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Artist
Jesse Yawn
12+ albums
bluesblues rocktraditional bluessoul blues
about
Palmetto singer Jesse Yawn lived the life of a blues man... The 79-year-old Manatee County native loved to sing the blues. And people, according to friends and family, loved to hear him. Maybe it’s good that no one seems to know the whole story of Jesse Yawn’s life. Those old-time blues men are supposed to have a bit of mystery about them, from Robert Johnson’s supposed deal with the devil to Buddy Guy’s probably apocryphal story about a passing stranger who gave him his first guitar. Still, it’s frustrating to try to track down information about Yawn, the great blues singer who died last week. He spent his last years in Palmetto, and he was 80 years old when he died. Or maybe 79. You call people who knew him. They have great things to say about his music and his personality, but they don’t know much about him beyond their personal experiences. They all learned about his death through Facebook. After a while, they invariably tell you, “You know who you really should talk to ...” and they give you the name of someone else who adds just another few brush strokes to the portrait. For people around Bradenton, Jesse Yawn was a great but relatively obscure blues singer who played scattered gigs around town. He used to stop in to a blues jam at Cork’s Cigar Bar that local blues guitarist Doug Deming ran. And two years ago Yawn, an Army veteran who by that time was using a wheelchair, sang “Every Day I Have the Blues” at the Bradenton Blues Festival with Eddie Shaw, one of that
