James “Tail Dragger” Jones performed regularly at Chicago blues clubs for several decades, sporting a cowboy hat, sometimes chomping on a thick cigar, and singing in a voice the Tribune in 2006 described as “bullfrog croak.”

“Tail Dragger was an incredibly raw, real-deal blues singer devoid of any showbiz polish,” said blues guitarist Johnny Burgin, who backed Jones for many years. “‘The blues is the truth,’ he always said, and he didn’t sugarcoat it.”

Jones, 82, died of natural causes on Sept. 4 at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, said his daughter, Mary Bohlar. He had been a longtime resident of the West Side’s Austin neighborhood.

Born in Altheimer, Arkansas, James Yancy Jones was raised by his paternal grandparents on a farm near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Bohlar said. He got his first taste of blues music while visiting his mother in Chicago, but his grandparents dissuaded him from pursuing the genre.

“His grandmother and grandfather were Christian, churchgoing people, and (to them) any other music was the devil’s music,” Bohlar said. “He got a whiff of the blues, and it kind of like put him in a trance. He wanted to sing the blues. So he would sneak into the clubs when he was underage, and that’s when he saw a couple of blues singers and said, ‘I’ve got to do that.’ It’s like it touched his soul.”

After a stint in the Army, Jones moved to Chicago’s West Side in 1966 and began working as an auto mechanic and as a truck driver while also singing locally. Jones soon met legendary blues singer and guitarist Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett, who started letting Jones perform onstage with him.

Burnett nicknamed Jones “Tail Dragger” because his day job frequently caused him to show up late for gigs. It also was a reference to his unorthodox musical timing, since he would follow his band’s guitarist instead of the drummer, who typically keeps time for a band.

“He was a true original and he was pure authentic unadulterated, West Side in-your-face blues,” Chicago blues harmonica player and singer Billy Branch said of Jones. “He was kind of the last of the era of the old blues greats, and of course he did a lot of Howlin’ Wolf songs. And he said that Howlin’ Wolf gave him that name (Tail Dragger) but you know, he was gritty, rootsy, in-your-face, and what you saw is what you got.”

Burgin lauded Jones’ stage presence — which at times involved crawling around onstage while singing. He performed for decades at clubs like Kingston Mines, Buddy Guy’s Legends and Vern’s Friendly Lounge.

“I’ve seen him walk slowly onto a stage, sit down, stare at the audience balefully and after a few seconds, the crowd went insane,” Burgin said. “His performances were almost shamanistic.”

After Chicago’s annual Blues Festival in 1993, Jones was involved in a violent altercation with blues guitarist Bennie “Boston Blackie” Houston. Jones told the Tribune in 2006 that the dispute was over money, and it escalated into deadly violence, with Jones shooting Houston in the face. Jones claimed that a knife-wielding Houston had cornered him outside a gig, and that Jones only had fired in self-defense.

A court found Jones guilty of second-degree murder, and he served 17 months of a four-year sentence in an Illinois prison. After his release, Jones resumed performing.

In 1996, Jones’ first album, “Crawlin’ Kingsnake,” was released. Three more albums followed, with the last one released in 2012.

“The blues is nothing but a story about life,” Jones told the Tribune in 2006. “You reflect on life and then you sing about it.”

Chicago-based blues harp player Martin Lang called Jones “the Virgil to my Dante in the blues ‘Inferno.’”

“He knew everybody and everything and he knew the music really well, too. The foundation of my blues knowledge came from him,” Lang said. “And he had high standards — he took the music very, very seriously. He’s the type … we will never see again. We’ll see musicians playing blues who are good at it, but bluesmen, like Tail Dragger, are extinct.”

In 2003, Tribune reviewer Kevin McKeough contrasted Jones’ role as a charismatic showman with the “screaming-note melodramatics too many younger blues guitarists employ.”

“The difference a showman could make was evident … as Tail Dragger, a.k.a. James Yancy Jones, prowled the audience, moaning and rasping to women in the crowd on his knees, as the band blew the music off its hinges behind him,” McKeough wrote. “While Tail Dragger’s performance shamelessly imitated the legendary Howling Wolf in sound and spectacle, his much-too-brief appearance was thrilling just the same.”

Jones, who in addition to performing in Chicago toured Europe and South America, was performing up until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“I miss it, but what can I do?” he told the Tribune in 2020. “A lot of people get up onstage like they’re important. You need the people, they don’t need you. You’ve got to go out into the crowd. Howlin’ Wolf taught me that.”

In 2022, Jones performed at the Taste of Chicago Austin. Also that year, actor and filmmaker Kevin Mukherji released an 88-minute documentary about Jones, titled simply “Tail Dragger.”

“The blues make me feel good,” Jones told the Tribune in November 2022. “Blues is happy music. You have up and down times. That’s the way life is. You take the bitter with the sweet.”

Jones was married numerous times. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Bertha; three other daughters, Karen Ellis, Wanda Jones and Rachel Davis; two sons, Curtis Goodlow and Ezera Daniels; a stepdaughter, Lisa White; a stepson, Todd White; 25 grandchildren; many great-grandchildren; two brothers, Kenneth Day and Timothy Day; and two sisters, Doris Hollin and Brenda Day.

Services were held.

Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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