On the Trail of Lum Guffin, Bartlett’s Elusive Bluesman

I grew up in Bartlett, and went to Bartlett High School. A lot of my friends lived in the Black community along Old Brownsville Road, and I knew some people that lived along the road whose name was Guffin. But somehow, I had never heard of Lum Guffin, and the sadder thing was that he was living during those warm afternoons when I used to walk along Old Brownsville Road visiting friends. I wouldn’t encounter Lum Guffin until much later, after his death in 1993, when I saw a download link for his album Walking Victrola in an online blog, noticed his last name, and wondered if he might have been from Bartlett. I downloaded the album and enjoyed it, did some reading that revealed that Lum Guffin had played the Memphis Country Blues Festival at the Overton Park Shell in 1969, and then had pretty much moved on to other things. But later, in 2015, I began to do some research into Black fife-and-drum music, specifically trying to determine if it had ever occurred in West Tennessee as it had in North Mississippi. For a number of reasons, I considered Fayette County to be the most likely location for fife-and-drum music in Tennessee. Overwhelmingly rural, it has historically been the county with the largest Black majority in the state, and it is directly north of Marshall County, Mississippi, one of the most important blues counties in America. But my research led in a different direction, and to a major shock- there had indeed been a fife and drum band in West Tennessee, one called the United Sons and Daughters of Zion Fife and Drum Band Number 9, and it was located in Bartlett, Tennessee. Furthermore, it had been recorded, by the Swedish blues writer and researcher Bengt Olsson. A check of the liner notes of the On The Road Again compilation that contained the track mentioned that the leader and fife player of the band was none other than Lum Guffin, and he was quoted regarding other chapters of the United Sons and Daughters of Zion having fife-and-drum bands, and about the friendly competition between various fife-and-drum bands at the annual Brunswick Picnic in August. Lum later recorded for Italian musicologist Gianni Marcucci in his front yard in 1978. The recordings were issued in part on the Albatros label in 1979, and more or less completely on the excellent Blues at Home Volume 13 on Marcucci’s own Mbiraphon label.
Years have passed since the summers of 1984 and 1985 when I used to hang out along Old Brownsville Road, and time has not been kind to the Black community that once was there. Most of the small homes and farms which used to line the road have been replaced by suburban tract subdivisions, but I did notice that one of the new subdivisions had a road named Guffin Road. I didn’t really expect to find much, for the area had been so built up, but suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise-ordinary suburban subdivision was a stand of old forest and an old, historic looking home. It was weather-beaten and ancient, and there was no historic marker, but I could not help but imagine that it had been preserved for a reason. Could it have been the homestead of Columbus “Lum” Guffin? I took a few pictures of that house on that pleasant sunny Sunday in July, and posted them on Facebook, and within a day, I learned that the house was indeed the old home of Lum Guffin. I heard from several of Guffin’s descendants over the next few weeks, and learned that many of them are active in gospel music. My next step is to try to set up interviews with many of the remaining members of Guffin’s family in the hopes of making his story fully known.