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Edward Milton grew up in Chicago in the 1940s. When he was young, he would sneak out of his house and peek into club windows to watch blues musicians, then head home to practice riffs on a broom. He eventually became a blues singer and guitarist and was dubbed “Little Eddie King” because he so admired blues greats like Freddie King and B.B. King. He was as meticulous about his guitar-playing as he was about his appearance. He would paint his fingernails with clear polish, so they’d look nice when he was playing, and he even powdered his face.
“He’d rather play music than eat,” his wife, Bessie Milton, told the Peoria Journal Star last year. “It was his heart.” Over the course of his career, he played with legends like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. When he and Bessie lost five children in a fire in 1964, he coped by touring. Later in his career, long after the “little” had been dropped from his sobriquet, he joined the “Queen of the Blues” Koko Taylor’s band and played with it for more than 20 years.
By 2010, though, King could hardly play anymore. He developed a rare brain condition, progressive supranuclear palsy, a disorder with similarities to Parkinson’s disease. Among other things, it made his hands stiff. He eventually ended up at Sharon Health Care Elms nursing home, where he died in hospice care for prostate cancer on March 14, 2012. His son, Louis “Rumpy” Milton, also a musician, had died two days earlier. The family buried father and son together in Peoria, Ill., where King and his wife had moved in 1973.
They couldn’t afford a gravestone. In a generation or two, the spot would probably be forgotten, along with the bluesman in it.
"When I first tell somebody about the project, they think that what we do is kind of weird,” says Aaron Pritchard, vice president of the Killer Blues Headstone Project, a grass-roots nonprofit that provides headstones for blues musicians in unmarked graves. “The best way I can make it real for someone who’s not into blues music is, imagine if your grandfather, your father, or your mother was lying in an unmarked grave. Wouldn’t you want to be able to visit them?”
We’re sitting in Webster Groves’ Highway 61 Roadhouse and Kitchen, which is packed after being featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives the day before. Pritchard is 33, trim with brown hair and a gravelly, bluesy voice. When he was 18, he discovered the blues at bars in Soulard, where he heard Brian Curran, the Soulard Blues Band, and Rich McDonough. Though at one time he was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for a pop band, Surreal, he always played the blues for his friends.
“The blues is one of the few original American art forms,” says Pritchard. He speaks quickly about the Delta blues between sips of coffee. “It’s raw. It’s rural. It tells the story of the rural South. You can read a history book or listen to a blues song—it’s the same thing. It tells the story like no other.”
When he was in his early twenties, he started making pilgrimages to the graves of influential musicians like the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, who wrote gospel standards like “Move On Up a Little Higher,” and bluesman and barber Wade Walton, who would slap out a beat on a leather razor strop. When Pritchard looked into finding Richard “Hacksaw” Harney, he discovered the bluesman had been buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
Steven Salter, a native of Whitehall, Mich., had a similar experience in 1997. He was headed to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and decided to visit graves along the way. He stopped in Cook County, Ill., where he saw the headstones of McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield and Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett, but he realized blues pianist Otis Spann didn’t have a marker. Salter wrote a letter to Blues Revue magazine, which raised money for the headstone. At the time, Salter sold CDs and T-shirts at blues festivals as part of a side business called Killer Blues. He decided that proceeds would go to headstones for blues musicians instead.
In 2008, he created the nonprofit Killer Blues Headstone Project. The same year, Salter organized the White Lake Blues Festival, a fundraiser in his hometown. He also created a calendar called Buried in the Blues, with the birth and death dates of more than a thousand blues artists and pictures of headstones. With the proceeds from these ventures, he was able to place two headstones: one for Major “Big Maceo” Merriweather, a blues pianist, and one for Walter Vinson, who wrote “Sitting on Top of the World” with the Mississippi Sheiks string band. “I had a smile on my face for a week,” Salter recalls.
He began placing two headstones a year.
In October 2011, Pritchard was researching his next pilgrimage when he happened on Salter’s website (killerblues.net). After exchanging emails and a phone call, they met in Chicago.
“My wife loves the story,” Salter says with a laugh. “She says, ‘So you met this guy on the Internet, and you’re going to Chicago to get a hotel room and spend the night with him?’ I’m like, ‘It’s about the blues, darlin’!’”
Pritchard and Salter talked about blues over beers until the small hours, eventually deciding to work together. “It blew me away that there’s someone else out there doing what I was doing,” Pritchard says. “We became fast friends because of that.”
One of the first headstones they laid together was for Harney in Mississippi.
But Pritchard was determined to start recognizing some St. Louis blues legends as well.
"St. Louis doesn’t get its own credit,” Pritchard says.
In October, he laid a headstone for Blues Hall of Fame pianist Walter Davis, who was lying in an overgrown grave at Greenwood Cemetery in Hillsdale. Davis recorded more than 160 sides during the Great Depression (including the now-classic “Ashes in My Whiskey” and “Sunnyland Blues”). “That’s absolutely unheard of,” says Pritchard.
He lists all of the people in St. Louis for whom he wants to get headstones, including Bennie Smith, a bluesman who started his career playing with Ike and Tina Turner; Tommy Bankhead, a blues guitarist; and Lee Shelton, a man who never played a note but is a central part of the blues origin story.
Shelton’s the man and myth at the center of one of the most recorded songs of all time: “Stagger Lee.” On Christmas Day 1895, Shelton, a cab driver and pimp who went by the name “Stack Lee,” started arguing with Billy Lyons in Bill Curtis’ saloon in St. Louis’ notorious “Bloody Third” District. Lyons took Shelton’s white Stetson hat and refused to return it, so Shelton shot him in the stomach and killed him.
More than 400 artists have recorded variations of the song inspired by that story, including Ma Rainey, James Brown, and Duke Ellington. The Isley Brothers made an R&B version and caused a scandal when Ron Isley pulled a gun from his jacket pocket to mimic the shooting while performing the song on TV in the UK. Ike and Tina Turner rewrote it as a brawl in a go-go bar. Neil Diamond made a disco version. (Hear Mississippi John Hurt's classic version below.)
What isn’t told in that song, however, is the eventual fate of Shelton, who died in prison from tuberculosis on March 11, 1912. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Greenwood Cemetery. Today, the area is so overgrown that it’s impossible to get to Shelton’s grave.
Pritchard, with the help of the Friends of Greenwood Cemetery Association, plans to install a memorial garden on April 14 that honors not only Shelton but also Marion “Lindberg” Sparks, one half of the Sparks Brothers—identical twins who, in addition to being bootleggers, made the first recordings of “61 Highway Blues” and “Every Day I Have the Blues.” (Marion sang, while his brother, Aaron, played barrelhouse-style piano; Aaron isn’t buried in Greenwood.)
“These folks, all of them, paid their dues, and played 20, 30, sometimes 40 or 50 years on the circuits, and they didn’t have much money when they passed. Still, to this day, they are lying in unmarked graves,” says Pritchard. “It’s a wrong that we want to right.”
Last year alone, the Killer Blues Headstone Project was able to place five headstones, bringing the total to 12. This year, it hopes to place six to eight more, and Pritchard is starting a blues-festival fundraiser in St. Louis, similar to the one that Salter hosts in Michigan. Pritchard's is slated for October. He and Salter have also written Every Day I Have the Blues, a book that includes the birth and death dates of thousands of blues musicians, as well as a state-by-state index of where many of them are buried.
“The book is to recognize and honor these people’s contributions to music,” says Salter. “There’s a lot of people that have passed and we have no idea where they’re buried. To me, that means they’re lost twice.”
This past September, Pritchard and Salter were working at the Big Muddy Blues Festival when Dave Wright, a blues DJ for WEFT-FM in Champaign, Ill., told them about Eddie King, the Chicago bluesman who had died in March and whose family couldn’t afford a gravestone.
Salter and Pritchard immediately began fundraising. Within a month, they were able to buy the headstone and place it during a dedication ceremony on a sunny October day. Bessie Milton spoke about her husband and the son she’d lost, and said that she’d been praying for help to honor them both.
“To hear her speak was one of the most touching things I’ve ever heard in my life,” says Pritchard. “The love she has for not only the Lord, but life in general, is unbelievable.”
Afterward, King’s family invited Pritchard, Salter, and Wright back to the house for a soul-food dinner, and King’s friends had an impromptu jam session in the driveway.
“When I first started doing this, it was to honor the legacy of these musicians and honor their contribution to American music,” says Pritchard. “But you start doing it long enough, and it changes—you see how it touches these families. That’s the reason I do it now.”
