Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham

Legendary blues musicians and San Diego residents Jeannie and Jimmy Cheatham describe their lives, the blues, teaching, traveling, recording and playing as one seamless activity.

Those who have heard the Cheathams and their Sweet Baby Blues Band play locally in the Jazz at the Adobe series, First Night Escondido and the Horton Grand Hotel are fans for life. As former KPBS blues host Dan Pothier says, “I could sit for days and listen to them.”

They play Kansas City-style blues, which Pothier describes as shuffle jazz blues, the kind of syncopated rhythm that pleases swing dancers.

The Sweet Baby Blues Band exudes a joyful, sometimes sassy spirit, enhanced by Jimmy’s broad smile and distinctive cap and Jeannie’s dynamite red dress, her sultry voice and her piano skill. The Cheathams call the 50-some Baby Blues alumni (those in the band formerly) “family.”

“That’s the only way you can play the blues,“ she says, referring to family, “because most of it is not on the paper.”

Born in Akron, Ohio, Jeannie has a long acquaintance with the blues, which she heard as a child. “Our ancestors sang the blues, except the ones that belonged to the Baptist Church. The blues itself has been around since before the Civil War. Most people think of them as sad, but they can be sweet, happy and sour, too. Whatever emotion that can be conjured by a human being, the blues is that.”

Jimmy says, “The blues will exist as long as there are human beings on earth. A good blues singer is like the mailman. When they bring the mail, it’s really got a message.”

Jeannie began piano lessons at age 5 and accompanied the church choir in which her mother sang. At 14, she began to play jazz. Eventually she toured with Cab Calloway and accompanied such blues greats as T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington and Jimmy Witherspoon. She performed with Big Mama Thornton and in the PBS-TV special, “Three Generations of the Blues” with Thornton and Sipple Wallace.

Jimmy played bass trombone with Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Thad Jones and Ornette Coleman. He arranges all the songs for Sweet Baby Blues Band, many of them originals co-written with Jeannie.

The two met in Buffalo, N.Y., in the mid-1950s. Jeannie was in town for a jam session; Jimmy had gone to visit his mother. They met, sparks flew, and they have been together ever since. Sparks still fly.

“We make music together, so we got to get along,” he says. “We know how to accept the consonance and the dissonance as a challenge rather than a threat.”

“And we know how to tacet,” she says, a musical term that means “be silent.”

They came to San Diego in 1978. Jimmy taught improvisation and black music history at UCSD and was the director of UCSD’s jazz program. He retired as professor emeritus in 1993.

“They called him right back to active duty,” Jeannie says, and he still teaches two nights a week and directs UCSD’s award-winning jazz ensemble.

The Sweet Baby Blues Band is named after the title song of their first recording for the Concord label in 1984. It is composed of Jeannie on piano and vocals, and Jimmy on seven reeds and brass. Each of their eight Concord releases ends with “the choir,” which means that all and sundry sing, typically the first album’s hit song, “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On.”

Fans admit to wearing black underwear to concerts, which end in similar fashion. The players parade through the audience, by now members of the choir.

“Our motto is that no one goes away sad from a Sweet Baby Blues concert,” Jeannie says. No one does.

Parents of two middle-aged children, the Cheathams have been together nearly 50 years.

“Let’s not say (how old we are),” says Jeannie. "Keep it nice and juicy. That way, people can guess.”

— Charlene Baldridge