14 Facts About Jesse Fuller

Jesse Fuller was an American one-man band musician, best known for his song "San Francisco Bay Blues".

Jesse Fuller was sent by his mother to live with foster parents when he was a young child, in a rural setting where he was badly mistreated.

Jesse Fuller worked briefly as a film extra in East of Suez and The Thief of Bagdad.

Jesse Fuller married, and he and his wife, Gertrude, had a family.

Around the early 1950s, Jesse Fuller began to consider the possibility of making a living as a musician.

Up to this point, Jesse Fuller had never worked as a full-time professional musician, but he was an accomplished guitarist and he had carried his guitar with him and busked for money by passing the hat.

Jesse Fuller had a good memory for songs and had a large repertoire of crowd-pleasers in diverse styles, including country blues, work songs, ragtime and jazz standards, ballads, spirituals, and instrumentals.

Jesse Fuller began to compose songs, many of them based on his experiences on the railroads, and reworked older pieces, playing them in his syncopated style.

Jesse Fuller's instruments included 6-string guitar, 12-string guitar, harmonica, kazoo, cymbal and fotdella.

Jesse Fuller told of his love of his wife and family, but some of his stories were anything but cheerful, often including recapitulations of his tragic childhood, his mother's illness and early death, his determination to escape the segregated racial system of the South, suicide, and death.

Jesse Fuller built at least two of them, in slightly different patterns, as evidenced in photographs and film footage of his performances.

Jesse Fuller's solution was the fotdella, a foot-operated percussion bass, consisting of an upright wood box, shaped like the top of a double bass, with a short neck at the top, and six piano bass strings attached to the neck and stretched down over the body.

Jesse Fuller occasionally played without it, if a song exceeded its limited range.

Jesse Fuller died on January 29,1976, in Oakland, California, from heart disease, at the age of 79.