Big Pete Pearson is turning 90 on Oct. 4. And as the legendary Phoenix bluesman is pleased to report, “I'm not planning on stopping. I just go ahead and shout those blues the way I always have.”
His legs have gotten noticeably weaker over time, which definitely slows him down a bit, and he’s been battling cancer for nearly two decades. But those cancer numbers have been holding steady.
“The doctor said my health is good,” Pearson says. “And I'm pretty happy about that.”
He has other reasons to be pretty happy.
“I'm surprised that I still have my voice,” he says.
“I don't have the old man voice. I have the voice I've always had. In fact, I think it's stronger now than it was when I was 26. So I'm just thankful I can still do what I'm doing. It’s a miracle
for me. Just being able to perform, to do my work, to sing, means everything. I’m so thankful God has given me the strength to do my job.”
Big Pete Pearson took his first blues gig at 9 years old
It’s a job he’s been doing for 80 years now.
He was 9 years old the day he accepted his first paying blues gig at a place called the Triple J Tavern in Austin, Texas. Prior to that, he’d been playing guitar with a spiritual group at church.
“I had learned to play guitar pretty good, and I loved to sing,” he says. “I had loved to sing since I was old enough to hum a tune."
When Ricky Mills and Sonny Ace came by Pearson’s grandparents’ house and asked if he could come with them to play some music, he assumed they meant a church gig.
“They told my grandmother, ‘We’d like for Peter to come play guitar for us,’” Pearson recalls. “And I thought I was going to a church to play, but I ended up at a bar. They asked me, could I sing the blues? I told them, ‘Yeah, but I'm not supposed to.’ And the guys that I was working with said, ‘Well, you just go ahead and sing them and you’ll be OK. We won't tell Miss Pearson and the Rev. Pearson,' because my grandpa was a preacher.”
He was “scared to death,” he says, that they’d find out, but Mills and Ace convinced him it would be their little secret.
“So I went ahead and sung,” Pearson says. “And people liked it. I think they was kind of excited to see a kid as young as me singing. And I was just pouring it out, man. I was OK. I knew blues songs because I always listened to the radio. I wasn't supposed to, but I listened to the radio and learned those blues songs.”
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'I only made 50 cents, but that was good'
What drew him to the blues at that age, Pearson says, was “the way the guys was expressing theyselves in a way like they was really into what they was doing. I didn't know exactly what they were singing about, but I liked what I heard. So I said, ‘I think I can do that.’ But when I wanted to practice, I'd leave the house and walk down the street from my grandparents’ house. I’d be humming those blues so I wouldn't forget them, you know?”
His grandparents never did find out he’d been singing the blues at a bar that day.
As Pearson recalls, with a laugh, “I didn't tell them, and they didn't ask. And if they did find out, they never said nothing to me about it. When I left to go play, I was with people they thought would be taking me to church to play.”
It was a fun gig and a decent payout for a nine-year-old in 1946.
“I only made 50 cents,” Pearson says. “But that was good.”
Pearson says the Triple J Tavern “was a completely different world for me because I wasn't used to watching people drink beer. I wasn't used to being told I couldn't sit here. I couldn't sit there. I couldn't use the restrooms. We had to go into alleys to use the restroom. I was kind of scared, but other than that? I mean, I had two kind of grown-up guys taking care of me. So I was OK, I guess.”
Then, with a laugh, he adds, “I came this far and I didn't have no problem.”
At a certain point, after his grandfather died, his grandmother heard her grandson had been playing at a bar.
“Somebody told her one day,” Pearson says. “She said, ‘What you doing now? Singing the blues?’ I said, ‘Well, no, they asked me, could I sing? I sang a song. They liked it, and they asked me, could I work? I said I had to check with you first.' She said, ‘Well, you just be careful. Don't you get hurt.’ She didn't scold me or nothing. She just told me to be careful. So it was all right, I guess.”
Big Pete recalls sharing the stage with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters
The scene at the Triple J Tavern didn’t seem that wild until he got a little older — old enough that he “began to understand what the blues was all about and what was happening in the clubs and bars.”
As he got older, Pearson got a steady gig with Blues Boy Hubbard and the Jets at Charlie's Playhouse and found himself backing up some of the biggest names in blues.
“To me, they were big stars,” Pearson says before rattling off a list of legendary artists who would’ve been big stars to anyone who cared about the blues.
“Big Joe Turner, Bobby Blue Bland, Little Willie John, Big Mama Thornton, Howlin’ Wolf, people like that,” Pearson says.
“And later on, we was backing Etta James and people like that, Johnny Ace. I played a little bass for Muddy Waters. John Lee Hooker. Little Walter. Oh God, I could go on forever. I’ve got a book in there that's Who's Who in the Blues and I marked down guys I worked with in that blues book. It was almost every page, man. Did I say Bill Doggett? I worked with Bill Doggett. Earl Jackson, Erroll Garner.”
He also started writing songs when he was 17 or 18, maybe younger.
“I don't remember the exact year,” Pearson says. “But I’ve got quite a few songs that I've written through the years.”
Big Pete Pearson moved to Phoenix to work as a cook at Sky Harbor
He moved to Phoenix in the early ‘60s.
“My brother-in-law talked me into helping him move out here,” Pearson says. “I pulled a trailer to help move his family out here.”
His brother-in-law was working at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and told Pearson, who in addition to playing the blues was also working as a cook in Austin, about a career opportunity in Phoenix.
As Pearson recalls, “He said, ‘They need a cook. You ought to see if you can get a job.’ I said, ‘No, I'm going back to Texas.’ He said, ‘Go get your stuff and move out here with me. I hate being in Arizona by myself.’ So I did. I started working at Sky Harbor, cooking for TWA.”
He isn’t sure how long he worked there – maybe six years, maybe 10.
“Then I got tired of that and started working at Money Oldsmobile in Scottsdale,” Pearson says. “I worked in the detail department there for 9, 10 years.”
How Big Pete sang his way into the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame
By then, he’d long since doubled back to Austin to move his wife and kids out and sung his way into the Phoenix blues scene.
“There was some blues artists here when I came,” Pearson says. “But I didn't know what they was doing until I ran into a couple of guys that knew that I could sing the blues, and they invited me to come down to this American Legion in Phoenix. They had a big Monday jam all the time. And I run into a lot of bad dudes, man, that could play.”
That’s how he met Duke Draper, who helped him break into the better-paying Scottsdale venues.
“I worked with him for quite a while,” Pearson says. “Then I got my own group together.”
That group was Big Pete Pearson & the Blues Sevilles.
“We started playing a lot of the black clubs,” Peason says. “Then my buddies from Texas, T.D.Bell and Earl Jackson, came out and we played all over Arizona. I'm trying to think of the drummer's name.
"If you had asked me this year 10 years ago, I could have named all these people, but it's hard for me to remember their names now.”
In 1995, he was inducted to the Arizona Blues Hall of Fame alongside Chico Chism.
'Man, I'm just so excited that I'm still here and I can still do it'
In 2001, he released an album titled “One More Drink.”
“I wrote most of those tunes when I was real young,” Pearson says. “And when I recorded that, the guy that was doing the booking for me got me booked in London at a club called Ain't Nothing But The Blues.”
He’s played a lot of shows in Europe.
“I played over that for years and years with my band, The Gamblers,” Pearson says. “So many different countries — Germany, France, Italy. I was in Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, Denmark. You name a country over there and I think I played in it.”
Things haven’t been the same since the pandemic hit in 2020 though, Pearson says.
“But if they call me to go back to Europe, well, God dang me, I would just take off and I would go.”
He’s still out there shouting the blues in Arizona, though.
On Oct. 10, he’ll be doing a few songs at The Nash with True Flavor Blues. On Oct. 17, he’s playing the Elks’ Theatre in Prescott. Nov. 7 and 8, he’s playing outdoors from 12:30-2:30 p.m. in Litchfield Park. And on Nov. 20, he’s at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix.
“This is my 80th year on stage,” Pearson says. “Man, I'm just so excited that I'm still here and I can still do it. I've traveled pretty much all over the world, I guess you can say, playing music. I’ve met so many different people. And it's been a wonderful, wonderful life for me.”
Ed has covered pop music for The Republic since 2007, reviewing festivals and concerts, interviewing legends, covering the local scene and more. He did the same in Pittsburgh for more than a decade. Follow him on X and Instagram @edmasley and on Facebook as Ed Masley. Email him at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix blues icon turns 90. He isn't ready to stop shouting the blues
