Maple Blues Online Cover Story

Chuck Jackson is the front man for Downchild and behind-the-scenes impresario of the Southside Shuffle.

We've got Charlie Jackson to thank for Port Credit's blues and jazz festival, the Southside Shuffle.

Charlie, Chuck Jackson's grandfather, used to invite the Jackson clan over to his place in Port Credit for a corn roast every September; the street was closed off and Chuck's blues band played. "Even though he's not here, he planted the seed" for the Southside Shuffle," Chuck says.

The Shuffle, founded by Jackson, Dave Voyce and Roc 'n' Docs' John Krush, featured only a few bands in September 1999, its first year. Since then, the festival has done more than shuffle along; it's grown in leaps and bounds. This year, celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Shuffle includes a lineup of some 140 acts on two stages in Memorial Park, at the street festival, in the clubs and at Port Credit's Legion Hall. Last year, Jackson said, at least 35,000 people attended the street festival alone. He attributes the Shuffle's success "to the fact that we're putting out a really good product."

Jackson either books the acts for the Southside Shuffle himself or makes booking suggestions to other festival staff. He says that musicians who feel they've been overlooked so far may be featured in the coming years as Shuffle organizers are trying to include as many different acts as they can.

As the singer of the Downchild Blues Band, Jackson has been touring North America for the past 13 years, an experience from which he says he realized that Canada has some of the best blues performers, including artists who perform original material. "That's why 95 per cent of the performers who play at the Southside Shuffle are Canadians."

Those of us who went to the Shuffle in 2001 spent a blissful weekend there, moving from one absorbing musical experience to the next. Deciding who to see next, with so much choice, was our biggest problem. Barely two days after the last note had been played, the news of the 9/11 terrorist attack shook us all.

As a response to 9/11, Jackson and a group of other musicians formed Canadian Musicians For Liberty, which raised more than $30,000 for Canadian Red Cross disaster relief by staging a marathon of live music at the now-defunct Mississauga club Touchdown's. "I was in at the inception of it and I was very proud of it," Jackson said.

The October 2001 event featured hundreds of Canadian performers, including Ronnie Hawkins, Jeff Healey, Rita Chiarelli, Downchild Blues Band, Goddo, Planet Earth Michael Pickett, Blue Willow and The Prima Donnas.

"A lot of times, Canadians get stereotyped as people who don't step up. We wanted people to understand that we were deeply moved by what happened," Jackson said. "A lot of us (musicians) have worked in the U.S. We didn't want to sit around and mope about it."

At Touchdown's, a club that had a capacity of 50, musicians played for 141 hours from October 21 to 28, for the audience in the club and those watching the Internet broadcast. "At the end, people were in tears," Jackson said. CMFL set several world records for a live-music marathon, authorized by Guinness World Records.

The Canadian blues community has recognized Jackson's achievements. He won the 2002 Blues With A Feeling Award, the Toronto Blues Society's lifetime achievement award, and a few years before, received the 1999 Maple Blues Award for male vocalist of the year.

The longest reigning vocalist of the Downchild Blues Band and one of the singers of the newly re-united Cameo Blues Band, Jackson grew up listening to live music in his grandfather's kitchen on Saturday nights. A square-dance caller, Charlie Jackson had weekly hoedowns, with fiddle players and guitar players dropping by to join Chuck's brother-in-law, Ed, on guitar.

Jackson's introduction to R&B came at the age of five when he watched Fats Domino on American Bandstand, a television show his older sisters watched. He loved singing and remembers walking around the house singing as a child. He went on to sing in his school choir, performed with his first blues band in Grade 6 and played French horn and trumpet in high school.

At 16, in 1968, Jackson started out as a bass player in a blues band. "I couldn't play bass and sing very well at the same time," he recalls. "No one else in our band could sing very well, so I stopped playing bass and started singing." A year later, he began playing harmonica and now a highlight of every Downchild performance is a harp duet Jackson performs with Donnie "Mr. Downchild" Walsh.

Jackson sang with the Cameo Blues Band for 14 years, from 1978 to '92, and is one of the vocalists featured on the band's recently released CD, All Play And No Work. (See the January 2003 issue of the Maple Blues newsletter for John Valenteyn's review.)

"Cameo was a spontaneous band that has influences in old rock 'n' roll," Jackson says. "Everyone came from different musical styles, so even though we were playing blues it was quite eclectic."

After Jackson joined Downchild in 1990, he blossomed as a songwriter, contributing about a dozen songs to Downchild recordings. Of the songs he's written, Jackson's favourite is "I'm Mixed-Up," which he wrote about his wife, Suzanne. "We're happily married," he says. "I became un-mixed."

Away from music, Jackson says his main interest is his family, which includes his 19-year-old son, Justin, and his eight-year-old daughter, Sydney. With the Southside Shuffle, "we don't get very much time to go on vacation in the summer but we try to make up for it in the fall and winter."

Southside Highlights:

The Carlsberg Main Stage lineup features Alberta Adams, Omar and The Howlers, Downchild Blues Band, Fathead, Alex Pangman, David Wilcox, Jimmy Bowskill, the Junior Jam All-Stars and many more. The money raised by the Junior Jam All-Stars, featuring Jimmy Bowskill, Mojo Mike and Josh Toal, three players under 18, will be donated to the Hospital for Sick Children.

The Whiteley Brothers, Danny Brooks, Michael Pickett and Jimmy Bowskill, as well as other performers, appear on the new acoustic Expedite Plus Porch Stage.

The Fram Slokker Street Festival, on Lakeshore Road, features some 17 acts, including Suzie McNeil, the Bebop Cowboys, David Rotundo and the JW Jones Band.

Dozens of clubs in and around Port Credit are hosting the Southside Shuffle, with appearances by dozens of performers, including Sue Foley, Dylan Wickens, Jack de Keyzer, Paul James, Tyler Yarema and Jay Douglas.

For complete club listings, visit www.southsideshuffle.com.

Port Credit's Legion Hall features the Cameo Blues Band and the Polar Ice Vodka Cool Blues Jam, hosted by Mark "Bird" Stafford.

For more information, visit the Southside Shuffle's Web site at www.southsideshuffle.com or call the Shuffle's hotline: 905-278-2811.