Blues Route: The Reverend Shawn Amos
photo credit: James Freeman
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The Reverend Shawn Amos embraces joy. In May, Amos released Hollywood Blues: Songs and Stories From the Family Tree (1997-2022),an 18-track compilation spanning the past 25 years of his work. He calls the music he makes “joyful blues.” Amos followed that with a debut literary companion—a Young Reader novel, Cookies & Milk, that borrows tales from a wondrous youth at his father’s revolutionary cookie shop in 1970s Tinsel Town. It’s a time, too, he remembers as “so joyful.”
However, his childhood was also colored by pain and confusion. There is his father, the talent agent-turned-cookie entrepreneur, Wally “Famous” Amos—to many, a folk hero and shining example of Black excellence. And his mother, Shirl-ee May, a budding singer in New York City in the early 1960s who followed Wally to Los Angeles, losing her dream in his. The couple split when Amos was 7.
His dad displayed narcissistic tendencies. His mother suffered mental illness throughout her life. She committed suicide at age 66.
Growing up, Amos lived with his father in an upscale, nearly all-white Los Angeles neighborhood. He attended mostly all-white schools. In many social instances, he was the only member of his race in any given group. He felt conflicted— wanting to understand and express himself and his culture, while still trying to fit in.
Wally held legendary block parties, holding court with Muhammad Ali and Andy Warhol. But, Amos mostly viewed the lavish circles of influence surrounding him as distractions. “My father’s world was so big and commanded so much attention. My mother’s world was very painful and dysfunctional,” Amos says. “I spent a lot of my time trying to get away from it. Every time he had a party, I’d be on a bus to Westwood to go see a movie. Everything was loud, and I was looking for solitude.”
If any idiom could serve as the perfect panacea for Amos as a musician, then it was the blues. Yet, for many years, he wasn’t ready to listen. Amos grew up hooked on The Who—wearing out his copy of Quadrophenia and adjacently aware of the blues via a cover of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight to the Blind” on Tommy. He read Peter Guralnick’s exceptional books on the subject—more as a study than an inspiration—and traveled the Southern U.S. visiting the nearly mythical locales Guralnick detailed.
“It was very scholarly,” Amos says.
The future singer/harmonica player attended film school for screen writing, but quickly realized that he could make a greater impact through three minutes of words and music. He wasn’t into hip-hop even as it emerged as the ubiquitous musical vehicle for Black expression. He saw traps in the stereotypes and tropes of a Black man singing the blues. And, as a West Coast kid from a white neighborhood, he didn’t think he qualified for a blues card even if he wanted one.
Even as Amos grew more comfortable with the blues as a gateway to his heritage, he still didn’t want to play it. He was determined to have a career without the influence of race—a singer-songwriter forging a place in musical worlds that were largely white. He was performing in Italy when a friend invited him, for fun, to sing some blues.
“It was the most profound experience of my life. It was like the heavens opened up,” Amos says. “It was like, ‘Oh, my god, I’m home. I know who I am. I know where I come from. I feel secure.’ It answered so many questions I’d been sidestepping.”
In 2018, Amos went through a painful divorce. It was the first in a series of events that would reshape his creative plan—the Black Lives Matter movement bloomed, race started to became an increasing familiar topic in his songs and the effects of COVID-19 began creeping in.
Amos dug into a period of self-reflection. Estranged from his son, and with his father in the mid-stages of dementia, he felt disconnected and mournful. “I had one male figure on one end I couldn’t talk to and another male figure on the other end who wouldn’t talk to me,” Amos says. “And I’m stuck in the middle of both of them.”
But, Cookies & Milk eventually pulled him out of the darkness.
In order to be closer to his children, Amos planned a move to Texas. Ahead of the relocation, he visited his storage unit. And memories of the cookie store flew out of the boxes.
He has already started to process his relationship with his mother, reckoning with the tragedy of her life on 2005’s Thank You Shirl-ee May (A Love Story). And many of the songs he wrote throughout his near[1]quarter-century career had chronicled and confronted the pain of his childhood. This time, though, the recollections were different.
“There isn’t a bad memory that sits in the [cookie] store,” Amos says. “I hadn’t thought about that, ever. I spent so many years running away from that. It was a really beautiful feeling, and I wanted to memorialize it—for myself, for my kids, for my father.” In early May, Disney optioned the book for an animated series.
In a sense, Amos was archiving his past as he sorted through his memories. He utilized the downtime, gathering and reviewing his collection of old DATs and two[1]inch reels. Amos realized in some impressionistic way he’d been telling his own troubled story all along. Hollywood Blues became, he says, his version of a “family album.”
“The book, the songwriting and the blues,” Amos says. “That trifecta has put me in a very comfortable, safe, confident place with my identity.”
In the coming months, Amos and his band, The Brotherhood, will grace stages all over the world. When they do, he’ll place his harmonica case open beside him. On the inside cover of the case, facing his audience is a single, visible word: Joy.
