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A charmed life

Shirley Lewis knows the joy of the blues

by Ted Drozdowski

Shirley Lewis is a Singer, with a capital "S." That's understood when she puts down the microphone during a chorus of "You Can Have My Husband (But Please Don't Mess with My Man)" and her voice still cuts through the bar-room chatter and clank, over her musicians.

Such projection does not come easily. Neither does the gritty Žlan with which she fronts a band, her charming repartee, or the generosity she projects. These qualities, when wrapped in one of her Ma-Rainey-meets-Ella-Fitzgerald gown-and-hat combinations, add up to Personality -- with a capital "P." They also add up to 40 years in the business, which the Boston-based R&B vocalist is celebrating in '97 by, well, working. A lot. Throughout her New England stronghold, up into Canada, and across the US.

She's also marking her 60th birthday, but when we talk in the sunny kitchen of her Newton Corner residence, Lewis's equally bright demeanor, unlined face, and flower-colored blouse and hat make that seem a lie. And a wonder, given that she's nearly died twice from illness and once from fire, lost weeks of her life to amnesia, suffered an abusive early marriage that left her a single mother, and as a child was sexually molested by a family friend.

"Musically, things have always gone well for me, but there were things in my life that were really ugly," she states. "I've tried to concentrate on the positive stuff. I try to stress that to young women. If bad things happen to you, even as a child, focus on the good things . . . no matter if you know you'll always carry those bad things with you. It's hard, but don't let the dark side drag you down."

To hear Lewis tell it, she's never had to face that dark side alone. "I've always been spiritually aware. I think it started as an infant, when the house my family lived in burned down. My mother had so many children that she almost forgot about me. She had to run back into the house for me in my crib. Maybe that's where it started, my protection."

Lewis relates that when she entered a diabetic coma in 1990, visitors and hospital staff observed a strange glow around her -- an aura -- that she felt helped her through. And she says she's often able to see people's auras when she's performing on stage. Few performers claim to give their fans that kind of glow. But there's more.

"Feel the palm of my hand," she says, reaching over. "It's very hot." And, indeed, it is.

"I heal," she continues. "I've been able to heal people by touching them, people who were friends of mine who wanted to be touched or people who just came up to me and asked me to touch them." Among the latter, she relates, was the late grizzly bear of a wrestler Andre the Giant, whose eye had taken a particularly severe beating in a match.

"It was at the Club New Delhi in Vancouver, and doctors had told him he might lose the eye. Without knowing me -- and I never say anything about being able to do this from the stage or in public -- he just came up to me and asked me to touch his eye." Lewis relates a handful of similar incidents before upping the ante.

"I can also see things before they happen. I've saved lives quite a few times. I saved my brother's life. I saw him laying somewhere -- I didn't know where he was. I thought he'd been hit by a truck. Someone had beaten him up the night before with a two-by-four, and he was laying out in his front yard with his brains on the ground. I was at home in Canada, so I called my sister in New Jersey and told her to get somebody over to Roger's place. A few minutes later and he would have been dead. Now he's got a plate in his head and talks with a lisp."

So though Lewis isn't tearing up the national blues charts as she celebrates this year -- a new recording is in the works following '94's live Hard, Hard Times (Stanhope House), her '91 self-released For the Love of It, and her appearance on Tone-Cool's Boston Blues Blast, Vol. 1 compilation -- she's certainly enjoying the harvest of a charmed life. And it shows in her demeanor. Off stage and on, she laughs easily, smiles, seems gracious and happy -- whether she's chatting over tea or preaching the blues to 80,000 as she did headlining this year's Bessie Smith Strut festival in Chattanooga.

Lewis was raised to perform. Her father, a "full-black Hopi Indian," worked vaudeville shows around her native New Jersey. Her mother, a black woman of Blackfoot descent, taught school in North Carolina ("It was a little school where they would try to teach black children secretly") before marriage. "We lived in this broken-down shack in Florence, and all six of us kids slept on mattresses -- we couldn't afford beds -- in one room. We didn't have much, but we had a lot of love, a lot of caring."

At four, Shirley made her singing debut with her father and siblings. "I was wearing a little pink dress and patent-leather shoes with white socks. I was so happy to have a pair of shoes -- I'd never had them before -- that I wore them until they wore out." Tutored to sing and tap dance by her father, little Shirley joined him at fairs, ball games, and saloons. Then her parents began the Lewis Family Gospel Singers, taking their skills to church. And when the stage wasn't calling, it was the fields -- the Lewis kids helped mom with vegetable picking -- or school.

"In school, they had talent contests. I would win these little old contests," Shirley recounts. "In high school, they had bigger and better talent shows, and winning those gave me the confidence to be a singer. After high school I tried to be an accountant, but I kept going home with numbers in my head, so I took a government job and sang on weekends in church."

At church, Lewis's voice caught the ear of some parishioners who had an R&B band. Soon she was fronting their group, singing tunes by Earl Gaines, Ruth Brown, Jackie Wilson, and even Mahalia Jackson, sometimes opening for stars like B.B. King, who's remained an acquaintance since her Jersey days.

None of this pleased her husband at the time. He forced Lewis to quit the band; eventually his abuse became physical, and Shirley took her two small daughters and left. She considered her options: "I didn't want them to grow up in a situation where there was a lot of destruction. I'd moved to Camden, but I felt my children would get into gangs and such there, so I didn't want that. We stayed with my brother, who was mean and got meaner when he started drinking, so I thought, `How can I get away from this?' "

She took a chance and made promotional photos of herself and sent them to booking agencies. In keeping with Shirley's charmed nature, Amalgamated Artists in Kansas City took her on -- without an audition -- and started booking her on their revue tours. Positive feedback from audiences and promoters kept her there, traveling the US and Canada with dancers, comedians, and others singers until 1972, when the "Black Is Beautiful" show pulled into Vancouver. That city fell in love with Lewis's blend of on-stage brass and grace, and she stayed for four years at one venue, the Club New Delhi, where a revue was built around her. "I packed that place every night, two shows a night, six nights a week," she proudly relates.

Lewis performed in residencies in Canada through 1985 -- save for a visit to her sister, during which she lost her memory due to a blood-chemistry imbalance and woke up one day in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with no idea how she'd gotten there or how long she'd been away. "People told me I was even performing during that period, but I have no idea," she says. "My family had hired detectives, the police were looking for me . . . "

In '86, she moved to Boston to house-sit for friends and started playing here. At first, local clubs billed her as a Chicago blues singer. Funny thing is, "I'd never been to Chicago at that point," she laughs. "I never said I was from Chicago. They put their own fix on that."

I suggest that her cheery, robust stage presence and no-nonsense delivery made people associate her with Chicago's famous Koko Taylor, who like Lewis is one of the few blues singers today with a performing style that can be traced right back to Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and the earliest days of blues recording.

"All that emotion, that toughness and that heart, that's the Jersey girl in me," she insists. "Many great R&B singers come from Philadelphia and New Jersey. We sing from the heart, which is something a lot of people don't understand. A lot of people sing technically great; when I sing, sometimes I might go flat, but that's the way I feel. That's from learning to sing a cappella, not following instruments. When I was a kid and we wanted music, we made it on pots and pans -- banging the drum beat. And you know, that's where the blues started -- way back in the fields, with the drum and the hum."