I wasn’t surprised to hear that James King had passed away last month. Having seen him live many times over about 25 years, I knew that James enjoyed beer. He was a singer’s singer — one of those rare people blessed with such a powerful, emotional voice he could often bring me to tears with a song. In the past year or so James got clean and sober. He needed a liver transplant but through some slip-up he apparently didn’t get on a transplant list until it was too late.
He was good at finding tunes that would tug at those emotional heartstrings of his listeners. Everybody remembers “Bed by the Window” and “Echo Mountain,” but there were a bunch more. “The Big House on the Corner (Where Love Used to Live)” was a favorite of mine, along with “Potter’s Field” and of course “Thirty Years of Farming.”
My favorite James King story isn’t about James himself, but one of his sidemen. Twenty-plus (maybe 30?) years ago there were a couple of small bluegrass festivals held at the Shasta County Fairgrounds in Anderson. The festivals didn’t make enough money to justify themselves, but the next year or two the same people, I remember George Ireton was one of them, rented a piece of the fairgrounds and had an invitational jam and campout.
The year I remember, James and his band were traveling through and they were booked to play. We jammed most of the day, then James played a set in the late afternoon, we had a nice pot-luck dinner, followed by another set by James.
Barbara and I had just a Coleman white gas stove so we couldn’t do anything elaborate. We brought a Dutch oven full of Chinese pot stickers which we had cooked at home and then frozen. Before dinner we put them over a very low heat to bring them up to temperature.
As James’ second set began, he thanked the volunteers for the delicious dinner, and one of his band members, the fiddler I think, stepped forward. This fellow, and I think the rest of the band were the real deal — country folk from the Southeast. He wore bib overalls and sturdy shoes, and I suspect he had a can of snuff in his pocket somewhere.
“Who brought them little dumplins?” he asked.
I raised my hand.
“You make them?” he asked.
“Well no,” I answered. “I bought them from a Chinese guy.”
“Them was g-o-o-o-d!” he said.
James’ friends and fans have had a gofundme page for quite a while to help with his medical expenses. They’ve kept the page alive to pay for his funeral expenses and a grave marker. This is the URL: https://www.gofundme.com/JamesKing-GetWell
