(music) Welcome to the Rose Bowl Tavern here in downtown Urbana, Illinois.

We are here tonight with Candy Foster and the Shades of Blue.

We're on camera.

Here I go.

Let's go, Candy Foster!

In the house!

Come on y'all!

Put your hands together like this.

(music) And it don't get no better than this tonight.

Comin' 'atcha at the speed of light.

Give it up for Mr. Candy Foster!

I've been playing with Candy Foster for 28 years.

My first official gig was Y2K, New Years Eve.

When I got started, it was probably 13 years ago, almost.

For me, it was different with Candy Foster.

He's someone that I have known for a very long time in my life growing up.

I didn't meet him until we were like in high school.

He lived in Danville, and they used to come over here to the skating rink.

Back then, we weren't sweet on each other or anything like that.

Candy's legacy of music and entertainment spans 60 years.

He is history.

He is our musical community's history.

He loved music, and that's what he lives for.

He loves music, music and people.

He's a people person.

You gonna call me anything?

Call me a entertainer, because I'm far more of an entertainer than I am a singer.

I happen to be an entertainer that can sing a little bit.

I take a basic song and try to sell it to you where you you'd be patting your foot, yeah, and make you want to dance.

He gets people moving.

He got me excited about dancing again, because for a while I was out of the loop.

This band, Shades of Blue were put together for Candy Foster.

Some of the band leaders around here were saying, "Well, Foster, you can't have no seven, eight piece band and make any money.

You can't do that."

Horn sections and backup singers.

That's a dream world.

"Well, I know it is, but that's what I want."

(music) You know, the challenge as a professional musician is to play the style faithfully.

You have to catch, capture that vibe, that energy.

I think one of the things is he is showing that you could live the test of time, keeping the legacy going.

Turn on your radio and you hear you're still hearing the same kind of music, especially pop music on these stations that I heard 20 years ago.

2004, WILL did a show on Candy Foster, and we were lucky enough to open up the show and just be a part of the whole night.

(music) It was a fun gig.

I remember Candy was so hard to control that night that the producer that was putting it on literally crawled on the floor and touched Candy's foot and pointed down at the light that he wanted him to stand on.

You know, it was hard to kind of corral him that day.

(music) My Real name is Gerald Foster.

Uh, from Danville, Illinois.

Now somewhere down the line, I created a show name called Candy Foster.

Sports and blues...you gotta have nicknames.

(music) I got introduced to the Shades of Blue in 2000.

I do remember Kevin flowers was on the bass, and Ernie was on guitar.

Jeff Helgeson, on on a trumpet.

My dad was more of the sports, you know sports kind of person.

He played in the Negro League.

You know he played.

He was a sports man.

My mother was a good jazz singer.

She went around and did shows, but she was more of an influence on my music world and anybody.

Candy's mom had a voice that held the audience captive.

It was really about grace and style back in those days.

His mom was held in very highest regard by people in the community.

She was a blues singer, and that's where he got most of his style.

My mother had a chance to go with a famous guy...a Bruce Randolph.

But I was pretty young, and she was scared to leave me, so she turned them down because they wanted on a big tour.

He used to come downstairs in the bedroom and watch her rehearse.

I just thought she was having fun at first, and then I found out she was rehearsing.

She was around musicians all the time.

Danville always had a very strong talent base...blues, whatever!

Bobby Shark played for my mother.

He was playing in New York.

He's in movies and everything.

Jack McDowell was one of the top five jazz organists in the world played for my mother.

He turned out to be a really good friend.

Danville was wide open back in the days.

Champaign didn't have that many black clubs.

Danville had a whole bunch of 'em...They were people-people.

I didn't realize how valuable that was at the time, because I was too young.

There weren't a lot of venues for African Americans in this area, but Danville was one of the places where there were a lot of clubs in Danville.

I would say, probably at one point, maybe about 15 to 20.

You had jazz, you had blues, social organizations.

Players would come there and practice or or do they shows before they went to Chicago, like Wes Montgomery and Clark Terry.

Come to find out, Danville was a stepping stone.

When I tell people what I was listening to as a teenager, they (music) (music) look at me kind of funny.

Listen to blues.

Sam Cook... Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

The Platters.

But I was really into opera.

Mario Lanza.

I was a great fan What they had in Danville, an organization they called the of his.

Three four times a week, when I got out of school, I'd go to the record shop, and I found an album by him.

I'd hide the Royallettes, pretty much a black organization.

And they'd have album in the country western section.

Back then, you could take the album, go into a booth and listen to it.

And I think I learned one whole side of that album by heart.

this big talent show every year, and they call it the winter frolic.

It was like the biggest, blackest family reunion.

People would come from the Carolinas, New York, Boston, just for this one event that happens in a small, little white town every single year.

Yes, the winter frolics.

Before the doors opened up, the line would be clean around the corner.

Women would start in the springtime, finding the outfit.

They'd go Indianapolis, Chicago.

And so I'd be on there with my singing group sometimes.

I met Candy Foster as a child...seven or eight, yeah.

I was sitting behind the stage at the Winter Frolics.

my mother's band, WQBC was the backing band for the frolics.

Candy was guaranteed to be there every year.

He was like the Blues part of it.

(music) Candy is 86 years old, and he's probably at work right now.

Think about that.

Yeah.

I don't know what he's doing.

I see him out at my gigs.

He's doing his own gigs, other musicians gigs.

I don't know how he does it.

If I ever get blessed enough to be near 86 you will not see me out at nobody's gigs.

Busiest summer that I've had in the last 10 or 15 years.

Don't ask me why.

I don't see this man slowing down at any point.

And I'm kind of excited for it.

When I come to Champaign Urbana here I was 18.

I had kids I had to raise so I would wait tables, and then in the mornings, I'd go to campus and work back then you had to have two or three jobs anyway.

So that's when I started getting into the bands that guys come to me and say, Well, can you put together a group?

That's what I ended up doing.

And they let me use one of the rooms in the Douglas Center.

We rehearsed there.

I had my little singing group, Soul Brothers.

We played for the club.

We played all around the Midwest.

When we come to town, it was like a holiday.

William Aaron, better then known as Count Demon.

He's a mentor.

He had a song called Take It Upstairs.

Jack Macduff brought Count Demon here.

Count Demon put his own band together...went around all over the country at one time.

Count Demon was the legendary band leader in this area.

(music) He influenced countless musicians, people that became legendary.

These guys brought jazz in a way that no one else could bring jazz to the Champaign Urbana community.

(music) He taught me how to open the show, how to close shows.

He said, you know, you got a good voice.

You're not gonna always have a real nice voice, pretty voice and all that....but there's one thing you want to know how to do...people like to be entertained.

When the Vietnam thing got bigger and bigger and they (music) started bringing in more troops to Chanute Air Force Base in Rantoul.

These kids be 17, 18, years old.

Never Been away from home.

They be lost.

Then three, four clubs there, airman's clubs, social clubs, officers clubs.

The entertainment was set up for basically everybody but black kids.

That wasn't a thing.

They just kept waiting on something to happen, and it wasn't happening like anything else.

They finally had enough.

I wasn't there when it exploded.

It was enough to shake up the commander.

And so they called and said, You still got your band, right?

I said yeah.

Can you get them up here tomorrow?

Can you come do it, Foster?

So so we started playing just about every other night.

I was young enough where I didn't know how important it was, but I was old enough to know what was going on... (music) 1996 I opened up a business, Candy Foster's Lounge.

When Candy owned a club in Champaign, he wanted to add another flavor to the community.

Candy's place, but it was on South first street there.

Yeah, I played there quite a few times.

Did you?

Yeah.

Unfortunately, I wasn't conceived yet, but I heard a lot of great things about it.

Oh, Candy's Lounge was fun, fun, fun.

It was a party every weekend.

And all our friends that we knew that had left here and moved away always came back for special weekends.

And he had everybody working for him, his daughters, his friends were bartending or waiting tables.

Candy working full time for the state when he started that.

Little did he know that you got to be present when you're a business owner, and you you have to be a hands on person.

After he closed the club and went back to performing, I'm like, okay, but we're gonna do it in a different way.

You need to get paid.

And she's right.

We need to put the good band together that people are gonna pay for.

and have that down home flavor, singing genuine, real blues, (music) Early on, I was exposed to the Chitlin Circuit with Candy at the Malibu Club where Ike Manson would have entertainers coming from Chicago or St Louis.

What happens is they could stop, eat, entertain, spend the night and then move on to another place.

Ike was bringing in all kind of Big Blue Zacks that would come to his club.

Koko Taylor, "Sun" Seals, BB King.

Bobby Blue Bland... "Gatemouth" Brown and Little Milton and George Benson.

You know George Benson, Jack McDuff, Buddy Guy, Buddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and all them... Candy knew all these guys and hung around them and played music with them and booked gigs with them.

I wasn't the headliner.

I was the opener for their shows.

It's nice to carry on that legacy.

Nothing watered down, 100% blues.

After opening up for him in 2004 at the Iron Post, Kilborn Alley has gone on to play Europe and put out seven albums that have been critically acclaimed, and we stuck through it, going on 25 years.

I think Candy just wants to encourage young musicians.

That's what he's all about, really.

(music) Not only is he in the moment, he's actually kind of passing the football off, so to speak, to the next set of generations.

I've known him for years.

He's a good example of a quality person, and he is a family man.

He has a large family.

He has a really large family.

I got 11 that called me dad.

Six of them were boys.

Five was girls.

They couldn't wait to make me grandpa and stuff.

On the holidays, we had to hold hands through the different rooms, we would say grace.

Now as, not just a drummer or singer, now as a music director, band leader, Candy is my mentor.

So yeah, He plays many roles, mentor, community activist.

$1400 is on the table.

Musician, friend...

The Parkland College scholarship fund has been going on now for eight years.

I've been fortunate enough to be able to recruit really good people that's been able to come in and give me time and money, ends up being a big fundraiser.

It goes to Parkland students.

My committee makes the money.

Parkland decides who gets a scholarship.

I want to do my part to give back what I received and some.

All of it is about the story of life.

You get that out of a little bit of R&B, you get the blues...

There's like this song he does, and I cannot remember it....

Brick House can be different every night.

Brick House, that is the song.

(music) You hear the beat, and automatically you're bopping your head, you moving your body.

But then Candy gets up there, and he's like, "Ladies, if you're out here..." They're like, you know zombies that are following their master's call.

They're like, Okay, let's go.

Let's get on the dance floor.

(music) Whether there's four people in the crowd or 100 he'll still give you the Cadillac ride.

He does this thing like a call and response.

Everybody's happy and everybody's having a good time.

That's a good gig, and you get paid.

Music and entertainment is one of my first loves.

Music is so much of international language than anything I know.

I want to thank everybody for joining in.

Candy Foster and the Shades of Blue!

I like playing with you, Candy!

Always a lot of fun to me.

I'll say, I just feel blessed to have had such a great ride.

You just you feel it through your skin and into your bones.

18 years old, and Candy calls me up, and he says, I got a gig for you.

Next thing you know, we're there the Civic Center with the Champaign County Republicans, and also there was no pay, but these Republicans paid us in scotch, beer and like cheese and lunch meat and stuff.

So I like, I always like to tell that story.

I know Candy didn't want to play it, so he put the young kids out there.

You can't help it...pay with a smile on your face and even it in your own mind, if it was a train wreck, who else knows?

Candy?

I promise to get my butt on the dance floor more often, every time you're up.

He's now realized another generation of people that really enjoy his music...represents what's best about the human spirit.

Love you, sir, you know.

Call me anytime you need anything.

You already know!

The hardest working man between Chicago and St Louis.

Give it up for Mr. Candy Foster!

(music)