Shirley Granger (Shirley Fay Lewis)*

Shirley Lewis was a gospel-trained singer whose voice carried her from New Jersey church halls to Vancouver's nightclubs and finally to the top of the Boston blues scene. For sixteen years, from 1971 to 1987, she lived and worked in Canada, where she recorded as Shirley Granger and made one of the most unusual soul albums ever cut in British Columbia.

She was born in Sicklerville, New Jersey, to Myrta Alma Edwards and James Williams Lewis, and grew up poor on a farm in a large family. Her mother was of Blackfoot, Black and Irish descent. Her father was Hopi, a born showman who wrote vaudeville-style routines for his children, gave each of them a part and sewed their costumes himself. At two or three Shirley was beating time on pots and pans while her brothers sang, and at four she joined them on stage. As the Lewis Gospel Singers they worked churches, fairs and ball games across New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and on the gospel circuit she got to know Sam Cooke during his years with the Soul Stirrers. Her father died when she was fourteen.

In her early twenties, scouts looking for a singer for a band booked to open for B.B. King heard her in church. She got the job, opened for King in Chesilhurst, New Jersey, and became a regular guest with his band whenever it played the area. She went on to open for Ike and Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles, worked rooms such as Loretta's High Hat, and over the years shared bills with Buddy Guy and Ruth Brown. She married Peter Kirby and had two daughters. After the marriage ended she wrote to Chet Stamps at Amalgamated Artists in Kansas City, promising she could sing, dance and do anything else a show required. The agency sent her out with touring revues, including the floorshow of the Pearl Box Revue, and clubs kept asking to hold her over. Her first known single, 'You Belong To Me' b/w 'Respect', came out on the Flight 7 label in 1969 under the name Shirley Granger.

In 1971 she came to Vancouver to sing in the Black Is Beautiful Show, a revue of Black singers, dancers and comedians. When it closed after a couple of months, Isy's kept her on as house singer. She went on to headline at the Cave and then the Club New Delhi, played clubs across the country, and appeared on television as Shirley Granger and Friends. She said she fell in love with Canada and that its audiences returned the feeling. By the late 1970s she was singing more blues and more of her own songs, which she credited to Shirley Fay. One night at the New Delhi, André the Giant came in with a group of fans, told her he was about to lose the sight in one eye, and asked her to lay her hand on it. She did, and she counted that night as the moment she understood her music could heal.

In 1975 Shirley and her husband, Alexander Galbraith-Hamilton, built the Black Eyes at Port Hammond on the Fraser River. She was a 92-foot staysail schooner with 3,000 square feet of sail, a four-man crow's nest, a midship diving well and room to sleep 30, painted with false gunports like an old Blackwall frigate. Billed as the Gastown Schooner, she made daily sailings into English Bay with live blues and jazz on board, Shirley singing, and took group charters for weekends or full weeks. The album she gave her name to doubled as the ship's brochure, inviting listeners to sail with Shirley Granger and join in on the song.

Amist The "Black Eyes" was recorded by Stan Cayer at his SGM studio in Vancouver and released on SGM Records in 1977, credited to Shirley Granger and produced for her own Shirl-Ann company. It opens with 'Black Eyes (Ship Of)', with Galbraith-Hamilton, the ship's skipper, supplying spoken narration, and sets her originals 'Givin' Up The Man I Love', 'I Need You' and 'Country Feelin'' beside 'Stormy Weather', Joe Morris's 'Shake A Hand', 'The Lady Is A Tramp' and a gospel medley that runs from 'Swing Low Sweet Chariot' to 'He's Got The Whole World In His Hands'. Her band included Major Platt on grand piano, Henry Young on electric guitar, Tom Mohr on bass, Louise Martin on drums and Holly Burke on flute and alto sax, with Clive Gard, Dick Smith and Gary O'Bray taking over on 'Stormy Weather' and 'Shake A Hand'. Two of the originals also appeared on a Shirl-Ann single, 'Givin' Up (The One I Love)' b/w 'I Need You', produced by Terry McManus in versions different from the album takes.

The album proved costly, and by one account the couple handed the schooner to Cayer to settle the recording bills. Cayer, a Port Alberni-born singer who had named SGM after his own initials and had been an early promoter of Terry and Susan Jacks, sailed the Black Eyes down the coast, through the Panama Canal and up the Amazon, then brought her home from Panama alone. She later carried dive charters, with divers dropping into the sea through a moon pool in her hull, and spent her last two decades at anchor in Mannion Bay off Bowen Island. Cayer was working to restore her when he died in October 2016, and the following spring she was towed away.

Shirley returned to the United States in 1987, divorced and using her maiden name again. A booking agent brought her to Massachusetts, and one night in a Newton club Steve Morse of the Boston Globe heard her and named her "The Regal Queen of the Blues," a title that fit her gowns and hats as well as her voice. It stayed with her for the rest of her life. In 1989 she won the Battle of the Blues Bands at Harpers Ferry and was named one of Boston's 100 most interesting women by Boston Women's Magazine. She was twice nominated for Outstanding Blues Act at the Boston Music Awards, received a lifetime achievement award from Blues Trust Productions in 2001 and the City of Boston's Living Blues Legend Award in 2009, and in her mid-seventies won a regional contest that sent her to the 2012 International Blues Challenge. She claimed a repertoire of more than 2,000 songs, and her guitarists learned to expect anything from one number to the next.

She released For the Love of It on her own Shirley Lewis Experee-ance label in 1990. Her other recordings included Hard, Hard Times, cut live at the Stanhope House in New Jersey, a gospel album, and Blues Through the Eyes of Shirley Lewis, and her song 'Boppin' and Rockin' the Blues' appeared on Tone-Cool's Boston Blues Blast, Vol. 1. For more than twenty years she was a fixture of the Newburyport BluesCruise, and from 2009 she held down Friday and Saturday nights and a Sunday gospel brunch at Smoken' Joe's in Brighton, a club she helped a friend open. With Hattie Barrett and Shor'ty Billups she cofounded the Down Home Blues Society to help older blues musicians in need, and she was usually the first to organize a benefit, whether for women's shelters or for musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

In February 2013, with her cancer advanced, James Montgomery, Chris "Stovall" Brown, Diane Blue and much of the Boston blues community gathered in Newton for Living the Blues, a celebration of her life. She died of cervical cancer at her home in the Waban section of Newton on May 5, 2013, at 76. Newton and Newburyport each proclaimed a Shirley Lewis Day that year, and the Shirley Lewis "Living the Blues" Foundation carries on her belief in music as a healing force.

Shirley Lewis performed and recorded in Canada under her married name, Shirley Granger, and credited her compositions to Shirley Fay. She returned to Lewis after her divorce.

-Robert Williston