K.C. Douglas ranked among the final major exponents of rural blues in the San Francisco and Oakland vicinity. He created an enduring blues standard by cutting “Mercury Boogie” in 1949, a number saluting the American automobile that later appeared as “Mercury Blues” and was interpreted by Steve Miller and David Lindley. Country star Alan Jackson reached the top of the charts with his own version in 1992, prompting the Ford Motor Company to buy the publishing and feature the song in a national television spot for its trucks.
Born and raised on a family farm near Sharon, Mississippi, Douglas absorbed the 1920s recordings of Delta bluesman Tommy Johnson. He left home in 1934 for non-musical labor in Grenada and Carthage, yet met Johnson two years later and began his performing career. Impressed by Douglas’s baritone vocals and accomplished guitar work, Johnson joined him for street-corner and house-party appearances.
Douglas settled in Vallejo, California, in 1945 and found work in the naval shipyards. Within a few years he joined the San Francisco and Oakland blues circuit, organizing the Lumberjacks in 1947. His earliest sides came out on the Oakland-based Downtown label in 1948. Although he kept performing at dances and small clubs—sometimes with Jesse Fuller—through the 1950s and 1960s, he supported himself with other employment, serving in Berkeley’s public works department from 1963 into the mid-1970s.
He recorded “Born in the Country,” “Catfish Blues,” “Fanny Lou,” “Hear Me Howlin’,” “K.C.’s Doctor Blues,” and “Wake Up Workin’ Woman” for Bluesville in 1960 and Fantasy in 1967, yet reached his artistic peak only in the 1970s. After appearing at the Berkeley Blues Festival in 1970, he assembled a quartet and became a regular at coffeehouses, clubs, and bars throughout the East Bay, Modesto, and Stockton areas, cutting several tracks for Arhoolie between 1973 and 1974.
Douglas died of a heart attack on October 17, 1975, and was interred at Pleasant Green Cemetery in Sharon, Mississippi. ~ Craig Harris
