_“I took a lot of abusing off of people in this life,” says Cootie Stark, sitting in the passenger seat of a station wagon that is taking him back to the Woodland Homes public housing project in Greenville, South Carolina.

“I been through the hassles, man. And a whole lot of phony talk, you know. Phony talk. But I kept on, and I got to that smooth road. You ain’t gonna get there if you think getting to the smooth road is easy. That’s in life. Something is better out there for you. Sometimes when we get disgusted, we have to just try to hold on.”

Cootie’s smooth road is still fraught with surface scars. He is a poor, blind, seventy-one-year-old man who draws disability checks and lives alone in a ghetto apartment. Or he’s a forgotten hero of the blues, a direct link to Piedmont acoustic legends Pink Anderson, Simmie Dooley, and Baby Tate—an artist of international stature and unquestionable importance. It all depends on whom you ask, or believe. Cootie Stark appears in none of the accepted blues histories. Three years ago, he was undocumented, unheard, unknown. But lately, a renegade musicologist/philanthropist named Tim Duffy took him on tour to Europe and then got his picture in an ad that ran in Rolling Stone magazine. “This is the biggest piece of loose literature ever produced on country blues,” Duffy says. “We’ve gone right around the Blues Nazis, the people who are supposed to decide what is and what isn’t important. This ad is not even talking to a blues audience. It’s talking to music lovers, and there’s a lot more of them than of historians and musicologists.” Now a CD on Cello Records is in the works that could make the historians look like phony talkers.

“I’m happy about all that, man,” Stark says as the car stops in front of his apartment. “I ain’t never had it before, so it makes me happy. There’s a lot of people still living that want to hear this, and they ain’t got it on the radio. It should have been forty-five years ago, but more likely I’m better now than I was in my twenties. More likely I’m better.”

_Cootie Stark was born James Miller, but most everyone in Anderson County, South Carolina, called him Johnny. Some of them called him Cootie, though he can’t remember exactly why. He worked in the cotton fields with his sharecropper parents and dreamed of playing music.

Visits to an aunt in Greenville when Cootie was twelve exposed him to the Piedmont blues, a style that continues to influence his guitar playing today.

“Greenville had good talent back then,” he says. “Baby Tate used to play on the street there, and that's how I come to know him. Then I got a guitar when I was fourteen, and I learned songs from my Uncle Chump and a bunch of songs from Baby Tate.”

Cootie was encouraged to keep playing, in part because his near-total blindness was an impediment to working a straight job or gaining an education.

Three years after picking up the instrument, he was playing street corners in Greenville and dances in the outlying counties. After turning twenty, he began what he calls his “traveling years,” performing on the streets of Asheville, Knoxville, Greensboro, Columbia, and other Southern cities, and playing with older musicians who would one day be recognized as blues legends: Pink Anderson, Simmie Dooley, Peg-Leg Sam, and Josh White.

But while each of these artists recorded music that endures, Cootie remained in unrecorded obscurity, moving from town to town, playing for whatever he could get.

The details of Cootie’s next forty years are a hazy continuum of struggle and song. If there were few missed opportunities, there were few opportunities of any sort. Rock 'n’ roll obliterated traditional American ideas about popular music. Then the ’60s folk boom brought first-generation blues artists like White, Anderson, Rev. Gary Davis, and Lightnin’ Hopkins briefly into the national spotlight, while music scholars declined to bestow much significance on second-generation players who were extending and honoring the idiom’s traditions.

Cootie married twice and saw one union broken by death, the other by divorce. He moved back to Greenville in the ’80s, settling into Woodland Homes with little hope of ever finding an audience. “By then, the real Piedmont blues was pretty much gone,” he says. “All them guys was dead and gone, and I wasn’t making no headway.”

While Cootie’s prospects were declining, Tim Duffy was piling bluesmen from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, into his van and driving them to the cheese lines. “When I didn’t have money to help these people, I gave what I had, which was time and transportation at first,” Duffy says. “On check day, I’d fill up my van with Guitar Gabriel, Macavine Hayes, Mr. Q, Willa Mae Buckner, and other artists. We’d go to the pawnshop to cash their checks. Then we’d go to the grocery store, go to the cheese line, go to the cigarette store.”

Duffy is a blues anarchist of sorts, a folklore scholar who fully believes that the poverty-stricken compendium of unknowns in his van were the equals of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King. “Guitar Gabriel was as good as anybody. He was the most eloquent poet of the blues from the East Coast. Muddy Waters wasn’t any better or more important than Gabe. And Macavine, he plays some of the most unadulterated, pure blues I’ve ever heard. He’s a very important artist. Do you validate these artists by record sales? How many great artists never got recorded? Who’s setting the criteria here?”

In the early ’90s, Duffy began recording and assisting Guitar Gabriel. After producer Mark Levinson heard those tapes, he set Duffy up with recording equipment and industry contacts. “Mark came up with the name Music Maker Relief Foundation in 1994,” Duffy says. “And he put up the money for a compilation CD of these artists, and we started working to do something no one has ever done before.” That something was a Robin Hood approach to the blues, with Duffy and his wife Denise distributing money from donors directly to artists who needed better instruments, help in obtaining bookings, or simply money to pay a power bill. “It’s payback time,” says Duffy, who now makes his living as a salaried music producer. “Every major pop star is using blues licks, and it had to come from somewhere. There were a great many people that spawned this music that has turned into billions of dollars for the recording industry people, for Elektra, Sony, and Atlantic. Most of these great musicians live for $4,000 a year, and they’re the purveyors of this music, this culture. It’s time to write them a royalty check. If we can’t get it from the record companies, let’s start an organization, raise the money, and pay them what is owed.”

It was in the spring of 1996, about a year after Guitar Gabriel’s death, that Duffy traveled to South Carolina and saw Cootie Miller play electric guitar and sing Fats Domino songs. “I realized by the way he was playing the guitar that there was something more here than a Fats Domino copycat,” Duffy says. “I started asking Cootie, ‘Do you know any older songs?’ He said, ‘Oh, you like those old songs? I had an uncle named Uncle Chump and I knew this guy named Baby Tate. He taught me thousands of songs. You want to hear some of those?’ ” By the time of that meeting, Duffy’s Music Maker organization had a solid footing. Levinson had connected the foundation to a number of top-level music industry executives; Duffy had produced two compilation CDs and a full-length Guitar Gabriel disc; and donations from corporations and individuals brought the Music Maker bank account to previously unthinkable levels. By 1997, Duffy expanded his recipient base to nearly fifty performers and gave away $100,000. “A lot of people told me, ‘You should put that money back in an endowment and keep it growing,’ ” Duffy says. “But the need was so great, and how is that money going to help these people in ten years, when they’re dead? These artists are in their seventies and eighties now.”

Within months of hooking up with Duffy, Cootie had a new acoustic guitar, a new stage name (Stark was the surname of his stepfather), and a promising career. His abrasive, percussive guitar style melds with a vocal arsenal that ranges from a rough-hewn gospel shout to a tight, pretty vibrato, and his concerts are glorious time warps, direct links to a South long gone. “Cootie has taught me stuff I’d never had any idea about,” Duffy says. “He knows all these songs from all these rural musicians. It makes you realize that Pink Anderson and Baby Tate were just the tip of an iceberg of a world we don’t know anything about. And just because most of the people in that world were never recorded, that doesn’t make them any less great. Put Cootie on a stage in Europe singing songs like ‘Sandy Land’ or ‘Jigroo’ and people go nuts. They’ve never seen or heard anything like him, because he’s the real thing.”

“They say the older you get, the more fun you gonna have, and I believe them now,” Cootie Stark says. “I just wish I’d had some of this a long time ago. I’ve had a lot of wasted time, a lot of time gone. But that was just an old bumpy road.”