By Don Bradley
An hour and a half before Mama Ray’s Jam kicked off, Jack Kenyon sat on a railroad tie in front of BB’s Lawnside BarB-Q, off to the side, alone, head down and softly played his slide guitar.
He’s 14 and was really hoping his name would get called to play.
Been a lot of that since this Saturday music jam started 39 years ago.
Pickers and singers, drummers and horn blowers, they show up and put their name on a list. Regulars are pretty much a sure thing. Others hope — and wait.
They want to hear Diane “Mama” Ray call out their name so they can come down front and perform with her band in front of a packed BB’s house.
She is both gatekeeper and kindly matriarch. And forever the star.
Saturday was the 39th anniversary celebration of the oldest running jam in town. A lot of old regulars came for the occasion.
“We love her dearly,” singer Lori Tucker, of the famed Wild Women of KC, said. “She put us all out there and kept this thing going all these years.”
Mama loved seeing the familiar faces.
“My gosh, we had 30 musicians and singers show up, some go way back to the old days,” she said.
She’s 81. Her husband died of cancer in May and now her cancer has returned.
At a recent gig, she asked the audience: “Did you come to hear me sing or see if I’d died?”
The jam, free, starts at 2 p.m. every Saturday. It’s three hours of Rolling on the River and Chantilly Lace, burnt ends and jambalaya, cold beer and hurricanes.
“Let’s get Jack Kenyon up here,” Mama said about halfway through Saturday’s jam. “He’s 14, can you believe it?”
It took “Hatchet Jack” about three seconds to get there from a stool near the front door and not much longer to be rocking the place with Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man.”
The jam is known around the country and, apparently, the world.
Jay EuDaly, guitar player and longest tenured of Mama Ray’s band, remembers when a jazz guitarist from eastern Europe showed up.
“A lot of people playing music out there– first time they ever played in front of an audience was at the Mama Ray Jam,” EuDaly said.
And if a performer runs into trouble, the band is good enough to get them through.
“And nobody ever know it,” Mama said.
For 22 years, the jam was at the old Harlings in Westport. Upstairs, wooden floors, sun streaming through the big west windows.
“That first day we made $3.85 a piece,” EuDaly said.
In a blog he wrote about the time Mama Ray went full bore Janice Joplin and brought the house down at Harlings with “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
“What I wouldn’t give for some footage of that,” EuDaly said.
In 2008, the jam moved to BB’s Lawnside BarB-Q at 1205 E. 85th St. where it’s been ever since.
Longevity was never a sure thing. The Mama Ray band went through its share of relationship troubles, substance abuse and rehab. Peppermint schnapps got Mama Ray.
One band member, cornered by police after a car chase, jumped 80 feet off the Broadway Bridge into the Missouri River. After recovery and a prison stint, he was welcomed back and has since died.
Mama Ray, sober now more than 30 years, kept the jam going through it all. For her, there’s always been the music.
An Army brat, the first time she sang before an audience was at a USO Club in Germany. She’s done it everywhere since. Years on the road. She tells about the night her band andB.B. King’s band jammed until sunup in a New Orleans hotel room.
Finally, she settled in Kansas City.
“And I never left,” she said last week in her home.
Her favorite song to sing these days? “A Song for You” by Leon Russell.
“I’ve been so many places in my life and time
“I’ve sung so many songs, I’ve made some bad rhymes.”
The tendency, EuDaly said, would be to call her a survivor.
“But I think she’s more of a conqueror,” he said. “Raising kids by herself, on the road, getting sober, she beat it all and kept this thing going all this time.”
She is known also for putting on benefits for Hope House, the domestic violence shelter. And when she asks other musicians to perform, they show up.
“Why do they do it, year after year–because it’s freakin’ Mama Ray that’s why,” EuDaly said.
She doesn’t sing as much as she used to. Some songs are now in a different key. As she says, vocal cords break down like everything else.
“But I’m still above the ground and as long as I can still sing, I’ll be all right.”
And as long as that’s the deal, the dreamers like “Hatchet Jack” Kenyon will keep showing up early on Saturdays to get their name on the list.
To hope. And wait.
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