Ernie Hawkins 
Keeper of the Pulse by Richard Cuccaro

In the summer of 1965 I was working as a waiter at a resort in the Catskills. 
Frank Sinatra was still my hero, and I shamelessly mimicked him on stage 
on amateur night.  Then the pendulum began to swing.  Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" 
seeped out of the car radio and into my world view and my hands pounded 
the steering wheel to The Stones' "Get off of My Cloud." One day a folkie 
drifted through, stopping at the hotel to visit a friend. He pulled out his 
Martin 6-string and fingerpicked his way through a few songs. It sounded 
like bells ringing… the clarion call for all would-be troubadors. At summer's 
end I returned home to Connecticut, bought a second-hand Gibson and began 
taking lessons in Travis style picking. Soon after, word reached me that the 
mack daddy of blues guitarists, the Reverend Gary Davis was giving a performance 
at a church basement coffeehouse in Westport. If religion ever gave me anything, 
it was on that night when the notes fell like rain from the Reverend's fingertips and 
the stone walls shuddered from the sound of "Twelve Gates to the City," as it poured 
from his ancient, leathery vocal cords. A local student who was taking lessons from 
the Reverend had brought him out to play. This, as I found out many years later, 
was a recurring theme.

Today, as a less-than-human, soulless insensibility has wrested control of our lives, 
some of us ponder where the heart of America has wandered. The heart still beats 
in our poets and singers. While Celtic heritage speaks eloquently of tragedy and 
injustice, the heartbeat, the pulse… belongs to the blues. It's disciples extend from 
the masters and spread outward. Many have traveled the south, tracking down the 
legends. For a while, there was a legend right here in our midst, on Long Island… 
the Reverend Gary Davis. Three men in particular who I've met, learned from Gary, 
and became disciples: the late Dave Van Ronk, Roy Book Binder, and… Ernie Hawkins.

As it has in the past, the annual mid-November Northeast Folk Alliance Conference 
presented me with at least six months of feature material. This current issue's profile 
presented itself in the form of one Ernest Leroy Hawkins as he strolled down the aisle 
of the exhibit hall and stopped in front of the Acoustic Live booth. We struck up a 
conversation and I leaped at the chance to hear his story and present it to our readers. 
A taciturn man, his vocals are laid-back and he imparts a relaxed, fluid style to the 
intricacies of his guitar work.

Between Mother and the Gospel
It begins with Ernie's mother. She liked to sing around the house. He remembers, 
"Yeah… she knew every popular song. She got the sheet music to everything that came 
out in the 30's and 40's." However, it was her unfortunate  need for help that gave Ernie 
his first exposure to black roots music. He recalls; "My mother was sick and she hired 
a black woman, Jessie, to take care of us.  My mother told me recently before she died, 
that my favorite thing as a kid, was that Jessie would take me to her church every 
Sunday. I still vaguely remember it."


Guitar Lessons and Farm Chores
From Ernie's web site we learn: He first learned country guitar, mandolin, banjo and 
bones from a guy named Pete who worked on his Uncle's farm. Pete had come up playing 
with the Lilly Brothers and had rambled around the country - taking a 30-year detour 
down whisky lane that landed him in a cabin on the farm as property caretaker… and 
becoming a primary musical mentor to Ernie. He told me: "My father's family had farms 
in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I would go to live at one of my uncle's farms when I was 
in my early teens. There was a guy that worked on and managed the farm whose name 
was Pete. He was a multi-instrumentalist. He could play bones with both his hands and 
dance.  [Bones are a rythmic instrument. Made of wood and played like spoons, they look 
like rib bones.] He gave me a pair of wooden ones that I still have. He came up with the 
Lily Brothers in West Virginia. They were a country group. He played a lot of country stuff. 
He was a really good flatpicker and fingerpicker. I was fascinated with his fingerpicking. 
I still play some of the songs he taught me." On Mean Little Poodle, his most recent CD, 
the song "Railroad Blues" was learned from Pete. 

More and more, music ruled. Ernie states: "Back at home, we had a piano in the house. 
I took a few lessons. I was just interested in music and more and more interested in guitar, 
so I barely made it out of high school." 

Learning Fingerpicking 
It wasn't easy, as he relates: "Back then, in the early 60's you had to go out and find people 
who could play, if you wanted to learn. It was all oral tradition. You'd go down south a lot. 
There were people in Pittsburgh and Ohio you'd hear about and you'd just get in the car or 
hitchhike and you'd go find somebody. So that's why, when I found out about him, I went 
to find Gary Davis.

Before that, in the summer after 11th grade, I had $35. I hitchhiked down to Georgia to try 
to find Blind Willie McTell. Of course, he had died a few years earlier. I ran out of money 
and never found anybody who ever even knew him. I didn't have a car. I was just hitchhiking 
around. He was from Statesboro, Georgia and had written a famous song, 'Statesboro Blues.'"

The Gary Davis Pipeline
Apparently, Ernie has always had an entrepreneurial  sense. He recalls: "My high school buddy 
and I had this little coffeehouse in Pittsburgh --it's first coffeehouse. We borrowed coffee tables 
and card  tables and coffee pots. All of a sudden people knew about it and everybody from the 
area came around. This guy came through who knew Gary Davis and played some of his songs. 
He taught me some more fingerpicking and I was hooked.

I got my first Gary Davis record and I just loved it. Everybody that I knew that ever mentioned 
Gary Davis said, 'You could come to New York and call him up on the phone.' He lived in Long 
Island and his number was AX17609. Roy Book Binder is the only other person I run across who 
remembers that phone number.

The day after I got out of high school I moved to New York City. I got a job for $52.50 a week, 
downtown. I got a little apartment. I called him up and started taking guitar lessons and spent as 
much time as I could with him.
He worked really hard to teach me stuff. I stayed there about a year, then moved back to Pittsburgh. 
I brought him to Pittsburgh a lot. I would bring him and his wife and they sometimes stayed at
 my house for a week."
While studying toward a degree in Philosphy at the University of Pittsburgh, He got together 
with friends to promote a couple of blues festivals.  The university sponsored it. He says, 
"We brought in every blues guy that was available: Mance Lipscomb, Fred McDowell, Son House, 
Robert Peet Williams, Roosevelt Sykes, John Fahey, Victoria Spivey…" Ernie takes pride in 
having brought in the Reverend, who played with another Piedmont-style guitarist, a local man, 
Bobby Jones, whose style was similar to Gary's. Bobby later disappeared and then resurfaced 
years later under the name Guitar Gabriel. Gabriel had begun to achieve a wider recognition 
before his death in 1996.

The Texas Blues
After getting his degree in Philosphy, Ernie recieved a scholarship to study psychology  
at the University of Dallas. He says, "I was down there for 5 years. That's where I learned 
a lot of Texas blues. When I got to Texas I met some blues players including a guy by the 
name of Art Eskridge, a great player who showed me a lot of stuff. I got a lot of insight 
into Texas blues. Also, I'd known Mance Lipscomb from his trips to Pittsburgh, but then 
got to know him really well and got a bit of insight into his style. In Texas, while I was in 
school studying, I played, not professionally, but quite a bit, getting around, meeting people. 

The Doctor is… Out!
As his web site states:  "So, with Ph.D. in hand, Ernie wandered back into music." He puts
it this way: "When I got out of school in the late 70's, I wanted to take time off from academics, 
so I started playing out a little bit and got jobs in bands playing a little electric guitar. I wound 
up playing electric guitar for years and years in blues bands because it was easy.  I had a good 
time playing in country bands as well. I played a little bit of acoustic guitar on the side but 
I could make an easy living playing electric." For ten years he played electric guitar with the 
Blue Bombers, one of Pittsburgh's favorite R&B bands. They have two acclaimed recordings: 
Bombs Away and Altitude Adjustment.


Back to Tradition
Finally it was time to get back to the roots. He says, "Around the mid 90's, I was getting 
tired of that. I was thinking that I had this history of learning from the old blues masters and 
I was itching to play acoustic again. So in '96 I made my first solo acoustic CD."

In the early '80's he had recorded his first solo album, Ragtime Signatures. His second CD 
(the first acoustic) Blues Advice was dedicated to the memory of Gary Davis on the occasion 
of the centennial of his birth. The CD includes three songs taught to Ernie by Davis: 
"Penitentiary Blues," "Florida Blues" and "Will There Be Stars in My Crown" that have never 
been previously recorded. Ernie's third CD Bluesified received worldwide rave reviews. 
It regularly plays in the preemie unit of a Pittsburgh hospital where the soulful guitar is 
considered an integral part of the healing process.

It's worked out for Ernie. He's taken his blues ambassadorship to Europe and Japan, giving 
workshops and concerts and has made a bunch of teaching videos for Stefan Grossman's 
Guitar Workshop -- Texas blues -- Lightning Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, plus a video 
on Blind Willie McTell, who he still considers the greatest 12-string player ever. He's also 
made a number of teaching DVDs on the Reverend Gary Davis… his gospel stuff.

Especially known for his connection to Davis, he says of the Reverend, "His guitar style was so deep. 
It wasn't the usual thing. It was very hard to learn. He was a genius. He worked this out himself -- 
for thousands of songs. Now I'm trying to continue teaching it and keep it alive." 
We spoke about the difficulty of learning Gary's licks and remembered Dave Van Ronk's  
"Candy Man" dream in which Dave finally figured out a difficult guitar passage in that song long 
after the Reverend had passed away. In the dream he watched him play the song, then woke up 
realizing how he'd played it.  This was especially remarkable because Dave had procured gigs for 
Gary in Greenwich Village, sitting down front so he could learn all the licks. It still took a 
dormant, imbedded memory in a dream to bring the method to the surface.

Ernie was featured in SingOUT! Summer '01 and Fingerstyle Guitar Summer '00. Ernie's 
theatrical compositions include the NY production of L.E. McCullough's Blues for Miss Buttercup, 
the University of Pittsburgh production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Pittsburgh Public Theater's 
T-Bone and Weasel.

Ernie's advice to young players is to study the traditional masters. His next project is an album 
exploring early jazz. He's  been very excited to find, in exploring the work of Bix Beiderbecke 
and Louis Armstrong, that the ragtime horn lines translate perfectly to guitar.

The pulse of the blues still beats strongly and one of it's keepers will be visiting us soon in 
January, 2005. Ernie Hawkins will be at Makor at 35 West 67th St. in Manhattan on January 6th 
and at Sanctuary Concerts in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey with Paul Geremia and 
Bennett Harris on January 8th.   Check our listings.

For more information and future gigs, visit Ernie's web site at www.erniehawkins.com