Frank Frost: On the record

" She didn't hit hard, it didn't hurt. I'll never forget the song I was singin'. 'My Baby Don't Wear No Drawers.' "

By Ross Gohlke

This past summer, BlueSpeak writer Ross Gohlke sat down for a wide-ranging conversation with Frank Frost. Frost, who has been playing the blues for more than four decades (see related story), is content these days to spend his time fishing. He was willing, though, to reminisce.

Frost didn't grow up playing the blues. At least, not the secular version. In fact his mother strongly discouraged it.

"I wasn't playin' blues then, strictly in church. I played blues at home. My father taught me piano when I was 12 years old...I got the worst whoopin' in the world by playin' the blues. My oldest brother and sister got me to do it. Momma had gone in to town, see. When she got back my brother and sister slipped out of the room. I was still sittin' on the piano, singin' the blues and playin'. Momma was standin' there behind me the whole time and I didn't know it.

"Daddy didn't whup me, momma did. Daddy was sayin', 'Let that boy alone. Let him play.' She done whupped me anyway. She didn't hit hard, it didn't hurt. I'll never forget the song I was singin'. 'My Baby Don't Wear No Drawers.'"

But there was no shortage of music in his younger years.

"I learned music from my brother and father...In the church. My brother played music. Father, he blowed a big sax and my mother was a keyboard player. "

When he was a teen-ager, Frost started playing keyboards at church and found out just how powerful his musical gift was.

"Man, I was tough then. But what happened at the time, the old lady that was playin' for the choir, she played too sad of a music. The choir wanted to sing. You know how it is in a choir. She was good, you know, but she just didn't put it on. Sad like you're playin' for a funeral or somethin', just didn't put no spirit to it, you know. So they asked me to sit in. I put the spirit to 'em."

Suddenly the congregation was whipped into a frenzy.

"The people started gettin' crazy and I said, 'Ya'll, quit that.' Well, they told me, 'You oughta quit playin' like that.' They hired me, I was just playin' what I play, what I know."

What Frost knows is the Delta roots. Roots that grow up to become gospel, blues, soul, jazz, rock 'n' roll. And though he might have grown up in the church, he was exposed to the grittier side of music and life as well.

"I saw Sonny Boy (Williamson) over in Brinkley, Arkansas, a couple times. Then they called me on the bandstand and told me to blow harp. I thought they called me up there to play guitar. Sonny Boy was crazy about my harp playin', but I didn't know it. I thought he wanted me to pick up behind him or something. No. 'Come on up here, baby, come on up here.' The crowd in that club, they didn't want me to quit. Then they kinda got me feelin' embarrassed, you know. So I just went to blowin' out in public, small clubs, juke joints and things. Everybody like it, so I kept blowin'.

"I was 15 or 16 when I used to go downtown to the clubs. I couldn't get in the club where Howlin' Wolf and Roscoe Gordon were playin'. I couldn't get in without goin' to get my harp. Howlin' Wolf would let me sit there, holdin' me on his knee while he drank. 'This is my son.' "Then the devil got me."

Frost was living in St. Louis when it happened. It is safe to assume that the devil caught up with Frost about the same time he ran into drummer Sam Carr - a legend in his own right as the son of Robert Nighthawk, a bluesman of the first generation. Frost says the pair used to split a gallon of corn whisky every night they played.

Shortly thereafter, Carr stole Frost away from Willie Foster's band to play in his own blues band.

"I was just sittin' in with Will Foster's band. I wasn't really playing. I was playing, but, you know. So Sam needed a piano player and harp player and a vocalist. He knew Willie Foster, and Sam was livin' in St. Louis, too, see. He seen me playin' with Willie Foster and I started playin' with him.

"It was Sam's band. It was Sam Carr and the Blues Kings. He was already playin' the blues."

Yet despite being in demand as a musician, Frost never thought of music as a way to make a living as much as just a natural part of life.

"[I didn't think I'd] ever be in a movie and that kind of stuff (Frost made an appearance in the Ralph Macchio movie Crossroads and contributed to the soundtrack). We were just enjoyin' the kind of music. Sometimes we'd play for two dollars a night. It was just somethin' we'd do on the weekends, 'cause we could play."

These days Frost takes it easy. His drinking days have taken their toll. At 61, he moves slowly and relies on medication. He prefers to spend his days fishing. That's where he writes his songs, taking his harmonica along when he feels like it.

"Most of the times I write a song I'll be out on the fish lake or hunting or doing something. Keep a pencil and pad in my pocket so when it comes to me I write the first line down out of my mind, and then I just write the words down and I don't think of it no more...Most of the time it works. When I get to the studio they say, 'That's fine. Play that.'"