Henry Townsend

ST. LOUIS - Blues guitarist Henry Townsend, who ran away from his family as a boy and stayed in St. Louis for a prolific career spanning eight decades, has died at age 96.

Townsend died Sunday of a pulmonary embolism in Grafton, Wisconsin, where he was being honored by a local blues association.

Townsend, who wrote and published hundreds of songs, began his recording career in 1929 and continued to make records in every decade since, an accomplishment that put him in rare company, said Mark O'Shaughnessy, president of BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups, a St. Louis blues club.

"He was the patriarch of St. Louis blues," O'Shaughnessy said. "He wasn't in it for the money. He believed in the music. It told a very honest story."

Townsend, who often performed with his late wife, Vernell, was in in Grafton to be honored as the last surviving artist with the old Paramount Records. The label recorded one-fourth of all the blues material produced from 1929 to 1932, including so-called "race records" by black artists for black audiences.

He arrived Thursday, and was hospitalized Friday evening. The Grafton Blues Association brought a plaque honoring him to his hospital room hours before he died.

"He was quite a guy," the group's president, Kris Marshall, said. "We listened to his stories. He was very excited to be back here."

Townsend was born in Shelby, Mississippi, grew up in Cairo, Illinois, and left for St. Louis as a 9-year-old to avoid a whipping from his father, after he had "blown some snuff," he told The Associated Press in an interview in June.

He said his father played a button box accordion, but young Henry loved the guitar, and bought himself one. He also learned the piano.

While working as a shoe shine boy in St. Louis, he came to know a generation of piano players who had grown up on ragtime and were teaming up with guitarists to experiment with the blues.

He decided on a career in blues guitar after hearing budding bluesman Lonnie Johnson perform in the old Booker T. Washington Theater in St. Louis.

In the 1930s, Townsend played with blues greats Roosevelt Sykes, Walter Davis and Robert Johnson at neighborhood parties and fish fries. Townsend recalled they would "jam up and down the street" on top of a coal-hauling truck during the Depression to help raise rent money for people being evicted.

"If you got $2 to play somewhere, you were doing well," Townsend recalled.

In those days, record label scouts gathered up local musicians in cities like St. Louis, and took them to a studio for a recording session, Belford said.

As the Depression ended, Townsend and other blues musicians like him fell into near oblivion when the juke box replaced live music, and the materials needed for the war effort slowed down the record industry.

It was not until the late 1950s, when the old blues "race records" were rediscovered during a growing folk revival, that Townsend, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams and others found renewed popularity. They toured the U.S. and Europe and found new audiences, Belford said.

Townsend, who won a National Heritage Award in 1985 that recognized his being a master artist, never stopped performing.

He told the AP he had paid a price for staying in St. Louis, and lost some good breaks, but had no regrets.

"I never had an agent in my life," he said. "Just being me has got me where I am."
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press