Jerry Beach

Jerry Beach is an internationally recognized blues guitar player, singer and songwriter. His original songs have been recorded by notables such as Chris Thomas King, Bryan Lee, and Bobby Patterson. He received a Grammy nomination for his song “I’ll Play the Blues For You,” made famous by the legendary Albert King. And today, he lives and works in Shreveport as he did over 40 years ago.Beach got his start playing in bars when he was just 17. “The first club I played was the Pinstripe Lounge, in 1959 or 1960,” he recalls. Soon after, Beach teamed up with Danny Harrelson to form “Dan & Jerry,” one of the most memorable local groups from the ‘60s. The group played R&B interlaced with straight blues as well as blue-eyed soul. (“If there wasn’t feeling, we didn’t play it!” says Beach.)Dan & Jerry will forever be associated with the “Bossier Strip,” a stretch of clubs along East Texas Street in Bossier that was hopping with music and young soldiers from Barksdale Air Force Base. The Strip was so notorious, in fact, that in 1963 a travel journalist by the name of Erskine Caldwell (God's Little Acre) wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle: “After dark, when the rainbow colored, plastic encased, rocket shaped neon lights burst into all their crazy crystal glory. Bossier City is a dazzling three-mile strip of booze, girls and ear-jarring nightlife.”“The music scene on the Bossier Strip was pretty wide open,” recalls Beach. “There were so many people who were going to make their mark in music in the future -- like Johnny and Edgar Winter, and the band that would come to be known as the Boxtops. This is where they fine-tuned their craft. So we all interacted and worked off each other, and we all learned a lot.”During this time -- the heyday of southern soul -- Jerry Beach was also working as a staff musician for Sound City Studio. He started writing songs for the singers of local labels like Alarm Records. Of course, his biggest success as a songwriter was “I’ll Play the Blues For You.”“It’s always been a surprise to me,” Beach says of the song’s success. “‘I’ll Play the Blues For You’ was written between the Bossier Strip and Sound City on Line Avenue, in the car. When I wrote it, I didn’t think it was that great of a song. For one thing, the words don’t rhyme!”In 1972 Albert King released one of his best albums for Stax Records with I’ll Play the Blues For You. The title track belonged to Beach, who was unaware that Stax had picked up the song. “I didn’t even know that Albert King had recorded the song until I saw it on the Billboard Charts,” laughs Beach.In recent years Beach has received great recognition for his musical accomplishments. He was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 1998, the Louisiana Living Legends in 2000, and the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame in 2001. He was a special guest at the 2000 Montreal International Jazz Festival, and is a regular performer at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.Also, Jerry Beach is the 2002-2003 recipient of a SRAC Artist Fellowship. He has used the award money to start a teaching business: “I figure at my age, it’s time to start passing some of this on. I know that a lot of stuff is not in the books, and this knowledge needs to be passed on to younger players.” Beach offers private guitar lessons to students of all ages.Jerry Beach remains a vital part of the local music community. He appears frequently with his band at local venues, and he also hosts the Monday Night Blues Jam at Lee Wright’s club on East Kings Highway, along with Danny Wilder, Melvin “Kid” Mims and Ted Lindsay. “We start at 8 P.M., so people can come out and still get to work the next morning,” says Beach. “We’re keeping the blues tradition alive.”