SDMA

Jeannie Cheatham remembers praising her husband Jimmy even before the two met in New York in the 1950s.

“I think we connected on a musical level,” Jeannie remembers. “I felt like I knew him through his music before I even met him.”

After 47 years as a musical (and married) pair, it's clear they're still connecting on that level.

Jeannie, a singer-pianist, and Jimmy, a bass trombonist-bandleader, formed The Sweet Baby Blues Band as an outlet for their swinging blues bop, influencing music in San Diego and nationally.

“Maybe it's just that we always realized where the music was coming from on a spiritual level,” Jeannie says. “We always connected with what we do, and I think that's why other people do, too.”

But the Cheathams worked extensively as individual musicians long before they met and married. A Kansas City-style jazz-blues master, Jimmy Cheatham was born in 1924 in Alabama and attended the New York Conservatory of Modern Music.

Jeannie was born in 1927 to a musical family in Akron, Ohio. At 5, she took piano lessons and eventually fell in love with choir vocals. She got her professional start as a touring keyboardist and worked with Cab Calloway, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Jimmy Witherspoon and Dakota Staton.

The Cheathams met in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1956 when Jeannie was in town for a jam session and Jimmy was there to visit his family. They married three years later and settled in New York. Jimmy took up work as the music director for Chico Hamilton and played a short stint with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1972.

“We came into this business really struggling to find our own voice,” Jeannie says. “That was supposed to be the epitome so that when someone heard you, they could say it was Jimmy Cheatham or Jeannie Cheatham. We always aimed to be different.”

The pair also moved into academia in the '70s, with Jimmy teaching classes at Bennington College in Vermont, then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A job offer at the UCSD's jazz studies program lured the couple to San Diego in 1978.

Jeannie signed with Concord Records in 1984 after the documentary Three Generations of Blues featured her alongside Sippie Wallace and Big Mama Thornton. Jimmy also came on to help write nine albums for the label.

“We would do an album in one night; it just came out,” she says. “Nowadays someone says they're working on their album and three years later they're not done. We had that spontaneity, that inspiration.”

Their first album, Sweet Baby Blues, produced cover-song favorite “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On,” which was subsequently covered by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Chuck Carbo, Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson and the Magic Rockers. The duo toured endlessly with The Sweet Baby Blues Band, earning the Grand Prix Du Disque Du Jazz award in 1985 and the Blues Album of the Year from Down Beat Magazine in 1991 for Luv in the Afternoon.

Jimmy retired from UCSD last year at the age of 81. Jeannie's self-penned autobiography, Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On: My Life in Music, came out this year, keeping her busy with speaking engagements across the country.

“I'm used to having a piano in front of me when I have an audience, so these book engagements have been weird,” Jeannie says. “It's a challenge to explain your life without making [the crowd] go to sleep.”

The pair still jams, tours, writes and plays occasionally.

“It's been a good ride,” Jeannie says. “I find something fresh in it every single day. I think that's why we've lasted so long is because we don't let ourselves get bored.”

Albums

Sweet Baby Blues, Concord Jazz, 1984

Midnight Mama, Concord Jazz, 1985

Homeward Bound, Concord Jazz, 1987

Back to the Neighborhood, Concord Jazz, 1988

Luv in the Afternoon, Concord Jazz, 1990

Basket Full of Blues, Concord Jazz, 1991

Blues and the Boogie Masters, Concord Jazz, 1993

Gud Nuz Bluz, Concord Jazz, 1995

Concord Jazz Heritage Series: Jeannie & Doc Cheatham, Concord Jazz, 1998   Books

Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On: My Life in Music, by Jeannie Cheatham, University of Texas Press (includes six-song CD), 2006   Compilations

Jazz Celebration: Tribute to Carl Jefferson, Concord Jazz, 4-CD set includes “Cherry Red”

Jazz Moods: Groovin' The Blues, Concord Jazz, “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On”

Jazz moods: Jazz Party Mix 3, Concord Jazz, “Meet me With Your Black Drawers On”