Wilroy Sanders turned 73 this year. The people celebrating that birthday with him counted the event a pleasant surprise.
He drank of whiskeys. He smoked of tobacco cigarettes. And only when he was damn ready, he took the "stage" at the Blue Worm and turned his finely-aged baritone, singing "Saddle up my pony...."
The
lyrics of this hand-me-down ballad stretch back, at least, to Charley
Patton's 1929 recording of "Pony Blues" and Patton protege Son House's
1930 version of the same title. Patton and House both lived and played
in the Mississippi Delta at that time. Wilroy was born four years after
House's recording, across Mississippi in Byhalia.
Sanders' family moved to rural Shelby County, Tennessee, outside Memphis, when he was a boy.
Memphis guitarist James Bonner
remembers the colorful conditions his older cousin lived in during the
late 1960s and early '70s. "Wilroy lived on Buster Road out
in the county where we lived. That was
a place you could go and get your ass kicked, your money took, and your
name written down in the undertaker book.... Bootleggers, prostitutes,
it was so cool.... Wilroy
lived down there and picked guitar."
Sanders
has been a core member of the Memphis juke joint band The Fieldstones
for decades. The band has recorded sporadically, mostly for the
University of Memphis' (via David Evans) High Water Records. Sanders
owned the Memphis juke joint until it burnt in November 1997.
Sanders was the subject of the "Last Living Bluesman" documentary, produced by Shangi-La Projects in 1999.
We'll
post a proper interview with Sanders as soon as we can conduct one.
Until then, it just didn't seem right to go forward without him. We
asked Bonner about bringing Sanders along when we interviewed Bonner,
but as he explained, "[Wilroy] ain't no good in the daytime, he
just sleeps. He's a night person."
These days you can hear Wilroy, if he's in the mood, Friday and Saturday nights at the Blue Worm.