Jammin' After All These Years
Bo Diddley & a life of adventure on the road…
Inherent in the Call to Adventure is sacrifice. Although, when heeded, the rewards can be rich in experience for the traveling minstrel: distant lands and exotic landscapes, colorful characters and passionate lovers, and the making of good and lasting friendships with brilliant unknown artists, shining like a galaxy of stars waiting for discovery. Jammin’ Jeff Cerwinske is one of those friends and a mostly “undiscovered” talent hidden away in the enchanted piñon and juniper-studded hills of Southern New Mexico. Jeff, in his own words, lives “an ordinary life in a non-ordinary way.” His years on the road as an aspiring and professional musician helped to awaken The Call to Adventure in me and inspired my musical path.
In 1977 I met Jeff Cerwinske at a house concert in Miami, Florida. He had taken a break from pickin’ oranges to go fishin’ with a friend from Minnesota. I’m not sure how Jeff met my good friend Laura exactly. But when she heard him play, she was so blown away that she invited him to her Coconut Grove bungalow to perform a private concert for an intimate group of friends. I heard Jeff, your typical struggling musician, play that night, and his music also blew me away. Laura had booked the concert to help him raise money to get out of Florida and back to the Southwest.
With shining blue eyes, Jeff ripped through a set of lyrical and instrumental original tunes and classical pieces on his Martin acoustic guitar. He played clean and fast and sang in a deep voice, but what stood out was his ability to press down two strings at a time with one stub of a finger. His middle finger on his left hand had been lopped off at the distal joint when his father shut the car door, catching his finger in it — an unhappy accident that gave Jeff a playing advantage.
Jeff might have returned to the Southwest sooner had he and Laura not fallen in love. She turned him on to her guru, and he became a follower, which made him want to stick around. Many of our mutual friends followed Guru Maharaj Ji, including myself and my former husband, in the late ‘70s and early 80s. That era saw us becoming meditating vegetarians and brought us together as a spiritual family. Soon after their meeting, Laura and Jeff got married, had a kid, and he stuck around for a while, tuning pianos, and writing songs. Our sons were born a few months apart, and we became good friends.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Jeff is a country boy in love with the American Southwest. Laura, Miami born and raised, loved Miami Beach and art deco. Their worlds collided. Eventually, they split.
Then, in 1983, a mutual singer-songwriter friend, Jill Ayn, announced to Jeff that she was living with Bo Diddley in Hawthorne, Florida as his housekeeper. For those of you too young to remember, Bo Diddley is an American guitarist and singer who played an essential role in the transition from blues to rock and roll. He influenced artists like Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, George Thorogood, and many more.
Two weeks after Jill’s announcement, Jeff moved to Hawthorne and took a job for the Forest Service, sitting in a fire watch tower in Micanopy for the next 11 months. One day he went over to Bo’s house, but Jill wasn’t there, and Bo said to Jeff, “I want to show you something.” They went into his studio, strapped on a couple of guitars, and off they went.
“What did you say your name was?” Bo asked.
“Jeff Cerwinske,” he replied.
“I can’t do that,” says Bo. “So I’ll just call you Jammin’ Jeff.”
And that is how he got his name and joined Bo’s house band for over a decade. Bo also gave him one of his guitars. A signed, one -of-a-kind in all the world guitar. And they remained friends until Bo passed in 2008 on June 2nd, Jeff’s birthday.
I don’t call him Jammin’ Jeff for nothin’
– Bo Diddley
Jeff’s first strains of melody came through his voice. Singing in choirs from an early age, it became apparent that he was a child prodigy. When vocal music was not enough, he expanded his repertoire to include piano and guitar. He studied voice at Colorado Mountain College and Miami Dade Junior College and classical guitar at the University of Minnesota, graduating from their MacPhail Center for the Performing Arts as a piano technician, tuner, and rebuilder.
The list of musicians touched by Jeff’s music and mentorship runs the gamut of contemporary music. His licks are executed with clean technique and heartfelt soul as he bridges the gap between classical and jazz, blues and rock & roll. But it was his ability to rip out all manner of subtle hammering strokes, throw things into double-tempo overdrive, yank out a spiky clutch of harmonies, and barrel back into driving rhythms that made him Bo Diddley’s side man for over a decade and earned him the name, Jammin’ Jeff.
I lost touch with Jeff for about six years after I moved to San Francisco, California, to get married for a third time, then to Tucson, Arizona, to suffer through yet another divorce. In 1990 I ran smack into Jammin’ at the Tucson Folk Festival. Thirteen years after Jeff arrived in Miami, he had finally made his way back to the Southwest.
With guitar in hand, I approached the musician’s sign-up and registration table at the Folk Festival, hoping to play there for the first time. And who sat behind the table but Jeff? The last person I expected to see there. When he looked up and saw me, his jaw dropped, and his eyes grew big as moons. I put down my guitar, and he came from behind that table and hugged me so hard my feet came off the ground. We had found each other again, a long way from where we had started.
Jeff performed at the Tucson Folk Festival for many consecutive years, as did I. He traveled in and out of Tucson a lot and eventually bought a couple of trailer homes in an Americana trailerville park. Jeff gave me leads for gigs throughout the Southwest and supported my budding music career. One time he invited me to perform at a concert at Faraway Ranch in Telluride, Colorado, as a fundraiser for an environmental non-profit. My hero, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, headlined the festival and invited me to join him on stage to sing Puff the Magic Dragon. It warmed my inner little girl’s heart and became a memorable moment in my career. Puff is the song that made me want to learn to play the guitar at age eight.
When I decided to leave Tucson and join a band in Canada, Jeff helped me sell all my stuff and gave me a send-off. When it didn’t work out, and I returned two years later, he gave me a place to live by affordably renting one of his tin can trailers to me.
I never did get to see Jeff play with Bo Diddley, but I read an article about one balmy spring night they played together at Club Congress in Tucson. After Bo warmed up the crowd, he invited Jammin’ up on stage with a twinkle in his eye. The air became electric with the sound of two old friends playing real rock and roll. The crowd went crazy as Jeff’s happy fingers brought a spark of inspiration to the stage and to Bo’s eyes.
Jeff may have been Jammin’ Jeff to Bo, but he was Anpetu Kola Waste (Wash-tay) to me. His Lakota name means “early morning friend.” Jeff has been a true friend to many and a brother to me. In the early morning at sunrise I bore witness to his streaking naked across a field, whooping and hollering his greeting to the dawn like a wild Indian. Jeff gave me my Lakota name, Wutiwikima, meaning “woman being guided.”
Jammin’ Jeff’s commitment to music is total. I played with him again recently, traveling from Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband, Chuck, to Silver City, New Mexico, to celebrate his 76th birthday. And while he may not be gettin’ around like he used to, he is still playing the blues like it ain’t nobody’s business. Jeff told me about the Blue’s Festival in Silver City, New Mexico, which he attended the weekend before I arrived in late May to listen to his friends. They opened the festival with Bo Diddley’s You Can’t Judge a Book by the Cover. That song made Jammin’ a Diddley fan in 1955. Then the band announced that Jammin’ was in the audience, and Silver City sure was lucky to have him call it home.
A turning point in Jeff’s early career was acquiring a D-18S Martin guitar from his uncle, a gift after leaving the Navy. Back in 1966, Jeff had enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school. A meteorologist on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington for three and a half years, he had a band going on board, gave guitar lessons to the executive officer, and tuned his piano. In exchange, Jeff got a stateroom with a view, telephone, running water, double doors, and a mattress instead of a hammock.
“When I got the acoustic it changed my whole musical life because I wasn’t throwing switches and punching knobs. It was no watts. It was just me and the wood. So off to the woods I went.” – Jeff Cerwinske
In 1972, Jeff landed in the woods of Norwood, Colorado, when he got a summer surveying job in Dolores. He eventually moved to Telluride. There he played for four consecutive years at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. But winter got rough living in a VW bus with a wood stove. “It would be 15 below, and I’d flip a match, and it would get up to 92 in back and 50 up front for about 15 minutes. Wouldn’t last too long.” So he moved south to Summit Creek, Colorado, for about three years.
Artistically starving in 1976, he had a new engine installed in his ’56 VW bus, bought a new backpack and sleeping bag, hit the road again, and eventually wound up in Tucson broke. From there, he saved up a little money tuning pianos, then headed east to pick oranges in Florida. Jeff is a mountain man not well suited to the flatlands of Florida. Were it not for a wife and a kid, he never would have stayed as long as he did. And had he not stayed, he might not have ever met Bo Diddley.
I met Bo Diddley after he left Hawthorne and moved to Albuquerque. Jeff briefly returned to a cabin in Norwood, Colorado, on 40 acres that he shared with five horses, seven chickens, and eight cats. I remained on the road as a singer-songwriter with a regular Southwest circuit that took me through Albuquerque. In need of a place to stay on one of my tours, Jeff hooked me up for an overnight at Bo’s.
Late in the afternoon, I pulled my van up to a six-foot high chain link fence that surrounded Bo’s house as his guard dogs went berserk. I traveled with my wolf-dog, Shilo, and neither she nor the dogs were having it. I planned to sleep in the van but needed a place to park it for the night.
Bo knew I was coming, but before the days of cell phones, I had no way to let him know I had arrived other than to honk my horn and wait for someone to come out of the house. A young black man eventually emerged, more to check on the dogs than to respond to my beeping horn. I suspect he was a relative of Bo. The man asked me to park across the street and down a ways from the house so the dogs would stop barking. With Shilo tearing at the window and the dogs relentlessly lunging at the fence, there was no way it could work. But I had to pee!
I parked my van up the road, cracked the window for Shilo, and walked to the double chain link gate. The young man, somewhat impatient, unlocked the gate and showed me inside. The house smelled like fried chicken. A flurry of activity swirled around Bo. The smell made me crazed with hunger. A woman in the kitchen packed the fried chicken into a box, explaining that Bo had a plane to catch to Europe and needed to take his dinner with him. The way he liked it.
I guessed that my staying overnight had not depended on Bo being there. And when the legend entered the room, his presence loomed large, but he was not intimidating. He made me feel comfortable and shook my hand as he expressed his respect for Jeff. I thanked him for letting me stop by, asked to use the bathroom, then excused myself to get back on the road. He understood, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Exhausted and hungry, I drove a few hours north past sunset. I eventually pulled over to the side of the road and laid down in the back of my van with Shilo, fell asleep and dreamed of fried chicken. Such is life on the road.
One thing Jeff and I shared in common was a lack of parental support for a musical life. Our parents always wanted us to do something different. Mom would ask me why I wanted to have such a hard life. My parents came out to hear me play only one time. And that was after I had given up the ghost, left the touring life, and moved to North Carolina. Jeff’s parents never recognized him as a musician. The one time both of his parents came to hear him play was at the Sheridan El Conquistador when I backed him vocally with two of my girlfriends on the song, High-Heel Sneakers. It is a sad thing when a parent misses out on celebrating their offspring.
“Put on your red dress, mama. Cause we’re goin’ out tonight…” — Tommy Tucker
And so it is that the musical adventure continues with Jammin’ Jeff and his great sense of humor, playing out of a large studio he built behind his house in the foothills of the Gila Wilderness. The room is more of a museum than a studio, the walls plastered with memorabilia saved over many decades, the stage peppered with vintage instruments and amps, and perched on a shelf beneath a snake skin, buffalo skull, and wolf pelt sits a pair of red hi-heel sneakers. May his legacy live on, long after we are gone…
The thing about a rash and family is… You can get rid of the rash — !
Jammin’ Jeff, in a letter sent to Thea 2010
Update to original post (8.25.24)
R.I.P. Jammin’ Jeff Cerwinske June 2, 1947 - August 20, 2024
On the early morning of August 20th, 2024, shortly before 5am, I lost my “Early Morning Friend.” Jeff Cerwinske has graduated to his next great adventure after a long battle with kidney cancer. He believed this to be from chemicals he was exposed to during his military service. He died at home surrounded by friends and family. Previously unreleased recordings have now been archived on a website I created for him before he passed. Please visit Jammin’ Jeff on Bandcamp where you can listen and download his music for free. You can also view his last performance recorded on his 6.2.24 birthday along with other related videos filmed in his studio on Thea & The GreenMan’s YouTube Channel.
Paid subscribers receive Premium Content below:
Other Side of Love — Thea’s song written with Jeff Cerwinske in mind, from Planet We Ride.
Wutiwikima — Jeff’s song written with Thea in mind. Unreleased.
Video of Jill Ayn and Bo Diddley singing Jill’s song Love Sweet Love
Additional archival photos
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