Meet Me With Your Black Drawers on: My Life in Music

by Jeannie Cheatham

Jeannie Cheatham is a living legend in jazz and blues. A pianist, singer, songwriter, and co-leader of the Sweet Baby Blues Band, she has played and sung with many of the greats in blues and jazz—T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Cab Callaway, Joe Williams, Al Hibbler, Odetta, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Cheatham toured with Big Mama Thornton off and on for ten years and was featured with Thornton and Sippie Wallace in the award-winning PBS documentary Three Generations of the Blues. Her music, which has garnered national and international acclaim, has been described as unrestrained, exuberant, soulful, rollicking, wicked, virtuous, wild, and truthful. Cheatham's signature song, "Meet Me with Your Black Drawers On" is a staple in jazz and blues clubs across America and in Europe, Africa, and Japan. In this delightfully frank autobiography, Jeannie Cheatham recalls a life that has been as exuberant, virtuous, wild, and truthful as her music. She begins in Akron, Ohio, where she grew up in a vibrant multiethnic neighborhood surrounded by a family of strong women. From those roots, she launched a musical career that took her from the Midwest to California, doing time along the way everywhere from a jail cell in Dayton, Ohio, where she was innocently caught in a police raid, to the University of Wisconsin-Madison—where she and Jimmy Cheatham taught music. Cheatham writes of a life spent fighting racism and sexism, of rage and resolve, misery and miracles, betrayals and triumphs, of faith almost lost in dark places, but mysteriously regained in a flash of light. Cheatham's autobiography is also the story of her fifty-years-and-counting love affair and musical collaboration with her husband and band partner, Jimmy Cheatham.

Genres: Music

414 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2006

Reviews

[True · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can I not love this book, its all about my ANCESTRY! so Glad to meet and learn new family. I hope to get in touch with Ms. Jeannie. She's my Cousin! I'm enjoying reading about what I love to do so much which is Genealogy! Thank You for putting your story out there for all of us Family.
I can take my time and reference this and make note abt my heritage all the time. IT came with a CD of some of her songs. I can feel the BLUES in her too.

[Reginald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just RE-read this awesomely told legendary life events of my Aunt Jean...