The late local bluesman Kelly James leaves behind a considerable legacy
Stories fly around like solos in a blues circle whenever the name Kelly James comes up. Although the stories are different, depending on the particular members within the circle, the essentials are always the same. James, at 6-foot-6, 250 pounds and size 15 shoes, was a great man and a gentleman with a big heart, big smile, big voice, big physical dimensions. Bigger still was his impact on the music community and the depth of the love of those who treasure him even after his Jan. 3 passing at age 76.
James, originally from rural South Carolina, migrated northward in
pursuit of a football career. He moved from Philadelphia to Syracuse in
the 1960s when he heard about a semipro football team forming in the
Salt City. Although that career path never took hold, he found his place
working for 25 years as a sergeant for the Onondaga County Sheriff’s
Department, and found even firmer footing among the growing blues scene
in Syracuse.
“I’d say he was a little blob of glue right at the bottom of the whole thing for a long time,” says bandmate Terry Mulhauser about James’ place in the scene. James sang with the bands Triple Shot, Too Bad James and the Mississippi Mules and Dr. Blue (a moniker he took on) and the Kingsnakes among others, and started gaining momentum as a bluesman to watch in the 1970s and early 1980s.
“Back in the early 1980s when I was first getting into the blues, I went to see Triple Shot playing at Squires East on Westcott Street,” recalls local harp player and WAER-FM 88.3 deejay Tom Townsley. “I had just bought my first harmonica and was starting to play some blues records and I was sitting right in the front row and Kelly gets up and starts singing ‘Mannish Boy,’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ a bunch of Muddy Waters stuff. And I’m a big guy myself, but he’s towering over me in the front row and I’m like ‘Wow.’ It gave me a real sense of the power the blues could have.”
James also helped organize a blues festival prototype in 1979 held in the parking lot at the Barge Inn on Burnet Avenue. It was this early design of a blues fest, unheard of at the time, which would later inspire the New York State Blues Festival.
“There wouldn’t be a Blues Fest in this town if not for him,” says current Blues Festival producer Todd Fitzsimmons. “Most of the people that made it happen were introduced to the blues by K.J. He was doing blues in Syracuse—working it, promoting it, making it real—way before most of us ever heard of it. He had a lot to do with our blues scene, maybe more than anyone. We have a lot to thank him for.”
Pete McMahon, local harp player, vocalist and Kingsnakes veteran, recalls James’ persistence in finding just the right combination of players. “In the late 1970s and real early 1980s there wasn’t really much of a blues scene,” McMahon says. “There was Otis Lee’s band and Don Zogg and I was playing with them at the time, and some dangerous stuff was going on on and off the stage and I kinda thought that’s what you had to do. I think Kelly kinda rescued me from that. Kelly always said, ‘We’re gonna stay in touch, you and I.’”
Between 1980 and 1982 three different bands came together that included James and McMahon. James would take out newspaper ads and relentlessly check out other acts around town and eventually two creations of a group rehearsed and played a few gigs, but the third attempt proved the charm. McMahon says, “I remember him calling and getting real excited, sayin’, ‘I saw this dude last night. He’s a sharp guitar player. I thought he was blind at first,’ because Terry {Mulhauser} always plays with his eyes shut. He said, ‘This cat can play.’”
Dr. Blue and the Kingsnakes formed in 1982, channeling the spirit of John Lee Hooker in their name drawn from Hooker’s song, “Crawling King Snake.” The Kingsnakes, which also featured Mike Purdy, Gary Goal and Cliff Pike, quickly became a fixture in the Central New York blues scene, and they helped jump-start other outfits, such as Cold Shot Blues Band with Townsley, Fitzsimmons and Morris Tarbell, Lake Effect with brothers Phil and Mike Petroff, and several incarnations of Dr. Blue including lineups with Ron Spencer, Booth Johnson, Chad Tomlinson, Jim Capone, Tony Gambarro, Matt Tarbell and Jerry Neely.
James had to gracefully leave the Kingsnakes after a year to keep up with his job at the Sheriff’s Department, yet he kept close with the members. “Pete and I had kinda partnered off and kept things going and I know quite frankly Kelly was quite proud of us,” Mulhauser says.
In 1991 the blues scene took another leap forward when John Stage, a friend of James and owner of the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que, took James’ suggestion to bring blues music into the restaurant. “I had never considered live music,” he says. “But Kelly started talking about it and we decided to do it.” It began with James, in his Dr. Blue persona, playing on Thursdays. Now the Dino hosts music nearly every night of the week and has become a major destination for live music in the area.
James enjoyed substantial success on the circuit until a 2008 rollover car accident served as a wake-up call. “Kelly was fine, he didn’t have a mark on him, but I had a head injury and hurt my back and we lost our dog for a couple days. That’s when we decided to settle down,” Carol James says.
“It probably happened for a reason: to get him off the road,” McMahon notes. “Because when you’re on the road, you lose sight of some of the important things in life. He settled down the last few years and he was just in a really, really good place.”
Kelly spent his remaining years reconnecting with friends, popping into local shows here and there with various bands, and spending time with his adoring family: wife Carol, wedded for 25 years, and children ElFreda Brown, Ann Dobroski, Jackie Goodwin and Jason Dobroski.
“I think the best way to say what a great father he was, is that our biological father told him what a great job he did raising us,” Ann Dobroski says.
His grandchildren felt equally fortunate and close to James, especially grandson James Dobroski whom James helped raise. The two would talk daily and hang out like best friends to the point that Dobroski now says, “He wasn’t my grandfather. He was my dad.”
Despite the incredible size of James, both physically and talent-wise, it’s still the magnitude of the man himself that resonates most with his friends. “It’s much broader than the music,” Mulhauser says. “A lot of reporters asked me to describe his talent and my mind didn’t even really go to the singin’, to be honest with you, and that was pretty damn deep, too. You don’t see a guy like that come along. It might be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing.”
Friends, family and musicians remembered James during a spirited jam on Jan. 8 at the Comfort Suites banquet hall in Cicero. Instruments lined the walls and the smell of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que filled the air as long-time Syracuse musicians brought James-inspired blues to life. The sadness of the occasion was overcome with appreciation for his considerable contributions as a blues activist and local music legend.
“You might not think a bunch of bands playing in bars would make such a strong community,” Los Blancos singer and guitarist Colin Aberdeen said following the jam. “But it’s like glue.”
McMahon, his eyes misting up, was even more direct: “We owe him a lot.”
