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James Montgomery Brings It on Home

Blues musician James Montgomery knows love and loss and sings about his life with raw energy and rare talent. With a new band in the works, he’s just getting warmed up.

Photography by Patrick O’Connor

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James Montgomery’s right leg bounces nervously, up down, up down, as he sips from a glass of merlot, staring at the stage at Chan’s restaurant, that bastion of blues and jazz in Woonsocket. He looks excited, like a kid eyeing unopened presents under a Christmas tree. In a few minutes, he will be in front of an audience, playing his Chicago-style blues to the delight of the crowd, and himself.

“He’s got stage fright,” confides his girlfriend, Brenda Lombard.

Really? It’s hard to believe that this iconic bluesman who’s toured with the Allman Brothers, jammed with James Cotton and B.B. King, and given a few lessons to Mick Jagger gets the shakes before performing, for the umpteenth time, to a packed house at Chan’s, but now is the moment of truth.

“Are you nervous?” Montgomery nods his head slowly, in the affirmative, but his concentration on the stage never breaks.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, from Dee-troit, Michigan, the great James Montgomery,” David Hull, the bass player, yells into the microphone.

Montgomery enters from the back of the room, takes a youthful hop onto the stage, cups his harmonica in his hands and proceeds, stage fright forgotten, to bring the house down.

Montgomery is complex, sensitive, spiritual. He writes some of his own music; his albums have been nominated for some of the highest awards in blues, and he recently recorded the title song for Delta Rising, a documentary starring Morgan Freeman. He has made Newport his home for the past sixteen years, toured the world and played with the best in blues and rock, but he’s still not ready to take a seat in the audience. At fifty-eight, he’s embarking on a new venture with a new band that will include Aerosmith’s drummer and the horn section that tours with the Rolling Stones.

Blues is music that has its roots in lost love and struggle and Montgomery has dealt with both. The stage is his altar and the venues his church. “I’m in it for the music, pure and simple,” he says.

“He’s simply the best,” says actor/musician Jim Belushi, a close friend. Belushi will be singing and playing harmonica in Montgomery’s new band, and Montgomery played with Belushi and Dan Akroyd when they performed as the Blues Brothers. “His proficiency and showmanship are amazing.”           

It all started with a jug band, in Detroit, more than forty years ago. Montgomery grew up, the son of a journalist, on a farm outside the Motor City, and studied clarinet in junior high school. That, however, involved practicing written music. “I hated practicing,” Montgomery says with disdain. When he entered high school, he heard a jug band where musicians played washboards and upside-down washtubs. That was playing the blues. It was a moment for Montgomery akin to Jake and Elwood Blues beginning their “mission from God” to bring their band back together. “When I heard the blues, I thought, wow, that’s what I want to do,” he says.

Montgomery bought a harp (a.k.a. a harmonica to the uninitiated) and taught himself how to play. He began to hang out at the famous Chessmate club in Detroit, where legends such as Muddy Waters, James Cotton and Paul Butterfield were performing. Still, it was the late Junior Wells, the Chicago-based blues vocalist and harmonica player and one of the all-time great harp players, who inspired Montgomery. “Junior Wells taught me some tricks for playing the harp,” Montgomery recalls. “Junior’s Jump,” a tribute to Wells’ teacher, Sonny Boy Williams, and a track on his Handy Award-nominated album, “Bring It on Home,” opens his show to this day.

Montgomery’s reputation around the Detroit blues scene grew quickly, and one day he found himself invited on stage with Muddy Waters at Paul’s Mall in Boston.

“I couldn’t believe it. Here I was on stage with Muddy Waters,” Montgomery recalls with a smile. “It was such a great feeling.”

He also became friendly with James Cotton. Cotton may be the best blues harp player there ever was, and as word of Montgomery’s playing began filtering out into blues circles, Cotton took notice. One night at a gig near Chicago, he invited Montgomery to play with him.

“I was on stage, playing along with Cotton, when all of a sudden, in the middle of a song, he looked at me and said, ‘Take it,’” Montgomery says. “So there I was, soloing with his band, my first solo in a big time gig. I learned the hard way.”

Over the years, Montgomery and Cotton became close friends. They frequently tour together and Montgomery invites Cotton to his Rhode Island gigs a couple of times a year. Montgomery considers Cotton his teacher.

“I call him dad, he calls me son,” Montgomery says fondly.

On a warm summer day, Montgomery and I sit at a small table on a patio outside his cozy condo in Newport. When I ask him to define the blues, his answer is somewhat, um, esoteric.

“It’s the Aristotelian Cathartic Principal,” he says without skipping a beat. I wait with anticipation for further explanation. “Being in touch with that part of your soul, or being, that struggles with life.”

One of Montgomery’s struggles was his divorce from Rhode Island artist Lizzie Congdon. “I fell madly in love with her,” he says. “We were together for nine years, had no children. She is a gifted oil painter who remarried and lives in Jamestown. We are still friends.”

As he stares at his iced tea, Montgomery talks about his spiritual side. “I am a practitioner of Satyagraha. I read scripture every morning.” Satyagraha is the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. Mahatma Gandhi, Senator Claiborne Pell and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are among the followers.

Montgomery also talks a lot about the teachings of Jesus, “not the Catholic Church’s version” but the teachings as he reads them, and the inspiration he takes from them.

“I love it when people say things like ‘Jesus said such and such,’ when I know Jesus didn’t say such and such, because I read what Jesus said every morning for about an hour.”

His condo is in a white-clapboard building that was the first free black church in America. Watching Montgomery perform could lead you to think he’s channeling some of the souls who once occupied this house of worship.

“Let me give you a tour of my nine rooms,” he says with a smile. His condo would be considered a studio apartment in New York City, but it’s warm and comfortable.

“Here’s my library,” he says, pointing to a small bookshelf. “Here’s my living room,” gesturing toward his couch. I get the joke. We move on to the “office,” a desk with a computer in one corner of the same room as the library and living room.

The hundreds of photographs on the walls provide a road map of Montgomery’s climb to critical and popular acclaim in the world of blues.

There are pictures of him playing with B.B. King, James Cotton, Junior Wells and the Allman Brothers. In one photo, it’s Montgomery and George Harrison, in another Steven Tyler of Aerosmith sharing a microphone with Montgomery as they play a harmonica duet.

When Montgomery talks about his career and who he’s played with, it can sound like name-dropping, but the time I spend with him over a two month period assures me it’s not. He’s proud of what he’s accomplished in the very competitive professional world of music. And who wouldn’t brag a bit about being considered an equal to blues greats like John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters, James Cotton and Johnny Winter?

“He’s really humble and self-deprecating,” says Brenda, his girlfriend of two years.

Despite the accolades and recognition, when he performs, he works hard to prove himself, to give all he has and leave nothing on the stage, to live up to the “legend” that precedes his name whenever he’s written or talked about.

“I still hear guys play things I don’t know how to play on the harp,” he says. “I am always learning from other guys, and they learn from me.”