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WILLIAM THOMAS "CHAMPION JACK" DUPREE

(JULY 23, 1909 OR JULY 4, 1910 – JANUARY 21, 1992)

JIM SIMPSON

Extracted from Henry's Bluesletter #126 with permission

That terrific New Orleans barrelhouse piano player, Champion Jack Dupree, was a regular at
the original Henry’s Blueshouse at The Crown on Station Street, and, unsurprisingly, a top
attraction, playing to a full house every time.

We counted ourselves lucky to have such a legendary bluesman actually living, unlikely as that
seemed at the time, almost on our doorstep. In Halifax, Yorkshire, in fact.

In 1968 I recorded a conversation with Jack over a glass of beer one early evening at Henry’s.
Here’s a transcript.

These are Jack’s own words. I didn’t correct anything nor cut anything out.

You know, I used to be a prize-fighter – a boxer, you know.

That all started when I left home and I didn’t have no other way to get along, I met Jack
Thompson, who was the welter weight champion of the world, then he give me my start.
Because I always had the nerve and the courage, I
started fighting amateurs and then they was paying ten
dollars for three rounds and I went about thirty or so
bouts without losing any and then Jack Hammond, who
was the trainer of Jack Thompson, he told me I was good
for the big fights, and I starts fighting seven and eight
fights with the champions like Jack Thompson and
Battling Jack Redmond, who was a heavy weight. I won a
lot of fights and only lost two. So I’m a champion. When I
went to war I was still a champion, but when I came
back I didn’t take it up no more.

That was 1941. I was two years in prison camp in the
war. It never bothered me. I’m 60 now and I’m still good.
In this Japanese camp. I was playing music every night,
out in Japan. I never had no trouble. Us coloured people
we weren’t no trouble at all. They never mistreated us at
all because they know we didn’t have anything to do
with the war and they know we was only pushed into
fighting so they never give us no hard time but the
whites they did.

At the end of the war I was working as a janitor taking care of a twenty seven family house and
then I got the chance to come to Europe and when I come here I never did go back. That was in

1959.

I didn’t play no music for a living between 1941 and 1959. Well, in America you don’t have to
say you’re a professional musician ‘cause you don’t get a chance to play in the white places,