Interview with Lem Sheppard.

Lemuel Sheppard is a modern day troubadour. He is a Kansas native, and he began his musical career at Pittsburg State University. Lem has built a career on his musical talents, knowledge of history, and his ability to tell a story musically to any audience. Through his musical talent, Lem has become a recognized musician nationally and internationally. He has traveled the world performing, teaching other peoples about America, and teaching Americans about themselves. In this way, he has begun to give a name to the midwestern music scene around the world.

My name is Lemuel Sheppard. I was born in Kansas City, Kansas. Just a little area there, outside town, most of the people had farm animals. Some people had horses. I rode horses when I was younger. There was this old guy. He just wanted to make sure that people could ride horses. You could go to Mr. Jennings’ farm, and he’d take you to ride horses. They were everywhere. I can remember taking my kids back there-- actually it wasn’t so long ago-- and we saw all these kids riding horse back in the middle of this urban area. They were wearing tennis shoes, Nikes and stuff. Some of the horses didn’t have saddles. And I was telling him it’s good to see its still there. There was like fifteen horses, you know. It’s still going on there.

I grew up in a segregated neighborhood. (Sheppard’s family moved to a semi-rural, segregated community in Missouri when he was a child.) The first neighborhood we lived in was an all-black neighborhood, but we went to an all-white school. We could see the school from our house; it was an all-black neighborhood, but we went to an all-white school. But when we moved to an all-white neighborhood we went to an all-black school. The black school was just like eleven blocks away. I guess I was getting a lot of balance, you know, living in a white neighborhood and going to a black school, living in a black neighborhood and going to a white school. So I had this whole mixture of experiences based on that.

I think I benefited growing up in segregated Missouri. The old segregation is different than it is now. The old segregation, you know, the hospital I was born in was black owned, the doctor was black, the stores were black, the insurance company was black; it was a black world. Several black doctors, black politicians, including Clarence Love (a black politician), who actually was born in Weir. I saw his obituary when he died, and it said he was born in Weir, Kansas. It was weird. Clarence Love was a black politician. That’s what the old segregation was like. All the people that lived in that neighborhood were black. Now, they’ve all moved to Johnson County. The only ones left are the ones that can’t afford to live in Johnson County. So that’s what the old segregation was like. It wasn’t really segregated. Segregation was good and bad. It was bad that it was segregated; but it was good that if you were a doctor, so you got a chance to aspire to something big.

I remember when I was really young, like three or four, being by myself a lot. So I made up songs, and my mother heard me doing that. So, she would write them down and teach me how to write them down. So, I used to make up poetry as a kid. In grade school I used to get points for making up poems. But guitar was something, like back in the 60’s when I was a kid, the guitar was like a toy. A lot of people got guitars for Christmas, you know, the year that I got mine. They were plastic guitars; they were made by Sears. They were called Tiger Guitars. I actually found one at a junk store. It was kind of an antique, but I looked at it; it was a really well made instrument. You could put real strings on it. What they were, it was kind of the rock and roll thing, the music, the Beatles, so a lot of kids got guitars. So, it was just kind of a toy. Some people learned to play, some of them didn’t

I began playing guitar at the age of three. [My first influences]* were just local guys. Our mailman played guitar. There was this guy in our neighborhood that used to play with Louie Jordan; they call him the father of R&B music. At the time, I didn’t really make a connection between what was on the radio and the guitar itself. Eventually when I did, I stayed with it long enough and started getting into the music on my own. And then I got influenced by Wes Montgomery, of course Jimi Hendrix. When I was like eighteen or nineteen, my sister gave me her old acoustic guitar that she didn’t play much. I felt lucky that I got that guitar, and I played it all the time. Playing the acoustic guitar made me play more jazz because the neck was bigger and it made me play a lot more, and let me practice more because you didn’t have to plug it in. It wasn’t such a disruption and it wasn’t as loud, and I wound up practicing a lot more.

I went to college in Pittsburg. That’s what got me here. The reason I came here was that I had two brothers and a sister who graduated from Pittsburg State. I was studying music, and it was so hard because I couldn’t read music. I remember when I was in the marching band, and they thought I was an idiot because I had never marched in a band before; and all these other guys they had been in marching bands since seventh grade. I flunked music theory, couldn’t pass it; but I stayed with it. But I got really lucky that back in those days there were music teachers who pretty much knew this [music] is what they wanted to do, and they were going to do it for twenty or thirty years. And so I ran into some people like that who were teaching in college at that time.

The luckiest thing that happened to me there [at Pitt State] was an artist in residence here called Eva Jessie. She was eighty-nine years old. She worked for George Gershwin. She was sort of famous in the choral world, New York and stuff. So, my last two years in college I started working with her. So, she encouraged me to sing and she put on some productions. The last two years in college I did stuff with her as an accompaniment person, working in her productions. One of the productions we did was at the Kansas Folk-life Festival, and I did one or two songs in her show. The promoters at the show in 1979 asked me if I would come back next year as a solo artist. It had never occurred to me that I could get up on stage by myself and sing, without a whole band, and I just freaked out because I didn’t know any songs, you know.

[When I started] There were some mishaps and disasters, like I forgot songs in the middle of a set. I had songs that really didn’t fit during the show; I had like a Jimi Hendrix song. I was a fan of Jimi Hendrix’s music, and I said like “I gotta put some of that in because I just didn’t have anything else to do.” It just didn’t fit, you know. I had some original stuff that I had written, and some really, really old blues songs. It was just kind of a jumbled mix of songs. When I look back on it, that’s what I think probably impressed people because my talent wasn’t that great. But you know who else could move from Robert Johnson to Jimi Hendrix and then do a gospel song, then do my own composition or do some kind of a traditional folk song? I was just grabbing songs because I just wasn’t that good of a singer or guitar player at that time anyway. So, I spent the whole year putting together a show with about thirteen or twenty songs. [And that was the beginning of my solo career playing festivals and school shows.]

[Eventually], I just started writing for my audience. When you really get a fix on the kind of people coming out to the bars and coming out at night because they like this music, you start writing songs for them that really speak to them, you know. One of the things I enjoyed in college was my minor in sociology, sort of social psychology. I had read a lot of the sociology of music stuff, and all these guys who look at music and society as this kind of framework that worked together. So I knew then that if I’m going to write a song, I’ve got to be able use it; and it’s got to work, and that’s what changed my writing. I became more of a commercial writer, in terms of, when you study music you write just pure music, piano stuff, whatever. I began writing for my audiences.

As I traveled a lot, I noticed that Pittsburg is not really ahead or behind the scene. There are towns like Pittsburg just twenty minutes from New York City. I thought the Midwest was just the Midwest. Pittsburg is not a place that you would call it ahead of its time because there’s not enough venues, not enough places to experiment, you know-- which is good because you create music when you’re in a vacuum, I’ve been surviving in a vacuum, meaning I’m not influenced by the hottest band in town or the hottest act that comes through. I just have to invent my own music. In songs for shows, marketing material, it’s not based on like if I was living in New York or something. If I were living in New York, there would be in one week like six hundred or seven hundred guys just like me. So I don’t have to compete with them; I don’t have to think about them while I’m dong my own thing. So in a way its good, and I find a lot of musicians living in out of the way places. When I go to a lot of those places like Pittsburg that are outside of New York or Los Angeles, somebody will mention the name of a musician who lives in a small town like that. Of course, they live up and down the coast, so they have access to towns that we don’t.

Well, I’ve been to some exotic places, like Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, and Rio. Ever hear about Rio? There’s a song called, “Impanema.” Copacabana, I’ve been there. Oddly enough, the most interesting places are way up in the Appalachian Mountains. I played some songs at some schools up there. There’s this show I do, “The Legacy of Songs.” The thing that surprised me, if you go to the Appalachian Mountains as far up in the mountains as you can get, there’s African American communities. The actual name of the mountain is Black Mountain, and that’s highest peak of the Appalachians in Kentucky -- I think its Kentucky or Virginia. No, it had to be Kentucky. I was curious whether it was historically named that. Slaves walked across those mountains on the Underground Railroad, and that was probably the way they settled up there. But that was probably the most interesting place, being in Appalachia, and actually having a pretty nice time there. I felt like I got more in touch with your culture being there. Yeah, I really did ‘cause I saw people where the culture has been unchanged. They have a historical presence, and there’s something about being out there, you know, where African Americans don’t have a historic presence. You know, maybe culturally there was one miner out there in the 1850’s or something or the 1840’s. There’s something about being in the south, even if you go to an area where there’s maybe one or two black families. They’ve been there for four hundred years. There’s something about the south that I had not yet thought about. Even in the small towns, where there’s not a lot of black people here or there, but they’ve been around since the 1600’s so people have made the adjustments; where as, in some of the north places haven’t made these adjustments yet.

I went to South Africa a year or two after apartheid had ended. Now that’s one gig I found on my own. I got this newsletter from some state arts council. They said that there was a festival in South Africa, an international festival, and they were taking submissions of artists interested in performing. So, I just packed up a tape and just blind mailed it to South Africa, you know, and then I got a letter back. I mean it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to take ‘cause I mailed off so much stuff, you know. And they [responded], “We’d love to have you.”

So then I got scared; and I thought, “Oh man! I’ve got to go to Africa now.” You know when you blind mail stuff out and then somebody calls you. Just the whole connection-- you got to get on an airplane and fly, and you know just the whole logistics of going to Africa for eight days. So, it was actually nice. I had to do a lot on my own, and I found out that they don’t actually pay you. They don’t really put you up, you stay with a family there. So I contacted UNESCO, and I found out there’s a fund of money that’s called “The Fund,” and so any American who gets invited for a cultural opportunity overseas, they’re as a diplomatic effort. So they sent me money for a plane ticket and all that stuff, and I was over there. It was quite and experience.

The festival I played at was called the Isteadfa, it’s a Welch word and it’s a summer festival. People came from all over the world. I was the first American to play at that festival since they lifted apartheid. So I was really proud of that distinction. I just stumbled into that opportunity actually.

Lem Playing at the Isteadfa Festival in Johannesburg.

[In South Africa] The funniest experience I had was, because apartheid had been lifted, and they told me that you’re going to be staying with a Zulu family. So I thought I was going to be in Soweto or something. Then when I got to the grounds this woman pulls up in a Mercedes. They said, “ Oh yeah, Mrs. Kunene is here to pick me up to take me to her house.” So I get in her car, she talked great English, she’s a nurse; and then she took me to this fabulous house in the suburbs. It would be like a two hundred thousand-dollar house by our standards. Probably more than that ‘cause it was built with African labor. But, her husband was an insurance executive and they didn’t live in Soweto; but they said they had a house in Soweto, and it’s like a fifty thousand-dollar house. But they don’t have water or lights or sewage because that’s part of apartheid. The city didn’t care, they thought those are tribal people, they live like that so let them live like that. I went in there and saw four car garages, Rolls Royce’s, Mercedes, -- in Soweto!

So, it really opened my eyes up to what Soweto really was. No matter how high you got you were still treated like a tribal person-- like you could get by on nothing, without water or whatever. But, they had moved out and I met their son, he’s just like a western kid, like eighteen or nineteen years old. I was really impressed with just a stroke of a pen how much can change. Apartheid was lifted and it’s like suddenly everything was different.

The effects of apartheid were still present, a lot of people still talking about it. I was talking to this Dutch (Afrikaans) kid and he was really into American music and Rock n’ Roll; and he said if apartheid hadn’t been lifted, he was going to leave the country. He [a white South African] hated apartheid; he said, “It was oppressive to us [whites] too.” It was a system kept in place because it was a system where one to five percent of the white population benefited. The military, the business complex, people that kept the money circulating, made the wealthier people stay wealthy. So it wasn’t just oppressive racially, it was oppressive class-wise too. A lot of white people couldn’t handle it either.

I saw Africa very differently after I got there, you know, from the way it is portrayed on the Discovery Channel. It’s very complex because you still see both worlds. Even though the guy I stayed with was an insurance executive and his wife’s a nurse, they were kind of middle class by our standards. I was at the Festival and [I] met an African man there, he was admiring my sweater; I should have given it to him. I probably got it in a thrift shop, and I didn’t think about just taking it off and giving it to him. I had a guy come up to me in Brazil and I said, “Hey, that’s a nice shirt.” He just took it off and gave it to me. But the guy could speak a little English, and he wanted to know who I was. Because they had all these African groups, and he thought I was Nigerian because Americans are kind of tall. I said, “No, I’m African-American.” At first I said, “I’m American.” He just shook his head and said he never heard of it. He never heard of a black American. I said, “I’m African-American.” He said he never heard of that before. And it’s funny because here we are, America, we think we’re so much, and these people don’t even know we exist. They don’t even know we exist as a people, as a country. The funny thing about it is that I was trying to think of all these words to say what I was, and then I said, “I’m a Negro.” And then his eyes lit up, and he said, “I’ve never seen a Negro before.” So, then I realized that the people who live way out in the bush, that’s their designation for Africans who come to the West, you know. We’re Negroes; and so I remember I was meeting some women and we were eating together, and so they wanted to know what I was, and I said, “Negro,”

And they said, “He’s a Negro!” They had never seen a Negro before. Here they are in Africa, you know, so that was like a tribal designation, you know. That was the coolest thing to know that they wanted my tribal designation, my culture, my language. The couple I stayed with, he was Zulu, and she was Lesotho; they were a mixed marriage, and they were in a counseling service for mixed marriages, in that country. (When) I was at their house, there was a meeting; and it was all black people, from what I saw. But for them, they had all these different races of people in there. I don’t think that black people from America realize that over there they [Africans] didn’t see the color as being naturally connecting. It’s more of a cultural thing, I guess.

[In South Africa] I got a chance to understand the cultural differences [among Africans]. It’s like a country full of countries, almost. Just going through one area to the next, through a lot of the tribal areas. It just changed my whole concept of race. Even the word “race” is an invented word because, technically, there’s no such thing as race. It was invented to designate how people look different, not just skin color, but lips, hair. Over there, one tribe looks different than another tribe. They’re a different race. They’re different from each other. That’s how the word was invented, just to define what they call morphology-- this person’s shape, his head shape, and all the differences because of race. Over there really brought that idea home to me that two people can be black and be different races-- the way the word was intentionally invented and used. They can’t really tell us apart. They don’t really notice that we’re Americans; we don’t look American to them. We just look like another “race” to them. [The western use of race comes from slavery.] They [Americans] attached class to race. People who used that word originally-- and I’m not sure how far back that word was used-- they had to attach class and race together. Somehow in western society even slaves are a race. In some societies you could be a king, and then come to this culture and be a slave even though you were a king. And once you were free, you could live in that culture as the same class as they were. But over in western society, western culture, we attached [slavery and class], and that’s the struggle of African-American culture and white- American culture come together is that we got the slavery and class thing that’s stuck together. Historically, it didn’t in a lot of different cultures.

My visit to South Africa didn’t really change my music, it changed myself. It changed myself, realizing that I really didn’t have to work so hard at being known as a person who plays black music. African-American music is that. Everything I do is going to come out that way. And it’s not something that I have to try so hard to do anymore. I don’t have to try as hard to be a blues musician, to be authentic. I can just play whatever I like, and all these experiences, these things that I bring to the music are things that I don’t even know that I do. I actually made it [my music] stronger because I could draw from my own personal experiences.

When I was in South America people reacted to [my] music and [to me] as a person. There were these embassy shows, the U.S. embassy was trying something, it was called Hearts America--its changed, but it’s through the US embassy and the State Department. And so they were trying to get Americans in places were there was not a lot of westernization. So a lot of the places where I was playing at were these schools in South America, they call the Ebayus, which stands for English speaking schools for the people in Brazil. There are five of them set up in Brazil, and so each one was my host. I’m trying to think how I had gotten contact. It was a program that I had heard so I threw my name [in] so I’d be ready for that if they got the funding for it. Then I got a call saying that, “We would like to use [you].” And I was the first American on that program. They really liked it, there were really a lot of Blues musicians there, and they really wanted to play with me. I spent like a day and a half not speaking any English, and we [Brazilian musicians] got along somehow [without] speaking; and it didn’t seem like that much of a problem, oddly enough. We would sit around the table and they would say do you want something to eat and somehow you got the idea like if the waitress would come by and they would look at you and make gestures or something; and you would say yes. Of course, you could say yes or no. Actually, I found out in Brazil that some words actually translate, like Latin based words like comprendo like comprehend or something like that or aqua or water. Yeah, so a lot of words would just translate. We’d sit around and make music, and we went to this club and then we made music there. The funniest thing was that these musicians owned their own bar, and it was a private bar. After we’d played at all these clubs all over, then they said, “We’ll take you to a special place.” It was no bigger than this room [a classroom], and it was like half indoor half outdoor and they opened the flaps. They parked their cars. It was like in a neighborhood residential center, and the guy went in there and cooked up some meals while we sat out there on this big hill looking out over this fortelezza (fortress). Just looking out watching the sunrise, you know; but they weren’t wealthy musicians, they just somehow had their own little private club.

Lem playing in Brazil.

I did go to some guy’s house and he had a party in the house. Actually, he had a party on Friday and we went on Sunday and they were still there. I asked if he was having a big week long party, and he said, “Well, in Brazil we say, ‘you tell us when the party starts and we’ll tell you when it’s over’.” They were still there Sunday. But the funny thing was, we were passing around a guitar and everybody played guitar, and everybody in the party had a song they could sing. It was actually funny ‘cause they could sing in English. Once we went to a club in Manaos, it was in the Amazon, and there was a woman there singing Duke Ellington songs. She couldn’t speak English, but she could sing the English words. American music has an effect on them [Brazilians]. I mean they can sing all the Robert Johnson tunes; they can sing all the blues, the jazz, but they can't speak English. They learned the song lyrics. And it’s funny ‘cause like when you hear them singing, you want to go up and say, “ Hey, that was a great gig,” and they can’t speak to you.

In South America the people reacted really well to me as a person and to my music. They really liked my music; there were really a lot of Blues musicians there, and they really wanted to play with me. (It) was kind of funny, I was sitting around a table with guys who were all the same age. None of them could speak English, and I spent two and a half days with those guys. There was one guy there who had really good English, he was either an interpreter or a teacher in one of those schools; but then they came back and got me, and he wasn’t there the next day. I spent like a day and a half not speaking any English, and we got along somehow.

I felt like over there [in Brazil] there are so many musicians who really aren’t famous. These guys that I played in the band with, they were like on a professional level; but over there you don’t really get paid for that. One of these guys was an engineer, one of the guys was responsible for all the Volkswagens in Brazil, and another guy is an architect; and they lived like just an average person would live here. One guy had just like a little car and an apartment. We went to do something at his house, and he had just this little apartment, and he was like this engineer for Volkswagen. Over here he’d be making like two hundred thousand dollars a year, you know. So it taught me that being good is just about being good. It’s not about, “I’m going to be famous some day, I’m going to be rich, I’m going to be on TV.” It’s just you’re good because it has it own rewards. If there is anything I learned in Brazil about people who are really, really good; and that was the only reason they were good, because they wanted to be good not because they wanted to be famous. They don’t attach it [being good] to any rise in their income or their social status, just their status as a musician is enough. They play this music, and like a policeman or a fireman, they get respect because of the job they do-- because it’s important in the community. That’s kind of interesting--that being a musician is that kind of experience for them. It’s not an experience like [that] here where you think you’re going to be famous or something.

As you know, I’m interested in history; and what started [my] interest in history in general [was] that I didn’t know anything about the history of blues. In my festival shows I did this song called “Dust my Broom.” I was singing that song and I’d sing a line called “black cat bone,” and it was in the song, and I didn’t know anything about black cat bone. I didn’t know anything about it, and now I know today it was a Voodoo charm. And it was a thing that they did in the South. They would try to find this black bone that would float up stream, so the guy said, “My baby’s got black cat bone.” Then he meant you had a Voodoo charm. I could sing that line, or “Dust my Broom,” what does a broom have to do with getting married or what is a broom? And so, the history kind of added something to my shows. Like when I was in Africa and the family wanted to give me something to take back with me, to remember them by. So the husband kind of grabbed a little broom off the wall, and his wife said, “ You can’t give him that. That’s part of our marriage service.”

And he said, “Oh, o.k.” and I said,

“Wait a minute, what does this broom have to do with getting married?”

And she said, “When we got married, the oldest woman in the family passed this broom on to me as a symbol to keep our life or keep our marriage swept clean.” And those little brooms that we see in little craft shops, when I was in Africa they actually use them. They’re on their hands and knees. They have these huts--and man, they’re so neat and clean, the dirt is swept around their house; and you know it’s like concrete, all the way out to the gutter. So that symbolizes like sweeping clean. So anyway, I have that, and I knew that in colonial times African-American couples, when they got married, they would hold hands and jump over the broom. And I thought this was just some crazy thing they made them do--let’s get a broom and make them jump over it. And then, when I was growing up, if somebody was sweeping a floor, if the broom touched your feet that meant that you were getting married. I had an aunt who was real superstitious, and she believed that stuff, she was crazy. And then I went to Africa and had that experience, and it all just clicked. All these three things about the broom, just from picking up things that the broom is an African tradition. And that’s what the blues song says, “Dust my broom,” and that’s why they associate it with marriage, and that’s why they jumped over it on the plantation, because it’s an African tradition. So I realize that there’s like this continuum of history that’s there; and so it really got me into history, and not just history, but cultural history. To learn how important these insignificant things were, like the broom, and you know you could take an oppressed people and oppress them for four hundred years and some how their culture manages to stay alive.

Yeah, I was curious about history and still today I think I’m going to end up with a doctorate in musicology or something like that ‘cause I’m looking real close at schools that teach it. I feel like I’ve done a lot of research and so it really makes me do a much better program. It’s like when I was in Seattle on Monday I did a show for the historical society, the Washington State Historical Society. Part of it is just finding new venues as an artist. I really didn’t like playing bars. I like going to a bar, but I don’t like working at the bar. It’s just the environment. I didn’t think the environment was just right for me. It wasn’t a good fit you know, and I really like folk festivals and historical society shows, state historical things. Things where you can connect with the audience with some kind of story or some kind of theme. They can have more of an expense account. When you play at a bar, you just show up at eight o’ clock and play till three or four in the morning; and these people, you know, they take better care of you. As an artist you’re more respected, you’re not there to help sell beer or something like that, which is what you do in a bar. So I decided that if I’m going to do these shows, I’ve got to develop a show that fits. So I had to do some research and learn about American history, and African history, and African music, and now you have lots of African music to study. I found out that the banjo and the guitar, the names are really mixed up. The banjo is really a remmican; it’s based on the African remmican. This is one source I had. There was an African guitar, and there was an African banjo, and so I can deliver that type of information to my audience in the context of playing banjo songs. I do urban schools and I pull out the banjo, and there’s some snickering, they think here’s the old plantation guy (gesturing as if playing banjo). I remember I was in New Jersey, I would bring out the banjo, and the black kids would get kind of embarrassed, “He’s going to play the banjo. Oh, no!” So the first thing I did was I played a little eastern melody on it, and it sounded like it was from China; and the Chinese kids and the Asian kids perked up. And I said, “What does that sound like?”

Then they said, “Sounds like Siam, it sounds like Asia.”

Then I said, “What does this sound like?”

They (said), “It sounds like Arab music.” Then I took them on a trail of where the banjo comes from. Everybody in the world has an instrument that looks like this. It probably came from Asia, and then the Middle East and West Africa, and West Africa to America. Even thought the banjo was a black instrument, but it came from China. It’s got a history. So I bring the banjo all the way to America, and then I play the banjo. After having shared with them the Middle Eastern culture, the Asian culture, and the African culture, and now African-American culture, and then show them how white America got the banjo. So that’s why, in my shows, I try to use a single concept like that. I build a forty-five-minute show around this thousand-year journey.

You know its funny because I didn’t do very well in American history in college. I didn’t see how significant it was. And now I just can’t get enough of it. I want to find about the slave trade. I want to find out how much a slave cost, what kind of people could buy a slave, and how the economics effects and you know, it’s all American history now. Why so much of African-American culture comes out of the Mississippi Delta. It’s Charlotte, North Carolina, and Maryland, which is where most African-Americans were living in the eighteenth century, in Charlotte, North Carolina. And a lot of them, you know. Cotton was king, so the attention is focused on the Delta, you know, rather than in the northern states.

[Many things] affect my music writing, like [my] guitar playing and what kind of chords I use. When I first started out, I stayed with really traditional chords like your basic major and minor chords; and now I’m thinking more in terms of--you know, when you go to another culture, they don’t associate the minor chords with sadness, in the Eastern part of the world, they don’t attach that to it-- So now my guitar playing, I hate these words like sophisticated because that’s used in music theory, legitimate, meaning that you’re using more notes in your chord. Instead of the three notes that you’re accustomed to, I’m learning to do more what I call tone painting. Tone painting is like you say a sort of word, you want a musical background that matches that word. To create tension, to create sadness, or not just using major and minor chords. I’m having fun now writing more music, writing it from a guitar player’s point of view. I write guitar stuff all the time. At some point, I can think of some words to put on it so it will fit. Some of these songs I write words to seven or eight years after I write the guitar part. When I have need for a song, I take that guitar piece and put words to it. I try to make the guitar part and the vocal part stand alone from each other. The words should be poetry, and the guitar part should be a composition. So, if you put two good things together, you know they’ll be o.k. So that’s what I’m doing now in my writing. I write poetry, and then I write what I call composition. And lots of poetry I write. Someday I put them with a composition to make a song. Sometimes they match up, sometimes they don’t. I just keep them in my head.

This one song I’m doing in my show now, the words were written by a slave in the eighteenth century. It’s called “Early Affection.” This is interesting because he’s a poet, and he wrote music. He wrote poems that I think they could rival Shakespeare; and I’m not saying that because an African-American wrote them. I’m saying that if I were to give someone that poetry, you would think it was a Shakespearian sonnet, and a slave wrote it. But the chords I use are more jazz oriented. So I’m putting together those two things. And I have another thing I wrote where the chords are more alternative. That’s what the guy that helped me record it said. He says it sounds like something on the radio today, but the words were written in 1860 by William Wells Brown. If the message or the words are timeless, it should be appropriate to update them because you can say great things that have been said in the past with music. I learned that the hard way when I was doing these African-American programs. I was trying to do things the way they were done in the 1940’s. This is the way blues sounded then, and this is the stuff that came from the 1880’s. You can’t do that stuff at high schools and for young audiences because what happens is that they hear it all in a mass; and this mass comes to them as, “This is old stuff.” That’s what they hear. They don’t hear the pain and anguish of being a slave, or hiding out on the Underground Railroad. They hear, “This is old stuff.” But if I take the song, and [makes] it sound like what is on the radio today, [then] they start singing those words and they start getting it. They start getting those words because I put it in a package that they heard as “new stuff” that’s vibrant. They realize that that stuff is important today as it was two hundred years ago. And that’s the message I want to get across.

Wherever I go I want to blend in. Yeah you really want to blend in and feel like you’re one of them even if it’s a shock in the end. I was in some little, small town in Kansas. I played to a full sold out house, and made connections with people and went to a little hamburger place and I ate that night, and you know I was kind of a diplomat. I wasn’t pretending to be nice or pretending to be enjoying it. I just genuinely know that this will be fun, and you make that connection with people out there. Sometimes they’re surprised, when I go to New York or California, they think I’m from [that] area. They think that everyone that does school shows is from the area, and they want to know what I’m doing this Saturday. And I say, “I’m on the road man and I can’t say,”… and they say, “Where are you from man?”

And I say, “I’m from Kansas.”

And they’ll go, “No way (chuckles)!” Then they say, “I can’t believe you’re from Kansas.” Then they give you this look like you’re a ‘62 Chevy with ten thousand original miles. It’s just that you’re a good find. Unspoiled yet by their city. So, it’s just like being a diplomat. Understanding, and wanting to know more about someone’s culture; making an effort to say please and thank you in another country.

I think the problem of identity definitely has made problems for the development of blues. A lot of it is just commercial, I mean, the music was never really meant to be bought and sold. It was just meant to be heard in small family groups, small groups where the music spoke to this one group of people, you know. I’ve heard a lot of African-American musicians, I met a couple of them recently that, actually they remind me of during the minstrel period. The minstrel songs of basically these African- Americans in urban areas-- Baltimore, places like that. And, of course Charlotte, North Carolina. A lot of musicians heard them, wrote those songs down, and went up north and put the black face on and played them. And then black artists saw how successful they were, so they copied the white people imitating the black people. So there were black minstrel show, and the black minstrel show was a black person imitating a white person, imitating a black person. And now these blues are the same way. These young black artists are imitating white artists who are imitating black artists; and it’s just confusing to see these people. I can’t complain because a lot of these people are very well-know blues artists. I’ve opened for them. I’ve talked to their managers and agents, and I see they’re doing great by doing it. It works; commercially it works.

It is the business of music itself that’s creating the problems in the progression of music. It’s something about blues and African-American music--like hip-hop is going to be a victim of this. They have to make like it’s coming from deep in the bowels of America, deep in the urban areas, just like a lot of those rappers. If you look at these rappers out there, I bet you’re going to find that a lot of these guys are southerners. Their parents are teachers, professionals, they’re not like these ghetto kids; but commercially, it just works better if you can say, “He was in a gang, and he got shot and grew up without his father.” But if you say that a rapper grew up in Rochester, his father was a dentist, it just doesn’t sell. I really never put that stuff [details about my family background] in bios. I don’t want people to associate or imagine what I might be. I want people to just see who I am, and to just accept the music.

The blues I was doing was based on a certain social environment that was around twenty years before I was even born; and it changed my whole approach to music. You see these young guys who are making this music; and they are from Chicago, they have the dark glasses and the hat. The music kind of progresses, like Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix, they sound different. It would have been wrong for Jimi Hendrix to sound like Muddy Waters, even though he could have done it; but I see a lot of even African-American blues artists today do it. They sound like Robert Johnson because commercially they could make more money; and commercially I probably could make more money sounding like Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson than I could sounding like Lem Sheppard.

People listen to music differently today. The strangest thing is that CD sales aren’t as important anymore, you know. People are getting the music, they can get your music whether you want them to have it or not. That’s the new reality-- you may not be the one selling your music. Someone else is going to get it. And once your music is out there, it’s out there, and everybody can have it whether you want them to have it or not. So don’t think that people are going to the store to buy your record, they’re going to get [it] off line or get it in some other source. And so you have to figure out a way to make music; you have to figure out this whole thing of access. I still haven’t quite come to terms with it, I have this CD that people can buy on line, but I would just as soon give the CD to anyone who is going to give me a gig; and let people who want to hear the music come to the show. I think I want to go back to the times when it was all live, and you couldn’t buy the music. That’s how jazz was made. Jazz was live. You didn’t buy jazz records because it wasn’t the same thing. So I’m trying to figure a way to go back to that, maybe something like the Grateful Dead did, you know, put a recording deck out there and everybody who wants to record plug into my recording deck and record this show. If you go to the show, then you can record the songs and have them.

I think that file sharing [is] starting to turn music back to its roots. A lot of musicians are against it, and it’s because they’re recording people and they make a living by selling the records. And they can’t afford to not sell records. It’s like a group like Metallica. They’re so big and heavy that it’s quite possible that it costs them at every show. It might cost their show ten or fifteen thousand dollars just to show up in a city. So they had to make fifty thousand dollars off of it, and they had to sell shirts and things. When you get that big, it’s just tough. They were one of the people who were against file sharing; and I think it hurt them because the age of their audience was the same as the age of the people who were on the cutting edge of the file sharing. They’ll say we’re old and fat and we can’t afford not to sell records; and we can’t afford to travel anymore because we don’t like it. And their shows were big and cumbersome. With all the buzzers and whistles in recording studios most people would be shocked-- like there’s computer programs that can move your voice to the right pitch, move your guitar to the right pitch, and just repair it like [a] movie, paint it up, make it look real pretty. And that’s what recordings really are. But I want people to get back to thinking that recordings are less valuable than the live experience.

[Currently] I’m changing around a lot. I always think of my shows now in term of a single concept, like this show is called “I’ve seen rivers.” It focuses on a central character. Like a black man on the Lewis and Clark journey, and it kind of dispelled myths and rumors about what a slave was. That’s my music-- poetry that sounds like Shakespearean things that were written by slaves. I have this different view of what a slave was. I see them (slaves) like people who went to college because their master went to college. Went to college with them, and studied at Columbia and Oxford. And a lot of slaves did that. I mean they were sitting in the chair beside the guy, carrying his books. But you know they were mathematicians and what have you. So I focus on that concept, and I’m trying to think like in the ‘60s or ‘70s. So I’m writing music, and I’m trying to get out of categorizing myself. I’m in a transition now because people still know me as a blues artist and I have a lot of respect for that, and notoriety; but its like I wanna [be] just like, one of the guys I met, like Taj Mahal. They don’t think of him as a blues guitar player. He’s just Taj Mahal. Richie Havens, they kind of defy these categories. So that’s what I’m trying to do now, just pursue being a musician and using my name to define what my music is. It’s just Lemuel Sheppard music, it’s not blues or folk, it’s not this’ it’s not that. So that’s where I’m at right now. Just writing, being more free, you know.

Some songs are really autobiographical in a sense they have to because if you’re going to write about pain or joy or something like that, you should be able to reflect on your own life and find something that’s joyful about your own life, or some pain that you have and just try to describe it. Or loneliness or something like that. I always quote from my own experiences and write songs about things that I felt, or things that I like. Writing music they say is five percent inspiration, and ninety-five percent perspiration, or whatever. The truth of the matter is that you need a really strong hook to hang everything else on. That’s what I do now. I do something I can relate to, and something my audience can relate to; and that’s really the kind of artist that I want to be.

Lem’s website link is at www.lemuelsheppard.com.

*() indicates clarifying information

*[] indicates words not said by Lem

This oral history was researched and prepared by James Harmon, spring 2005