In 1997 he built the Bandstand in an empty lot at the northeast corner of Halsted and Maxwell as a place for weekly Blues jam sessions to keep the Blues tradition alive.  He constantly decorated it, adding images, flowers, and found objects, something new almost every week.  It became a place where people gathered every weekend to hear and play music as well as becoming a focal point for organizing to help preserve the buildings, businesses, and culture that remained in the area. The Bandstand has been documented by many international photographers and documentarians.  It was destroyed in 2001 to make way for UIC’s new University Village retail strip.

 

Mr. Scott  has created many posters.  Among the most famous is a series using a famous Maxwell Street Blues Musician Group portrait as the background. The photograph initially appeared as the centerfold in the June/July 2001 issue of Big City Blues Magazine and was taken by Robert Jr. Whitall who is the publisher and editor of Big City Blues magazine. When asked about the original photograph and his recurrent use of it in his work, Mr. Scott Jr. said "That is a beautiful picture. Everyone I meet says so. I was in it too, first row, far right. Robert Jr. took that photo earlier this year by the Maxwell Market hot dog restaurant at Liberty and Halsted, a block south from Maxwell Street. Almost all the Blues musicians, now living, who ever played on Maxwell Street were there. And the spirits of deceased ones, like Freddie King, Muddy, Johnny Shines, Little Walter, Willie James, David Lindsey, Big Walter Horton, Robert Nighthawk, Jewtown Jimmie, One Leg Sam, Blind Arvella, Earl Hooker, seemed there too. I kind of felt their presence when I sat down."

 

Mr. Scott continued, "I love that picture. It's so spiritual and historic. So, I created these different posters in different sizes using Robert Jr Whitall's picture and added images of my own into it. They call it a collage but I just mix it up. Robert Jr kindly gave me permission to use that photograph any way I wanted so I could raise some money to help the Blues musicians who still come down there to play on old Maxwell Street."

 

Musicians are not allowed to play on the old Maxwell Street anymore but Frank Scott Jr.’s work continues to provide a glimpse into what the blues culture was like on Maxwell Street and presents a living expression of the struggle to preserve that culture and music.

For more information about Maxwell Street see <http://www.openair.org/maxwell/preserve.html> and <http://www.maxwellstreet.org>.

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