Ritchie and Jimmy in the Village

  Ritchie and Jimmy in the Village

Once Ritchie learned to play guitar and sing he didn't do the quick sketch thing for money, and performed in the Village clubs at night instead.

But he remained friends with Napoleon, and occasionally, mainly on summer weekends, got on the bus to Ocean City for a few days just to get out of the city. While Napoleon sketched Ritchie hung out with the hippies on Schriever’s pavilion, sometimes jamming with Jim Croce, Todd Run grin, John Hall, Stephanie Nicks and Joe Walsh, who were all there at one time or another.

Napoleon continued to sketch and paint until he split for New Orleans in late 1969. How he got to the Big Easy is another story.

Playing three or four gigs a night Ritchie made out pretty good, and then got a good paying job uptown as a minstrel in an off Broadway play. As Ritchie put it, going uptown from the Village was like going to another country.

All of the musicians who worked uptown wore straight black slacks and shoes and most were in the union, and that's how Ritchie found Jimmy.

While they crossed paths briefly at the shore in the summer of '65, they didn't meet, and since then Jimmy had left Joey Dee and the Starliters and after getting fired by Little Richard for upstaging him, he was playing with the Isley Brothers at the Club Cheers, just across the street from the Peppermint Lounge, where the Starliters were still playing the Peppermint Twist and Shout.

Ritchie was the opening act and stuck around to catch The Brothers, but it was Jimmy the siideman in the back of the stage who caught his attention. Is that Dude playing the guitar with his teeth?, he thought to himself as he moved up through the crowd to get a closer look. Damn!, he is, and not missing a beat.

After the set Ritchie went backstage where the entertainers shared a dressing room, to meet this guy. After Jimmy told Ritchie what bands he had played with since leaving the Army - Billy Cox, Joey Dee, Little Richard and the Isley Brothers, Ritchie told Jimmy about the Village and how hip it was - another world all together, and that he needed to front his own band and not play behind the skirts of others.

When he finished his last set for the night Ritchie took Jimmy downtown in a cab, and introduced him to some musicians -' like John Hammond, Jr., and club owners, one of whom took Ritchie's word for it, and booked Jimmy Johnson and the Blue Flames to the Cafe Wha? - yea, it's spelt that way with a question mark.

While a drummer and bass player were recruited and they practiced, John Hammond, Jr.  slipped Jimmy a few bucks to sit in with him at the Village Gate, something he never did before.

Hammond liked to play old, traditional blues, even though he was a college educated white boy, and Jimmie jived nicely with that style.

As Ritchie later explained, it was quite common in folk and blues music circles to tell the story behind a song before playing it, and so it was a quiet mid-week off night, before Jimmy began playing at the Cafe Wha?, before he was "discovered" by the Bloody Brits and taken across the pond, it was before he became famous when Jimmy took the folk music cafe stage for an acoustic duet with John Hammond, Jr.

Jimmy had explained to Ritchie his reservations about singing - his father told him he had inherited his mother’s voice and couldn't carry a tune,  but Ritchie set him straight, as Jimmy wrote to his dad, repeating what Ritchie had said to him almost word for word.

"Nowadays people don't want you to sing good. They want you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs. That's what angle I'm going to shoot for. That's where the money is. So just in case you might hear a record by me which sounds terrible, don't feel ashamed, just wait until the money rolls in because every day people are singing worse and worse on purpose and the public buys more and more records."

"I just want to let you know I'm still here, trying to make it. Although I don't eat every day, everything's going alright for me. It could be worse than this, but I'm going to keep hustling and scuffling until I get things to happening like they're supposed to for me. Tell everyone I said hello. Please write soon, It's pretty lonely out here by myself. Best luck and happiness in the future, your son Jimmy." 

Jimmy's mom and dad divorced and Jimmy was raised by his dad, who bought him his first guitar after finding him playing the straws of a broom.

When it was his turn to pick a song, Jimmy began by saying this song came to him in a dream about his mother, and with Hammond gently playing a rhythm, began playing and singing:

Angel

Angel came down from heaven yesterday
She stayed with me just long enough to rescue me
And she told me a story yesterday
About the sweet love between the moon and the deep blue sea
And then she spread her wings high over me
She said she's gonna come back tomorrow

And I said, "Fly on my sweet angel
Fly on through the sky
Fly on my sweet angel
Tomorrow I'm gonna be by your side"

Sure enough this morning came unto me
Silver wings silhouetted against the child's sunrise
And my angel she said unto me
"Today is the day for you to rise
Take my hand, you're gonna be my man
You're gonna rise"
And then she took me high over yonder

And I said, "Fly on my sweet angel
Fly on through the sky
Fly on my sweet angel
Forever I will be by your side"