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By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 22, 2002; Page C01

John Jackson titled his last album "Front Porch Blues," but his music was just as much at home on the South Lawn of the White House and center stage at Carnegie Hall and London's Royal Albert Hall. Still, that front porch notion was accurate: Jackson was a sweet, gentle man, a charmer whose rolling guitar rhythms, easygoing vocals and warm, engaging smile invited one up.

Discovered in the early '60s while working as a gravedigger and handyman in Fairfax County, Jackson became one of the world's foremost finger-style guitarists and songsters, a beloved figure at folk and blues festivals around the country and the world.

Jackson, who died Sunday at age 77, went from anonymity to being declared a "living treasure" when he received a National Heritage Fellowship in 1986. That award, given by the National Endowment for the Arts, recognized Jackson's mastery of the sophisticated but deceptively simple Piedmont fingerpicking style. The award also acknowledged the richness of Jackson's repertoire, which embraced blues, gospel and early country music, traditional folk ballads and Tin Pan Alley standards, rhythmic rags and reels.

Though he was diagnosed with liver cancer late in December, Jackson insisted on keeping his commitment to perform at Falls Church's First Night concert on New Year's Eve. This likely surprised no one who knew him: He always insisted he was just a working man, and that work ethic undoubtedly gave him just enough strength for one last job.

Nor was it surprising that in his last days, Jackson was surrounded by friends and fellow musicians, one of whom, Stephen Wade, was quietly performing the lovely melody of "Hand in Hand" on his banjo as Jackson closed his eyes and slipped away.

John Jackson was never strictly a bluesman -- "a bluesman don't play anything but blues," he once pointed out in the rich, syrupy cadence that reflected his rural Virginia roots. He was born in 1924 in Woodville, in western Virginia's Rappahannock County, the seventh son of Hattie and Suttie Jackson, tenant farmers who were also musicians. Jackson's mother played harmonica and accordion and favored sacred song; his father, who played guitar, banjo and mandolin, preferred secular music, which he played in a string band with his brothers.

Their son showed an interest in guitar but could not learn from his father, who played left-handed and upside down. When he was 5, an older sister bought him a $3.95 mail-order guitar and Jackson started teaching himself by listening to used 78s played on a secondhand Victrola his parents had purchased from traveling furniture salesmen.

"They would come around once a month and collect whatever we was able to pay 'em and they had boxes of records for 10 cents apiece by everybody who made a record in the '20s and early '30s," Jackson recalled in 1986. "That's how I learned to play, listening to 78 records."

Jackson listened to early country bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt, Barbecue Bob, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake, and early country acts like Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Uncle Dave Macon and Ernest Tubb. The family radio also brought in the Grand Ole Opry and the Wheeling Jamboree. Because he listened to all kinds of music, Jackson developed an expansive repertoire that made his concerts delightfully inclusive. Songs stuck in his memory, Jackson suggested, because he'd had to drop out of school at an early age to work on the farm. "I don't read and write and I have to keep everything right up there," he said, pointing to his head.

There would be one teacher, known only as Happy -- a water boy on a chain gang laying Rappahannock County's first paved road, who'd come to the Jackson farm's spring. He eventually borrowed the family guitar and over a year-long period taught young John open tunings and slide techniques. From him John learned the Piedmont fingerpicking style, which reflected a lesser-known but vital strain of blues, lighter and more rhythmic than the harder blues of the Mississippi Delta and Texas.

Reflecting the influence of early string bands and ragtime, the style was built on a technique in which the thumb lays down a rhythmic bass line against one or two fingers plucking out the melody. That complex interplay could make one guitar sound like two in earnest conversation.

The Jacksons built a small stage on their farm, a site for the weekend house parties and hoedowns that were important social occasions in segregated times. Their son started performing with them in the '30s, but in 1945, at age 21, he stopped. "People sometimes liked to fight and I just hated violence, so I quit playing," Jackson explained. "It just wasn't worth it."

So until 1964, John Jackson didn't play publicly. He didn't even own a guitar again until 1960, when a friend gave him an old Gibson as collateral on a loan. By then Jackson and his wife, Cora Lee, had been living in Fairfax for a decade, having moved there so he could work various jobs on a dairy farm before becoming a gravedigger, a job he did the old-fashioned way, with pick and shovel.

When he began playing again, Jackson did so informally. In fact his "revival" was due to a sequence of fortuitous events. In 1964, he was entertaining neighborhood kids with "Walk Right In," a 1930 recording by Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers that had revived into a No. 1 hit by the Rooftop Singers. A mailman making his rounds heard Jackson and begged for a lesson. Embarrassed at the attention, Jackson kept putting him off until the man finally invited him for a late-night session at the gas station where he worked part time.

And that's where folklorist Chuck Perdue, president of the Folklore Society of Greater Washington, pulled in for a fill-up and heard Jackson playing Mississippi John Hurt's classic rag "Candy Man." Still unsure of his talents, Jackson had to be cajoled into playing another tune, Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Matchbox Blues."

By song's end, Perdue knew he'd made a wonderful discovery, and Jackson was soon playing in public again, notably at the Ontario Place coffeehouse that had become home base to such other Folk Revival discoveries as Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt.

Perdue ended up producing Jackson's 1965 debut on Arhoolie Records, "Blues and Country Dance Tunes From Virginia"; there would be nine albums in all. More important, after having become a local fixture, Jackson began to tour nationally and overseas, ultimately performing in more than 60 countries. He played in coffeehouses, clubs and community centers, but also on the stages of the world's major concert halls -- and, being practical, kept his job as a gravedigger part time.

Jackson celebrated his geographic roots in songs like "Rappahannock Blues," "Fairfax Station Rag" and "Graveyard Blues," though he'd also chuckle at earnest blues fans looking for deeper connections between his music and his old job. Mostly, they would be enthralled not only by his exquisite guitar playing and storytelling, but by his gentle personality, the warm laughter that came so easily, the sunny disposition that could not be clouded over by life's hard circumstances.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company