Master of Ceremories JESSE CRAWFORD

If you’re from Detroit or Ann Arbor and you listen to the rock and roll radio you’ll know his voice even if you can’t place his face. If you were one of the legion of MC-5 maniacs back in 1968 and 1969 while it was happening you won’t be surprised at all, not one bit, when you see him walk out on stage to announce the artists for the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. And if you were at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally at Crisler back in December of last year you’ll know him too, even if you weren’t quite sure who he was or what he was doing there.

Jesse Crawford’s back in town, for all the people who don’t know him yet, and he’ll be acting as master of ceremonies for the entire Festival, introducing the artists on stage and generally keeping things moving along as naturally as possible. And, as an extra treat, Jesse will be playing drums Sunday afternoon with the Mojo Boogie Band, bringing his involvement with the music featured at the Festival to full circle.

Jesse came to Ann Arbor from Cleveland, his home, in the middle sixties and he came as a drummer to jam out some blues with folks around town who were into the music like he was. After doing a spell with the legendary Prime Movers, Jesse stopped playing for a while and did some heavy hanging out for a year or so, most notably with his sidekick Panther White and a wide assortment of buddies and pals. In the summer of 1968 he teamed up with John Sinclair and the MC-5, becoming the warm-up man for the 5’s dynamite performances and consistently working rock-and-rollcrazed maniacs into a mindless frenzy even before the music would start. His rap of that period can be heard on the first MC-5 album, Kick Out the Jams, recorded live at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit on the first Zenta New Year.

Jesse was known variously then as “Brother J. C.,” “The Oracle Ramus” (one of the two original prophets, of Zenta, a religious movement which holds blues and jazz music as two of its strongest sacraments) and a number of other descriptive terms, but in the spring of 1969 he formalized his name as. “Jesse Crawford” and has laid with that ever since. Fired by the MC-5 after the imprisonment of John Sinclair, Jesse cruised into the Motor City radio scene one day and turned the whole thing around for a while.

Jesse’s cruise-time program on the former WKNR-FM station in Dearborn was a major force in shaping the musical, and to some extent, the social consciousness of thousands of Detroit rock and roll addicts. From the tunes he played to the rap he laid down around them, Jesse redefined for a while what rock and roll radio was supposed to be about, and in the process he captured the largest audience and the highest ratings of any FM radio personality in town. None of this was accompanied by any compromise in Jesse’s musical taste

— to the contrary, he made it a point to introduce people to music that was new to them, particularly jazz and blues, and it wouldn’t be wrong to say that at least some of the success of this Festival could be credited to Jesse Crawford and his radio assault of two years ago.

Jesse left WKNR after a regrettably short period of time — less than a year

— and soon left the Michigan area altogether to settle in Jamaica, where he lives to this day. He’s been flown back to Ann Arbor'to emcee the Festival, and a lot of people are hoping he’ll come back to stay.