HAMILTON -- Jackie Washington has never been far from his guitar since he got his first one at the age of 13, 70 years ago. But there he was, a living musical legend, up there on the main stage of Hamilton Place, guitarless. It didn't matter. The applause was just the same -- a standing ovation from a crowd of scholars and dignitaries, young and old, for the new doctor of letters.
"It was the guitar that made his vocation," McMaster University president Peter George said yesterday morning as he introduced Washington as a recipient of the honorary doctorate.
"Jackie Washington is known throughout Canada as a man who has been making people smile through his music and his humour."
Washington,grandson of a Virginia slave, has had many honours during his musical career, including last year's induction into the Canadian Blues and Jazz Hall of Fame. But he never saw high school. When he finished Grade 8 it was time for him to help put food on the table, to find a job.
"It's only a short distance from McIlwraith school (which Washington attended) in Hamilton's north end to the convocation stage of Hamilton Place," George said. "Jackie Washington took the long way around, and there are thousands of people across this country who are glad he did."
Washington stepped up to the podium with the help of a cane (he lost his right leg to diabetes), received his degree and then bashfully sat down again without saying a word.
Backstage after the ceremony, he was reunited with his battered guitar and within minutes was serenading a handful of family and friends in the VIP lounge with a few of the 1,300 ditties he has by heart.
One friend addressed him as Dr. Washington."No, it's Dr. Yeah Yeah," Washington joked. Yeah Yeah is the name the younger children in his extended clan have given to the 83-year-old patriarch.
Guitarist Brian Griffith, a nephew of Washington, stood hanging on every note his uncle played. "He's the reason why I play," he said. "As a kid, I used to sit right at his knee and just listen."
Washington formed his first band as a boy with three of his brothers. The act broke up in 1938 when his oldest brother died. Later, he was a railway porter on the CPR, washroom attendant in a Hamilton tavern, shoeshine operator at the Fort Erie racetrack and a soldier in the Second World War.
From 1943 to 1946, he and Sonny Johnston had a radio show on CKOC as the Personality Boys; then, from 1948 to 1950, came the Jackie Washington Show on CHML.
Washington became a mainstay of the coffee-house folk circuit of the 1960s, touring with such icons of the decade as David Clayton Thomas, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Arlo Guthrie, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.
On June 15, Washington and old friends Ken Whitely and Mose Scarlet will release his sixth album, Sitting on a Rainbow, at a special concert in Hamilton. Proceeds from the concert will go to the Jackie Washington Living Trust, a special retirement fund administered on behalf of Washington by Hamilton-area musicians.
