Bulwark of the Blues: David Booker's Remarkable Career

Legendary bluesman David Booker passed away on Sunday. Fellow musician Marty Jones interviewed Booker a year ago, when he was fighting cancer. "David was a giddy human encyclopedia of roots music, who knew more about it than anybody and could expertly and happily perform the songs he cared so much about," Jones remembers. "He was an immensely colorful character and by far the most working musician Denver’s scene has ever had. He was also an astonishing and rare example of someone who, on the local level, carried out a lifelong career of playing music they loved. He did it with joy and dignity right up to the end, and his death leaves a gigantic and unfillable hole in the city’s culture."

The following piece by Marty Jones was published exactly a year ago, on November 22, 2022.

For 41 years, David Booker has played various forms of blues and American roots music for Colorado’s live-music fans. His lengthy career, hefty talent and deep musical knowledge earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Colorado Blues Society in April. But the day after receiving the honor, Booker received something else: “I had my first chemo treatment,” he says. “It was hell. I couldn’t move for twelve days.”

Booker faced prostate cancer in 2017 and survived. But a checkup this spring signaled the cancer’s return. “It’s in my bones now,” he reports. The disease is no doubt fighting for space there, because music has been running through Booker's bones for most of his 75 years.

“David is one of the original four or five bluesmen who helped establish blues in Colorado,” says Chick Cavallero, the former Colorado Blues Society president who nominated Booker for the recent award. “He’s a great entertainer, his repertoire includes almost everything, and he's made a living playing music. There aren’t many blues musicians here who can say that.”

”I’ve always hustled,” says the aptly named Booker, who changed his name from Bowker thirty years ago on the advice of a band manager. “I’ve worked really hard and created a lot of connections, and I’ve always been able to pick up the phone and line up five or six gigs.” But because of the cancer and chemo, his workload has been floored. A musician who frequently played 25 to 30 gigs a month, he was down to two or three in that same time during treatment. “If I could just show up and do the gig, that would be okay," Booker says. "But loading in and setting up and plugging everything in is the hard part now.”

Doug Tackett, a local booking agent who has secured gigs for Booker for more than two decades, has been especially helpful over the past year. “David is an icon and the hardest-working man in this town,” Tackett says. “He truly loves his job, and it’s been heart-wrenching to see how all of this is impacting his ability to do it. But he keeps going, even if it drives him into the ground.”

Booker hit the ground running in Denver in 1981, arriving from London (he grew up in Manchester) after putting in a couple of decades in that city’s music scene. Why’d he leave? “Punk was like music COVID,” he says. “All of these working, popular bands were suddenly out of date.” He arrived in the Mile High City with two suitcases, a bass guitar and 120 albums of his favorite music.

“Back then,” he recalls, "there were a lot of venues and a good nightlife in Denver, with the airport being close to downtown." He played bass in country-Western acts, riding the tail of the Urban Cowboy era and the city’s oil boom. "You'd see guys in suits with briefcases downtown wearing cowboy boots and cowboy hats."

In 1982 he visited a local AM station, KJJZ, and pitched himself as a disc jockey, despite having never been one. The station's owner, Denny Workman, loved Booker’s British accent and music knowledge, and gave him an on-air name, The Captain. Booker shared a weekday morning show with Workman called Jazz in the Air With The Captain & The Bear. He also had an evening blues program on Saturdays called The Red Hot Blues Show. It was a hit with listeners and helped drive audiences to see Booker’s horn-powered group, The Captain & His Red Hot Blues Band, which drew big crowds to local bars and ski-resort gigs.

Booker left the airwaves in ’83, and the Red Hot Blues Band became the Red Hot Flames several years later. In the late ’80s, he formed the Alleygators, which released two albums during its seven-year run. He also spent two years in San Francisco with Warner Brothers act the Dynatones. When the late-’90s swing craze hit, he assembled bands at the Mercury Cafe and other swing-dance havens, and when the trend slowed, around 2006, he switched back to solo, duo and small-combo gigs at local bars and stalwarts such as the now-closed El Chapultepec, where he led a weekly blues jam for ten years. Through it all, he says, “I’ve never had to stray from playing the music I like to play.”

A past Westword Music Showcase performer and awards nominee, Booker was named Best Bluesman by Westword in 2002, and his El Chapultepec gig was named Best Blues Jam in 2012.

Over the past two years, Booker has recounted his career in fascinating installments in the Colorado Blues Society newsletter, The Holler. He's written about his childhood in Manchester, when he copied skiffle artists and early rockers, as well as his late teen years backing Champion Jack Dupree and meeting blues heavies like Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. Booker was a pal and bandmate of Roderick Mayall (younger brother of blues legend John), which led to further musical adventures. His Holler series details his time backing Del Shannon and mid-’60s British stars Dave Berry and Paul Jones (lead singer for Manfred Mann), auditioning for Jeff Beck, and seeing Jimi Hendrix at a Manchester pub after watching him perform for the first time. “I regret not going over and saying hello to him that night,” Booker says. He also chronicles years of musical moments stateside, including playing with and meeting many of his heroes.

The project was the brainchild of Cavallero, who was looking for compelling content for The Holler. “David’s history is part of blues history,” he says. “Who better to tell it than him?” Booker's tales morph into backstories of songs and musicians, their gear and other music minutiae. His pieces also include photos he's taken, set lists and promo posters from bygone gigs, and other personal artifacts. “I don’t think David has thrown away anything related to his music career,” Cavallero adds.

Booker hopes to turn the stories into a self-published book. While dealing with cancer, he's used his time off stage to visit music-rich places with his three daughters and ex-wife. They live in a house divided, literally, so that they can be under one roof but in separate spaces. “I’m really proud of what we’ve all done together,” he says. “My ex-wife is my next-door neighbor, so to speak, and my girls have been amazing in supporting me. I couldn’t be getting through this without them.”

He’s also proud of his efforts as a lifer musician. “I’m not a household name,” he says, “but I feel like I’ve made it. I’ve paid my bills and taxes, kept myself afloat and raised kids. And I’ve earned the respect of my kids and put food on the table.”

On a recent Tuesday night at Westminster’s Elevate Bar & Grill, Booker leads a weekly jam; fans drop bucks in his tip jar and smile. He smiles back from beneath the Black Lives Matter ball cap he just picked up in Memphis. He’s got hair growing back under that hat now. He’s also got a bad case of thrush, and chemo-fried tastebuds that make food “taste like modeling clay.” This is the fourth gig he’s played since getting his last dose of chemo eight days earlier.

Booker steers a cast of local players through a set that includes a slow blues from Little Willie John, a Slim Harpo classic, and an obscure Professor Longhair cut. He shows no sign of age or health troubles, instead pairing his laid-back hep cat singing with savvy left-handed guitar playing that stretches from tasty and swampy to raunched up and raucous. He also does a timely song of his own: “Gimme Back My Mojo.”

“Little gigs that I’ve kind of dreaded in the past have now become especially meaningful to me," he says. "I’ve got people coming up to me that I haven’t seen in a long time, telling me how much my music has meant to them. It's been the best therapy I could find, playing these gigs.”

That and his now-completed chemo treatments have Booker thinking about another type of lifetime achievement award: remission. He’s hoping to get back to playing a few gigs a week, and his outlook is a long way from blue.

“My doctors offered to give me a range of how much time I’ve got,” he says, “but I don’t want to know. I just want to laugh, feel good, and stick around as long as I can for my girls, to make the best of this.” In the meantime, he notes, “I just booked a wedding for next summer. That says something, doesn’t it?”

This piece was originally published on November 22, 2022.