Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “keeping the blues alive,” a goal shared and stated by many blues musicians — from BB King and Howlin’ Wolf to Eric Clapton.
If you can credit anyone for keeping blues music alive in South Carolina, it’s Gary Erwin, known by his stage name Shrimp City Slim.
In addition to being a top-notch pianist who can draw from decades of blues tradition, Erwin is also a songwriter, promoter and producer who has brought the blues to various spots around the state — and the world. He has spent years booking the Blues Cruise in Greenwood, a multi-day festival featuring top local, regional and national blues performers.
Currently, he’s got two Charleston events on the horizon: the Lowcountry Cajun Festival on April 13 featuring Gerard Delafose, Randy McAllister and Shrimp City Slim himself, and the Blues By The Sea festival on April 14, a free event featuring the Nick Moss Band, Jon Lee & The Apparitions and more.
Erwin is also a prolific artist. He’s released 12 albums in the last couple of decades, most recently the 2016 album Tidal Pool. Erwin said he has explored so many different styles of blues because the genre is part of his roots.
“I grew up in Chicago,” he said, “and the first blues records I bought were, oddly enough, not by piano players. I bought an album by Lightnin’ Hopkins called Lightnin’ Hopkins Sings The Blues, and I bought Sonny Boy Williamson’s Down & Out Blues on Checker.”
Erwin credited both the British Invasion of the 1960s, a cultural and musical movement, and his father for helping him fall in love with the blues in the first place.
“Like a lot of people in my generation, the British Invasion was very useful in bringing blues music back to the U.S.,” Erwin said. “So when I heard some of the British bands playing what sounded like blues, I realized that was what I’ve been hearing most of my younger life living in Chicago. And that’s because my dad used to take us on the weekend to these free concerts in the park where they booked all the jazz and blues people. So I started getting into the original guys.”
Storytelling through blues
Erwin said he was entranced by both the sound and the emotion of blues music.
“The improvisational element was really important to me,” he said. “But so were the compositional elements, and the poetry of the message and the personal presentation of it.
“Hearing and seeing live blues musicians in my impressionable years, I picked up on the fact that these people were up there talking about their lives or talking about someone that they knew living through something, and they were expressing basically true life stories through song. That really impressed me because it was very natural, and it was very sincere and honest and very direct and very simple.”
Erwin has certainly had time to learn from these blues players because he has performed alongside many of them. His resume features stints with Big Boy Henry, Beverly “Guitar” Watkins, Walter “Lightning Bug” Rhodes, Chicago Bob Nelson and the legendary Drink Small, among many others. In fact, it was Big Boy Henry who gave Erwin his musical name.
“All these guys had these blues names,” he said, “And it was like, ‘Gary Erwin’: OK, that’s kind of a really blasé name. And Big Boy Henry said, ‘You need to get yourself something better.’ And he knew I was a seafood lover, living here in Charleston, so he anointed me as Shrimp City Slim.”
As someone with decades of experience under his belt as far as the blues is concerned, Erwin certainly has the knowledge to comment on Charleston’s current blues scene, or in his opinion, the lack thereof.
“I started a blues radio show on public radio here in 1984 and then started the Low Country Blues Bash Festival in 1991, which ran for 22 years,” he said. “During that time, we had an appreciable blues scene here. But now it’s gone back to pretty much nothing. I would say that there are, at this moment, maybe three to five blues acts that perform semi-regularly around here. We’re in a depressed period right now in Charleston in terms of the blues scene.”
At 70 years old, Erwin isn’t sure how much longer he’ll be striving to keep the blues alive.
“I’ve done my thing,” he said. “I’ve been doing it for 40 years. So it’s about time for somebody else to pick it up. I would like to see some younger people grab it, but what I’m not seeing in the younger generation is an interest in going back to the roots. If somebody from the younger generation wants to come along and do something about reviving the blues scene, that would be very welcome.”
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