Greenwood native Walter “Furry” Lewis lived the blues as much as he played it.
The one-legged guitarist and singer spent much of his life in poverty sweeping streets in Memphis after the Great Depression put a multi-decade halt on his recording career.
But after being rediscovered as an old man, Lewis could still make his guitar sing — and entertain an audience.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, guitar, you answer. Glory what?” he said in a recording made when he was in his late 70s. He then plays the notes from the song, “When I Lay My Burden Down.” It sounds like “Hallelujah.”
“Halle what?” Lewis asks next. The guitar answers with the notes, “Lujah.”
“When I?”
“Lay my burden down,” the instrument responds.
The master performer will be posthumously honored Tuesday with the 150th marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail. It will be placed on Carrollton Avenue near the former C&G railroad, across from the Crystal Grill. It’s near the site of Lewis’ long-gone birthplace on Lamar Street.
The WGRM marker on Howard Street was one of the first three blues trail markers unveiled on the same day in December 2006.
Now Greenwood will host the 150th marker.
“We’re hoping for a big crowd since it’s a milestone on the Mississippi Blues Trail,” said Paige Hunt, executive director of the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau. Several officials from Jackson are expected to attend, she said.
The sign will be unveiled at 10 a.m. Tuesday and will be followed by a reception at the Crystal Grill.
Lewis’ year of birth is not absolutely known. His gravestone in Memphis lists it as March 6, 1893, but the 1900 census lists him as a 1-year-old born in March 1899, according to information from the blues marker.
The census said he was residing with his mother and other relatives in the house of his grandparents on Lamar Street. His family had moved to Memphis by 1901, and he was playing solo at parties and taverns and on the streets as a teenager. W.C. Handy, known as the “Father of the Blues,” gave Lewis his first guitar and let the young performer play with his famed orchestra, according to stories Lewis fondly told.
He traveled as a wandering musician until 1916, when he lost a leg trying to hop aboard a train in Illinois. He later got an artificial leg.
Lewis lived the rest of his life in Memphis, working for the city’s Sanitation Department from 1923 until 1966.
According to the blues marker, he was one of the first blues guitarists from Mississippi or Memphis to enter a recording studio when he recorded six songs for the Vocalion label in Chicago in 1927.
The marker said his early recordings are now regarded as some of the finest examples of early blues. They included ragtime-influenced pieces, Delta-style blues and folk hero ballads, it said.
But the Great Depression and a crackdown on Beale Street ended Lewis’ heyday, and he labored for years with the Sanitation Department.
Music writer Stanley Booth, who graduated from Memphis State, became friends with Lewis and followed him on his job cleaning streets, which began before 3 a.m. In a sad scene from a 1970 “Playboy” profile by Booth, Lewis sweeps trash off Beale Street, where he once performed in the Roaring ’20s.
He didn’t record an album from 1929 until 1959.
But like Mississippi John Hurt and other blues artists of his generation, he was rediscovered at a late age when folk music regained popularity in the 1960s.
Lewis performed around the country and endeared himself to fans with his humor and showmanship, the marker said.
He had a role in a 1975 Burt Reynolds movie, “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings,” opened a Memphis concert for the Rolling Stones and appeared on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.”
He died in Memphis on Sept. 14, 1981, and was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame earlier this year.
