When Earl Thomas Bridgeman announced his retirement from music in late 2019, his fans, including this writer, worried that they would never again have the chance to see him perform live. Earl had returned to his career in dentistry, a profession he pursued before launching his musical career. In this interview, he explained in depth the surprising reason for his retirement and what prompted his return to live performance.
Earl’s mother, Jewell Ermalee Vernon Bridgeman, was a gospel singer; his father, Earl “Papa T” Thomas Bridgeman, sang the blues. Earl is now following his mother’s long-ago advice to perform gospel music. “My mom told me I should, and I didn’t listen because I wanted to be Rod Stewart,” Earl recalled. His August appearances at the Notodden Blues Festival with The Gospel Ambassadors, featuring the vocal trio Sister Leola, convinced the rest of us that Earl’s brand of old-school gospel is precisely where he belongs.
Related: The Notodden Blues Festival: How Blues Saved a City
The audience responded to you so well in your performances. Does that tell you you’re on the right path coming back from being retired?
Yes, and the interesting thing is that same response has been everywhere we’ve done this show. Every single time. I didn’t intend for this gospel show to do anything; it was just going to be something we did in a local San Diego restaurant called Humphreys that wanted me to do a gospel brunch. I’d actually declined for an entire year, and then finally she just kept asking, and I finally said, ‘OK, I’ll do it if I can get the right orchestra because this music can’t be played by everybody. It can’t be played by just some guy who considers himself a blues person.’
I needed people that grew up in gospel like I did. With the Gospel Ambassadors, we’re all speaking the same language, we’re all on the same page. So, we put it together and, in San Diego, people loved it. They just went nuts. Then we had the opportunity to go to London to do Ronnie Scott’s for the EFG London Jazz Festival in 2023. Jostein (Forsberg, director of the Notodden Blues Festival) saw some of that footage and invited us to Notodden.
Between then and now, we’ve probably played 100 shows. Every single show, we get this response, which tells me I’m on the right track. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this many positive accolades in my life this consistently. We all grew up in this music, and we all share that we’re sort of destined to share the music of our ancestors, of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the music that helped them get through the Jim Crow years. They had to have something, and while they may not have had ideal lives, they did have an outlet.
You mentioned you’re from East Tennessee, and your mother was a gospel singer. Is that a family tradition, being part of the church?
Yes, my mother was a gospel singer, my father was a bluesman, but my dad was in the Navy, so he never pursued a musical career, but he always played. Everybody in my family plays and/or sings. My dad played guitar, harmonica, and could sing. My dad was as good as anybody you’ve ever heard – B.B. King, my dad was like that.
My mom – you’ve heard of Clara Ward or Aretha Franklin – my mom was like that. We never thought of music as a career opportunity, but every family gathering, every church service, every funeral, every homecoming, which is what we called our yearly reunion, a celebration of emancipation, the 4th Sunday in August since 1865. Our family always made music in that environment. I lived in my hometown until I was 3 years old, and then we returned to Pikeville when I was 14. I didn’t grow up in church there, but my mother never let us forget where we came from. We always had gospel music in our house, we always had blues in our house, rhythm and blues, soul music.
What is your mother’s name?
Jewell. My mother would have been so proud of me tonight, seriously. She was right about the music I should sing. As soon as I started doing this gospel music, opportunities started falling left and right. But it’s not about the opportunities. I’m really very clear now about my role in this game, because I am a representative and very proud to be. I’m like maybe the last of the Mohicans because this style of gospel – African-American music changes as the culture changes.
You know, the blues changed as the culture changed. What started out as the Delta blues with the sharecroppers, then The Great Migration happened, and they went to Chicago. And with it the Chicago sound came a bit more freedom. Jim Crow was still the law of the land, but if you lived in Chicago, at least you could get a decent job. You could maybe even put your child into college. You couldn’t live on the North side, but you could survive in a way you couldn’t survive in Mississippi.
Then as the ‘60s came and the civil rights movement came, the blues changed again. As the ‘70s and ‘80s came, it changed again. We all understand the tradition, but the voice has changed because we grew up in the world where we didn’t have that level of oppression that our grandparents had. Gospel changed.
What was it that motivated you to want to retire from music in 2019?
The reason I really wanted to retire is because I felt that I was a fraud. I was never comfortable with the term “modern-day bluesman” applied to me, but I didn’t know why I was uncomfortable. I began to come to terms with that probably in my mid-50s.
Someone asked me why I had never been nominated for a Blues Music Award, and I said I didn’t know why. I’d never thought about it. That’s not something on my list of desires. We had this really deep conversation where I said, to me, the Blues Music Awards are for imitation. You can’t give someone an award for falling off of a log.
I’m continuing the story of my ancestors; I didn’t just go learn the blues and imitate it off of some old recordings, right? I actually have the backstory. But my dad was in the Navy, so I didn’t grow up in Pikeville, Tennessee. I never got the narrative, the one that said White people are superior and Black people are inferior. I was able to grow and develop my mind without all of that oppression. Whether it was real or imaginary, it was still there.
The shadow of Jim Crow still lived in my hometown. If I had not left with my dad in the Navy, I would have gone to a segregated elementary school kindergarten through 1st grade and been traumatized when they integrated the schools like my cousins were. They were all traumatized, and it affected them for the rest of their lives. I didn’t get any of that. I never was comfortable getting on stage singing sad notes when I wasn’t sad; I was always pretending to be.
The blues was the only free speech that my grandparents had; they could only express themselves in this music, in gospel and the blues. I could always say what was on my mind. My generation was the first that could speak to White people. Mine was the first generation that could say no to White people or could disagree with White people.
My grandparents did not have that. If they said no or they disagreed, they could be lynched, they could be killed. Many were. I felt that if I were going to stand up here, and the Blues Music Awards or some panel is going to decide if I am “authentic.” Well, I’m already authentic.
When I decided to retire, I decided that I couldn’t continue imitating my grandparents. Then the gospel came along, and I realized I don’t have to imitate anybody. This is real. This is authentic. So, I didn’t really retire; I just came to terms with my life and turned it around to do what I should’ve been doing all along. But now I realize the real me is what I’m doing now.
I remember reading on your Facebook page that you were a dental hygienist. I thought maybe it was a thing to get you through the Covid years. I had some of your music and wanted to see you perform.
I was in dentistry before I started music. One other thing I should mention that I’m very proud of. Yes, I felt fraudulent in my performance, but in my songwriting, I was real. When Etta James recorded my song “I Sing the Blues,” she validated something in me. I wrote that song as an observer, observing my parents. I did not know what I was writing about. But when Etta James recorded my song, she knew what she was singing about. She brought my song to life in a way that I could never do. She brought her life into my song. She brought her survival of Jim Crow, her drug addiction, her ups and downs in the music industry. When she sang my song, I literally heard it for the first time. I realized that as a songwriter, there’s nothing fraudulent about that.
When Solomon Burke did three of my songs, and when he sang “Baby Please Don’t Cry,” he brought his whole world into that song. When I met him, he said, “I wish you would have been in the studio with me. Did I sing it all right?” I’m like, “Dude, you’re Solomon Burke. Yes, you did!” I remember thinking, he’s asking me if he sang that song right. I could never have sung that song like you. He knew where to stretch the note, hold the note, where to drop it.
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins did one of my songs, and the way I heard it in my head, it was cute, but he just went, “I Am the Cool.” He was telling you who he was. In my performance I felt phony; my songwriting I felt real. Now that I’m doing this gospel, I feel completely real, completely valid.
White gospel just leaves me cold, but African-American gospel makes me cry. It stirs something. The primarily White audience in the Notodden Kirke (church) – they were all on their feet.
Everybody loves African-American gospel because they feel it; that’s real life. I think, too, you hear a little Norwegian culture in there because Norway was a big part of the United States. Scandinavia has a stake in the United States, so of course their culture is there. I think African-American gospel and blues, you feel it. People will say things like, Black people don’t listen to blues anymore, that’s not true at all. We don’t need it like we used to. The culture changed.
But if you go to big mama’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, after dinner while they’re washing dishes, and the men are on the porch drinking gin, somebody puts on some Muddy Waters. Even that 16-year-old with his hat on sideways and baggy pants is going to feel it because it’s part of our spiritual harmony. They may not listen to it every day, but when they put it on, you hear people say, “Oh, hey!” That’s a spiritual harmony connection.
You’re not going to have that with the Blues Music Award winners. They’re not part of that. They can play it, but they’re not part of our spiritual harmony.
I also wanted to ask about your work with the youth at Little Steven’s Band Camp.
Now that I really love. I love working with the children more than performing. There’s a certain reward that comes from it. This is like Tanglewood in Norway. At Tanglewood they’re studying classical, Beethoven, Bach, and all that.
Here they’re studying Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Jimmy Reed, and they really get into it. All I do really is give them a few pointers here and there. I don’t tell them what to play or how to play it because they’re so enthusiastic. They’ll spend all day rehearsing. At one session, the guitar player was playing a lot of notes, and I said, “Would you consider playing less notes?” He took my advice and sounded so much better.
My big thing was telling them, ‘Be fearless to put yourself on the line,’ because that’s what they did. Robert Johnson’s devil at the crossroads was the Ku Klux Klan, but he put it on the line. A Black man during Robert Johnson’s day walking after dark was a very dangerous place to be, but they don’t talk about that. They’ve romanticized that story. The only devil there was the plantation, the church, and the Klan, and that was it. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Son House, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, that whole generation, several generations of bluesmen and women laid it on the line. They sang those songs, they were not playing.
A lot of the students I had at the band camp back in the ‘90s are part of this festival, and some of them are teachers now. I met three guys who were part of my students; they’re teaching the seminar also. Do you know Kid Andersen? He was one of my students here. When he moved to the States, I saw him. I think maybe he was playing with Charlie Musselwhite, and I went, that looks like that guy from Norway. And they said, ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is Kid Andersen.’
