Crossroads Club 27

Blind Lemon Jefferson

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:52:00 +0000

"Blind" Lemon Jefferson (September 24, 1893[1] or October 26, 1894[2] or July 1897[3] – December 1929[4]) was an influential blues singer and guitarist from Texas. He was one of the most popular blues singers of the 1920s, and has been titled "Father of the Texas Blues."[5]

His musical style was individualistic, and Jefferson's singing and self-accompaniment were distinctive as a result of his high-pitched voice and originality on the guitar.[6] He was not influential on some younger blues singers of his generation, as they did not seek to imitate him as they did other commercially successful artists.[7] However, later blues and rock and roll musicians attempted to imitate both his songs and his musical style.[8]

Early life

Jefferson was born blind near Coutchman, Texas in Freestone County, near present-day Wortham, Texas.[3] Jefferson was one of eight children born to sharecroppers Alex and Clarissa Jefferson.[3] Disputes regarding his exact birth date derive from contradictory census records and draft registration records. By 1900, the family was farming southeast of Streetman, Texas, and Lemon Jefferson's birth date is indicated as September 1893 in the 1900 census.[9] The 1910 census, taken in May before his birthday, further confirms his birth year as 1893, and indicated the family was farming northwest of Wortham, near Lemon Jefferson's birthplace.[10]
In his 1917 draft registration, Jefferson gave his birth date as October 26, 1894, further stating that he then lived in Dallas, Texas, and that he had been blind from birth.[11] In the 1920 Census, he is recorded as having returned to the Freestone County area, and he was living with his half-brother Kit Banks on a farm between Wortham and Streetman.[12]

Black Snake Moan

Jefferson began playing the guitar in his early teens, and soon after he began performing at picnics and parties.[3] He also became a street musician, playing in East Texas towns in front of barbershops and on corners.[3] According to his cousin, Alec Jefferson, quoted in the notes for Blind Lemon Jefferson, Classic Sides:

They was rough. Men was hustling women and selling bootleg and Lemon was singing for them all night... he'd start singing about eight and go on until four in the morning... mostly it would be just him sitting there and playing and singing all night. By the early 1910s, Jefferson began traveling frequently to Dallas, where he met and played with fellow blues musician Leadbelly.[13] In Dallas, Jefferson was one of the earliest and most prominent figures in the blues movement developing in Dallas' Deep Ellum area. Jefferson likely moved to Deep Ellum in a more permanent fashion by 1917, where he met Aaron Thibeaux Walker, also known as T-Bone Walker.[13] Jefferson taught Walker the basics of blues guitar, in exchange for Walker's occasional services as a guide.[13] Also, by the early 1920s, Jefferson was earning enough money for his musical performances to support a wife, and possibly a child.[13] However, firm evidence for both his marriage and any offspring is unavailable.

The beginning of the recording career

Unlike many artists who were "discovered" and recorded in their normal venues, in December 1925 or January 1926, he was taken to Chicago, Illinois, to record his first tracks. Uncharacteristically, Jefferson's first two recordings from this session were gospel songs ("I Want to be like Jesus in my Heart" and "All I Want is that Pure Religion"), released under the name Deacon L. J. Bates. This led to a second recording session in March 1926. His first releases under his own name, "Booster Blues" and "Dry Southern Blues," were hits; this led to the release of the other two songs from that session, "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues," which became a runaway success, with sales in six figures. He recorded about 100 tracks between 1926 and 1929; 43 records were issued, all but one for Paramount Records. Unfortunately, Paramount Records' studio techniques and quality were infamously bad, and the resulting recordings sound no better than if they had been recorded in a hotel room. In fact, in May 1926, Paramount had Jefferson re-record his hits "Got the Blues" and "Long Lonesome Blues" in the superior facilities at Marsh Laboratories, and subsequent releases used that version. Both versions appear on compilation albums and may be compared.

Success with Paramount Records

It was largely due to the popularity of artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and contemporaries such as Blind Blake and Ma Rainey that Paramount became the leading recording company for the blues in the 1920s.[citation needed] Jefferson's earnings reputedly enabled him to buy a car and employ chauffeurs (although there is debate over the reliability of this as well); he was given a Ford car "worth over $700" by Mayo Williams, Paramount's connection with the black community. This was a frequently seen compensation for recording rights in that market. Jefferson is known to have done an unusual amount of traveling for the time in the American South, which is reflected in the difficulty of pigeonholing his music into one regional category. He sticks to no musical conventions, varying his riffs and rhythm and singing complex and expressive lyrics in a manner exceptional at the time for a "simple country blues singer." According to North Carolina musician Walter Davis, Jefferson played on the streets in Johnson City, Tennessee during the early 1920s at which time Davis and fellow entertainer Clarence Greene learned the art of blues guitar.[14]

Jefferson was reputedly unhappy with his royalties (although Williams said that Jefferson had a bank account containing as much as $1500). In 1927, when Williams moved to OKeh Records, he took Jefferson with him, and OKeh quickly recorded and released Jefferson's "Matchbox Blues" backed with "Black Snake Moan," which was to be his only OKeh recording, probably because of contractual obligations with Paramount. Jefferson's two songs released on Okeh have considerably better sound quality than on his Paramount records at the time. When he had returned to Paramount a few months later, "Matchbox Blues" had already become such a hit that Paramount re-recorded and released two new versions, under producer Arthur Laibly.
In 1927, Jefferson recorded another of his now classic songs, the haunting "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" (once again using the pseudonym Deacon L. J. Bates) along with two other uncharacteristically spiritual songs, "He Arose from the Dead" and "Where Shall I Be." Of the three, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" became such a big hit that it was re-recorded and re-released in 1928.

Death and grave

Jefferson died in Chicago in December 1929. The cause of death is unknown, and though rumors swirled that a jealous lover poisoned his coffee, a more likely scenario is that he died due to a heart attack after being disoriented during a snowstorm (another scenario is that he froze to death). The book "Tolbert's Texas" claims that he was killed while being robbed of a large royalty cash payment by a guide taking him to Union Station to catch a train home to Texas. Paramount Records paid for the return of his body to Texas by train, accompanied by pianist Will Ezell. Jefferson was buried at Wortham Negro Cemetery (now Wortham Black Cemetery). Far from his grave being kept clean, it was unmarked until 1967, when a Texas Historical Marker was erected in the general area of his plot, the precise location being unknown. By 1996, the cemetery and marker were in poor condition, but a new granite headstone was erected in 1997. In 2007 the cemetery's name was changed to Blind Lemon Memorial Cemetery and keeping his wishes his gravesite is being kept clean by a cemetery committee in Wortham Texas.

Covers of Blind Lemon Jefferson

The White Stripes's "De Ballot of De Boll Weevil" is a cover version of "Boll Weevil Blues."

Bob Dylan's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" on Bob Dylan.

The Beatles's "Match Box" was a cover version of "Matchbox Blues."

B. B. King's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" on One Kind Favor

Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz accidentally claimed credit for the song "Mean Jumper Blues" in the liner notes of the re-release of August And Everything After (Deluxe Edition). The cover is featured as part of a selection of early demo tracks recorded by the Counting Crows. Duritz apologized immediately after this error was brought to his attention in his personal blog.[16]

References to Blind Lemon Jefferson

King Solomon Hill recorded the song "My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon" as a tribute to Jefferson in 1932.

Van Morrison refers to Jefferson in the song "Cleaning Windows" on the 1982 album Beautiful Vision.

Francis Cabrel refers to Jefferson in the song "Cent Ans de Plus" on the 1999 album Hors-Saison.

Geoff Muldaur refers to Jefferson with the song "Got To Find Blind Lemon" on the album The Secret Handshake

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recorded the song "Blind Lemon Jefferson" on the album The Firstborn Is Dead.

The 2007 film Black Snake Moan refers to the title of Jefferson's song "Black Snake Moan"

In the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous, Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson) gives his friend Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) Blind Lemon's original guitar, on which he claims Matchbox Blues was first recorded.

Patrick Sky parodied Jefferson as "Blind Funk Earwax" playing "Child Molesting Blues" on his 1973 album Songs That Made America Famous

Cheech and Chong parodied Jefferson as "Blind Melon Chitlin'" on their self-titled 1971 album Cheech and Chong (album), their 1985 album Get Out of My Room, and in a stage routine that can be seen in their 1983 movie Still Smokin'.

A bar called Blind Lemon appears in the Philip K. Dick novel The Game-Players of Titan.

An episode of Sanford and Son titled "The Blind Mellow Jelly Collection" refers to Jefferson's name.

Michael Martin Murphy refers to Jefferson in the song "Rolling Hills' on his 1973 album Cosmic Cowboy Souvenir.

Lead Belly refers to Jefferson in his song "My Friend Blind Lemon."

On VeggieTales, Larry tries to sing the blues with the help of Blind Lemon Lincoln.

Blind Melon may be a reference to his name and/or style.

Notes^

1 ^Govenar and Brakefield, 62.

2 ^ World War I Draft Registration records; Dallas County, Texas; Roll: 1952850; Draft Board: 2

3 ^ a b c d e Dicaire, 140.

4 ^ Dicaire, 143.

5 ^ Dicaire, 140, 143.

6 ^ Dicaire, 144. ^ Charters.

7 ^ Dicaire, 144.

8 ^ 1900 US Census; Census Place: Justice Precinct 5, Freestone, Texas; Roll: T623 1636; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 37.

9 ^ 1910 US Census; Census Place: Justice Precinct 6, Navarro, Texas; Roll: T624_1580; Page: 17B; Enumeration District: 98; Image: 982.

10 ^ World War I Draft Registration records; Dallas County, Texas; Roll: 1952850; Draft Board: 2

11 ^ 1920 US Census;Census Place: Kirvin, Freestone, Texas; Roll: T625_1805; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 24; Image: 231.

12 ^ a b c d Dicaire, 141.

13 ^ "Walter Davis: Fist and Skull Banjo," by Wayne Erbsen, Bluegrass Unlimited: March 1981, 22-26 ^ 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll

14 ^ Countingcrows.com B.B. King covers "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" on his 2008 release "One Kind Favor," which is named after a line in the song.

Bibliography

Charters, Samuel. The Blues Makers. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977. ISBN 0-306-80438-7.

Govenar, Alan, and Jay F. Brakefield. Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1998. ISBN 1-57441-051-2.

Dicaire, David. Blues Singers: Biographies of 50 Legendary Artists of the Early 20th Century. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1999. ISBN 0-7864-0606-2.

Wikibio

Discography

Downloads form CC27

Skip James

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Biography by Wikipedia

Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James (June 21, 1902 – October 3, 1969) was an American Delta blues singer, guitarist, pianist and songwriter.

Early years

James was born near Bentonia, Mississippi. His father was a converted bootlegger turned preacher. As a youth, James heard local musicians such as Henry Stuckey and brothers Charlie and Jesse Sims and began playing the organ in his teens. He worked on road construction and levee-building crews in his native Mississippi in the early 1920s, and wrote what is perhaps his earliest song, "Illinois Blues", about his experiences as a laborer. Later in the '20s he sharecropped and made bootleg whiskey in the Bentonia area. He began playing guitar in open D-minor tuning and developed a three-finger picking technique that he would use to great effect on his recordings. In addition, he began to practice piano-playing, drawing inspiration from the Mississippi blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery.

1920s and '30s

In early 1931, James auditioned for Jackson, Mississippi record shop owner and talent scout H. C. Speir, who placed blues performers with a variety of record labels including Paramount Records. On the strength of this audition, Skip James traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin to record for Paramount. James's 1931 work is considered uniquely idiosyncratic among pre-war blues recordings, and forms the basis of his reputation as a musician.

As is typical of his era, James recorded a variety of material — blues and spirituals, cover versions and original compositions — frequently blurring the lines between genres and sources. For example, "I'm So Glad" was derived from a 1927 song by Art Sizemore and George A. Little entitled "So Tired", which had been recorded in 1928 by both Gene Austin and Lonnie Johnson (the latter under the title "I'm So Tired of Livin' All Alone"). James changed the song's lyrics, transforming it with his virtuoso technique, moaning delivery, and keen sense of tone. Biographer Stephen Calt, echoing the opinion of several critics, considered the finished product totally original, "one of the most extraordinary examples of fingerpicking found in guitar music."

Skip James - Devil Got My Woman From: Coldyron

Several of the Grafton recordings, such as "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues", "Devil Got My Woman", "Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader", and "22-20 Blues" (the basis for Robert Johnson's better-known "32-20 Blues"), have proven similarly influential. Very few original copies of James's Paramount 78s have survived.

The Great Depression struck just as James' recordings were hitting the market. Sales were poor as a result, and James gave up performing the blues to become the choir director in his father's church. Skip James himself was later ordained as a minister in both the Baptist and Methodist denominations, but his involvement in religious activities was sketchy.

Disappearance, rediscovery, and legacy

For the next thirty years, James recorded nothing and drifted in and out of music. He was virtually unknown to listeners until about 1960. In 1964 blues enthusiasts John Fahey, Bill Barth and Henry Vestine found him in a hospital in Tunica, Mississippi. According to Calt, the "rediscovery" of both Skip James and of Son House at virtually the same moment was the start of the "blues revival" in America. In July 1964 James, along with other rediscovered performers, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. Several photographs by Dick Waterman captured this first performance in over 30 years. Throughout the remainder of the decade, he recorded for the Takoma, Melodeon, and Vanguard labels and played various engagements until his death in 1969.

Although James was not initially covered as frequently as other rediscovered musicians, British rock band Cream recorded two versions of "I'm So Glad" (a studio version and a live version), providing James the only windfall of his career. Despite the band's well-known musicianship, Cream based their version on James's simplified '60s recording, instead of the faster, more intricate 1931 original.

Since his death, James's music has become more available and prevalent than during his lifetime — his 1931 recordings, along with several rediscovery recordings and concerts, have found their way on to numerous compact discs, drifting in and out of print. His influence is still felt among contemporary bluesmen, as well as more mainstream performers such as Beck, who sings a partially-secularized, Skip-inspired version of "Jesus Is A Mighty Good Leader" on his 1994 "anti-folk" record, One Foot in the Grave. James also left a mark on 21st-century Hollywood, as well, with Chris Thomas King's cover of "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the 1931 "Devil Got My Woman" featured prominently in the plot and soundtrack of Ghost World. In recent times, British post-rock band Hope of the States released a song partially focused on the life of Skip James entitled "Nehemiah", which charted at number 30 in the UK charts.

Singer Dion (DiMucci) issued an album in November 2007 entitled Son of Skip James.

Musical style

Skip James' sound was unique to the blues genre and although he influenced other blues musicians, such as Robert Johnson, few have been able to recreate his style. His high pitched voice seems otherworldly and frail, even in his early recordings. He is said to have had a 'preaching' style of singing and was known to also sing spirituals. James is regarded as a gifted and distinctive guitarist. He often used an open D-minor tuning (DADFAD) which gave his instrument a dark and desolate tone. James reportedly learned this tuning from his musical mentor, the unrecorded bluesman Henry Stuckey. Stuckey in turn was said to have acquired it from Bahamanian soldiers during the First World War. The famed Robert Johnson also recorded in this "Bentonia" tuning (see Below), his "Hell Hound On My Trail" being based on the James opus "Devil Got My Woman". James' classically-informed, finger-picking style was fast and clean, using the entire register of the guitar with heavy, hypnotic bass lines. Ironically, James' style of playing had more in common with the Piedmont blues of the East Coast than with the Delta blues of his native Mississippi.

Skip James - Crow Jane From: ledzepp461

Skip James' signature lick in open D-minor involves a fingered slide of the third string from the second to the fourth fret; a slide on the same string from the fourth back to the second fret; striking the fourth string open; then hammering the third string in the first fret. James used this simple but effective lick in many of his songs, especially "Devil Got My Woman."

"Bentonia School"

Skip James has often been called one of the exponents of the Bentonia School of blues playing, which was later carried on by guitarist and singer Jack Owens. Calt, in his 1994 biography of James, I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, maintains that there was indeed no style of blues that originated in Bentonia, and that this is simply a notion of later blues writers who overestimated the provinciality of Mississippi during the early 20th century, when railways linked small towns, and who failed to see that in the case of Owens, "the 'tradition' he bore primarily consisted of musical scraps from James' table." Whatever the truth is regarding the origins of James' style, or of the "Bentonia School," he certainly stands as one of the most original of all blues performers.

Biography by Cub Koda (AllMusic Guide)

Among the earliest and most influential Delta bluesmen to record, Skip James was the best known proponent of the so-called Bentonia school of blues players, a genre strain invested with as much fanciful scholarly "research" as any. Coupling an oddball guitar tuning set against eerie, falsetto vocals, James's early recordings could make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Even more surprising was when blues scholars rediscovered him in the '60s and found his singing and playing skills intact. Influencing everyone from a young Robert Johnson (Skip's "Devil Got My Woman" became the basis of Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail") to Eric Clapton (who recorded James's "I'm So Glad" on the first Cream album), Skip James's music, while from a commonly shared regional tradition, remains infused with his own unique personal spirit.

Skip James - I'm So Glad From: SFBA4me

References
Skip James Wikipedia
A biography by Roi Geyari
AllMusic Guide
MySpace
The Mysteries Of Skip James by Matt R. Lohr

Discography
Wirz
AllMusic Guide

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads
Skip James

Mississippi John Hurt

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:45:00 +0000

Biography by Wikipedia

"Mississippi" John Smith Hurt (March 8, 1892,[1] Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi - November 2, 1966, Grenada, Mississippi) was an influential blues singer and guitarist.[2]

Raised in Avalon, Mississippi, he learned to play guitar at age 9. He spent much of his youth playing old time music for friends and dances, earning a living as a farm hand into the 1920s. In 1923 he often partnered with the fiddle player Willie Narmour (Carroll County Blues) as a substitute for his regular partner Shell Smith. When Narmour got a chance to record for Okeh Records in reward for winning first place in a 1928 fiddle contest, Narmour recommended John Hurt to OKeh Records producer Tommy Rockwell. After auditioning "Monday Morning Blues" at his home, he took part in two recording sessions, in Memphis and New York City (See Discography below). The "Mississippi" tag was added by OKeh as a sales gimmick. After the commercial failure of the resulting disc and OKeh records going out of business during the depression, Hurt returned to Avalon and obscurity working as a sharecropper and playing local parties and dances.

In 1963, however, a folk musicologist named Tom Hoskins, inspired by the recordings, was able to locate[3] John Hurt near Avalon, Mississippi.

Mississippi John Hurt - You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley From: xyrius

In fact, in an early recording, Hurt sang of "Avalon, my home town." Seeing that Hurt's guitar playing skills were still intact, Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, DC, and begin performing on a wider stage. Whereas his first releases had coincided with the Great Depression, his new career could hardly have been better timed. A stellar performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival saw his star rise amongst the new "folk revival" audience, and before his death in 1966 he played extensively in colleges, concert halls, coffee houses and even the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as well as recording three further albums for Vanguard Records. John Hurt's influence spans several music genres including blues, country, bluegrass, folk and contemporary rock and roll. A soft-spoken man, his nature was reflected in the work, which remained a mellow mix of country, blues and old time music to the end.

References

^ There is confusion about his date of birth, but the grave marker mentions this date.

^ Trail of the Hellhound: Mississippi John Hurt. http://www.nps.gov/. Retrieved on 2008-05-29.

^ Tom Hoskins was able to find Mississippi John Hurt after listening to the lyrics of Avalon and realizing it was written about a place called Avalon. Unable to find Avalon on a recent map, Hoskins searched older and older maps and eventually found it on an atlas from 1878 between Greenwood and Grenada.

^ a b c d e Spike Driver's Blues is about the Afro-American folk hero John Henry (folklore).

Biography by Bruce Eder (AllMusic)

No blues singer ever presented a more gentle, genial image than Mississippi John Hurt. A guitarist with an extraordinarily lyrical and refined fingerpicking style, he also sang with a warmth unique in the field of blues, and the gospel influence in his music gave it a depth and reflective quality unusual in the field. Coupled with the sheer gratitude and amazement that he felt over having found a mass audience so late in life, and playing concerts in front of thousands of people — for fees that seemed astronomical to a man who had always made music a sideline to his life as a farm laborer — these qualities make Hurt's recordings into a very special listening experience.

John Hurt grew up in the Mississippi hill country town of Avalon, population under 100, north of Greenwood, near Grenada. He began playing guitar in 1903, and within a few years was performing at parties, doing ragtime repertory rather than blues. As a farm hand, he lived in relative isolation, and it was only in 1916, when he went to work briefly for the railroad, that he got to broaden his horizons and his repertory beyond Avalon. In the early '20s, he teamed up with white fiddle player Willie Narmour, playing square dances.

Hurt was spotted by a scout for Okeh Records who passed through Avalon in 1927, who was supposed to record Narmour, and was signed to record after a quick audition. Of the eight sides that Hurt recorded in Memphis in February of 1928, only two were ever released, but he was still asked to record in New York late in 1928.

Hurt's dexterity as a guitarist, coupled with his plain-spoken nature, were his apparent undoing, at least as a popular blues artist, at the time. His playing was too soft and articulate, and his voice too plain to be taken up in a mass setting, such as a dance; rather, his music was best heard in small, intimate gatherings. In that sense, he was one of the earliest blues musicians to rely completely on the medium of recorded music as a vehicle for mass success; where the records of Furry Lewis or Blind Blake were mere distillations of music that they (presumably) did much better on-stage, in John Hurt's case the records were good representations of what he did best. Additionally, Hurt never regarded himself as a blues singer, preferring to let his relatively weak voice speak for itself with none of the gimmicks that he might've used, especially in the studio, to compensate. And he had no real signature tune with which he could be identified, in the way that Furry Lewis had "Kassie Jones" or "John Henry."

Not that Hurt didn't have some great numbers in his song bag: "Frankie," "Louis Collins," "Avalon Blues," "Candy Man Blues," "Big Leg Blues," and "Stack O' Lee Blues," were all brilliant and unusual as blues, in their own way, and highly influential on subsequent generations of musicians. They didn't sell in large numbers at the time, however, and as Hurt never set much store on a musical career, he was content to make his living as a hired hand in Avalon, living on a farm and playing for friends whenever the occasion arose.

Mississippi John Hurt might've lived and died in obscurity, if it hadn't been for the folk music revival of the late '50s and early '60s. A new generation of listeners and scholars suddenly expressed a deep interest in the music of America's hinterlands, not only in listening to it but finding and preserving it. A scholar named Tom Hoskins discovered that Mississippi John Hurt, who hadn't been heard from musically in over 35 years, was alive and living in Avalon, MS, and sought him out, following the trail laid down in Hurt's song "Avalon Blues." Their meeting was a fateful one; Hurt was in his 70s, and weary from a lifetime of backbreaking labor for pitifully small amounts of money, but his musical ability was intact, and he bore no ill-will against anyone who wanted to hear his music.

A series of concerts were arranged, including an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where he was greeted as a living legend. This opened up a new world to Hurt, who was grateful to find thousands, or even tens of thousands of people too young to have even been born when he made his only records up to that time, eager to listen to anything he had to sing or say. A tour of American universities followed as did a series of recordings: first in a relatively informal, non-commercial setting intended to capture him in his most comfortable and natural surroundings, and later under the auspices of Vanguard Records, with folk singer Patrick Sky producing.

It was 1965, and Mississippi John Hurt had found a mass audience for his songs 35 years late. He took the opportunity, playing concerts and making new records of old songs as well as material he'd never before laid down; whether he eventually put down more than a portion of his true repertory will probably never be clear, but Hurt did leave a major legacy of his and other peoples' songs, in a style that barely skipped a beat from his late-'20s Okeh sides.

As with many people to whom success comes late in life, certain aspects of the success were hard for him to absorb in stride; the money was more than he'd ever hoped to see, even if it wasn't much by the standards of a major pop star; 1,000 dollar concert fees were something he'd never even pondered having to deal with. What he did most easily was sing and play; Vanguard got out a new album, Today!, in 1966, from his first sessions for the label. Additionally, the tape of a concert that Hurt played at Oberlin College in April of 1965 was released under the title The Best of Mississippi John Hurt; the 21-song live album was just that, even if it wasn't made up of previously released work (more typical of a "best-of" album), a perfect record of a beautiful performance in which the man did old and new songs in the peak of his form. Hurt got in one more full album, The Immortal Mississippi John Hurt, released posthumously, but even better was the record assembled from his final sessions, Last Sessions, also issued after his death; these songs broke new lyrical ground, and showed Hurt's voice and guitar to be as strong as ever, just months before his death.

Mississippi John Hurt - Goodnight Irene From: peglegsam

Mississippi John Hurt left behind a legacy unique in the annals of the blues, and not just in terms of music. A humble, hard-working man who never sought fame or fortune from his music, and who conducted his life in an honest and honorable manner, he also avoided the troubles that afflicted the lives of many of his more tragic fellow musicians. He was a pure musician, playing for himself and the smallest possible number of listeners, developing his guitar technique and singing style to please nobody but himself; and he suddenly found himself with a huge following, precisely because of his unique style. Unlike contemporaries such as Skip James, he felt no bitterness over his late-in-life mass success, and as a result continued to please and win over new listeners with his recordings until virtually the last weeks of his life. Nothing he ever recorded was less than inspired, and most of it was superb.

Mississippi John Hurt - Candy Man Blues From: peglegsam

References
The Mississippi John Hurt Museum

Internet Archives

AllMusic Guide

Discography
WirzAll

Music Guide

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Mississippi John Hurt

Leadbelly

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:57:00 +0000

Biography by Wikipedia

Huddie William Ledbetter, (January, 1888 – December 6, 1949) was an American folk and blues musician, notable for his clear and forceful singing, his virtuosity on the twelve string guitar, and the rich songbook of folk standards he introduced.

He is best known as Leadbelly or Lead Belly. Though many releases list him as "Leadbelly," he himself spelled it "Lead Belly." This is also the usage on his tombstone, [1][2] as well as the Lead Belly Foundation.

Although he most commonly played the twelve string, he could also play the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, concertina, and accordion. In some of his recordings, such as in one of his versions of the folk ballad "John Hardy", he performs on the accordion instead of the guitar. In other recordings he just sings while clapping his hands or stomping his foot. The topics of Lead Belly's music covered a wide range of subjects, including gospel songs; blues songs about women, liquor and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding and dancing. He also wrote songs concerning the newsmakers of the day, such as President Franklin Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, the Scottsboro Boys and multi-millionaire Howard Hughes.

Early life

Lead Belly's date of birth is uncertain. He was probably born in January 1888, although his gravestone gives his year of birth as 1889. The earliest year given for his birth has been 1885, although other sources stated either 1888 or 1889. According to the 1900 census, Hudy (the spelling given in the census) is one of two listed children (the other is his stepsister, Australia Carr), of Wes and Sallie (Brown) Ledbetter of Justice Precinct 2, Harrison County, Texas. Wesley and Sallie were legally wed on February 26, 1888, shortly after Lead Belly's likely date of birth, even though they had lived together as husband and wife for years. The 1900 census, differing from the usual census in that it lists the month and year of birth, rather than just the age, states the birth year of 'Hudy' Ledbetter to be 1888 and the month listed as January; Huddie's age is listed as twelve. The census of 1910 and the census of 1930 confirm 1888 as the year of birth.

The day of his birth has also been debated. The most common date given is January 20, but other sources suggest he was born on January 21 or 29. The only document we have that Ledbetter, himself, helped fill out is his World War II draft registration from 1942 where he gives his birth date as January 23, 1889.

Lead Belly was born to Wesley and Sallie Ledbetter as Huddie William Ledbetter in a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, but the family moved to Leigh, Texas, when he was five. By 1903, Lead Belly was already a 'musicianer', a singer and guitarist of some note. He performed for nearby Shreveport, Louisiana audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, a notorious red-light district in the city. Lead Belly began to develop his own style of music after exposure to a variety of musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms.

At the time of the 1910 census, Lead Belly, still officially listed as 'Hudy', was living next door to his parents with his first wife, Aletha "Lethe" Henderson, who at the time of the census was seventeen years old, and was, therefore, fifteen at the time of their marriage in 1908. It was also there that he received his first instrument, an accordion, from his uncle, and by his early 20s, after fathering at least two children, he left home to find his living as a guitarist (and occasionally, as a laborer). Lead Belly would later claim that as a youth he would "make it" with 8 to 10 women a night.

Influenced by the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912, he would go on to write the song "The Titanic",[1] which noted the racial indifferences of the time. "The Titanic" was the first song he ever learned to play on a 12-string guitar, which was later to become his signature instrument. He first played it in 1912 when performing with Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929) in and around Dallas, Texas. Leadbelly noted that he had to leave out the verse about boxer Jack Johnson when playing before a white audience.

Prison years

Lead Belly's boastful spirit and penchant for the occasional skirmish sometimes led him into trouble with the law, and in January 1918 he was thrown into prison for the second time, this time after killing one of his relatives, Will Stafford, in a fight. He was incarcerated in Sugar Land, Texas and it is there that he got the inspiration for the song Midnight Special.[2] It is said that he was released two years into his 35-year sentence after writing a song appealing to Governor Pat Morris Neff for his freedom. Lead Belly had swayed Governor Neff by appealing to his strong religious values. That, in combination with good behavior (including entertaining by playing for the guards and fellow prisoners), was Lead Belly's ticket out of jail.

In 1930, Lead Belly was back in prison, this time in Louisiana for attempted homicide. It was there, three years later, that he was "discovered" by musicologists John and Alan Lomax, who were enchanted by his talent, passion and singularity as a performer, and recorded hundreds of his songs on portable recording equipment for the Library of Congress. The following year Lead Belly was once again pardoned, this time after a petition for his early release was taken to Louisiana Governor O.K. Allen by the Lomaxes. The petition was on the other side of a recording of one of his most popular songs, "Goodnight Irene". The state's prison records, however, show he was released due to good behavior, mentioning nothing of the song.

Where Did you Sleep Last Night From: todd131981

There are many disputed stories regarding Ledbetter's famous nickname, but he likely first acquired it while he was in prison. One claim says his fellow inmates dubbed him "Lead Belly" as a play on his last name and a testament to his physical toughness. One story tells that when one of the inmates tried to stab him in the neck (which left him with a scar) during his second prison term, he took the knife away and in turn almost killed his attacker with it. Another says he earned the name after being shot in the stomach with shotgun buckshot.[3] Blues singer Big Bill Broonzy claimed that Lead Belly's name came from the claim that he had a tendency to lay about "with a stomach weighted down by lead" in the shade when the chain gang was supposed to be working.[4] Others claim the name comes from his ability to drink the homemade liquor the prisoners would make. He then used the nickname as a pseudonym when he was recording, and the name stuck ever since.

Bob Dylan once remarked, on his XM radio show, that Lead Belly was "One of the few ex-cons who recorded a popular children’s album."[5]

Life after prison

Indebted to the Lomaxes, Lead Belly allowed Alan to take him under his wing, and in late 1934 migrated to New York City with him, where he attained fame, though not fortune. In 1935 he married Martha Promise and began recording with the American Record Corporation (ARC), but achieved little commercial success with these records. Part of the reason for the poor record sales may have been because ARC insisted he record blues songs rather than the folk for which he was better known. In any case, Lead Belly continued to struggle financially.

Life magazine ran a 3-page article titled "Lead Belly - Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel" in the April 19, 1937 issue. It includes a full-page, color (rare in those days) picture of him, sitting on grain sacks playing his guitar and singing. Also included are a striking picture of Martha Promise, Lead Belly's hands playing the guitar (with the caption "these hands once killed a man"), Texas Governor Pat M. Neff, and the "ramshackle" Texas State Penitentiary. The article attributes both of his pardons to his singing of his petitions to the governors, who were so moved that they pardoned him. The article text ends with "he... may well be on the brink of a new and prosperous period."

In 1939 he was back in jail for assault. Upon his release in 1940, Lead Belly returned to a surging New York folk scene, and befriended the likes of Woody Guthrie and a young Pete Seeger. During the first half of the decade he recorded for RCA, the Library of Congress, and for Moe Asch (future founder of Folkways Records), and in 1944 headed to California, where he recorded strong sessions for Capitol Records. Leadbetter was the first American country blues musician to see success in Europe.[6] In 1949 he began his first European tour with a trip to France, but fell ill before its completion, and was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Lead Belly died later that year in New York City, and was buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery in Mooringsport, 8 miles (13 km) west of Blanchard, Louisiana, in Caddo Parish.

Technique

Lead Belly styled himself "King of the 12-string guitar," and despite his use of other instruments like the concertina, the most enduring image of Lead Belly as a performer is wielding his unusually large Stella twelve-string. This guitar had a slightly longer scale length than a standard guitar, slotted tuners, ladder bracing, and a trapeze-style tailpiece to resist bridge lifting.

Lead Belly played with finger picks much of the time, using a thumb pick to provide a walking bass line and occasionally to strum. This technique, combined with low tunings and heavy strings, gives many of his recordings a piano-like sound. Lead Belly's tuning is debatable, but appears to be a downtuned variant of standard tuning; more than likely he tuned his guitar strings relative to one another, so that the actual notes shifted as the strings wore. Lead Belly's playing style was popularized by Pete Seeger, who adopted the twelve-string guitar in the 1950s and released an instructional LP and book using Ledbetter as an exemplar of technique.

In some of the recordings where Lead Belly accompanied himself, he would make an unusual type of grunt between his verses. He would do this grunt, "Haah!", through many of his songs, such as, Looky Looky Yonder, Take this Hammer, Linin' Track and Julie Ann Johnson. It gave a somewhat catchy sound to the songs. He explains that, "Every time the men say 'haah', the hammer falls. The hammer rings, and we swing, and we sing",[7] an apparent reference to prisoners' work songs. The grunt represents the tired deep breaths the men would take while working, singing and pausing in cadence with the work.

References and notes

^ "The Titanic", performed by Lead Belly

^ Lomax, Alan, (editor). Folk Song USA. New American Library.

^ The Mudcat Cafe. Leadbelly - King of the 12 String Guitar. Retrieved on January 30, 2007

^ Terkel, Studs (2005). And They All Sang. New Press.

^ Inside Bob Dylan's Brain, Vainty Fair, April 2008

^ The Mudcat Cafe. Leadbelly - King of the 12 String Guitar. Retrieved on January 30, 2007

^ Youtube. Lead Belly singing Take this Hammer. Retrieved on January 30, 2008

^ Wikipedia article, "Kisses Sweeter than Wine (song)"

^ Rolling Stone interview with Van Morrison

AllMusic Biography

by William Ruhlmann

Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, was a unique figure in the American popular music of the 20th century. Ultimately, he was best remembered for a body of songs that he discovered, adapted, or wrote, including "Goodnight, Irene," "Rock Island Line," "The Midnight Special," and "Cotton Fields." But he was also an early example of a folksinger whose background had brought him into direct contact with the oral tradition by which folk music was handed down, a tradition that, by the early years of the century, already included elements of commercial popular music. Because he was an African-American, he is sometimes viewed as a blues singer, but blues (a musical form he actually predated) was only one of the styles that informed his music. He was a profound influence on folk performers of the 1940s such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who in turn influenced the folk revival and the development of rock music from the 1960s onward, which makes his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, early in the hall's existence, wholly appropriate. Huddie Ledbetter was born on the Jeter Plantation near the community of Shiloh, which is in turn near the town of Mooringsport, LA. He was the only son of a sharecropper who moved his family to nearby Harrison County, TX, when the child was about five.

Ledbetter attended school from the age of eight to about 12 or 13, after which he worked full-time on the farm his father had managed to buy. He had shown an early interest in music, learning the button accordion as a child and playing in the school band. He later added other instruments, eventually turning primarily to the guitar, having obtained his first one in 1903. By his teens, he was playing and singing for money at local dances. At about the age of 16, he moved to Shreveport, LA, where he lived for two years supporting himself as a performer. From the ages of about 18 to 20, he traveled around Texas and Louisiana, performing and supplementing his income as a farm worker. Falling ill, he returned home, where he recovered, married, and settled down to work as a farmer. In 1910, he and his wife moved to Dallas, TX. There, possibly around 1912, he met the young street musician Blind Lemon Jefferson, five years his junior, and the two teamed up to play around the Dallas area for the next several years. During this period, he switched from the six-string to the 12-string guitar, the instrument that became his trademark. Ledbetter moved back to Harrison County around 1915. In June, he was arrested due to an incident the specifics of which are lost to history. Eventually, he was convicted of carrying a pistol illegally and sentenced to 30 days on a chain gang. He escaped and moved to Bowie County, TX, where he lived under the name Walter Boyd and returned to performing while also working as a sharecropper.

In December 1917, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Will Stafford, the husband of one of his cousins, and with "assault to murder" another man. He was convicted of both charges, the first carrying a sentence of five to 20 years, the second two to ten years, to be served consecutively. In prison, he gained his nickname, Leadbelly, and learned many songs from inmates. In January 1924, he sang for Texas Governor Pat Neff, including a specially written song in which he asked for a pardon. As Neff reached the end of his term as governor in January 1925, he actually did pardon Leadbelly, such that, instead of serving the minimum of seven years required by his sentences, he served six years, seven months, and eight days. Leadbelly moved to Houston initially, then returned home before settling in Mooringsport. In January 1930, he was involved in a stabbing incident that led to his being charged with "assault with intent to murder." He was convicted, given a sentence of six to ten years, and sent to Angola Prison. There he was a model prisoner, and due to budgetary restrictions brought on by the Depression, he was able to participate in an early release program. He applied for such release in June 1933 and was told that he would be released the following year if Governor O.K. Allen approved the petition.

Song collector John Lomax, in the employ of the Library of Congress, visited Angola in July 1933 with his son Alan Lomax, looking for folk songs to record. They were introduced to Leadbelly, whom they recorded. This initial session, which has not been released commercially, included a song Leadbelly called "Irene" that he had learned from an uncle. Subsequent research has demonstrated that the song was not a traditional folk song, but rather in its original form was written and published in 1886 by African-American songwriter Gussie Lord Davis under the title "Irene, Good Night." But the version taught to Leadbelly by his uncle was much altered from Davis' original.

A year passed without any action being taken on Leadbelly's petition for early release. John and Alan Lomax returned to Angola in the summer of 1934, and they recorded another session with Leadbelly. A few of these recordings were released commercially by Elektra Records in 1966 in a box set called The Library of Congress Recordings and were reissued in 1991 by Rounder Records on a CD called Midnight Special. As that title indicates, among the songs was "Midnight Special," a song Leadbelly first heard during his incarceration in Texas in the early 1920s and which he adapted. The session also included "Governor O.K. Allen," a song Leadbelly had written to encourage the governor to sign his petition of release. The Lomaxes took a record of the song to the governor's office, though there is no evidence that he actually listened to it. But on July 25, 1934, he signed Leadbelly's petition, commuting his sentence to three to ten years, and since Leadbelly had already served four and a half years, he was released on August 1, 1934. In later years, the state of Louisiana repeatedly denied the legend that Leadbelly had sung his way out of prison for a second time.

Upon his release, Leadbelly initially moved to Shreveport, but in the fall of 1934 he sought out John Lomax, who was living in Texas, and went to work for him, acting as his chauffeur and assistant on further trips to prisons in search of songs. At the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas, Leadbelly first heard a prisoner perform "Rock Island Line," a song he added to his repertoire and altered extensively. In the winter of 1934-1935, he accompanied Lomax north, where they made a series of appearances at academic and scholarly gatherings such as the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia and lecture-performances at Yale and Harvard. They attracted considerable media attention, including articles in major newspapers and appearances on radio and newsreel versions of Time Marches On. Leadbelly signed a management agreement with Lomax and was in turn signed for a series of recordings by the American Record Corporation (ARC), which issued records on a variety of low-priced labels and also owned the venerable Columbia Records label. The ARC recordings, 40 sides, were made in January, February, and March 1935, though ARC only released two singles at the time, with a third issued the following year. Viewing Leadbelly as a blues artist, ARC emphasized that aspect of his large repertoire, but the records did not sell well in the blues market and most of the recordings remained unissued for decades. The first extensive release of them came with the Columbia Records LP Includes Legendary Performances Never Before Released in 1970, and more of them appeared on Columbia/Legacy's King of the 12-String Guitar in 1991. During this period, Leadbelly also made more recordings for the Library of Congress, some of which appeared on the 1966 Elektra LP and on the 1991 Rounder albums Midnight Special and Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In.

In March 1935, John Lomax, who had found Leadbelly unreliable during a northeast tour, severed his relationship with the singer, and Leadbelly returned to Louisiana. There he obtained legal representation and sought more money from Lomax, and over a period of months the two worked out a settlement that allowed Lomax to use Leadbelly's songs in his book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, published in 1936. In February 1936, Leadbelly moved back north, settling in New York City and attempting to build a career as a performer. From 1937 to 1939, he made more recordings for the Library of Congress at the behest of Alan Lomax, some of which have appeared on the Elektra and Rounder albums already mentioned. He was taken up by left-wing activists who increasingly used folk music as a forum for the expression of their political beliefs, and though he himself appears to have had only a limited interest in politics in general, his fervor for civil rights, expressed in such songs as "The Bourgeois Blues," concurred with theirs. He became part of a community of urban folk musicians, including Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the team of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee, among others.

In March 1939, Leadbelly was arrested for stabbing a man in New York. While on parole before trial, he made his second set of commercial recordings for Musicraft Records, a session arranged by Alan Lomax to help pay his legal bills. The recordings were issued initially on a Musicraft album called Negro Sinful Tunes and have since been reissued by such labels as Stinson, Everest, and Collectables.

Leadbelly was convicted of third-degree assault and served an eight-month sentence. The singer was busy in 1940, appearing on the network radio series Folk Music of America and Back Where I Come From and launching his own weekly 15-minute program on local WNYC, a show that ran for a year. He also undertook his third set of commercial recordings in June, this time for RCA Victor and accompanied on some tracks by the Golden Gate Quartet. These sessions resulted in an album called The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs, released on RCA's Bluebird imprint. A 1964 compilation of the material on RCA was called Midnight Special, there was a 1989 collection called Alabama Bound, and in 2003, as part of its Secret History of Rock & Roll series, Bluebird issued When the Sun Goes Down, Vol. 5: Take This Hammer, a compilation containing all 26 tracks that were recorded. In August 1940, Leadbelly also returned to recording for the Library of Congress, and some of these tracks have turned up on the previously mentioned Elektra set as well as on the Rounder albums Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In and Let It Shine on Me (1991).

In May 1941, Leadbelly recorded his first session for Asch Records, a tiny independent label run by Moses Asch. Leadbelly went on to record extensively for Asch and its successors, Disc and Folkways, this material later reissued both by Smithsonian/Folkways (from the 1990s on) and by various small labels that acquired rights to it. In 1944, he moved to the West Coast, where he remained for the better part of two years. While there, he signed to Capitol Records and did three sessions for the label in October 1944 that resulted in a series of singles. Later, Capitol issued such compilation albums as Classics in Jazz (1953) and Leadbelly: Huddie Ledbetter's Best (1962), drawn from these sessions. Back in New York from 1946 on, Leadbelly continued to record for Folkways, his 1948 recordings later turning up on a series of LPs called Leadbelly's Last Sessions and gathered together into a four-CD box set by Smithsonian/Folkways in 1994.

By 1948, he was beginning to suffer unexplained spells of numbness in his legs, and was often forced to walk with a cane and perform sitting down. In May 1949, he toured in France, but his increasing physical difficulties led to a visit to a doctor who diagnosed him as having contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, an incurable condition leading to paralysis and death. Returning to the U.S., he was able to manage a few more performances, including ones in Texas and Oklahoma in June. (The Texas show was recorded and later released by Playboy Records under the title Leadbelly, erroneously marketed as the singer's last concert.) But he was soon bedridden, and he died at 61 in December. Leadbelly's fame began to increase almost immediately after his death.

In 1950, his song "Irene," now called "Goodnight, Irene," was recorded by the Weavers, a folk group including Pete Seeger and other musicians acquainted with Leadbelly, and became a number one pop hit, with hit covers by such pop singers as Frank Sinatra and a number one country recording by Ernest Tubb and Red Foley. The Weavers then adapted a Leadbelly song called "If It Wasn't for Dickey" (itself based on the Irish folk song "Drimmer's Cow") into "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," which they took into the Top 40 in 1951 and which Jimmie Rodgers covered for a Top Ten hit in 1957. In 1956, the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group reached the Top Ten in the U.K. and the U.S. with their recording of "Rock Island Line," taken directly from Leadbelly's version, setting off the British skiffle fad that inspired many later British rock stars, including the Beatles. (Johnny Cash scored a Top 40 country hit with his version in 1970.) "The Midnight Special" in Leadbelly's version had first reached the charts for the Tiny Grimes Quintet in 1948. Paul Evans had a Top 40 hit with it in 1960, and Johnny Rivers also took it into the Top 40 in 1965. Leadbelly's "Cotton Fields" (aka "Old Cotton Fields at Home") was a Top 40 hit for the Highwaymen in 1961. All of these songs have become standards. When the folk revival hit in the late '50s, its practitioners frequently covered other songs associated with Leadbelly in arrangements that recalled his.

Leadbelly's own recordings, in addition to the more legitimate reissues on Rounder, Columbia/Legacy, RCA Victor, Capitol, and Smithsonian/Folkways, have turned up on a dizzying number of labels in the CD era, especially as they have come into the public domain in Europe (where copyrights extend only 50 years). Confusing as this discography may be, it is a testament to the continuing influence of Leadbelly on contemporary music.

References

Wikipedia

Lead belly Foundation

Allmusic

Discography

Allmusic

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Leadbelly

John Lee Hooker

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:46:00 +0000

Biography by Wikipedia

John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an influential American post-war blues singer, guitarist, and songwriter born in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi. From a musical family, he was a cousin of Earl Hooker. John was also influenced by his step-father, a local blues guitarist, who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time.[1] John developed a half-spoken style that was his trademark. Though similar to the early Delta blues, his music was rhythmically free. John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen" (1948) and "Boom Boom" (1962).

Early life

Hooker was born on August 22, 1917[2] in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi,[1] the youngest of the eleven children of William Hooker (1871–1923), a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (1875–?). Hooker and his siblings were home-schooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs, with his earliest musical exposure being the spirituals sung in church. In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided John's first introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style).[3] The year after that (1923), John's natural father died; and at age 15, John ran away from home, never to see his mother and stepfather again.[4]

It Serves Me Right to Suffer

From: julianasanc

Throughout the 1930s, Hooker lived in Memphis where he worked on Beale Street and occasionally performed at house parties.[1] He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, drifting until he found himself in Detroit in 1948 working at Ford Motor Company. He felt right at home near the blues venues and saloons on Hastings Street, the heart of black entertainment on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its piano players, guitar players were scarce. Performing in Detroit clubs, his popularity grew quickly, and seeking a louder instrument than his crude acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.[5]

Career

Hooker's recording career began in 1948 when his agent placed a demo disc, made by Hooker, with the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern Records label. The company initially released an up-tempo number, "Boogie Chillen", which became Hooker's first hit single.[1] Though they were not songwriters, the Biharis often purchased or claimed co-authorship of songs that appeared on their labels, thus securing songwriting royalties for themselves, in addition to their streams of income.

Sometimes these songs were older tunes renamed (B.B.King's "Rock Me Baby"), anonymous jams ("B.B.'s Boogie") or songs by employees (bandleader Vince Weaver). The Biharis used a number of pseudonyms for songwriting credits: Jules was credited as Jules Taub; Joe as Joe Josea; and Sam as Sam Ling. One song by John Lee Hooker, "Down Child" is solely credited to "Taub", with Hooker receiving no credit for the song whatsoever. Another, "Turn Over a New Leaf" is credited to Hooker and "Ling".

Despite being illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting the occasionally traditional blues lyric (such as "if I was chief of police, I would run her right out of town"), he freely invented many of his songs from scratch. Recording studios in the 1950s rarely paid black musicians more than a pittance, so Hooker would spend the night wandering from studio to studio, coming up with new songs or variations on his songs for each studio. Due to his recording contract, he would record these songs under obvious pseudonyms such as "John Lee Booker", "Johnny Hooker", or "John Cooker."[6]

His early solo songs were recorded under Bernie Besman. John Lee Hooker rarely played on a standard beat, changing tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical idiosyncrasies. As a result, Besman would record Hooker, in addition to playing guitar and singing, stomping along with the music on a wooden pallet.[7] For much of this time period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland, who is still performing as of 2008. Later sessions for the VeeJay label in Chicago used studio musicians on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor... the could "go" with him very well. His biggest UK hit, "Boom Boom", had a horn section to boot!

He appeared and sang in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. Due to Hooker's improvisatory style, his performance was filmed and sound-recorded live at the scene at Chicago's Maxwell Street Market, in contrast to the usual "playback" technique used in most film musicals.[8] Hooker was also a direct influence in the look of John Belushi's character Jake Blues, borrowing his trademark sunglasses and soul patch.

In 1989, he joined with a number of musicians, including Keith Richards, Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt to record The Healer, for which he and Bonnie Raitt won a Grammy Award. Hooker recorded several songs with Van Morrison, including "Never Get Out of These Blues Alive", "The Healing Game" and "I Cover the Waterfront". He also appeared on stage with Van Morrison several times, some of which was released on the live album A Night in San Francisco. The same year he appeared as the title character on Pete Townshend's The Iron Man: A Musical.

Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where, in 1997, he opened a nightclub called "John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom Room", after one of his hits.[9]

He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died soon afterwards at the age of 83. The last song Hooker recorded before his death, is "Ali D'Oro", a collaboration with the Italian soul singer Zucchero, in which Hooker sang the chorus "I lay down with an angel". He was survived by eight children, nineteen grandchildren, numerous great-grandchildren and a nephew.

Among his many awards, Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1991 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom" were named to the list of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" was included as one of the Songs of the Century. He was also inducted in 1980 into the Blues Hall of Fame. In 2000, Hooker was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. MusicHooker's guitar playing is closely aligned with piano Boogie Woogie. He would play the walking bass pattern with his thumb, stopping to emphasize the end of a line with a series of trills, done by rapid hammer-ons and pull-offs. The songs that most epitomize his early sound are "Boogie Chillen", about being 17 and wanting to go out to dance at the Boogie clubs, "Baby Please Don't Go", a blues standard first recorded by Big Joe Williams, and "Tupelo Blues",[10] a stunningly sad song about the flooding of Tupelo, Mississippi in April 1936.

He maintained a solo career, popular with blues and folk music fans of the early 1960s and crossed over to white audiences, giving an early opportunity to the young Bob Dylan. As he got older, he added more and more people to his band, changing his live show from simply Hooker with his guitar to a large band, with Hooker singing.

His vocal phrasing was less closely tied to specific bars than most blues singers'. This casual, rambling style had been gradually diminishing with the onset of electric blues bands from Chicago but, even when not playing solo, Hooker retained it in his sound.

Though Hooker lived in Detroit during most of his career, he is not associated with the Chicago-style blues prevalent in large northern cities, as much as he is with the southern rural blues styles, known as delta blues, country blues, folk blues, or "front porch blues". His use of an electric guitar tied together the Delta blues with the emerging post-war electric blues.[11]
His songs have been covered by The White Stripes, MC5, The Doors, George Thorogood, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, The Yardbirds, The Animals, R. L. Burnside, the J. Geils Band and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Footnotes

1^ a b c d Palmer, Robert (1982). Deep Blues. United States: Penguin Books, p. 242-243. ISBN 0-14-006223-8.

2^ There is some debate as to the year of Hooker's birth. 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have all been given.(Boogie Man, p. 22) 1917 is the one most commonly cited, although Hooker himself claimed, at times, 1920, which would have made him "the same age as the recorded blues" (p. 59)

3^ Conversation with the Blues CD Included By Paul Oliver, p. 188See also: Guitar Facts By Bennett Joe, Trevor Curwen, Cliff Douse, Joe Bennett, p. 76

4^ Boogie Man p.43

5^ Wogan, Terry (1984). Shoes Off the Record. New York, N.Y.: Da Capo Press, p. 116-118. ISBN 0-306-80321-6.

6^ Liner notes to Alternative Boogie: Early Studio Recordings, 1948-1952

7^ Boogie Man p. 121

8^ The Blues Brothers (1980) - Trivia

9^ "Discovering the Blues of John Lee Hooker" Adapted from: Blues For Dummies, by Lonnie Brooks, Cub Koda, Wayne Baker Brooks, Dan Aykroyd, ISBN 0-7645-5080-2, August 1998

10^ YouTube - John Lee Hooker - Tupelo (1995)

11^ Rhino - John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) - Rzine #203 ^ John Lee Hooker - The World´s Greatest Blues Singer - cont´d (page 1)

Biography by Bill Dahl

He was beloved worldwide as the king of the endless boogie, a genuine blues superstar whose droning, hypnotic one-chord grooves were at once both ultra-primitive and timeless. But John Lee Hooker recorded in a great many more styles than that over a career that stretched across more than half a century.

"The Hook" was a Mississippi native who became the top gent on the Detroit blues circuit in the years following World War II. The seeds for his eerily mournful guitar sound were planted by his stepfather, Will Moore, while Hooker was in his teens. Hooker had been singing spirituals before that, but the blues took hold and simply wouldn't let go. Overnight visitors left their mark on the youth, too: legends like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Blind Blake, who all knew Moore.

Boogie Chillin'

From: KingoftheBlues07

Hooker heard Memphis calling while he was still in his teens, but he couldn't gain much of a foothold there. So he relocated to Cincinnati for a seven-year stretch before making the big move to the Motor City in 1943. Jobs were plentiful, but Hooker drifted away from day gigs in favor of playing his unique free-form brand of blues. A burgeoning club scene along Hastings Street didn't hurt his chances any.

In 1948, the aspiring bluesman hooked up with entrepreneur Bernie Besman, who helped him hammer out his solo debut sides, "Sally Mae" and its seminal flip, "Boogie Chillen." This was blues as primitive as anything then on the market; Hooker's dark, ruminative vocals were backed only by his own ringing, heavily amplified guitar and insistently pounding foot. Their efforts were quickly rewarded. Los Angeles-based Modern Records issued the sides and "Boogie Chillen" — a colorful, unique travelogue of Detroit's blues scene — made an improbable jaunt to the very peak of the R&B charts.

Modern released several more major hits by "the Boogie Man" after that: "Hobo Blues" and its raw-as-an-open wound flip, "Hoogie Boogie"; "Crawling King Snake Blues" (all three 1949 smashes); and the unusual 1951 chart-topper "I'm in the Mood," where Hooker overdubbed his voice three times in a crude early attempt at multi-tracking.

But Hooker never, ever let something as meaningless as a contract stop him for making recordings for other labels. His early catalog is stretched across a road map of diskeries so complex that it's nearly impossible to fully comprehend (a vast array of recording aliases don't make things any easier).

Along with Modern, Hooker recorded for King (as the geographically challenged Texas Slim), Regent (as Delta John, a far more accurate handle), Savoy (as the wonderfully surreal Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar), Danceland (as the downright delicious Little Pork Chops), Staff (as Johnny Williams), Sensation (for whom he scored a national hit in 1950 with "Huckle Up, Baby"), Gotham, Regal, Swing Time, Federal, Gone (as John Lee Booker), Chess, Acorn (as the Boogie Man), Chance, DeLuxe (as Johnny Lee), JVB, Chart, and Specialty; before finally settling down at Vee-Jay in 1955 under his own name. Hooker became the point man for the growing Detroit blues scene during this incredibly prolific period, recruiting guitarist Eddie Kirkland as his frequent duet partner while still recording for Modern.

Once tied in with Vee-Jay, the rough-and-tumble sound of Hooker's solo and duet waxings was adapted to a band format. Hooker had recorded with various combos along the way before, but never with sidemen as versatile and sympathetic as guitarist Eddie Taylor and harpist Jimmy Reed, who backed him at his initial Vee-Jay date that produced "Time Is Marching" and the superfluous sequel "Mambo Chillun."

Taylor stuck around for a 1956 session that elicited two genuine Hooker classics, "Baby Lee" and "Dimples," and he was still deftly anchoring the rhythm section (Hooker's sense of timing was his and his alone, demanding big-eared sidemen) when the Boogie Man finally made it back to the R&B charts in 1958 with "I Love You Honey."

Vee-Jay presented Hooker in quite an array of settings during the early '60s. His grinding, tough blues "No Shoes" proved a surprisingly sizable hit in 1960, while the storming "Boom Boom," his top seller for the firm in 1962 (it even cracked the pop airwaves), was an infectious R&B dance number benefiting from the reported presence of some of Motown's house musicians. But there were also acoustic outings aimed squarely at the blossoming folk-blues crowd, as well as some attempts at up-to-date R&B that featured highly intrusive female background vocals (allegedly by the Vandellas) and utterly unyielding structures that hemmed Hooker in unmercifully.

British blues bands such as the Animals and Yardbirds idolized Hooker during the early '60s; Eric Burdon's boys cut a credible 1964 cover of "Boom Boom" that outsold Hooker's original on the American pop charts. Hooker visited Europe in 1962 under the auspices of the first American Folk Blues Festival, leaving behind the popular waxings "Let's Make It" and "Shake It Baby" for foreign consumption.

Back home, Hooker cranked out gems for Vee-Jay through 1964 ("Big Legs, Tight Skirt," one of his last offerings on the logo, was also one of his best), before undergoing another extended round of label-hopping (except this time, he was waxing whole LPs instead of scattered 78s). Verve-Folkways, Impulse, Chess, and BluesWay all enticed him into recording for them in 1965-1966 alone! His reputation among hip rock cognoscenti in the States and abroad was growing exponentially, especially after he teamed up with blues-rockers Canned Heat for the massively selling album Hooker 'n' Heat in 1970.

Eventually, though, the endless boogie formula grew incredibly stagnant. Much of Hooker's 1970s output found him laying back while plodding rock-rooted rhythm sections assumed much of the work load. A cameo in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers was welcome, if far too short.
But Hooker wasn't through; not by a long shot. With the expert help of slide guitarist extraordinaire/producer Roy Rogers, the Hook waxed The Healer, an album that marked the first of his guest star-loaded albums (Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and Robert Cray were among the luminaries to cameo on the disc, which picked up a Grammy).

Boom boom

From: xyrius

Major labels were just beginning to take notice of the growing demand for blues records, and Pointblank snapped Hooker up, releasing Mr. Lucky (this time teaming Hooker with everyone from Albert Collins and John Hammond to Van Morrison and Keith Richards). Once again, Hooker was resting on his laurels by allowing his guests to wrest much of the spotlight away from him on his own album, but by then, he'd earned it. Another Pointblank set, Boom Boom, soon followed.

Happily, Hooker enjoyed the good life throughout the '90s. He spent much of his time in semi-retirement, splitting his relaxation time between several houses acquired up and down the California coast. When the right offer came along, though, he took it, including an amusing TV commercial for Pepsi. He also kept recording, releasing such star-studded efforts as 1995's Chill Out and 1997's Don't Look Back. All this helped him retain his status as a living legend, and he remained an American musical icon; and his stature wasn't diminished upon his death from natural causes on June 21, 2001.

References

Wikipedia
Official site

Allmusic

Discography

Allmusic

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

http://crossroadsclub27.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Lee%20Hooker

Muddy Waters

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:25:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

McKinley Morganfield (born April 4, 1913, Issaquena County, Mississippi; died April 30, 1983, Westmont, Illinois), better known as Muddy Waters, was an American blues musician and is generally considered "the Father of Chicago blues". He is also the actual father of blues musicians Big Bill Morganfield and Larry 'Muddy Junior' Williams.

Considered one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, Muddy Waters was a huge inspiration for the British beat explosion in the 1960s[1] and considered by many to be one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.[2]

In 2004 Waters was ranked #17 in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.[3]

Biography

Early life

Waters usually said that he was born in Rolling Fork, Mississippi in 1915. He was actually born in neighbouring Issaquena County, Mississippi in 1913. [4] (For many years a birth year of 1915 was reported; recent research uncovered documentation showing that in the 1930s and 1940s he reported his birth year as 1913 on both his marriage license and musicians union card; a 1955 interview in the Chicago Defender is the earliest documentation of him shaving off a couple of years and giving 1915 as his year of birth, and which he continued to use in interviews from that point onward.) His grandmother Della Grant raised him after his mother died in 1918. His fondness for playing in mud earned him the nickname "Muddy" at an early age. He later it changed to "Muddy Water" and finally "Muddy Waters".[5] Water started out on harmonica but by age seventeen he was playing the guitar at parties emulating two blues artists who were extremely popular in the south, Son House and Robert Johnson. "His thick heavy voice, the dark coloration of his tone and his firm almost solid personality were all clearly derived from House," wrote Peter Guralnick in Feel Like Going Home, "but the embellishments which he added, the imaginative slide technique and more agile rhythms, were closer to Johnson."

Early career

In 1940 Waters moved to St. Louis before playing with Silas Green a year later and returning back to Mississippi. In the early part of the decade he ran a juke joint, complete with gambling, moonshine, a jukebox and live music courtesy of Muddy himself. In the Summer of 1941 Alan Lomax came to Stovall, Mississippi, on behalf of the Library of Congress to record various country blues musicians. "He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house," Waters recalled in Rolling Stone, "and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records. Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice. Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, `I can do it, I can do it.'" Lomax came back again in July of 1942 to record Waters again. Both sessions were eventually released as Down On Stovall's Plantation on the Testament label.

In 1943 Waters headed north to Chicago in hopes of becoming a full-time professional. He lived with a relative for a short period while driving a truck and working in a factory by day and playing at night. Big Bill Broonzy, one of the leading bluesmen in Chicago at the time, helped Muddy break into the very competitive market by allowing him to open for his shows in the rowdy clubs. In 1945 Waters's uncle gave him his first electric guitar, which enabled him to be heard above the noisy crowds. In 1946 Waters recorded some tunes for Mayo Williams at Columbia but they weren't released at the time. Later that year he began recording for Aristocrat, a newly-formed label run by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess. In 1947 Waters played guitar with Sunnyland Slim on piano on the cuts "Gypsy Woman" and "Little Anna Mae." These were also shelved, but in 1948 Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home" became big and his popularity in clubs began to take off. Soon after, Aristocrat changed their name to Chess and Waters' signature tune, "Rollin' Stone", became a smash hit. In fact the Muddy Waters recording that they (The Rolling Stones) got their name from was Mannish Boy. Muddy sings "I'm a rolling stone" in the song.

Success

Initially, the Chess brothers would not allow Waters to use his own musicians (Jimmy Rogers and Claude "Blue Smitty" Smith) in the studio; instead he was only provided with a backing bass by Ernest "Big" Crawford. However, by 1952 Waters was recording with arguably the best blues group ever: Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica; Jimmy Rogers on guitar; Elga Edmonds (a/k/a Elgin Evans) on drums; Otis Spann on piano; Big Crawford on bass; and Waters handling vocals and second guitar. The band recorded a string of blues classics during the early 1950s, some with the help of bassist/songwriter Willie Dixon. "Hoochie Coochie Man" (Number 8 on the R&B charts), "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (Number 4), and "I'm Ready". These three were "the most macho songs in his repertoire," wrote Robert Palmer in Rolling Stone. "Muddy would never have composed anything so unsubtle. But they gave him a succession of showstoppers and an image, which were important for a bluesman trying to break out of the grind of local gigs into national prominence."

Waters reigned over the 1950s Chicago blues scene; he was its most popular artist and led its tightest band, fueled by hits from Willie Dixon, its most successful composer. On all these fronts, however, Waters contended with fierce competition from the gravel-voiced singer Howlin' Wolf. Wolf's band rivaled Waters's all-star lineup, notably featuring the now-legendary guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Wolf also competed with Waters for the songwriting attention of Willie Dixon and recorded a large number of Dixon tunes. Nonetheless, Waters consistently retained an edge in popularity and esteem. Both Waters and Wolf are held in immense regard by modern rock and blues aficionados, but Waters scored far more chart hits and is generally considered to be the more commercially successful and the more well-known of the two; especially to the casual listener.

By 1954, Waters was at the height of his career. "By the time he achieved his popular peak, Muddy Waters had become a shouting, declamatory kind of singer who had forsaken his guitar as a kind of anachronism and whose band played with a single pulsating rhythm," wrote music critic Peter Guralnick in his book The Listener's Guide to The Blues.

The success of Waters's ensemble paved the way for others in his group to break away and enjoy their own solo careers. In 1952 Little Walter left when his single "Juke" became a hit (although he would continue to play on Muddy's recording sessions until the late '50s), and in 1955 Rogers quit to work exclusively with his own band, which had been a sideline until that time. Waters could never recapture the glory of his pre-1956 years as the pressures of being a leader led him to use various studio musicians for quite a few years thereafter.

Rollin' Stone aka Catfish Blues

From: Mandy39

England and low-profile

He headed to England in 1958 and shocked audiences (whose only previous exposure to blues had come via the acoustic folk/blues sounds of acts such as Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy) with his loud, amplified electric guitar and a thunderous beat. His performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, recorded and released as his first live album, At Newport 1960, helped turn on a whole new generation to Waters's sound. He expressed dismay when he realized that members of his own race were turning their backs on the genre while a white audience had shown increasing respect for the blues.

However, for the better part of twenty years (since his last big hit in 1956, "I'm Ready") Waters was put on the back shelf by the Chess label and recorded albums with various "popular" themes: Brass And The Blues, Electric Mud, etc. In 1967, he joined forces with Bo Diddley, Little Walter and Howlin' Wolf to record the Super Blues and The Super Super Blues Band pair of albums of Chess blues standards. In 1972 he went back to England to record The London Muddy Waters Sessions with four hotshot rockers — Rory Gallagher, Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, and Mitch Mitchell — but their playing was not up to his standards. "These boys are top musicians, they can play with me, put the book before 'em and play it, you know," he told Guralnick. "But that ain't what I need to sell my people, it ain't the Muddy Waters sound. An' if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man."

Waters's sound was basically Delta country blues electrified, but his use of microtones, in both his vocals and slide playing, made it extremely difficult to duplicate and follow correctly. "When I plays onstage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me," he said in Rolling Stone. "But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play."

Comeback

On November 25, 1976, Muddy Waters performed at The Band's farewell concert at Winterland, San Francisco. The concert was released as both a record and a film, The Last Waltz, featuring Waters' performance of "Mannish Boy" with Paul Butterfield on harmonica.

In 1977 Johnny Winter convinced his label, Blue Sky, to sign Waters, the beginning of a fruitful partnership. Waters's "comeback" LP, Hard Again, was recorded in just two days and was a return to original Chicago sound he had created 25 years earlier, thanks to Winter's production. Former Waters sideman James Cotton contributed harmonica on the Grammy Award-winning album and a brief but well-received tour followed. "He sounds happy, energetic and out for business," stated Dan Oppenheimer in Rolling Stone.

The Muddy Waters Blues Band was one of the crack outfits on the scene at the time and included guitarist Bob Margolin, pianist Pinetop Perkins, and drummer Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, and all were on this session. Winter played guitar in addition to producing. Waters asked James Cotton to play harp on the session, and Cotton brought his bassist Charles Calmese. According to Margolin's warm and informative anecdotal liner notes, Waters never picked up his guitar during these sessions. It hardly matters. From the opening roar of "Mannish Boy," with shouts and hollers throughout, with incendiary guitars to the old-style Delta blues of "I Can't Be Satisfied", with a National Steel solo by Winter, to Cotton's screeching intro to "The Blues Had a Baby", to the moaning closer "Little Girl", Hard Again is rock solid. Its live feel heralds back to the Chess Records days, and its cooperative musicianship and intimate, good time vibe have rarely been replicated since that time -- and never on a major label. The expanded reissue includes one bonus track, a remake of his 1950s single "Walking Through the Park," that could have been part of the original album without a problem -- the other outtakes ended up on King Bee. Margolin's notes state that while the album has been remastered, it was not remixed because its sound holds up. Hard Again showcased Waters as a blues lion, and in its grooves lies all the evidence for the legend he remains. It was the first studio collaboration between Waters and Winter, who produced his final four albums, the others being I'm Ready, King Bee, and Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live, for Blue Sky, a Columbia Records subsidiary.

In 1978 Winter recruited two of Waters' cohorts from the early '50s, Big Walter Horton and Jimmy Rogers, and brought in the rest of Waters' touring band at the time (harmonica player Jerry Portnoy, guitarist Luther "Guitar Junior" Johnson, and bassist Calvin Jones) to record Waters' I'm Ready LP, which came close to the critical and commercial success of Hard Again.

The comeback continued in 1979 with the lauded LP Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live. "Muddy was loose for this one," wrote Jas Obrecht in Guitar Player, "and the result is the next best thing to being ringside at one of his foot-thumping, head-nodding, downhome blues shows." Accompanied by his touring band, augmented by Johnny Winter on guitar, Muddy turns in an enthusiastic performance. The set list contains most of his biggest hits, and the sound quality and performances are energetic. King Bee the following year concluded Water's reign at Blue Sky, and these last four LPs turned out to be his biggest-selling albums ever. King Bee was the last album Muddy Waters recorded. Coming last in a trio of triumphant studio outings produced by Johnny Winter, it is also a mixed bag. During the sessions for King Bee, Waters, his manager, and his band were involved in a dispute over money. According to the liner notes by Bob Margolin, the conflict arose from Waters' health being on the wane and him playing fewer engagements. The bandmembers wanted more money for each of the fewer gigs they did play in order to make ends meet. Ultimately a split occurred and the entire band quit. Because of the tensions in the studio preceding the split, Winter felt the sessions had not produced enough solid material to yield an entire album. He subsequently filled out King Bee with outtakes from earlier Blue Sky sessions and the cover photograph was by David Michael Kennedy. For the listener, King Bee is a leaner and meaner record. Less of the good-time exuberance present on the previous two outings is present here. The title track, "Mean Old Frisco", "Sad Sad Day", and "I Feel Like Going Home", are all blues with ensemble work. The Sony Legacy issue features completely remastered sound and Margolin's notes, and also hosts two bonus tracks from the King Bee sessions that Winter didn't see fit to release the first time.

Got my Mojo Workin'

From: Mungrass

Influence

His influence is tremendous, over a variety of music genres: blues, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, folk, jazz, and country. Waters also helped Chuck Berry get his first record contract.

His 1958 tour of England marked possibly the first time amplified, modern urban blues was heard there, although on his first tour he was the only one amplified. His backing was provided by Englishman Chris Barber's trad jazz group. (One critic retreated to the toilets to write his review because he found the band so loud.)

The Rolling Stones named themselves after Waters' 1950 song, "Rollin' Stone," (also known as "Catfish Blues," which Jimi Hendrix covered as well). Cream covered his song "Rollin' and Tumblin'" on their 1966 debut album Fresh Cream, as Eric Clapton was a big fan of Muddy Waters when he was growing up, and influenced Claptons music career. The song was also adapted by Bob Dylan in the album "Modern Times." One of Led Zeppelin's biggest hits, "Whole Lotta Love", is based upon the Muddy Waters hit, "You Need Love," which was written by Willie Dixon. Dixon wrote some of Muddy Waters' most famous songs, including "I Just Want to Make Love to You" (a big radio hit for the 1970s rock band Foghat), "Hoochie Coochie Man," made famous by The Allman Brothers Band and "I'm Ready" covered by Humble Pie. In 1993, Paul Rodgers released the album "Muddy Water Blues: A Tribute to Muddy Waters" in which he covered a number of Muddy Waters songs, such as "Louisiana Blues," "Rollin' Stone," "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man," "I'm Ready," and others in collaboration with a number of famous guitarists such as Brian May and Jeff Beck.

Angus Young of the rock group AC/DC has cited Waters as one of his influences. Waters' songs sometimes appear in long-time fan Martin Scorsese's movies, including The Color of Money, Casino, as well as Goodfellas. Waters's 1970s recording of his mid-'50s hit "Mannish Boy" (a.k.a. "I'm A Man") was used memorably in the hit film Risky Business.

Other songs for which Muddy Waters is known include "Long Distance Call", "Rock Me", and the blues anthem "Got My Mojo Working". Screenwriter David Simon has written an unproduced teleplay about Waters' life.[7]

In the 2006 Family Guy episode "Saving Private Brian" is a parody of Muddy Waters trying to pass a kidney stone; his screams of pain form a call and response with the Chicago blues band in his bathroom.

Death

In 1983 Waters died in his sleep a few weeks after his 70th birthday. At his funeral, throngs of blues musicians and fans showed up to pay tribute to one of the true originals of the art form. "Muddy was a master of just the right notes," John Hammond Jr., told Guitar World. "It was profound guitar playing, deep and simple. . . . more country blues transposed to the electric guitar, the kind of playing that enhanced the lyrics, gave profundity to the words themselves." Two years after his death, the city that made Muddy Waters (and vice versa) honored him by renaming a portion of 43rd Street near his former home on the south side "Honorary Muddy Waters Drive". Following Waters's death, B.B. King told Guitar World, "It's going to be years and years before most people realize how great he was to American music".

Footnotes

1^ "Waters, a massive inspiration for the British beat explosion, beloved of Alexis Korner, Long John Baldry et al." http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/g84h/ - Retrieved 12/09/07

2^ "Muddy Waters, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century." http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artist/g84h/ - Retrieved 12/09/07

3^ The Immortals: The First Fifty. Rolling Stone Issue 946. Rolling Stone.

4^ Gordon p. 3 ^ Gordon p. 9 ^ The Official Muddy Waters Website - What's New

5^ Cynthia Rose. The originator of TV's 'Homicide' remains close to his police-reporter roots. Seattle Times. Retrieved on 2006-09-28.

6^ Grammy Awards search engine ^ Grammy Hall of Fame Database

7^ 500 Songs That Shaped Rock ^ The Blues Foundation Database ^ Muddy Waters: 29 cents Commemorative stamp

References

Discography

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

http://crossroadsclub27.blogspot.com/search/label/Muddy%20Waters

Junior Kimbrough

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:55:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Junior Kimbrough (born David Kimbrough in Hudsonville, Mississippi, July 28, 1930; d. Holly Springs, Mississippi, January 17, 1998) was a prominent bluesman from Mississippi.

Kimbrough lived in the North Mississippi Hill Country around Holly Springs. He recorded for the Fat Possum Records label. He was a long-time associate of labelmate RL Burnside, and the Burnside and Kimbrough families often collaborated on musical projects. This relationship continues today.

Beginning around 1992, Kimbrough operated a juke joint known as "Junior's Place" in Chulahoma, Mississippi, which attracted visitors from around the world, including members of U2 and The Rolling Stones. Kimbrough's sons, musicians Kinney and David Malone Kimbrough (two of Junior's rumored to be twenty-eight children), kept it open following his death, until it burned to the ground on April 6, 2000.

Junior Kimbrough died in 1998 following a stroke.

Junior Kimbrough began playing guitar in his youth, and counted Lightnin' Hopkins as an early influence. In the late 50s Kimbrough began playing in his own style, which made use of mid-tempo rhythms and a steady drone he played with his thumb on the bass strings of his guitar. His music is characterized by the tricky syncopations between his droning bass strings and his mid-range melodies. His soloing style has been described as modal and features langorous runs in the mid and upper register. The result is complex and funky, described by music critic Robert Palmer as "hypnotic."

Kimbrough's music defies easy categorization. In solo and ensemble settings it is often polyrhythmic, which links it explicitly to the music of Africa. Fellow North Mississippi bluesman and former Kimbrough bassist Eric Deaton has suggested similarities between Junior Kimbrough's music and Malian bluesman Ali Farka Toure's.

Kimbrough made his recorded debut with a cover of Lowell Fulson's "Tramp" released as a 45 on an independent label in the early to mid 1960s. He recorded off and on until his death in 1998. Among his earliest extant recordings are two duets with rockabilly legend and childhood friend Charlie Feathers from 1969. Feathers counted Kimbrough as an early influence, calling him "the beginning and end of all music." This quote is on the back of Kimbrough's tombstone.

Kimbrough recorded very little in the 70s, contributing an early version of "Meet Me In The City" to a European blues anthology. With his band, The Soul Blues Boys, Kimbrough recorded throughout the 80s, releasing a single in 1982 ("Keep Your Hands Off Her" b/w "I Feel Good, Little Girl") that shows him backed by a superb band of hill country musicians and at the top of his powers as a singer and guitarist. He recorded at least one session for the independent label Gold Star in the mid 80s, though this label has never released any of his material. The High Water label recorded a 1988 session with Kimbrough and The Soul Blues Boys, releasing it in 1997 with his 1982 45 as Do The Rump.

Junior came to national attention in 1992 with his debut album All Night Long. Robert Palmer produced the album for Oxford, Miss., label Fat Possum Records, recording it in a local church with Junior's son Kent "Kinney" Kimbrough (aka Kenny Malone) on drums and RL Burnside's son Garry Burnside on bass. The album featured many of his most celebrated songs, including the title track, the complexly melodic "Meet Me In The City," and "You Better Run" a harrowing ballad of attempted rape. All Night Long earned near-unanimous praise from critics, receiving four stars in Rolling Stone magazine. His stock continued to rise the following year after live footage of him playing "All Night Long" in one of his juke joints appeared in the Robert Mugge-directed, Robert Palmer-narrated documentary Deep Blues. This performance was actually recorded earlier, probably about 1990, and showed Junior just before a stroke robbed him of much of his energy.

A second album for Fat Possum, Sad Days and Lonely Nights followed in 1994. A video for the album's title track featured Junior, Garry Burnside and Kent Kimbrough playing in Junior's legendary juke joint, with its distinct murals and relaxed atmosphere. The last album he would record, Most Things Haven't Worked Out, appeared on Fat Possum in 1997. Following his death in 1998, Fat Possum released two posthumous compilations of material Kimbrough recorded in the 90s, God Knows I Tried (1998) and Meet Me In The City (1999). A greatest hits compilation, You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough, followed in 2002. Fat Possum released a tribute album, Sunday Nights: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough, in 2005, that featured the likes of Iggy & The Stooges (Kimbrough once toured with frontman Iggy Pop), The Black Keys and Mark Lanegan.

Kimbrough's influence is most apparent in the Oxford and north Mississippi music scene. His son, David Kimbrough, is an accomplished guitarist, singer and songwriter in his own right, releasing his first album (as David Malone) on Fat Possum records in the mid 90s and his second, Shell-Shocked, on Lucky 13/BC Records in 2006. Garry Burnside, one of Kimbrough's bassists, teamed with his nephew, drummer Cedric Burnside, as Burnside Exploration, to record The Record (2006). Both Burnsides count Kimbrough as a formative influence, as does Duwayne Burnside, Garry's older brother, who used to back Kimbrough in his youth. Another Kimbrough bassist and acolyte, Eric Deaton released his debut, Gonna Be Trouble Here in 2006 as well. Contemporary bands the North Mississippi All Stars, The Black Keys, Jimbo Mathus & The Knockdown Society and Mr. Airplane Man all count Junior Kimbrough among their influences.

AllMusic Bio

by Bill Dahl & Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Cited as a prime early influence by rockabilly pioneer Charlie Feathers, Mississippi Delta bluesman Junior Kimbrough's modal, hypnotic blues vision remained a regional sensation for most of his career. He finally transcended the confines of his region in the early '90s, when he appeared in the 1991 movie Deep Blues and on its Anxious/Atlantic soundtrack, leading to his own debut for Fat Possum Records, All Night Long.

Junior Kimbrough was born and raised in Hudsonville, Mississippi, where he learned how to play guitar by listening to records by Delta bluesmen. In 1968, he cut his first single, "Tramp," for the local Philwood label. For the next two decades, Kimbrough didn't have the opportunity to record frequently — he recorded a single, "Keep Your Hands Off Her," for High Water and his "All Night Long" was available on the various artists compilation National Downhome Festival, Vol. 2 released on Southland Records.

During the '70s and '80s, Kimbrough played juke joints throughout Mississippi, which is where music journalist Robert Palmer discovered him in the late '80s. Palmer featured Kimbrough in his documentary film Deep Blues. The exposure in the movie led to a national record contract for Kimbrough — he signed with Fat Possum and released his first full-length album, All Night Long, in 1992. The record was critically acclaimed by both blues and mainstream publications, as was Deep Blues and its accompanying soundtrack. All of the media attention led to performances outside of the Delta, including a few shows in England. After the flurry of activity in 1992, Junior Kimbrough returned to playing juke joints in the Delta, recording occasionally — he released his second album, Sad Days, Lonely Nights, in 1993. Most Things Haven't Worked Out followed in 1997, and a year later Kimbrough returned with God Knows I Tried. He died of a heart attack on January 17, 1998.

Junior KimbroughBy: Greg Johnson

Article Reprint from the April, 2002 BluesNotes

Prior to the 1992 release of the film documentary "Deep Blues," based loosely on the book by music historian, Robert Palmer, few people were aware of the musical legacy of the North Mississippi Hill Country. Unlike the Delta, not far to the west, the Hill Country was farmland run mostly by sharecroppers and not home to the large cotton plantations. Modern conveniences such as the development of the Interstate highway system was late arriving in this s part of the state, so many of the field researchers who discovered the performers in the Delta knew nothing of this community only a short drive away. Perhaps the only Blues musician of any true renown from that area was "Mississippi" Fred McDowell, and his discovery did not take place until 1959, close to 30 years after many of the legendary figures of the Delta.

The film "Deep Blues" changed all of that. Portions of the movie took place at the Chewalla Rib Shack, located just east of Holly Springs, approximately one hour from Memphis. The stage is first occupied in the film by the talented Jessie Mae Hemphill, the grand-daughter of the great fife-and-drum musician, Sid Hemphill. Fife-and-drums played a major role in the development of the region's sound, with it's long, hypnotic beat. But, it was the film's next performer who drove this style home: David "Junior" Kimbrough.

Kimbrough had been playing this form for more than 40 years when the movie was released. His mesmerizing appearance caught the attention of Matthew Johnson, a journalist for "Living Blues" Magazine, who had decided that he wanted to pursue authentic Blues musicians in order to create a new record label. He was tired of seeing the newer Blues musicians coming out of large cities in the East, playing heavy-handed Blues-infused-Rock. Junior Kimbrough became the first artist on this new label he dubbed Fat Possum.

Junior Kimbrough had spent nearly his entire life in the Hill Country, born in nearby Hudsonville on July 28, 1930. He was the son of sharecroppers and at an early age he would be left alone in the care of his older sister while the family tended the farm. Both his father and brother owned guitars, but they placed them where they believed they'd be secure from younger hands. David was entranced by the sound of the guitar and he removed the instruments from their hiding places once the others had left for the day. He had a natural gift, able to learn by ear. Once he even claimed that if he had a thought for a song, all he would need to do was play it once and it would be committed to memory. If he did not play it, then it was lost forever. Fred McDowell was one source for his learning. As was a local guitarist named, Eli Green, a man who many believed gained his musical prowess through the voodoo powers he was said to possess. Young David was a quick learner and even proved to be a teacher to his childhood friend, future Rockabilly star, Charlie Feathers, who to this day claims Kimbrough to be his earliest influence.

But, it wasn't only the guitar that David found intriguing while his family was at work. It was also reported that he gained his first taste for whiskey by the age of eight. One day his mother came home and found him in an alcoholic-induced coma. This proved to be the last time that the youngster was left home with his sister; instead he began learning the ways of farming.

After only two years of attending high school, David accepted a position working at the local John Deere dealership. He held onto this position until 1954, when he decided to migrate north like many other African-Americans of the time and ended up in Chicago. Four years later he returned south and settled briefly in Memphis. All throughout this period he continued to perform, now playing under the self-given moniker of "Junior"

While living in Memphis, he had his first opportunity to record. He made a handful of sides for the father of Sun Records owner, Sam Phillips, but they failed to garner any airplay at the time and Junior moved back to the Hill Country.

Over the years, Kimbrough would work in many professions, including sharecropping, as a mechanic and also as a moonshiner. He began to hold weekend parties, turning the family home into a juke joint. He was extremely popular with the local crowd and sometimes would even draw people from the nearby university in Oxford. His next recording session was made in 1968 with the song "Tramp" for the local Philwood label, but this recording also generated no success.

In 1979, historian David Evans, a professor of music at the University of Memphis, chanced upon Junior Kimbrough playing at Ethel's Juke Joint in Holly Springs. The University had recently created its own small record label called High Water and he brought Kimbrough, along with Jessie Mae Hemphill and longtime friend, R.L. Burnside, in to cut some sides, including his next single titled, "Keep Your Hands Off Her." The sides would be compiled for Junior's first full-length album, "Do The Rump" (re-released by the HMG label in 1997). Other than an early version of the single, "All Night Long", which would appear on a compilation recording released by Southland Records, these would be Kimbrough's last recordings until the debut Fat Possum release, "All Night Long" in 1992.

Fat Possum utilized "Deep Blues" producer, Robert Palmer, to create the album for Kimbrough. It was decided the only true way he could be captured was live at the Chewalla Rib Shack and so a make-shift studio was erected. This proved to be a success, as this untapped sound which had caused a sensation with the film, turned out to be the right combination for the fledgling label. "All Night Long" received rave reviews, eventually being named the "Most Important Blues Album of the Decade" by "Rolling Stone" Magazine.

Not long after the. releases of "Deep Blues" and "All Night Long," Sammy Greer, the owner of Chewalla Rib Shack, decided that he had had enough of the juke joint business and closed down. Junior purchased a larger juke in nearby Chulahoma, which came to be known simply as "Junior's Place." Fat Possum released a second album titled, "Sad Days Lonely Nights," which proved to be another winner for Junior. Soon, his juke was being visited by tourists and touring Rock musicians from around the world, including The Rolling Stones and U2, who came to see Junior, R.L. Burnside, and their respective families perform.

Junior's success would lead to Fat Possum putting together traveling renditions of the juke joint's artists throughout the United States and Europe. Kimbrough even found himself doing a tour as the opening act for rocker, Iggy Pop. A third album was also issued by Fat Possum in 1997, "Most Things Haven't Worked Out."

At this same period, Junior began to suffer from various health problems, including a series of strokes. He was also involved in an auto accident that revealed other medical conditions he was unaware of, including diabetes, high blood pressure and gall stones. He was forced to step away from playing for a while and left the juke joint to be run by his sons, David (Malone), Jr. and Kenny Malone. On January 17, 1998, Junior was watching TV at the home of his common-law wife, Mildred Washington, in Holly Springs, when he died of a sudden heart attack. He was 67 years old.

Funeral services were held at Rust College in Holly Springs on January 24th and he was buried at the Kimbrough Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in his hometown of Hudsonville. Besides his partner Mildred Washington, Kimbrough left behind 36 children from various relationships.

The juke joint, Junior's Place, continued to thrive as a local music hangout and tourist attraction until April 6, 2000, when it was destroyed by a fire caused by arson. Everything inside was lost: instruments, stage equipment and original artwork by regional painters. But, the sound that was created inside the walls of the juke will always remain. Junior Kimbrough may not have experienced the grandeur of success that his friend R.L Burnside has received over the following years, but he is the acknowledged creator of the style that has sparked a whole new generation of Blues musicians.

Junior's childhood friend, Charlie Feathers, is quoted on Kimbrough's headstone, which probably brings this musical creation home. It reads: "Junior Kimbrough is the beginning and the end of all music".

Fat Possum Records

David "Junior" Kimbrough, quite possibly the most important blues guitarist of the second half of the 20th century, redefined blues. Junior's approach to music is so hugely different from anything that came before him that he ranks among the three greatest bluesmen of all: Son House, Bukka White, and Fred McDowell. An originator, Junior did more than build on certain tradition or perfect a certain style. Junior re-imagined the blues; he made a sound for himself.

If Junior's sister had been any kind of baby-sitter he might not have picked up the guitar. When Junior was too small to help his father work the fields his eldest sister stayed home with him. She was supposedly watching him the day he took his father's guitar "off the high shelf," where his father kept everything he didn't want his children fooling with. It became routine: when his father left for the fields, Junior carefully took down the guitar. He learned fast and well, well enough to teach a local white boy, Charlie Feathers, how to play.

Junior was six years old, and his sister was doing her usual bang-up job of babysitting the day he took a gallon jug of corn off the high shelf. His mother found him in an alcohol-induced coma; she thought Junior was dead. Junior's father recognized the problem and knew the solution: his daughter needed a whipping and Junior belonged in the field. After two years of high school Junior was lured into Holly Springs by a job at the John Deere dealership.

Junior couldn't remember the exact date he deliberately set out to create music but knew the reasons. He was still a young man and had gone as far as he could go at John Deere. If Junior was gonna make his mark in the world, he'd have to do it with a guitar. Up until then he'd been playing the same country blues standards, as well as the contemporary hits of Little Milton and Albert King, in the same jukes and clubs that his long-time friend and rival R.L. Burnside played. And then Junior stopped playing covers and stopped taking requests. Determined not to become just another "entertainer" or "performer," Junior realized playing covers only helped the composers or the artist who first recorded the song. He wasn't going to help anybody, ever again. From then on, Junior would only play Junior.

He might've been the first person in his family to work off the farm, but Junior never gave up his rural habits like throwing parties every Sunday night with his furniture dragged out in the yard so more people could fit. Before long Junior had to rent a one-bedroom apartment to get a break from the chaos he'd started at home. Junior's old house became more than a club. It was an entity: it was Junior's Place--and without help from a sign or telephone locals gathered on Sunday nights to drink and dance. Junior understood music, and had a gift for songwriting, and began developing the music that was first recorded in the mid-'80s for a Memphis State single.

Unfortunately, David "Junior" Kimbrough didn't release his first album until 1992, when he was 62, but when he finally made his first album, All Night Long (produced by Robert Palmer for Fat Possum Records), the world took notice. Rolling Stone was the first to acknowledge Junior and awarded the album four stars. In addition to giving his music long overdue exposure, All Night Long gave the Fat Possum label hope. Junior, for the most part, was not physically able to tour, now that he finally had the support of a record company. There were notable exceptions: a string of dates with Iggy Pop, and several tours with the Fat Possum Circus (a package deal). But the news traveled-- to hear Junior you had to go to Mississippi. Rock bands such as the Rolling Stones, Sonic Youth, and U2 made pilgrimages to Holly Springs to experience his club and hear Junior with his son Kinney Malone on drums and Garry Burnside on bass. Junior went on to record Sad Days, Lonely Nights, Most Things Haven't Worked Out and the posthumously released God Knows I Tried (all on Fat Possum).

Junior was 67 when died of heart failure on January 17, 1998 at Mildred's apartment in the Holly Springs public housing project, watching TV on her couch. Mildred Washington, his companion of 30 years, had been taking care of him. Junior Kimbrough still kept a one-room bachelor's apartment at the time of his death: immaculately clean, with nothing whatsoever on the walls or tables, no pictures, no tour posters, nothing. Junior knew what he had accomplished, and didn't need any souvenirs. In addition to the 36 children he claimed, Junior put his brand on music.

Sad Days, Lonely Nights From: roastingears

Junior Kimbrough Runs The Voodoo Down

By Wes Freeman (June 2000)

Night has already fallen on October 28, 1990, when 60-year-old David "Junior" Kimbrough sits down to play guitar for the regulars at his juke joint in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Behind him is his drummer Calvin Jackson. To his right is Little Joe Ayers, his electric bass player. He looks at the crowd and then past them. His mouth is open and he looks lost, even though he owns the place in every sense of the word. Within a few months he will have a stroke. In a year he will record his first album. In time, his son and musical heir, David Kimbrough, will be imprisoned. He will be awarded a $5000 Gibson Les Paul guitar, his most prized possession. In seven years, he will die of heart failure. But right now, Junior knows none of this; he's just getting ready to play guitar. As he begins to play, he moves his head as if he is receiving radio transmissions from deep space. He says that his songs come to him in his dreams, and listening to him play them, you can believe it. The bassist and drummer tighten up behind him, so that everybody can dance. Over their muscular, repetitive rhythm, Junior's electric guitar floats and bounces, moving at about half the speed of his rhythm section, but guiding it through his songs just the same.

His solos almost always use the same groups of notes, but they never cease to beguile the dancers. He watches them move, then turns to watch his bass player, his drummer, then back to the bass player again. He wears an expression that is delighted and perplexed, as though he has never seen a guitar before, but inexplicably knows how to play one.

The late Robert Palmer, a New York Times journalist and university instructor, produced Kimbrough's first two albums, All Night Long (1992) and Sad Days, Lonely Nights (1994). In the liner notes to All Night Long, Palmer said that "you'll hear (Junior) sing something that sounds like a pre-blues field holler while he's playing a guitar rhythm like Memphis soul music, and when the bass and drums come in on one of Junior's riffs, the music might sound like some kind of hillbilly-metal-funk that hasn't been heard yet - except around Junior's place."

"Junior's place" was an institution in the hill country of Northern Mississippi. Originally, it was his house. Kimbrough and his band, the Soul Blues Boys, would rehearse on Sunday afternoons and people just began showing up. "The people there seemed to be the disinherited, the poor, and sometimes wayward individuals looking to ease their pain from the pressures of everyday life," said Sylvester Oliver, a professor at Mississippi's Rust College. "There was a natural tendency of these people to divest themselves of phoniness and pretentiousness and let it all hang out, so to speak. There were usually more people outside engaging in merrymaking, who never entered the house and were content to listen from afar." Kimbrough's house has since burned down.

In the '70s Junior's place became a small wooden shack in the hills. In the early '90s, his reputation began to grow, first with his appearance in the documentary Deep Blues (1990) and then with the release of All Night Long, which received 4 out of 5 stars in Rolling Stone. Prior to recording All Night Long, Kimbrough moved his juke joint to an abandoned church, and there, his reputation was really made.

The band would set up in a corner of the church (there was no stage) so the dancers could have the floor. The building was decorated with surreal murals and knick-knacks, probably the closest anyone would ever get to a visual representation of Junior's mind and the subconscious that played music for him in his dreams. On the walls were homemade paintings, the products of a rural black culture. On one wall there's a painting of Oprah Winfrey as an African princess. It's bright reds and yellows make it look as if it might have been painted by Van Gogh after he mastered the velvet Elvis technique. Another painting shows a horse as it rears up and paws the air beneath a desert sun. In other paintings, African American women hold babies and bottles of perfume. A landscape shows black children running through deserts and across mountains. Grandest of all is the seascape that stretches out behind Kimbrough and his band. In the mural, alien beaches and uncharted islands frame a churning sea, and it's difficult to tell from the sky above whether it's day or night. This was where Junior held court, "his university" as Sylvester Oliver called it. Supposedly, members of the Rolling Stones once visited the place and sat in with the band. Although Junior was too nice to ever kick anyone off his "stage," the crowd apparently booed them off because they couldn't "swing the music."

"It was the only place (in the area) where it didn't matter if you were black or white," said one of the white regulars at Junior's place. "There was no tension at all."

This was the place that Kimbrough was running when he died at 67. He was with Mildred Washington, his companion of 30 years and mother to some of his 36 children, sitting on her couch and watching TV when his heart failed him.

"Junior Kimbrough still kept a one-room bachelor's apartment at the time of his death," read the liner notes from God Knows I Tried, his fifth album. "(The apartment was) immaculately clean, with nothing whatsoever on the walls or tables, no pictures, no tour posters, nothing."

Recently, his juke joint burned down, as did the houses of his bass player, Gary Burnside, and drummer, Kent Kimbrough. This adds to the mystery of the man, something Kimbrough never discouraged. He once told a story about Eli Green, a local blues musician who had a profound influence on Kimbrough. Green was a firm believer in voodoo and allegedly could throw a pack of cards in the air so that they all stuck on the ceiling. Once the cards were in place, Green could call out the name of a card, and that card would fall to the ground. Kimbrough's talent was equally inexplicable and, like the seemingly random array of images in his juke joint, seems to have no precedent. But his music is still the best bet for finding out what Kimbrough was all about.

His lyrics are simple, mostly about love and sex, drenching with an eroticism that manages to be deeply intimate without being self-conscious. He sang about what he knew, and after fathering 36 children by multiple partners, he knew sex pretty well. His music is not terribly dynamic either, although it is immensely complex. His songs are rarely built out of more than one chord (they are meant for dancing and have a deliberately hypnotic quality) but their rhythmic subtletly and freshness of vision are overwhelming. Kimbrough weaves in and out of key, layering his stock melodic phrases on top of the already dense rhythmic layers put down by the other two members of the band. Solos and vocal breaks alternate regularly, phasing past and into one another (a distinctly African musical technique) so that the listener can't remember how the song began and when it ends, the effect is often shattering. Junior's voice, high and plaintive, drips with soul and emotion.

When he spoke, which he did not do often, he was quiet and "dreamy" as one of his ex-sidemen put it. When he saw something amusing, like two of his women arguing for instance, he chuckled quietly to himself. He was fond of flipping his middle finger at people for no reason. There is video footage of him throwing a cigarette off the stage of a local blues festival. He does it with a long, slow gesture and when he finally releases the spent butt, he wears an angry expression, like he's casting out a demon.

Junior Kimbrough existed in a self-made bubble. His music seemed to rise from the dust or descend from the clouds. It existed without any help from anybody, and now that Junior's gone, it can't be explained. There was no reason for Junior Kimbrough: he came, baffled the world, and left it before anyone could catch on. Charlie Feathers, a recording artist and contemporary of Kimbrough's who was deeply influenced by his unique style, called Junior "the beginning and end of all music." This is perhaps the best way to describe a man whose songs were too small for more than one chord, but big enough to put his world inside.

References

Wikipedia

AllMusic

Cascade Blues Association

Fat Possum Records

Perfect Sound Forever

Discography

AllMusic

Junior Kimbrough - Crossroads Club 27

Robert Johnson

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:54:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Robert Johnson, born Robert Leroy Johnson (May 8, 1911 – August 16, 1938) is among the most famous of Delta blues musicians. His landmark recordings from 1936–1937 display a remarkable combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that have influenced generations of musicians. Johnson's shadowy, poorly documented life and death at age 27 have given rise to much legend. Considered by some to be the "Grandfather of Rock-and-Roll", his vocal phrasing, original songs, and guitar style have influenced a broad range of musicians, including John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, Johnny Winter, Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band, The Rolling Stones, Paul Butterfield, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, The Band, Neil Young, Warren Zevon, Jeff Beck, and Eric Clapton, who called Johnson "the most important blues musician who ever lived". He was also ranked fifth in Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. He is an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Johnson's life is not well documented, and the variety of legends that have surrounded him for decades have made scholarship difficult. Serious research was not undertaken until the late 1960s and early 1970s, most notably by researchers Mack McCormack and Stephen LaVere. Most of the information on his life has come from the decades-old recollections of surviving family and associates. The two known images of Johnson were located in 1973, in the possession of the musician's half-sister Carrie Thompson, and were not widely published until the late 1980s.

Five significant dates from his career are documented: Monday, Thursday and Friday, November 23, 26, and 27, 1936 at a recording session in San Antonio, Texas. Seven months later, on Saturday and Sunday, June 19–20, 1937, he was in Dallas, Texas at another session. His death certificate was discovered in 1968, and lists the date and location of his death. Two marriage licenses for Johnson have also been located in county records offices. Other facts about him are less well established. Director Martin Scorsese says in his foreword to Alan Greenberg's filmscript Love In Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson, "The thing about Robert Johnson was that he only existed on his records. He was pure legend."

Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi sometime around May 8, 1911, the 11th child of Julia Major Dodds, who had previously borne 10 children to her husband Charles Dodds. Born out of wedlock, Johnson did not take the Dodds name.

Twenty two-year-old Charles Dodds had married Julia Major in Hazlehurst, Mississippi—about 35 miles (56 km) south of Jackson—in 1889. Charles Dodds owned land and made wicker furniture; his family was well off until he was forced out of Hazlehurst around 1909 by a lynch mob following an argument with some of the more prosperous townsfolk. (There was a family legend that Dodds escaped from Hazlehurst dressed in women's clothing.) Over the next two years, Julia Dodds sent their children one at a time to live with their father in Memphis, where Charles Dodds had adopted the name of Charles Spencer. Julia stayed behind in Hazlehurst with two daughters, until she was evicted for nonpayment of taxes.

By that time she had given birth to a son, Robert, who was fathered by a field worker named Noah Johnson. Unwelcome in Charles Dodds' home, Julia Dodds became an itinerant field worker, picking cotton and living in camps as she moved among plantations. While she worked in the fields, her eight-year-old daughter took care of Johnson. Over the next ten years, Julia Dodds would make repeated attempts to reunite the family, but Charles Dodds never stopped resenting her infidelity. Although Charles Dodds would eventually accept Johnson, he never would forgive his wife for giving birth to him. While in his teens, Johnson learned who his father was, and it was at that time that he began calling himself Robert Johnson.

Around 1914, Robert Johnson moved in with Charles Dodds' family, which by that time included all of Dodds' children by Julia Dodds, as well as Dodds' mistress from Hazlehurst and their two children. Johnson would then spend the next several years in Memphis, and it was reportedly about this time that he began playing the guitar under his older half-brother's tutelage.

Johnson did not rejoin his mother until she had remarried several years later. By the end of the decade, he was back in the Mississippi Delta living with his mother and her new husband, Dusty Willis. Johnson and his stepfather, who had little tolerance for music, did not get along, and Johnson had to slip out of the house to join his musician friends.

It is not known whether Johnson attended school in the Delta during this time. Some later accounts say that he could neither read nor write, while others tell of his beautiful handwriting. In any case, everyone agrees that music was Johnson's first interest, and that he had his start playing the Jew's harp and harmonica in addition to guitar.

Johnson began travelling up and down the Delta, travelling by bus, hopping trains, and sometimes hitchhiking. According to Blues folklore, Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become a great blues musician, he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery’s plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned the guitar so that he could play anything that he wanted, and handed it back to him in return for his soul. Within less than a year’s time, in exchange for his everlasting soul, Robert Johnson became the king of the Delta blues singers, able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard. The source of this legend is unclear, some of Johnson's associates, most notably Johnny Shines, say he fostered this story and image during his lifetime. However, people "in-the-know" often suggest that this story was originally started by the brother-in-law of fellow bluesman Tommy Johnson (no relation, though the two were born just 20 miles apart), and that only later in his life did Robert Johnson pass off the story as his own.

When Johnson arrived in a new town, he would play on street corners or in front of the local barbershop or a restaurant. Anything he earned was based on tips, not salary. He played what his audience asked for—not necessarily his own compositions, and not necessarily blues. With an ability to pick up tunes at first hearing, Johnson had no trouble giving his audiences what they wanted, and certain of his contemporaries, most notably Johnny Shines, later remarked on Johnson's interest in jazz and country. (Many giants of the blues, including Muddy Waters, were not averse to playing the hit songs of the day.) Johnson also had an uncanny ability to establish a rapport with his audience; in every town in which he stopped, Johnson would establish ties to the local community that would serve him well when he passed through again a month or a year later.

Fellow musician Johnny Shines was 17 when he met Johnson in 1933. He estimated that Johnson was maybe a year older than himself. In Samuel Charters' Robert Johnson, the author quotes Shines as saying:

"Robert was a very friendly person, even though he was sulky at times, you know. And I hung around Robert for quite a while. One evening he disappeared. He was kind of peculiar fellow. Robert'd be standing up playing some place, playing like nobody's business. At about that time it was a hustle with him as well as a pleasure. And money'd be coming from all directions. But Robert'd just pick up and walk off and leave you standing there playing. And you wouldn't see Robert no more maybe in two or three weeks.... So Robert and I, we began journeying off. I was just, matter of fact, tagging along."

During this time Johnson established what would be a relatively long-term relationship with Estella Coleman, a woman who was about fifteen years his elder and the mother of musician Robert Lockwood, Jr.. Johnson, however, reportedly also cultivated a woman to look after him each town he played in. Johnson supposedly asked homely young women living in the country with their families whether he could go home with them, and in most cases the answer was yes—until a boyfriend arrived or Johnson was ready to move on.

Around 1936, Johnson sought out H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi, who ran a general store and doubled as a talent scout. Speir, who helped the careers of many blues players, put Johnson in touch with Ernie Oertle, who offered to record the young musician in San Antonio, Texas. At the recording session, held on November 23, 1936 in rooms at the landmark Gunter Hotel which Brunswick Records had set up as a temporary studio, Johnson reportedly performed facing the wall. This has been cited as evidence he was a shy man and reserved performer, a conclusion played up in the inaccurate liner notes of the 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers. Johnson probably was nervous and intimidated at his first time in a makeshift recording studio (a new and alien environment for the musician), but in truth he was probably focusing on the demands of his emotive performances. In addition, playing into the corner of a wall was a sound-enhancing technique that simulated the acoustical booths of better-equipped studios. In the ensuing three-day session, Johnson played 16 selections, and recorded alternate takes for most of these. When the recording session was over, Johnson presumably returned home with cash in his pocket; probably more money than he'd ever had at one time in his life.

Among the songs Johnson recorded in San Antonio were "Come On In My Kitchen", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom", and "Cross Road Blues". "Come on in My Kitchen" included the lines: "The woman I love took from my best friend/Some joker got lucky, stole her back again,/You better come on in my kitchen, it's going to be rainin' outdoors." In "Crossroad Blues", another of his songs, he sang: "I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees./I went to the crossroads, fell down on my knees./I asked the Lord above, have mercy, save poor Bob if you please./Uumb, standing at the crossroads I tried to flag a ride./Standing at the crossroads I tried to flag a ride./Ain't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by."

When his records began appearing, Johnson made the rounds to his relatives and the various children he had fathered to bring them the records himself. The first songs to appear were "Terraplane Blues" and "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", probably the only recordings of his that he would live to hear. "Terraplane Blues" became a moderate regional hit, selling 5,000 copies.

In 1937, Johnson traveled to Dallas, Texas, for another recording session in a makeshift studio at the Brunswick Record Building, 508 Park Avenue. Eleven records from this session would be released within the following year. Among them were the three songs that would largely contribute to Johnson's posthumous fame: "Stones in My Passway", "Me and the Devil", and "Hellhound On My Trail". "Stones In My Passway" and "Me And The Devil" are both about betrayal, a recurrent theme in country blues. The terrifying "Hell Hound On My Trail"—utilising another common theme of fear of the Devil—is often considered to be the crowning achievement of blues-style music. Other themes in Johnson's music include impotence ("Dead Shrimp Blues" and "Phonograph Blues") and infidelity ("Terraplane Blues", "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day" and "Love in Vain").

Six of Johnson's blues songs mention the devil or some form of the supernatural. In "Me And The Devil" he began, "Early this morning when you knocked upon my door,/Early this morning, umb, when you knocked upon my door,/And I said, ' Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go,'" before leading into "You may bury my body down by the highway side,/ You may bury my body, uumh, down by the highway side,/So my old evil spirit can get on a Greyhound bus and ride."

It has been suggested that the Devil in these songs does not solely refer to the Christian model of Satan, but equally to the African trickster god, Legba.

In the last year of his life, Johnson is believed to have traveled to St. Louis and possibly Illinois, and then to some states in the East. He spent some time in Memphis and traveled through the Mississippi Delta and Arkansas. By the time he died, at least six of his records had been released in the South as race records.

His death occurred on August 16, 1938, at the age of twenty-seven at a country crossroads near Greenwood, Mississippi. He had been playing for a few weeks at a country dance in a town about 15 miles (24 km) from Greenwood.

There are a number of accounts and theories regarding the events preceding Johnson's death. One of these is that one evening Johnson began flirting with a woman at a dance. One version of this rumor says she was the wife of the juke joint owner who unknowingly provided Johnson with a bottle of poisoned whiskey from her husband, while another suggests she was a married woman he had been secretly seeing. Researcher Mack McCormick claims to have interviewed Johnson's alleged poisoner in the 1970s, and obtained a tacit admission of guilt from the man. When Johnson was offered an open bottle of whiskey, his friend and fellow blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson knocked the bottle out of his hand, informing him that he should never drink from an offered bottle that has already been opened. Johnson allegedly said, "don't ever knock a bottle out of my hand". Soon after, he was offered another open bottle of whiskey and accepted it, and it was that bottle that was laced with strychnine. Johnson is reported to have started to feel ill into the evening after drinking from the bottle and had to be helped back to his room in the early morning hours. Over the next three days, his condition steadily worsened and witnesses reported that he died in a convulsive state of severe pain - symptoms which are consistent with strychnine poisoning. Strychnine was readily available at the time as it was a common pesticide, and although it is a very bitter-tasting substance it is extremely toxic, and a small quantity dissolved in a harsh-tasting solution such as whiskey could possibly have gone unnoticed, but (over a period of days due to the reduced dosage) still produced the symptoms and eventual death that Johnson experienced.

The precise location of his grave remains a source of ongoing controversy, and three different markers have been erected at supposed burial sites outside of Greenwood. Research in the 1980s and 1990s strongly suggests Johnson was buried in the graveyard of the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist church near Morgan City, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, in an unmarked grave. A cenotaph memorial was placed at this location in 1990 paid for by Columbia Records and numerous smaller contributions made through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund. More recent research by Stephen LaVere (including statements from Rosie Eskridge, the wife of the supposed gravedigger) indicates that the actual grave site is under a big pecan tree in the cemetery of the Little Zion Church north of Greenwood along Money Road. Sony Music has placed a marker at this site.

In 1938, Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who had heard Johnson's records, sought him out to book him for the first "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. On learning of Johnson's death, Hammond replaced him with Big Bill Broonzy, but still played two of Johnson's records from the stage. Robert Johnson has a son, Claude Johnson, and grandchildren who currently reside in a town near Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

Johnson's recordings have remained continuously available since John Hammond convinced Columbia Records to compile the first Johnson LP, King of the Delta Blues Singers, in 1961. A sequel LP, assembling the rest of what could be found of Johnson's recordings at that time, was issued in 1970. In the UK, both albums were issued as a two-LP set by Blue Diamond Records in 1985 under the same name, King of the Delta Blues Singers. An omnibus two-CD set (The Complete Recordings) was released in 1990 [Sony/Columbia Legacy 46222], containing all 41 known recordings of his 29 compositions.

A 1996 plastic jewel-case remaster of the Complete set [Sony/Columbia Legacy 64916] corrected fidelity and pitch problems from the cardboard-packaged box. The more recent CD re-releases of "King of the Delta Blues Singers" Volumes 1 & 2 improve the sound quality far more dramatically, but don't include 10 alternate takes (and two accidental introductions) found on Complete. Volume one includes a recently discovered alternate take of "Traveling Riverside Blues" which is not included on the Complete collection. This now brings the number of known Johnson recordings to forty-two.

Blues musician and historian Elijah Wald feels that Johnson's major influence is on rock—particularly on white rock. He has made the controversial appraisal that "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note." Assessments such as Eric Clapton's of Johnson as "the most important blues musician who ever lived," says Wald, attempt to expand Johnson's reputation. Wald argues that Johnson, although well traveled and always admired in his performances, was little heard by the standards of his time and place, and his records even less so. ("Terraplane Blues", sometimes described as Johnson's only hit record, outsold his others but was still a minor success.) If one had asked black blues fans about Robert Johnson in the first twenty years after his death, writes Wald, "the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled 'Robert who?'" Musical associates such as Johnny Shines also stated that in live performances, Johnson often did not focus on his dark and complex original compositions, but instead pleased audiences by performing more well-known pop standards of the day.

After decades of obscurity, Johnson's influence was kick-started in 1961, when Columbia Records compiled the album King of the Delta Blues Singers from Johnson's recordings. This and bootleg recordings brought his work wide distribution, and a fan base grew around them which included future rock stars such as Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. When Keith Richards was first introduced to Johnson's music by his band mate Brian Jones, he replied, "Who is the other guy playing with him?", not realizing it was all Johnson playing on one guitar. Clapton described Johnson's music as "the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice." The song "Crossroads" by British psychedelic blues rock band Cream is a cover version of Johnson's "Cross Road Blues", about the legend of Johnson selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, although Johnson's original lyrics ("Standin' at the crossroads, tried to flag a ride") suggest he was merely hitchhiking rather than signing away his soul to Lucifer in exchange for being a great blues musician.

"Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way."—Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, on NPR's Fresh Air, recorded in 2004.

An important aspect of Johnson's singing, and indeed of all Delta Blues singing styles, and also of Chicago blues guitar playing, is the use of microtonality—his subtle inflections of pitch are part of the reason why his singing conveys such powerful emotion.

John P. Hammond (the son of the aforementioned John Hammond) produced a documentary in the early 1990s about Johnson's life in the Delta area.

In the summer of 2003, Rolling Stone magazine listed Johnson at number five in their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Johnson's recorded work has become more widely heard since the Columbia double CD release, and some have opined that the recordings run too fast. Support for this comes from passages of Johnson's songs that some believe his guitar playing sound constrained, and some of his vocals sound odd and robotic. Thus the claim is that some (or all) of Johnson's songs were intentionally or accidentally sped up before or after the recording process. Speeding up recordings has been a common practice in the recording industry, as it tends to make things sound more energetic. However, there has been a definitive lack of proof as to whether or not the recordings have actually been sped up, and this may be a matter of subjective explanation.

Some claim that when Johnson's music is slowed down (one article even states slowed down 20%), Johnson's music sounds more "natural." The guitar sounds warmer, more full, and more in line with other recordings from the late 1930s. His voice becomes more expressive, although it loses some of Johnson's trademark emotional "whine." Conversely, when some songs are slowed down (5-10%), Johnson's guitar playing begins to sound sloppy, and he seems to make tempo mistakes that a professional player would not make at slower speeds, and so there seems to be a lack of clarity about whether the claim is that all or only some of the songs that have been sped up.

A supporting argument for the sped up view is that in many of Johnson's songs, he would be playing extremely high up on the neck of the guitar, and in some cases he is said to be playing higher than there are frets on the guitar. For example, the intro of "Walkin' Blues" sounds like it is played at the fifteenth fret of a guitar in standard tuning. The argument here is that acoustic guitars generally do not have that many frets. This would seem to indicate that the recordings are sped up, since it would be difficult or impossible for Johnson to play this high. However this view is mistaken, because most guitars made since 1910 have at least sixteen frets, and Johnson's Gibson L-1 had 18 frets. It is also quite possible that he tuned his guitar higher than concert pitch. For playing slide guitar, the extra tension from tuning sharp can be an advantage.
This theory also does not take into consideration aspects of how slide guitar is played. By using a slide, the strings do not use frets to make sound, the pitch of the sound is determined by where the slide is placed on the strings, and so a slide guitarist can play extremely high notes that are impossible to play with traditional fretting technique. "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day" is an example.

The strongest argument against the position that his work was consistently either speeded or slowed is that it would have been impossible: it couldn't have happened at all of the original sessions due to equipment failure, since the sessions were months apart. And it couldn't have happened in some version of post-production, since the tracks were released over the course of years, and many of them were never released on 78 at all. So if there indeed are speed anomalies, they should be consistent only within one session or for a particular group of releases--and the proponents of the speed controversy are all claiming there is some consistent alteration.
There is also controversy over whether the original recording masters were transferred from "wax" onto analog tape before being digitally restored. If this were the case, the tape machine used could quite easily have been out of calibration, thus pitching up the notes and increasing the tempo.

There is a strong possibility that this speed controversy comes from an attempt to explain the tonally tinny, hyper-treble end product of a sub-standard studio recording from the 1930s.

Tributes

The Allman Brothers Band have covered in live performances "Drunken Hearted Boy" and others. Their guitarist, Dickey Betts, has covered "Come On In My Kitchen" on his most recent live album.

The Blues Brothers covered "Sweet Home Chicago" in their eponymous 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Rory Block released in 2006 an album consisting solely of covers of Johnson's songs, The Lady and Mr. Johnson. In addition, she had previously performed or recorded "Come on in My Kitchen", "Hellhound on My Trail", "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day", "Rambling on My Mind", "Walking Blues", "Cross Road Blues", "Kindhearted Man" (a reworking of "Kind Hearted Woman Blues"), "Terraplane Blues", "When You Got a Good Friend", "Me and the Devil Blues", "Stones in My Passway", "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Traveling Riverside Blues". Eric Clapton released in 2004 an album consisting solely of covers of Johnson's songs, Me and Mr. Johnson, and in the following year released a DVD and CD combo entitled Sessions For Robert J. In addition, he had previously performed or recorded "I'm a Steady Rolling Man", "Malted Milk", "Walkin' Blues", "From Four until Late", "Crossroads", "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day", and "Ramblin' on My Mind". While playing with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, he recorded "Ramblin' on My Mind". With Cream he recorded "Cross Road Blues" (reworked as "Crossroads") and "Four until Late". To quote "I have never found anthing more deeply soulful than Robert Johnson. His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in a human voice, really." Delaney & Bonnie and Friends recorded "Come On in My Kitchen" on their 1970 album To Bonnie from Delaney. In addition, their live album On Tour with Eric Clapton (also 1970) includes the song "Tribute to Johnson", co-authored by Delaney Bramlett (as introduced on the album) about "Robert Johnson, one of our favorite singers". Bob Dylan ("Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "Milkcow's Calf Blues", "Rambling On My Mind", "I'm A Steady Rolling Man") Fleetwood Mac ("Hellhound On My Trail", "Kind Hearted Woman", "Preachin' Blues", "Dust My Broom", "Sweet Home Chicago") The Grateful Dead ("Walkin' Blues") "Deal," a Dead original by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, also hints lyrically at Johnson's "Last Fair Deal Gone Down". "Walkin' Blues" was also performed by Bob Weir solo and with his band Ratdog. Hot Tuna ("Walkin' Blues") The song was also performed in solo gigs by Jorma Kaukonen. Peter Green Splinter Group (all 29 songs) John P. Hammond ("32-20 Blues", "Milkcow's Calf Blues", "Traveling Riverside Blues", "Stones in My Passway", "Crossroads Blues", "Hellbound Blues" ("Hellhound On My Trail"), "Me and the Devil Blues", "Walking Blues", "Come on in My Kitchen", "Preaching Blues", "Sweet Home Chicago", "When You Got a Good Friend", "Judgment Day", "Rambling Blues") Keb' Mo ("Come on in My Kitchen", "Last Fair Deal Gone Down", "Kindhearted Woman Blues", "Love in Vain") Led Zeppelin ("Traveling Riverside Blues", "The Lemon Song") Zeppelin's version of Johnson's "Traveling Riverside Blues" consisted of an amalgamation of several Johnson songs (such as "Cross Road Blues" and "Kind Hearted Woman") as well as new material by the band. Furthermore, lyrics from Johnson's "Traveling Riverside Blues" were used by Zeppelin in "The Lemon Song". Robert Lockwood, Jr. ("32-20 Blues", "Stop Breakin’ Down Blues", "Little Queen of Spades", "I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom", "Ramblin’ on My Mind", "Love in Vain Blues", "Kind Hearted Woman Blues", "Walking Blues", "I’m a Steady Rollin’ Man", "Sweet Home Chicago") Phish "Alumni Blues", an early Phish original, was influenced by Johnson's "Walking Blues" and both songs share opening lyrics. "Crossroads Blues" was included in Phish's live repertoire from 1993–98. The Radiators have covered many songs in their 4200 known live performances. "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" are staples of their live shows (having been performed over 100 times each). Other songs that have been covered approximately a dozen times or less include "Come on in My Kitchen", "Cross Roads Blues", "Dead Shrimp Blues", "From Four until Late". "Hellhound on My Trail", "I'm a Steady Rollin' Man", "Love in Vain", "Me and the Devil Blues", "Ramblin' on My Mind", "Sweet Home Chicago'", "Walkin' Blues" "When You Got a Good Friend". Tim McGraw refers to Robert Johnson/Devil legend in the opening and closing lines in "How Bad Do you Want it" on the Live Like You Were Dying album . The Rolling Stones ("Love in Vain", "Stop Breaking Down") "You know, you think you're getting a handle on the blues, and then you hear Robert Johnson..."—Keith Richards The White Stripes covered "Stop Breaking Down Blues", dropping "Blues" in the title, on their self-titled debut album. They have also recorded "Stop Breaking Down Blues" as the B-side to their 2002 single, "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground". They have covered many Robert Johnson songs on stage, including "Stones in My Passway" and "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day". Widespread Panic played "Me and The Devil" on their 1988 debut album Space Wrangler; "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" appeared on the 2005 Live at Myrtle Beach release. They have also played "Crossroads" live. Lucinda Williams covered "Stop Breaking Down Blues" on her debut album Ramblin', also dropping the word "Blues" from the title. Cassandra Wilson, mostly known as a jazz singer, covered "They're Red Hot" on her blues-influenced album Belly Of The Sun, calling it "Hot Tamales". Johnny Winter ("Kind Hearted Woman", "Me and the Devil", "When You Got a Good Friend") Red Hot Chili Peppers ("They're Red Hot" appeared on Blood Sugar Sex Magik) Gov't Mule ("32/20 Blues" and "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day" ) Joe Bonamassa did a cover of "Walking Blues" in 2003 on his album Blues Deluxe. Steve Miller Band ("Come on in my Kitchen" appeared on The Joker) Paul Butterfield Blues Band covered "Walking Blues" on their debut album The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Gun Club covered "Preachin' Blues" on their album Fire of Love, but renamed the song "Preaching the blues". Jeff Martin of The Tea Party has long been a fan of the Blues and Robert Johnson in particular. The song "Sun Going Down" from Splendor Solis begins with a quote from "Me and the Devil" ("I woke up this morning, someone was knocking at my door. And I said hello sweet Satan, I believe it's time to go.") and the song "Black Snake Blues" from Exile and the Kingdom is a tribute to Johnson. The Mountain Goats ("Hellhound on My Trail" appeared on "Nothing for Juice")

Songs

Most of the collection, minus a few songs, are available on The Complete Recordings (1990, 1996)"32-20 Blues" (.32-.20 is a revolver or rifle cartridge) "Come on in My Kitchen" (two versions—only one appears on "Complete" collection. Both versions of the song appear on Snapper Music's 2007 Robert Johnson and the Last of the Great Mississippi Blues singers 6 CD set.) "Cross Roads Blues" (two versions) "Dead Shrimp Blues" "Drunken Hearted Man" (two versions) "From Four Till Late" "Hellhound on My Trail" (see also: Hellhound) "Honeymoon Blues" "I'm a Steady Rollin' Man" "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" (sometimes called "I Believe My Time Ain't Long") "If I Had Possession over Judgment Day" "Kind Hearted Woman Blues" (two versions—only one appears on "Complete" collection.Both versions of the song appear on Snapper Music's 2007 Robert Johnson and the Last of the Great Mississippi Blues singers 6 CD set) "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" "Little Queen of Spades" (two versions) "Love in Vain" (two versions) "Malted Milk" (malted milk is a sweet beverage) "Me and the Devil Blues" (two versions) "Milk Cow's Calf Blues" (two versions) "Phonograph Blues" (two versions) "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil)" "Rambling on My Mind" (two versions) "Stones in My Passway" "Stop Breakin' Down Blues" (two versions) "Sweet Home Chicago" "Terraplane Blues" "They're Red Hot" "Traveling Riverside Blues" (two versions—only one appears on The Complete Collection. Both versions of the song appear on Snapper Music's 2007 Robert Johnson and the Last of the Great Mississippi Blues Singers 6 CD set) "Walkin' Blues" "When You Got a Good Friend" (two versions)

A biography reassessed and revised upon the eve of the 60th anniversary of his death.

Eleven 78 rpm records were issued during Johnson's lifetime and one posthumously. They were just "race" records then--another casual attempt at trying to capitalize on the blues. Needless to say, they were enough to establish his identity wherever he went and afford him a degree of fame and fortune for the short time he lived after their release.

Including the material that never saw issuance on 78's, there are 29 compositions and alternate versions of nearly half of them. Including the recent discovery of a previously unknown alternate take of one of Johnson's recordings, a total of 42 recordings remain to this day--the only recordings of one of the true geniuses of American music, blues singer extraordinaire Robert Johnson.

For the people too young to have known him; for those not fortunate enough to have shared the same time and space as he; for those who knew of him during his lifetime, but never took the time or had the inclination to seek him out; and for those who did and failed, due to one cause or another, his records are all you will have. But in the minds of countless others, there remain the memories of a jook-joint musician--what he looked like, what he did when he played music, how he was crazy about women, and all the countless intangible aspects of meeting and seeing another human being. To most of them, however, he was just a rambling musician.

He was rambling so fast, in fact, that he rarely gave anyone more than a glimpse at his shining star. Indeed, he hardly received more than a casual, passing glance, and was seen at the time by only a few of his musical associates and even fewer aficionados to be the consummate artist he was.

Moreover, only his family and a handful of childhood friends knew anything of significance about him, and most of those who survive have only recently come to realize his seminal importance in the world of today's popular music.

To his half-sister, Carrie Spencer, he was the baby brother who got caught in the upheaval that her family underwent so many years ago. They became very close over the years, and upon his death, "Mama and them didn't want to tell me about Robert bein' poisoned. They knew it'd hurt me so. But by them not tellin' me and lettin' him be buried by the county, why, you know that hurt me even more."

To his late stepfather, Dusty Willis, he was no good...because he wouldn't get behind that mule in the mornin', plow behind him all day long, all week long, all year long, all for nothing--to be told at the end of the year, if you did well, that you only owed the bossman $300 on next year's crop!
To his friend R.L. Windum, he was the schoolboy with whom he used to blow harmonica and who grew up to be a fine and famous guitar player: "Robert come back here every year, wantin' me to go with him, but I never went; just never followed that life."

To Willie Brown, he was the little boy to whom he showed the rudiments of guitar--how to make chords, when to change, how to play anything he wanted.

To Son House, he was the little boy who could play harp pretty good and would slip off from home to hear him and Willie Brown. When the youngster tried to play the older musician's guitar, Son scolded him, "Don't do that, Robert. You drive people nuts. You can't play nothin'." Years later, Son could only stand off and blink.

To Ike Zinnerman, he was the fellow who used to stay away from his wife all weekend to learn the guitar and the blues and songs Ike played.

To Robert Lockwood, Jr., he was the man who lived with his mother. "Before Robert come along, I always wanted to be a piano player, but he got me offa that and onto the guitar. He was such an inspiration to me-he took time with me and showed me things, and he didn't do that with nobody--I never thought about the piano again."

To Johnny Shines, he was a living idol; someone he tagged along behind and from whom he tried to learn about music and the guitar. "When I first heard him play. I felt then that I had to learn to play like him. Here was somebody that was doin' the things that I felt like was right and naturally I was quite inspired by it."

To Don Law, he was the shy, young bluesman he recorded in Texas in the 1930s who "had never been off the plantation on which he was born!" Law's other recollections of Johnson are equally distorted, inaccurate, and misleading.

But to John Hammond, champion of black music and talent scout par excellence, he was the greatest primitive blues singer of all time. "When I was selecting talent for my first Spirituals to Swing Concert, I sent for Robert Johnson. I wanted black music to make an impression on a white audience and we got the finest exponents of blues, jazz and gospel music that we could find. Can you imagine how famous Robert Johnson would be today had he been able to make it?"

And to the world at large, however unaware it might be, Robert Johnson is the most influential bluesman of all time and the person most responsible for the shape popular music has taken in the last six decades!

Charles and Harriet Dodds and Gabriel and Lucinda Brown Majors were all born into slavery--Mr. Dodds in North Carolina, all the others in Mississippi. Their children, Charles Dodds, Jr. and Julia Ann Majors, were married in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in February 1889.

Charlie Dodds, Jr. became a successful and well-respected, land-owning farmer, carpenter, and wicker furniture maker, and he and his wife raised six daughters and a son. Illness put an early end to the lives of two of the daughters, and Charlie's mistress, Serena, gave birth to two sons before a personal vendetta by the prominent Marchetti Brothers forced Dodds to flee Mississippi and take up residence in Memphis around 1907 under the assumed name of Spencer.

After his successful, yet clandestine departure, he sent for Serena and her sons, as well as some of Julia's children, and they all joined the new "Mr. 'C. D.' Spencer" in Memphis and began a new life. Julia and two daughters remained in Hazlehurst, but the Marchetti's soon uprooted them from their house and displaced them from their land.

In the meantime, Robert Johnson was born May 8, 1911, in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, to Julia Dodds and Noah Johnson, the man whom she favored in Mr. Dodds' absence. However, little Robert didn't stay in Hazlehurst long. Still a babe-in-arms, his mother took him and his baby sister, Carrie, and signed on with a Delta labor supplier. After a couple of very hard and unsettling seasons in migrant labor camps, they all were living in Memphis with, and as, the family of Charles Spencer.

It was a full house at the Spencers' in 1914. Charlie had a wife and a mistress and children by both of them, in addition to Robert. And although no friction between the two women is recalled, Julia decided to leave her children and make her own way elsewhere.

And so, Memphis became Robert's home for the next couple of years. He lived with the Spencers in their Handwerker Hill residence until around 1918, when it became apparent that he needed more supervision than they were capable of giving him. He was a strong-willed child; his obedience was waning and Mr. Spencer eventually decided that he would do better under his mother's care.

He took the Spencer name with him to Robinsonville, a small but thriving northern Mississippi cotton community some 20 miles south of Memphis. He lived there with his mother and new stepfather, Willie "Dusty" Willis, a hardworking little dark fellow whom Julia had married in October of 1916, and the two of them raised him to manhood.

In his early teens, Robert Spencer took an interest in music. His initial attraction to the jew's harp was soon supplanted by the harmonica, which became his main instrument for the next few years. He and his pal, R. L. Windum, traded verses of songs and accompanied each other on harps until they were both young men.

As a teenager, Robert was told of his real father and began introducing himself as a Johnson, although he retained the Spencer name through the mid-1920s while he received the rudiments of an education at the Indian Creek School at Commerce, Mississippi, also known as the Abbay & Leatherman plantation, on which the Willis' were living.

Not being a zealous student, problems with his eyesight afforded Robert an excuse to quit school. It was a malady that plagued him over the years. His half-sister Carrie had bought his first glasses for him in the early 1920s in Helena, Arkansas, but he didn't wear them much. In later years, many of his associates would recall that he had "one bad eye." Reportedly, a small cataract afflicted him from time to time, but later disappeared.

The guitar became an interest during the late 1920s. He made a rack for his harp out of baling wire and string and was soon picking out appropriate accompaniments for his harp and voice. Leroy Carr's 1928 "How Long-How Long Blues" in recalled as being one of his favorite songs at that time.

As in the case with any aspiring musician, he looked to the closest source for information and help. Willie Brown, a musician of some renown and abilities, lived in Robinsonville in those days, and he tried to help and show Robert all he could. The then omnipresent and now ultra-legendary Charlie Patton regularly visited Robinsonville, playing "jook" houses, sometimes in the company of Brown, and between the two of them, Robert got all the help and inspiration he could handle.

Robert's private life got serious about this time as well. A good looking boy, he had very little trouble making himself popular with the girls. In fact, he had more trouble keeping his hands off them, his arms from around them, and himself away from them. Eventually, it would be his downfall, but for the time being, most of the ladies were single. One particular one, however, caught his eye, and he asked her to be his wife.

Even though Robert was playing music a great deal at this time--mainly the popular recorded blues of the day--and learning even more from Brown, Patton, Myles Robson, Ernest "Whiskey Red" Brown, and other locals, he was reluctant to consider himself anything but a farmer when he married Virginia Travis in Penton, Mississippi, in February, 1929. They began their life together sharing a home with Robert's older half-sister Bessie and her husband, Granville Hines, on the Kline plantation just east of Robinsonville.

Virginia became pregnant in the summer of 1929, and Robert was not only a proud expectant father, but, naturally, a protective one as well. During a ride through the country in Granville's old car, Robert is humorously recalled warning Granville when he took a bad spot in the road just a little too fast for Virginia's comfort, "Man, be careful! My wife's percolatin."

Robert's pride was short-lived, however. Whatever hopes and dreams he may have had for his wife and family-to-be were all dashed in one fell swoop. Both Virginia and the baby died in childbirth in April 1930. She was 16 years old!

If anything soothed Robert's wounds, it may have been his music. Less than two months later, close to the first of June, Son House came to live in Robinsonville at the request of Willie Brown, with whom, along with Charlie Patton and Louise Johnson, he had traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, and recorded for Paramount Records.

House, a precarious combination of bluesman and preacher, brought with him an intensity in his music that was shared with no one, not even Patton. It was the rawest, most direct pure emotion Robert had ever heard, and he followed House and Brown wherever they went. There were four jook joints in and around Robinsonville in those days, and against his folks' wishes, Robert would find out at which one they were going to be and slip off from home to take it all in. He had been able to play some of Brown's music for some time, especially "The Jinx Blues," but now he had someone even more to his liking to study. Son's impressions upon the youngster became permanently etched in his musical mind and style. They could still be distinctly discerned by 1936 and 1937, when he recorded, and mark much of his finest, most powerful work.

Before too long, though, Robert realized that if he ever wanted to be anything other than a sharecropper, he needed to get himself and his music together. With that in mind, when wanderlust took hold of him, he decided to leave home to try and locate his real father. All he had to go on was his birthplace, the small, lush town some 210 miles to the south whence his mother had brought him in a bundle.

Hazlehurst, Mississippi, named after the chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad, George H. Hazlehurst, was to provide Robert, in addition to a good living for the next couple of years, an ideal proving ground for his talents.

The whole country was deep in the Depression at that time, but Hazlehurst, as well as the whole of central Mississippi, was fortunate to have the WPA building highways through its territories, not only providing work for all that wanted it, but some cash money on which to have a good time come Saturday night.

The jook joints of the road gangs and lumber camps set the stage for Robert, and bluesman Ike Zinnerman became his coach and mentor. By then, Robert had found out that women would provide everything else for him and in Martinsville, a lumber camp a few miles south of Hazlehurst, he singled out a kind and loving woman more than ten years his senior, who had been married twice before and had three small children.

Robert and Calletta "Callie" Craft were married at the Copiah County courthouse in May 1931 and kept their marriage a secret from everyone. She idolized Robert, fussed over him, cooked for him, worked for him, treated him like a king, even served him his breakfast in bed! She trusted him away from her, too, and had no qualms about him staying all night at Zinnerman's to learn what he could about music.

Ike Zinnerman was born in Grady, Alabama, in the early years of the century and had always told his wife that he had learned to play guitar in a graveyard at midnight while sitting atop tombstones. In any event, he could really play the blues and Robert knew it--he attached himself to Ike for the next couple of years and kept the older man up late into the night learning what he could about the guitar and the blues Ike played on it.

When he wasn't at home with Callie or with Ike, Robert, on a slim chance, might be found working, picking cotton, but more often than not, he would be sitting alone and to himself going over what Ike had been teaching him. He began keeping a little book to write his songs in and he'd go off into the nearby woods and sing and pick the blues to himself. He'd play the same tune over and over until he got it just like he wanted it and thought it should be.

On Saturdays, he'd practice his lessons by performing for the public on the steps of the courthouse during the day and at any number of local jook joints from Saturday evening about dark, sometimes until late Sunday night. At first he and Ike played together, and occasionally he might have played with local favorites, Tommy Johnson and his brothers (no kin) from nearby Crystal Springs, but as time went by, and he became more confident of his own abilities, he played more by himself.

He worked the little country suppers that were regularly held at Martinsville and neighboring Beauregard and Galatin. Occasionally he'd hitchhike out east to Georgetown or up to Jackson to play with Johnny Temple and his friends, but he usually stayed around home. In later years, he was content to be at home wherever he was, but at that time, home was where his wife was.

Callie loved to dance and she frequently went with him on his playing jobs. Sometimes she'd sit on his knee while he played a number or two, but usually his legs and feet were too busy keeping time. He'd flail his legs up and down and back and forth at the same time and his feet would get a terrific rhythm going in accompaniment to his music. When somebody else played, though, Robert might dance. He liked to tap dance and his agility is still recalled with a certain respect.

But respect wasn't something Robert received in abundance. Upon becoming a professional musician, his respectability, in the eyes of those who had to put in many hours' work in the heat of the sun every day, was replaced by a mild contempt. He wasn't a rough-and-tumble guy. Robert Johnson was a small man, small boned. He had long delicate fingers, beautiful hands, enviably wavy hair, and appeared a good deal younger than he acted. Physically, he wasn't the type of man who commanded much respect. In addition, it eventually became clear that he wanted more out of life than most others could think of for themselves and, of course, more than he alone could provide for himself. To attain his ends, he allowed himself to be kept by an older woman, who no one knew was his wife, while always sporting nice clothes and well-shined shoes. Occasionally, he would go to church, but Sundays usually found him wearing off Saturday night getting ready for Sunday's fun. All told, what respect Robert did receive was due to his abilities as a blues player and singer. He was good at that and everyone knew it--everyone from the good-time, Saturday-night-every-night people to the wide-eyed youngster and the hero-worshiping kid. And despite all the social marks against him, Robert developed quite a local following around Hazlehurst and was known to everyone as simply "R.L.".

He told everyone that asked that the initials stood for Robert Lonnie, the latter like another, more famous musician named Johnson. That was only half right--his mother had named him Robert Leroy. (She liked the name Leroy and also gave it to her other son, Charles Melvin Leroy Dodds, Robert's older half-brother.) But he liked the way Lonnie played and he liked associating himself with him--an affinity which was distinctly displayed many years later in two of his own recordings.

This extended sojourn to southern Mississippi in the early 1930s was a very important stage in Robert Johnson's life. During his stay in Copiah County, whether he was successful in locating his father or not, he developed the personal traits that marked him as the man he was to be the rest of his life. Most importantly though, his musical talent flowered and bloomed in Hazlehurst, and when he thought he was ready for more exciting territory, he packed up Callie and the kids and slipped away to the Delta, unbeknownst to her family and friends.

Mrs. Johnson, despite her full body and well-roundedness, was not a strong, healthy woman. Her efforts to maintain her small family eventually got the best of her in Clarksdale. Evidently, her breakdown got the best of Robert, too, for when she called home to Hazlehurst for her family to retrieve her, it was in desperation--Robert had deserted her. Callie died a few years later and though Robert returned to Copiah County in later years, neither she nor her family ever saw him again.

A trip home was in order, and Robinsonville was made to stand up and take notice of Robert. Son House and Willie Brown were very surprised at his musical development since he'd been gone, and they openly acknowledged his improvements with acceptance and praise. They had to--both they and their audiences were acutely aware that Robert had been able to surpass them, both in abilities and appeal.

He'd returned to Robinsonville to see his mother and kin as well as to show himself off to Willie and Son, and he stayed around for a couple of months playing on the street corners and in the jook joints. He would continue to return and stay a few months at a time, but it would never be his home again. Robinsonville was a farming community, and he was finally no farmer. He had to move on--on to something more in line with what he had in mind for himself--more in keeping with what he thought about himself.

One of the most wide-open, musically active towns in the Delta in those days was on the Arkansas riverside, and it became Robert's home base for the rest of his short life. Although he traveled up and down the river playing in levee camps, for road gangs, and in the jook joints of the surrounding countryside, visiting family and friends in Robinsonville and Memphis, and even as far afield as Canada and New York in later years, he took the little town of Helena, Arkansas, to be his own.

All the great musicians of the era came through Helena. "Sonny Boy Williamson" (the latter, then known as Little Boy Blue), "Robert Nighthawk", Elmore James, "Honeyboy" Edwards, "Howlin' Wolf", "Hacksaw" Harney, Calvin Frazier, Peter "Memphis Slim" Chatman, Johnny Shines, and countless others performed in Helena's and West Helena's many night clubs and hot spots. Robert had his chance to meet and play with them all--an he did--and left his mark on most of them, too.

There was one special young fellow to whom Robert took a liking, undoubtedly as a result of his living with the boy's mother. (Estella Coleman was good to Robert. She loved him and cared for him. Robert more than repaid her kindness and became a mentor to her son.) He was named Robert, too, and wasn't much younger than him. Although named Robert Lockwood, Jr. after his real father, he was soon known as "Robert, Jr.", after his "stepdaddy", Robert Johnson.

The youngster displayed a natural aptitude for music even before he met Johnson, but it began to take definite shape under his tutelage. Johnson showed much of what he knew to the younger man and over the next four or five years imparted to him, so that it would become his own, many of the characteristics of the Johnson style.

While basing himself in Helena with Stella and Robert, Jr., Johnson played all over the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta- -Clarksdale, Rosedale, Friars Point, Lula, Coahoma, Midnight, Inverness, Moorhead, Itta Bena, Tchula, Drew, Jonestown, Yazoo City, Hollandale, Greenville, Leland, Shaw, Gunnison, Beulah, Lobdell, Lamont, Winterville; and Tunica, Robinsonville, Clack, and Walls in the northern Delta as well as Marianna, Hughes, Brickeys, Marvell, Arkansas and some little places that didn't even have names! The word would go out that Robert Johnson was going to be at such and such a place and the people would come. They knew they'd have a good time and hear some fine music if they went where he was. From all reports, they were right.

Robert Johnson was protective about his style of playing music and was acutely aware of overly watchful eyes. He wouldn't show aspiring musicians how to play his songs--that was his business and his living. If he was asked how he played something, he might say, "Just like you", and be through with it. If someone was eyeing him too closely for his comfort, he might get up in the middle of a song, make some feeble excuse to leave the room, and be gone for months. This reported practice of protection and disappearance all seemed very quirky until research undertaken in the early 1990's has revealed that Johnson may have been guarding a method of tuning his guitar that he wanted no others to discover, not even his own student.

In any event, and for whatever reason, Robert Johnson became a stone traveler. He developed a penchant for it. Awake or asleep, anytime of the day or night, he was ready to go anywhere, even back the way he'd just come. Traveling was, in and of itself, the main thing.

Moving around the way he did and playing in so many different places to so many different people all the time, he had to, out of necessity, be able to play almost anything which was requested of him. In addition to the blues for which he was known, he developed a very well-rounded repertoire that included all the pop tunes of the day and yesterday, hillbilly tunes, polkas, square dances, sentimental songs, and ballads. Among the more common pieces he played were, "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby," "My Blue Heaven," and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"!

In having to learn the many kinds of music which he had to play, Robert developed a very unusual talent. He could hear a piece just once over the radio or phonograph or from someone in person and be able to play it. He could be deep in conversation with a group of people and hear something--never stop talking--and later be able to play it and sing it perfectly. It amazed some very fine musicians, and they never understood how he did it. Johnny Shines reported that Robert never had to practice, by the time he got ready to play something he already knew it.

Robert came in contact with a great many people in his travels and they all helped to spread his fame. Naturally, at least half of them were women, and most of them were crazy about him. The other half, the men, would go crazy if their women liked him too much. Robert was pretty hard on "working girls"--they were too tough for him, too--but if he was going to be in any one place for a while, he developed a technique of female selection that generally kept him out of trouble and well fed and cared for, to boot.

As soon as he hit town, he'd find the homeliest woman he could. A few kind words and he knew he'd have a place to stay anytime. His reasons were threefold: 1. She probably wouldn't have a man. 2. No one was likely to be after her or upset if he was with her. 3. Just a little attention would bring him nearly anything he wanted. Accordingly, Robert could be the nicest guy in the world to the ugliest witch in town.

He never stopped loving all the women, though, and out having fun, he might put his arm around anybody's old lady. More than once it got him in a scrape that, being small and no scrapper to begin with, somebody else would have to help him finish.

He had developed a taste for booze, gambling, and an occasional smoke, too, and although he never became habitual with any of them, he did drink to excess more than a few times. He couldn't handle his liquor at all, and when he did drink too much, he would often talk loud, curse his maker, and get in fights, but he was never a sloppy or messy drunk!

Sober, Robert Johnson frequently became a pensive man. Often he could be found sitting alone in a deep study. Over the years, his behavior became progressively moody and erratic, but a drink or two, especially if he had purchased them for himself and a few friends, transformed him into the life of the party.

By the middle 1930's Robert Johnson had been a professional musician for quite a few years. He was very well known all through the Delta areas and had followings in southern Mississippi and eastern Tennessee, too. He had wanted to make records for some years, as his mentors Willie Brown, Son House, and Charlie Patton had done. He wanted to join the ranks of the musicians to whom he had listened and from whom he learned off phonograph records, Kokomo Arnold, Leroy Carr, Skip James, Lonnie Johnson, and others. And so he made contact with the one fellow in Mississippi that he knew would know how he should go about it.

H. C. Speir ran a music store in Jackson, Mississippi, and had an informal studio for making records for personal use on the premises. He was also employed from time to time as a talent scout by various record companies. Paramount recorded a great many people upon his recommendation and he was known in the industry as the possessor of an acute ability to be able to determine on what black people would spend their money. During the times when hardly anybody knew what anyone would buy, this was a great and useful talent, and Speir was constantly in demand for his advice and services.

By the time Robert Johnson was ready to record, Speir had just concluded a deal with the American Record Company that left him rather embittered. His agreement with them included a payment schedule based on the number of sides released, and of the 178 sides he helped them cut in Jackson and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, ARC chose to issue a mere 40! Speir was so discouraged about it that when Robert contacted him and auditioned for him at his music store, all he was willing to do was take his name and pass it along to someone who might do him some good.

Ernie Oertle was the ARC salesman and informal talent scout for the mid-South in the late 1930s, and surprisingly, it was to him that Speir gave Johnson's name and address. After an audition, Oertle decided to take Johnson to San Antonio to record.

Robert's first session in November 1936 yielded the song for which he is most widely remembered, "Terraplane Blues." It was his best seller and a fair-sized hit for Vocalion Records. He was recalled to Texas to cut some more sides the following June, but although Don Law was able to get some very decent material from him--in fact, some of his best--nothing sold as well as "Terraplane." Although six of Johnson's eleven records were still in the Vocalion catalog by December 1938, he wasn't recalled that spring nor even the following summer. Vocalion did release one final 78 in February 1939, but that was probably due to a great deal of interest in him by John Hammond.

The recordings, especially "Terraplane," provided Robert additional fame, and through personal appearances, an increased fortune. He was able to go nearly anywhere and find an eager, expectant crowd. He soon found out that this was true not only in his own area of concentration, but around the country as well.

Robert left Helena with Johnny Shines and Calvin Frazier, who really had to leave--he had killed a couple of men in Arkansas--and they struck out on a trip that lasted about four months. They took Highway 51 north to Chicago through St. Louis, where they met many of the city's famous bluesmen--Peetie Wheatstraw, Henry Townsend, Roosevelt Sykes, Teddy Darby, and others--and Decatur, Illinois, where they played for a square dance.

In Detroit, their next stop, they hooked up with a broadcasting preacher and appeared with him on radio as well as in his personal appearances, both there and in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Calvin stayed in Detroit, where he settled and later recorded for the Library of Congress in 1938, clearly displaying his musical affinity with Johnson, who, with Shines in tow, visited the East Coast briefly, playing in New York and New Jersey. Their return through St. Louis and Memphis reinforced newly-made friendships and renewed old ones, while the whole trip served to spread Johnson's name considerably and widen his audience as well as his own awareness and personal horizons.

During this excursion with Shines, Robert displayed a certain uneasiness with his traveling companion. Frequently he would slip away from him, and Shines would have to guess which way he went and try to catch up with him. It was an uncomfortable feeling for Shines, but he knew of no one better to follow and learn from, so he stuck with it to Memphis.

Urban life presented no great challenge to Robert--he'd feigned urbanity for many years by that time--and he took St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, and New York in easy stride. His musical approach was altered a bit--he began playing with a small combo. He used a pianist and a drummer in a Belzoni jook joint--the drummer had "Robert Johnson" painted in black letters across his bass drum--before a large crowd of people, a good many of them musicians. And he was able to play anything people wanted, he began to concentrate less and less on the blues. He may have gotten away from it almost entirely had it not been for some divine intervention.

It seems so ironic that for all of Johnson's efforts to make himself known to the world through his music, better himself, and upgrade the status quo, at least for himself, he should be heard so distinctly by the one person that had his ear open, pocketbook ready and the power and ability at his beck and call to assist him. And it's even more ironic--indeed, tragic--that it was never to be.

Sometime in June or July of 1938, Robert left Helena and swung through Robinsonville to see his people before taking up a playing offer he had further down in the Delta. There was a jook joint out from Greenwood at the intersection of Highways 82 and 49E, a little place the locals referred to as "Three Forks", "Three Corners" or "Three Points". It was here that Robert played his last job. During the time that he was there, he became friends with a woman on whom another had already staked his claim.

It was a dangerous occupation being a musician in those days: Musicians hated you if you played better than them. Women hated you if you cast your eye on anyone else. And the men hated you if the women loved you. A great musician had to be careful, especially if he didn't care to whose woman he was talkin'. And, by then, Robert was notorious for that.

Robert Johnson had been in the Greenwood locale for at least a couple of weeks, sharing Saturday night plays with "Honeyboy" Edwards, who lived in Greenwood. Robert had made friends with a local woman, who happened to be the wife of the man who ran the jookhouse at "Three Forks". She would come into Greenwood on Mondays, ostensibly to see her sister, but, in fact, to spend time with him.

On one Saturday night of in July, 1938, there was the added attraction of "Sonny Boy Williamson". He wore a belt of harps around his waist in those days, and he was a familiar and popular rambling songster. "Honeyboy" wasn't to arrive until after 10:30 p.m.. By that time, Robert and Sonny were through for the evening. Sonny Boy had left, and never again would Robert perform his great blues!

Musician Houston Stackhouse was not there, but having been close to Robert at one time, he was curious about Robert's death. He was also close to Sonny Boy and so, over a period of time, he was able to obtain a more complete picture of the events of that fateful evening. The tale Stackhouse received from Sonny was verified to the best of knowledge by "Honeyboy", and so it is that we know how Robert Johnson met his fate.

There was a great deal of music and dancing that night, what with a great Delta guitarist and an exemplary harmonicist in attendance, both of whom sang and played their own brand of Delta blues. One can imagine that there was a great deal of good-natured musical rivalry going on, too, but as the evening progressed, a different, less good-natured form of rivalry reared its ugly head.

From all reports, Robert, as he was wont to do, began displaying his attraction to the lady he had been seeing during his time in the locale. He may not have known, nor probably would it have mattered to him, that she was the houseman's wife.

Sonny Boy had been keeping an eye on the evening's proceedings. He had noticed both the attraction Robert displayed for the lady, as well as the marked tension on the countenances of certain persons in the house. He knew that it was a potentially explosive predicament. He was ready.

And so, during a break in the music, Robert and Sonny Boy were standing together when someone brought Robert an open half-pint of whiskey. As Robert was about to drink from it, Sonny Boy knocked it out of his hand and it broke against the ground. Sonny admonished him, "Man, don't never take a drink from a open bottle. You don't know what could be in it." Robert, in turn, retorted, "Man, don't never knock a bottle of whisky outta my hand." And so it was. When a second open bottle was brought to Johnson. Sonny could only stand by, watch, and hope.
It wasn't too long after Robert returned to his guitar that he soon could no longer sing. Sonny took up the slack for him with his voice and harmonica, but after a bit, Robert stopped short in the middle of a number and got up and went outside. He was sick and before the night was over, he was displaying definite signs of poisoning; he was out of his mind. It seems the houseman's jealousy finally got the best of him and someone laced Robert's whisky with strychnine. It got the best of Robert, too!

He was young and virile enough to withstand the poisoning, though, and he made it through the next couple of weeks. Eventually, he was removed from his room in the "Baptist Town" section of Greenwood to a private home on the "Star of the West" plantation, where he received round-the-clock attention... but it was already too late. He lay deathly ill and in his weakened condition, he apparently contracted pneumonia (for which there was no cure prior to 1946), and succumbed on Tuesday, August 16, 1938.

In late 1938, John Hammond began recruiting talent for his first From Spirituals to Swing concert. He called Don Law in Dallas and asked him if he could round up Robert Johnson and get him to New York for his presentation at Carnegie Hall. Hammond thought Johnson the greatest of all the country blues guys and wanted him to fill one of the opening slots in his show. Law could hardly believe his ears. He told Hammond he was making a big mistake. Johnson was so shy that he would freeze up in front of an audience. But Hammond replied that if Law would just get in touch with him, he would take care of the rest. Law got the word to Oertle, who set out to locate Johnson.

It had been more than a year since Oertle had been in contact with him, and it took some digging before he learned the bitter truth and got it back to Law--Johnson had died recently under uncertain circumstances. In truth, Robert Johnson had been poisoned for getting too close to somebody else's woman one time too many.

Robert Johnson was buried in a wooden coffin that was furnished by the county. His mother, brother-in-law, and later his half-sister Carrie all visited his grave in, as recent research indicates, the graveyard of the Little Zion Church just north of Greenwood, Mississippi. That particular stretch of county road, which eventually delivers the traveler to the hamlet of Money, Mississippi, is commonly referred to as, "the Money road".

Hammond, by the way, got Big Bill Broonzy.

Article from Los Angeles Times

Inside the pink brick estate he built with a blues fortune, 72- year-old Claud Johnson cannot shake the habits he formed when he was a poor man.

Three years after moving in, he still has more rooms than he has furniture. Creamy wall-to-wall stretches across the second floor, which is mostly empty. To tell the truth, he's not sure if his wife, Miss Ernestine, has ever gone up there.

He keeps his finicky 25-year-old Mack gravel truck parked nearby, where he can keep an eye on it through the living room window. He drove the truck, by his own estimate, one and a quarter million miles. Even as plants poke up around its chassis, it seems the truck -- not the blues or the house -- is the thing that matters to him.

After Claud won his court battle in 1998 and was recognized as the son of blues music legend Robert Johnson, his lawyer handed him a six-figure cashier's check and begged him to quit hauling gravel. Claud kept hauling gravel for five months.

"After 29 years, it just gets in your blood," said Claud, whose smile reveals glinting gold dental work. "I wake up some mornings, I want to get on that truck."

Late in life, surrounded by the wealth of a stranger, Claud has begun to consider a parent he never knew.

Robert Johnson was a blues guitarist, singer and songwriter. Disgusted with fieldwork, he left his sharecropping family around 1930 and took to the highway, recording, in his unearthly voice, 29 songs.

Johnson's music was so good, other men said, that his talent could not be natural: Delta legend has it that one day at a backcountry crossroad, Johnson waited for the devil to come by. After that, Johnson could play any song he wanted, but he had surrendered his soul.

Johnson was just 27 when he died in August 1938 -- poisoned, most people believe, by a jealous husband in a Greenwood, Miss., juke joint. He was so poor and unloved, it is said, that his body was dumped into the ground without a coffin, and to this day, no one is entirely sure where he's buried. But the brooding songs he wrote and recorded have been discovered and rediscovered by the generations that came after him.

People in Greenwood have become accustomed to the Japanese tourists who come looking for Johnson's grave. Just this year, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Eric Clapton released "Me and Mr. Johnson," a CD devoted entirely to Johnson's blues.

In the midst of all this celebrity is Claud Johnson, who did not know until he was almost 40 that his father had recorded music.

Claud is that rare thing, said blues historian Gayle Dean Wardlow: an ordinary man who was drawn into a legend.

"He's just a little old country boy from Crystal Springs, Miss.," said Wardlow. "It's almost like, I guess, one of those Shakespearean things. He got pulled into it, totally."

Since 1974, Robert Johnson's songbook had been in the hands of a California record producer and blues archivist, Stephen LaVere, who sought out the musician's half-sister, Carrie Thompson, and promised to split the profits evenly.

Over the next decade, that bargain dissolved into a catfight. LaVere was pressuring bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones to pay to use the music. Thompson, meanwhile, had turned against LaVere, and attempted to sever the contract.

Then, in 1990, Sony put out a boxed set of Johnson's music, expecting it to appeal to a narrow audience of blues connoisseurs. It won a Grammy and sold more than 500,000 copies.
When word got out that Robert Johnson's estate could be worth millions, putative heirs appeared by the dozen.

Willis Brumfield, the estate's executor, began getting calls at odd hours from people who claimed they were Johnson's long-lost twin brother or daughter, he said.

"They had some idea it was a fortune of money," Brumfield said, "and it was."

Out of this cacophony emerged Claud Johnson.

A few people already knew who he was. In 1970, a Texas cultural historian named Mack McCormick had traveled to Crystal Springs to search for Robert Johnson's relatives, and found himself face to face with a twinkly old woman, who, he recalls, "just burbled over. She said, 'My boy is his baby.' " Blues buffs passed the information among themselves -- a son! But Claud continued with his quiet life.

The estate eventually grew to $1.3 million. But Robert Johnson's executors found that they had no clearly established heir. Thompson, the half-sister, had died in 1983, and her half-sister and son were still wrangling with LaVere over the licensing rights. LaVere recalled mentioning Claud to the executors.

Not long after that, Claud received a summons in the heirship case. "I didn't know what to do with the letter," Claud said. He decided to hire a lawyer.

When Claud retained the services of Jim Kitchens, a prominent Jackson trial lawyer and former district attorney, they were already friends of 30 years' standing, from the days when Claud dropped off deliveries for Kitchens' family store in Crystal Springs. Kitchens bought barbecue at Claud's pit, and Miss Ernestine treated him, Kitchens said, "like one of her own kids."

In Kitchens' office, an overhead fan revolves lazily and a picture of Elvis Presley is propped against an upright piano.

"He [Claud] walked in one day and said, 'Jim, do you know who Robert Johnson was?'

"I said, 'Sure I do,' " Kitchens recalled.
"He said, 'How do you know that?'
"I said, 'I listen to public radio.'
"He said, 'That was my daddy.' "
"I said, 'What?'
He said, 'That was my daddy.'
"I said, 'Who else knows this?'
"He said, 'Well, there's my momma.' "

Among the dirt farms of southern Mississippi, where Claud was raised, there were two kinds of people: those who listened to the blues and those who did not. Claud knew early in life that he was the second kind.

Born out of wedlock to 17-year-old Virgie Mae Smith, he was mostly raised by Virgie Mae's father, a preacher and sharecropper, in a house where music was slapped back like the creeping fingertips of the devil.

If the blues came on the radio, a hand flew to the radio and switched it off. Once, Claud's uncle bought him a guitar, but his grandfather told him to put it down immediately.

His grandparents told him his father was Robert Johnson, a blues singer. Robert Johnson had given Virgie Mae a small amount of money after learning of Claud's birth -- $20 or $30 -- but showed little interest in the boy after that. Around his fifth birthday, Claud watched from the doorway of his grandparents' house as they talked to a grown man in a light-colored shirt and black pants.

"They stood on the porch. They made him stand in the yard," he said. "They talked to him a few minutes and then he went away."

Pulled out of school every year to work in the fields, Claud dropped out for good in the sixth grade and found satisfaction in work, long hours of it, sometimes at two or three jobs. He sold barbecue from a pit beside his house, worked at gas stations and a car dealership; his wife waited tables at a local diner.

Claud saved enough to buy his own gravel truck -- a machine so crotchety that he carried a tangle of cables and four extra batteries in order to start it, Kitchens remembers. Often Claud drove it for 18 hours a day. In this way, he and Ernestine put five children through college.
His grandparents' stern influence had served him as a rudder, steadying him throughout his life, he said.

"It learned me something about life, growing up that way," he said.

Then, in his 60s, the heirship case opened a view into a second Mississippi: a place where, in moments of glamour, young people ducked the narrow rules of sharecropping life.

In testimony, Claud's 79-year-old mother and her friends would describe the dark clubs where the field workers gathered, laughing, in the half-light of evening.

They described his father: a man known for slipping out without saying goodbye, for traveling under aliases, for sleeping in boxcars and emerging with pants that looked like they had just been steam- ironed.

They described performances where Robert Johnson sat alone with a guitar and held them all still. They described what happened when he met up with 17-year-old Virgie Mae Smith on her way to school.

In the end, the crucial testimony came from Virgie Mae's closest friend, Eula Mae Williams, an 80-year-old midwife with pure white hair, who recalled an evening walk she took with her fiance and Virgie Mae and Robert Johnson.

To the shock of the assembled lawyers, who had to pause during questioning because they were laughing so hard, she described how both couples made love standing up in the pine forest, watching each other the whole time.

She was questioned by Victor McTeer, an attorney from Greenville who was representing Carrie Thompson's relatives as they contested Claud's claim to the estate.

Q: Well, let me, let me share something with you, because I'm really curious about this. Maybe I have a more limited experience. But you're saying to me that you were watching them make love?
A: M-hm.
Q: While you were making love?
A: M-hm.
Q: You don't think that's at all odd?
A: Say what?
Q: Have you ever done that before or since?
A: Yes.
Q: Watch other people make love?
A: Yes, I have done it before. Yes, I've done it after I married. Yes.
Q: You watched other people make love?
A: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Q: Other than ... other than Mr. Johnson and Virgie Cain [her married name].
A: Right.
Q: Really?
A: You haven't?
Q: No. Really haven't.
A: I'm sorry for you.

Today, in the working-class neighborhood where he raised his children, Claud lives in a grand house on 47 acres of property, with a long, curving driveway.

His victory stands out in the annals of Mississippi probate law.

For an illegitimate child to prove the paternity of a long-dead man is a daunting legal challenge. It took 10 years, two trips to the Mississippi Supreme Court and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the question. Claud's mother died in 1998, months before he received the money.
In a way, the most remarkable thing is that anyone in Mississippi is holding Robert Johnson's wealth at all.

The first two or three generations of blues musicians saw their music diffuse into American culture, but most of them died without securing rights to their composition. If their relatives received anything later, it was tiny. The strip of Mississippi that gave rise to the blues remains one of the poorest places in America.

"If it's not unique, it's close to unique," said Thomas Freeland, a Mississippi attorney and blues historian.

When the San Francisco-based band the Grateful Dead recorded songs by the North Carolina blues musician Elizabeth Cotton, Freeland said, "the story is, [she] bought a dishwasher with the royalties."

Inside the pink brick gates to their land, the Johnsons live somewhat awkwardly with the wealth they inherited. On a recent afternoon, Miss Ernestine was sitting in the garage, listening to a religious program on the car radio. Claud looked critically at his vast lawn, irritated by the task of mowing it.

Inside, a small decorative Bible sat on a coffee table, resting on a lacy pillow. A large framed poster of Robert Johnson hung on the wall. Claud listens to his father's blues recordings sometimes now, although he prefers gospel.

He doesn't have much to say about the windfall he received -- money, he said, does not mean too much to him.

"I was excited when I found out there was going to be a little bit of money in it," he said. "I was a little excited. And then that went away."

What remains is a quiet resentment toward Robert Johnson's other relatives, whose lawyers for years argued that he was not the musician's son. Claud has never met any of them, but the challenge, he says, has offended him.

"I've always known all my life who I was and whose son I was," he said. "Never got angry over it. Like I said, my grandparents they always told me Robert Johnson was my father."
Already, he was a solitary, careful man.

Claud, a church deacon, has had such a lifelong fear of poisoning he did not eat at his mother-in-law's house for two years after his wedding.

Even at home, if he gets up from a meal leaving a half-drunk glass of water, he will not touch it on his return.

"I'm just curious that way," he said, with a slow smile. "It just sticks in the back of my mind what happened to him."

With all these people talking to him about Robert Johnson's music, too, he's had occasion to wonder about a few things.

He remembers the guitar being lifted from his hands that time long ago. He says that he has a nice singing voice.

One after another, people from outside Mississippi have come to Claud to tell him the effect Robert Johnson had on their lives: Magical, haunting, almost godlike.

He wonders what it would have been like if his father had stuck around.

And he wonders, from time to time, if, in that alternate version of his life, he would have played the blues.

AllMusic

Biography by Cub Koda

If the blues has a truly mythic figure, one whose story hangs over the music the way a Charlie Parker does over jazz or a Hank Williams does over country, it's Robert Johnson, certainly the most celebrated figure in the history of the blues. Of course, his legend is immensely fortified by the fact that Johnson also left behind a small legacy of recordings that are considered the emotional apex of the music itself. These recordings have not only entered the realm of blues standards ("Love in Vain," "Crossroads," "Sweet Home Chicago," "Stop Breaking Down"), but were adapted by rock & roll artists as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Steve Miller, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton. While there are historical naysayers who would be more comfortable downplaying his skills and achievements (most of whom have never made a convincing case as where the source of his apocalyptic visions emanates from), Robert Johnson remains a potent force to be reckoned with. As a singer, a composer, and as a guitarist of considerable skills, he produced some of the genre's best music and the ultimate blues legend to deal with. Doomed, haunted, driven by demons, a tormented genius dead at an early age, all of these add up to making him a character of mythology who — if he hadn't actually existed — would have to be created by some biographer's overactive romantic imagination.

The legend of his life — which by now, even folks who don't know anything about the blues can cite to you chapter and verse — goes something like this: Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become great blues musician, he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery's plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned it, and handed it back to him. Within less than a year's time, in exchange for his everlasting soul, Robert Johnson became the king of the Delta blues singers, able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard.

As success came with live performances and phonograph recordings, Johnson remained tormented, constantly haunted by nightmares of hellhounds on his trail, his pain and mental anguish finding release only in the writing and performing of his music. Just as he was to be brought to Carnegie Hall to perform in John Hammond's first Spirituals to Swing concert, the news had come from Mississippi; Robert Johnson was dead, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend while playing a jook joint. Those who were there swear he was last seen alive foaming at the mouth, crawling around on all fours, hissing and snapping at onlookers like a mad dog. His dying words (either spoken or written on a piece of scrap paper) were, "I pray that my redeemer will come and take me from my grave." He was buried in a pine box in an unmarked grave, his deal with the Devil at an end.

Of course, Johnson's influences in the real world were far more disparate than the legend suggests, no matter how many times it's been retold or embellished. As a teenage plantation worker, Johnson fooled with a harmonica a little bit, but seemingly had no major musical skills to speak of. Every attempt to sit in with local titans of the stature of Son House, Charley Patton, Willie Brown, and others brought howls of derision from the older bluesmen. Son House: "We'd all play for the Saturday night balls, and there'd be this little boy hanging around. That was Robert Johnson. He blew a harmonica then, and he was pretty good at that, but he wanted to play a guitar. He'd sit at our feet and play during the breaks and such another racket you'd never heard." He married young and left Robinsonville, wandering the Delta and using Hazelhurst as base, determined to become a full-time professional musician after his first wife died during childbirth. Johnson returned to Robinsonville a few years later and he encountered House and Willie Brown at a juke joint in Banks, MS; according to House, "When he finished all our mouths were standing open. I said, 'Well, ain't that fast! He's gone now!'" To a man, there was only one explanation as how Johnson had gotten that good, that fast; he had sold his soul to the Devil.

But Johnson's skills were acquired in a far more conventional manner, born more of a concentrated Christian work ethic than a Faustian bargain with old Scratch. He idolized the Delta recording star Lonnie Johnson — sometimes introducing himself to newcomers as "Robert Lonnie, one of the Johnson brothers" — and the music of Scrapper Blackwell, Skip James, and Kokomo Arnold were all inspirational elements that he drew his unique style from. His slide style certainly came from hours of watching local stars like Charley Patton and Son House, among others. Perhaps the biggest influence, however, came from an unrecorded bluesman named Ike Zinneman. We'll never really know what Zinneman's music sounded like (we do know from various reports that he liked to practice late at night in the local graveyard, sitting on tombstones while he strummed away) or how much of his personal muse he imparted to Johnson, if any. What is known is that after a year or so under Zinneman's tutelage, Johnson returned with an encyclopedic knowledge of his instrument, an ability to sing and play in a multiplicity of styles, and a very carefully worked-out approach to song construction, keeping his original lyrics with him in a personal digest. As an itinerant musician, playing at country suppers as well as on the street, his audience demanded someone who could play and sing everything from blues pieces to the pop and hillbilly tunes of the day. Johnson's talents could cover all of that and more. His most enduring contribution, the boogie bass line played on the bottom strings of the guitar (adapted from piano players), has become part-and-parcel of the sound most people associate with down-home blues. It is a sound so very much of a part of the music's fabric that the listener cannot imagine the styles of Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Eddie Taylor, Lightnin' Slim, Hound Dog Taylor, or a hundred lesser lights existing without that essential component part. As his playing partner Johnny Shines put it, "Some of the things that Robert did with the guitar affected the way everybody played. He'd do rundowns and turnbacks. He'd do repeats. None of this was being done. In the early '30s, boogie on the guitar was rare, something to be heard. Because of Robert, people learned to complement theirselves, carrying their own bass as their own lead with this one instrument." While his music can certainly be put in context as part of a definable tradition, what he did with it and where he took it was another matter entirely.

Although Robert Johnson never recorded near as much as Lonnie Johnson, Charley Patton, or Blind Lemon Jefferson, he certainly traveled more than all of them put together. After his first recordings came out and "Terraplane Blues" became his signature tune (a so-called "race" record selling over three or four-thousand copies back in the early to mid-'30s was considered a hit), Johnson hit the road, playing anywhere and everywhere he could. Instilled with a seemingly unquenchable desire to experience new places and things, his wandering nature took him up and down the Delta and as far a field as St. Louis, Chicago, and Detroit (where he performed over the radio on the Elder Moten Hour), places Son House and Charley Patton had only seen in the movies, if that. But the end came at a Saturday-night dance at a juke joint in Three Forks, MS, in August of 1938. Playing with Honeyboy Edwards and Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Johnson was given a jug of moonshine whiskey laced with either poison or lye, presumably by the husband of a woman the singer had made advances toward. He continued playing into the night until he was too sick to continue, then brought back to a boarding house in Greenwood, some 15 miles away. He lay sick for several days, successfully sweating the poison out of his system, but caught pneumonia as a result and died on August 16th. The legend was just beginning.

In the mid-'60s, Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers, the first compilation of Johnson's music and one of the earliest collections of pure country blues. Rife with liner notes full of romantic speculation, little in the way of hard information and a painting standing for a picture, this for years was the world's sole introduction to the music and the legend, doing much to promote both. A second volume — collecting up the other master takes and issuing a few of the alternates — was released in the '70s, giving fans a first-hand listen to music that had been only circulated through bootleg tapes and albums or cover versions by English rock stars. Finally in 1990 — after years of litigation — a complete two-CD box set was released with every scrap of Johnson material known to exist plus the holy grail of the blues; the publishing of the only two known photographs of the man himself. Columbia's parent company, Sony, was hoping that sales would maybe hit 20,000. The box set went on to sell over a million units, the first blues recordings ever to do so.

In the intervening years since the release of the box set, Johnson's name and likeness has become a cottage growth merchandising industry. Posters, postcards, t-shirts, guitar picks, strings, straps, and polishing cloths — all bearing either his likeness or signature (taken from his second marriage certificate) — have become available, making him the ultimate blues commodity with his image being reproduced for profit far more than any contemporary bluesman, dead or alive. Although the man himself (and his contemporaries) could never have imagined it in a million years, the music and the legend both live on.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson_%28musician%29

http://www.deltahaze.com/johnson/

http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/latimes.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EMUSIC/blues/crb.html

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:ajfuxql5ldhe~T1

Discography

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:ajfuxql5ldhe~T21

Downloads from Crossroads Club 27

Bukka White

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Booker T. Washington White (November 12, 1909 – February 26, 1977) was a delta blues guitarist and singer. "Bukka" is not a nickname, but a misspelling of White's Christian name by his second (1937) record company (Vocalion).

Born near Houston, Mississippi, he gave his cousin B.B. King, a Stella guitar, King's first guitar. Bukka himself is remembered as a player of National Steel guitars. He also played, but was less adept at, the piano.

White started his career playing the fiddle at square dances. He claims to have met Charlie Patton early on, although some doubt has been cast upon this; regardless, Patton was a large influence on White. He typically played slide guitar, in an open tuning. He was one of the few, along with Skip James, to use a crossnote tuning in E minor, which he may have learned, as James did, from Henry Stuckey.

Bukka White - Mama Don't Allow From: bobzukowsky

He first recorded for the Victor label in 1930. His recordings for Victor, like those of many other bluesmen, fluctuated between country blues and gospel numbers. His gospel songs were done in the style of Blind Willie Johnson, with a female singer accentuating the last phrase of each line.

Nine years later, while serving time, he recorded for folklorist John Lomax. The few songs he recorded around this time became his most well-known: "Shake 'Em On Down," and "Po' Boy."Bob Dylan covered his song "Fixin' to Die Blues", which aided a "rediscovery" of White in 1963 by guitarist John Fahey and ED Denson, which propelled him onto the folk revival scene of the 1960s. White had recorded the song simply because his other songs had not particularly impressed the Victor record producer. It was a studio composition of which White had thought little until it re-emerged thirty years later. White was at one time managed by experienced Blues manager, Arne Brogger. Fahey and Denson found White easily enough: they wrote a letter to "Bukka White (Old Blues Singer), c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi." Fahey had assumed, given White's song, "Aberdeen, Mississippi", that White still lived there, or nearby. The postcard was forwarded to Memphis, Tennessee, where White worked in tank factory. Fahey and Denson soon travelled to meet Bukka White. He and Fahey remained friends throughout White's life and he recorded a new album for Fahey's Takoma Records. Denson became his manager.

Bukka White - Please Don't Put Your Daddy Outdoors From: SFBA4me

White was, later in life, also friends with fellow musician Furry Lewis. The two recorded, mostly in Lewis' Memphis, Tennessee apartment, an album together, Furry Lewis, Bukka White & Friends: Party! At Home.

One of his most famous songs, "Parchman Farm Blues", about the Mississippi's infamous Parchman Farm state prison, was to be released on Harry Smith's fourth, never realized, volume of the Anthology of American Folk Music. His 1937 version of the oft-recorded song, "Shake 'em on Down," is considered definitive, and became a hit while White was serving time in Parchman.

Bukka White was heavily sampled by electronic artist Recoil for the track, "Electro Blues For Bukka White", on the 1992 album, Bloodline; the song was reworked and re-released on the 2000 EP "Jezebel".

AllMusic Bio

Bukka White (true name: Booker T. Washington White) was born in Houston, Mississippi (not Houston, Texas) in 1906 (not any date between 1902-1905 or 1907-1909, as is variously reported). He got his initial start in music learning fiddle tunes from his father. Guitar instruction soon followed, but White's grandmother objected to anyone playing "that Devil music" in the household; nonetheless, his father eventually bought him a guitar. When Bukka White was 14 he spent some time with an uncle in Clarksdale, Mississippi and passed himself off as a 21-year-old, using his guitar playing as a way to attract women. Somewhere along the line, White came in contact with Delta blues legend Charley Patton, who no doubt was able to give Bukka White instruction on how to improve his skills in both areas of endeavor. In addition to music, White pursued careers in sport, playing in Negro Leagues baseball and, for a time, taking up boxing.

Bukka White - Piano Boogie From: lubitel11

In 1930 Bukka White met furniture salesman Ralph Limbo, who was also a talent scout for Victor. White traveled to Memphis where he made his first recordings, singing a mixture of blues and gospel material under the name of Washington White. Victor only saw fit to release four of the 14 songs Bukka White recorded that day. As the Depression set in, opportunity to record didn't knock again for Bukka White until 1937, when Big Bill Broonzy asked him to come to Chicago and record for Lester Melrose. By this time, Bukka White had gotten into some trouble — he later claimed he and a friend had been "ambushed" by a man along a highway, and White shot the man in the thigh in self defense. While awaiting trial, White jumped bail and headed for Chicago, making two sides before being apprehended and sent back to Mississippi to do a three-year stretch at Parchman Farm. While he was serving time, White's record "Shake 'Em on Down" became a hit.

Bukka White proved a model prisoner, popular with inmates and prison guards alike and earning the nickname "Barrelhouse." It was as "Washington Barrelhouse White" that White recorded two numbers for John and Alan Lomax at Parchman Farm in 1939. After earning his release in 1940, he returned to Chicago with 12 newly minted songs to record for Lester Melrose. These became the backbone of his lifelong repertoire, and the Melrose session today is regarded as the pinnacle of Bukka White's achievements on record. Among the songs he recorded on that occasion were "Parchman Farm Blues" (not to be confused with "Parchman Farm" written by Mose Allison and covered by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Blue Cheer, among others), "Good Gin Blues," "Bukka's Jitterbug Swing," "Aberdeen, Mississippi Blues," and "Fixin' to Die Blues," all timeless classics of the Delta blues. Then, Bukka disappeared — not into the depths of some Mississippi Delta mystery, but into factory work in Memphis during World War II.

Bob Dylan recorded "Fixin' to Die Blues" on his 1961 debut Columbia album, and at the time no one in the music business knew who Bukka White was — most figured a fellow who'd written a song like "Fixin' to Die" had to be dead already. Two California-based blues enthusiasts, John Fahey and Ed Denson, were more skeptical about this assumption, and in 1963 addressed a letter to "Bukka White (Old Blues Singer), c/o General Delivery, Aberdeen, Mississippi." By chance, one of White's relatives was working in the Post Office in Aberdeen, and forwarded the letter to White in Memphis.

Things moved quickly from the time Bukka White met up with Fahey and Denson; by the end of 1963 Bukka White was already recording on contract with Chris Strachwitz and Arhoolie. White wrote a new song celebrating his good fortune entitled "1963 Isn't 1962 Blues" and swiftly recorded three albums of material for Strachwitz which the latter entitled Sky Songs, referring to White's habit of "reaching up and pulling songs out of the sky." Nonetheless, even White knew he couldn't get away with making up all his material regularly in performance, so he also studied his 78s and relearned all the songs he'd written for Lester Melrose. Although Bukka White was practically the same age as other survivors of the Delta and Memphis blues scenes of the 1920s and '30s, he didn't look like someone who belonged in a nursing home. White was a sharp dresser, in the prime of health, was a compelling entertainer and raconteur, and clearly enjoyed being the center of attention. He thrived on the folk festival and coffeehouse circuit of the 1960s.
By the '70s, however, Bukka White couldn't help getting a little bored with his celebrity status as an acoustic bluesman. White's tastes had grown with the times, and he would have loved to have played an electric guitar and fronted a band, as his old acquaintance Chester Burnett (aka Howlin' Wolf) and Bukka's own cousin, B. B. King, had been already doing successfully for years. But he only needed to look at what happened to his friend Bob Dylan's career for a lesson on what happens to folk blues artists who try and "go electric." So, Bukka White stayed on the festival circuit to the end of his days, beating the hell out of his National steel guitar, and sometimes his monologues would go on a little long, and sometimes his playing was a little more willfully eccentric than at others. Patrons would wait patiently to hear Bukka play "Parchman Farm Blues," although some of them were under the mistaken impression that they had paid their money to hear an artist who had originated a number that Eric Clapton made famous.

Blues purists will tell you that nothing Bukka White recorded after 1940 is ultimately worth listening to. This isn't accurate, nor fair. White was an incredibly compelling performer who gave up of more of himself in his work than many artists in any musical discipline. The Sky Songs albums for Arhoolie are an eminently rewarding document of Bukka's charm and candor, particularly in the long monologue "Mixed Water." "Big Daddy," recorded in 1974 for Arnold S. Caplin's Biograph label, likewise is a classic of its kind and should not be neglected.

by Uncle Dave Lewis

Bukka White

by Arne Brogger

Booker T. Washington White was born in Aberdeen, Mississippi, in 1902. I first met Bukka in Memphis in 1972 when Steve LaVere and I arrived at his house on Leath Street. We were greeted by his wife (aka Big Mama, per Bukka). Asking if Bukka was around, we were told that "Big Daddy is at his office."

The Office...

Bukka's "office" was located about two blocks away. It consisted of a folding lawn chair, an orange crate perched next to it and both leaning up against the brick wall of a drug store on the shady side of the sidewalk. When we got there, Bukka was already talking to visitors and sipping a pint of bourbon "as protection against snake bite. There's a lot of snakes here'bout."I was introduced as an agent from "up north" who was interested in arranging some dates for Bukka to play. Bukka's reaction was wary and standoffish. He had obviously heard the rap before. I told him what we had in mind. We wanted to take a group of the best country blues artists living in Memphis and put them on the road. The money would be straight up and negotiated on a date-by-date basis. Bukka said he would have to hear about the money first -- before discussions went any further.

Like most musicians, Bukka had experienced his share of trouble on the money end of things in the past. This was compounded by the fact of race, and I was told obliquely but clearly that he didn't trust me, and wouldn't, until I'd delivered as promised. That was fine with me.
Over the next few months, as the dates came together, we reached an agreement and Bukka became a member of the Memphis Blues Caravan. He became a featured performer for the next ten years.

On The Bus At 5:00 a.m....

My relationship with Bukka was slow to develop, but eventually it became a friendship that I am proud of to this day. Early on he displayed himself as a man of his word. And he expected the same in return. He never had to be told twice when we were leaving, when he had to go on stage, how much time he could do. If we had a 5:00 a.m. call to leave for the next gig, Bukka was the first man on the bus.Some time into our second or third tour, he and I were talking about his life and times, who he used to work with, how he started, etc. I asked him about Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison which was home, at one time or another, to a great many of the blues greats. He had done some time there, in addition to stints in the Memphis county jail. All were for manslaughter. "I hated to do it, but I had no choice...." Self-defense. Bukka White was not a man to trifle with.

Aberdeen Blues...

On stage, Bukka's playing was impeccable. He was introduced as the "Master of the National Steel Guitar" and he made it ring like a bell. His signature tune, "Aberdeen Blues," contained a riff which he executed with a very flashy move. Both right and left hands crossed in front of the guitar and alternated hitting the strings on the neck and the box. Audiences went nuts.One night after a show, a few of us gathered in Bukka's room. We had picked up a relief bus driver, a man named Eddie Humphries from East St. Louis, Missouri, who had joined us the day before. He had no idea what he was getting involved with. He sat quietly in the corner of the room and watched as the guitar was passed from hand to hand. The realization of what he was hearing was fascinating to watch. With each tune he moved closer to the edge of his chair. When Bukka played "Aberdeen" and hit that riff, Eddie exploded. "BUKKA! BUKKA! BUKKA!" It was 1:30 in the morning and you could hear him out to the street. After that night, Eddie sat in the front row of every performance.

Bukka White - World Boogie From: bluesindex

The Big Red Stella...

Bukka was a first cousin to B.B. King. In 1974 or so, I organized a concert at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. The show consisted of Bukka White, Muddy Waters and B.B. King. Muddy had played Detroit the night before and drove straight through to make the date. He stopped in Chicago at about 4:00 a.m. to pick up harp player Carey Bell, just to add a little weight. I have never seen musicians so psyched to play as these guys were when they showed up.Bukka opened the show, Muddy played next and B.B. closed. The show started at 8:00 and B.B. finally came down from the stage at 1:00 a.m. There were 3,500 people there, and no one left. At the close of the show, B.B. called Bukka up on the stage to acknowledge him. Bukka grabbed the mike and began to talk. He reminded B.B. of the first guitar B.B. ever had -- a red Stella given to him by Bukka. Bukka said B.B. was about 9 years old at the time. "You remember, B, you was so little next to that big red Stella..." There was absolute silence. B.B. was looking at the tops of his shoes. His eyes were filling. He looked for all the world like a 9-year-old boy standing on that stage. "Yeah... I sure do remember," he finally said, and then he threw his arms around Bukka. The audience erupted.

Bukka's artistry entertained and delighted audiences wherever we played. I sit and listen to tapes of those days and marvel at what he did. Like Furry, and most other master performers of the idiom, he varied each song to reflect what he was feeling or thinking at any particular moment. Always fresh. Always original. Always Bukka White.

Sliding Delta Bio

The letter was addressed to: " Booker T.Washington White, (Old Blues Singer), C/O General Delivery Aberdeen , Miss." and forwarded to him by a relative. That was how John Fahey and Ed Denson of the "blues mafia" found Bukka White in 1963. For Bukka , it was a one of many turns in a truly remarkable life. Booker T. Washington White (aka Bukka White) was born on a farm near Houston, Mississippi on November 12,1909. When he was 9, his father John White bought him a guitar. His father was a railroad man and many of Bukka's best tunes emulate the driving rhythm of trains and their mournful whistles. After hearing Charley Patton, Young Booker decided that he too would be a "great man like Charley Patton". Bukka's first recordings were14 songs done in Memphis in May 1930. One of those songs, The Panama Limited was a featured part of Bukka's repetoire until his death and is is probably one of the best "train" songs ever recorded. His driving alternating bass evokes the engines and his slide creates the sound of airbrakes and trainwhistle. The Panama Limited, The New Frisco Train, I am the Heavenly Way and Promise True and Grand were released on Victor (one secular 78, one Gospel 78) and can be found on the Fabulous CD Panama Limited along with most of his other prewar recordings(Sic 'Em Dogs On and Po' Boy are not on this CD. If you can find the Travelin' Man CD The Complete Recordings 1930-1940, it includes these two tunes.). To my knowledge, the remainder were never released

Bukka did an electrifying performance of this on the Vastapol Masters of The Country Blues DVD, complete with a trick playing style more often associated with Jimi Hendrix than a Delta Bluesman (This DVD also Features Eddie "Son" House).

Bukka White - Alcohol Dance From: bluesindex

During the '30 Bukka, like many other bluesmen, hoboed around, workied as a professional boxer in Chicago and as a Negro League pitcher with the Birmingham Black Cats. It wasn't until 1937 that Big Bill Broonzy got Bukka a shot at recording again, when he cut Shake em' On Down and Pinebluff Arkansas for ARC in Chicago( is Big Bill the uncredited 2nd guitarist on these tunes?). While Shake Em' On Down was a hit when released on the Vocalion label, Bukka was doing time on Parchman Farm in Mississippi . While at Parchman in 1939, Alan Lomax recorded two tunes by Bukka for the Library of Congress; Sic 'Em Dogs On and Po' Boy (played with National across his lap on Masters of The Country Blues) . In 1940 , he cut some more sides in Chicago accompanied by Washboard Sam. Shake em' On Down re-emerges as I Wonder How Long Before I Can Change My Clothes, and songs like Strange Place Blues, Parchman Farm Blues, High Fever Blues and Fixin' To Die Blues set a somber tone.

Until Fahey and Denson found him in 1963, it was assumed that Bukka was dead. If someone had checked, they would have known otherwise. In 1947 Bukka had given a young cousin, Riley King a Red Stella Guitar, Riley went on to be known as The Beale St. Blues Boy, B.B. King.

When Fahey and Denson did find Bukka, they immediately recorded him in his Memphis boardinghouse room . A few months later Bukka White was a recording artist with a new career playing the Coffee House/Folk Festival circuit. The recordings (available on the Aim CD Mississippi Blues)show that the fire was still there. Listen to New Orleans Streamline- a new train song, Poor Boy Long Way From Home or Parchman Farm Blues(actually I Wonder How Long Before I Can Change My Clothes) Bukka had been playing around Memphis with Frank Stokes and in his later stuff that influence comes through along with Bukka's desire to stay current (hence Big Bill Broonzy's Baby Please Don't Go). Unlike many other Blues artist of his generation, Bukka's audiences got to see the real thing, not a shadow. He continued to record and play until his death in Memphis on February 26, 1977.

Bukka White - Poor Boy Long Way from Home From: NaOH123

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukka_White

http://wc03.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:67d5vwrva9uk~T1

http://thebluehighway.com/bukka.html

http://slidingdelta.com/bluesmen/bukkawhite2.html

Discography

http://www.wirz.de/music/whitbfrm.htm

http://wc03.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:hifuxq95ldae~T2

http://www.windowsmedia.com/Mediaguide/Templates/Discography.aspx?p_id=P%20%20%20%20%20%20574

Lyrics

http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/2541/blbwhite.htm

Bukka White Downloads from CrossroadsClub 27

http://crossroadsclub27.blogspot.com/search/label/Bukka%20White

Charley Patton

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:29:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Charlie Patton, better known as Charley Patton (May 1, 1891 - April 28, 1934) is best known as an American Delta blues musician. He is considered by many to be the "Father of Delta Blues" and therefore one of the oldest known figures of American popular music. He is credited with creating an enduring body of American music and personally inspiring just about every Delta blues man (Robert Palmer, 1995). Palmer considers him among the most important musicians that America produced in the twentieth century. Many sources, including some musical releases and even his gravestone, spell his name “Charley” even though the musician himself spelled his name “Charlie”.

Charlie Patton was one of the first mainstream stars of the Delta blues genre. Patton, who was born in Hinds County, Mississippi near Edwards, lived most of his life in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta. Most sources say he was born in 1891, but there is still some debate about this. In 1900, however, his family moved 100 miles north to the legendary 10,000-acre Dockery Plantation sawmill and cotton farm near Ruleville, Mississippi. It was here that both John Lee Hooker and Howlin' Wolf fell under the Patton spell. It was also here that Robert Johnson played his first guitar.

At Dockery, Charlie fell under the tutelage of Henry Sloan, who had a new, unusual style of playing music which today would be considered very early blues. Charlie followed Henry Sloan around and by the time he was about 19 he was an accomplished performer and composer, having already written "Pony Blues" - a song that would become iconic of the era.

He was extremely popular across the Southern United States, and - in contrast to the itinerant wandering of most blues musicians of his time - was invited to perform at plantations and taverns. Long before Jimi Hendrix impressed audiences with stylish guitar playing, Patton gained notoriety for his showmanship, often playing guitar on his knees, behind his head, and behind his back. Although Patton was a small man at about 5 foot 5 and 135 pounds, the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice was rumored to have carried for over 500 yards without amplification. This gritty voice was a major influence in the singing style of one of his students, Howlin' Wolf.

Patton settled in Holly Ridge, Mississippi with his common-law wife and recording partner Bertha Lee in 1933. He died on the Heathman-Dedham plantation near Indianola from heart disease on April 28, 1934 and is buried in Holly Ridge (both towns are located in Sunflower County). A memorial headstone was erected on Patton's grave (the location of which was identified by the cemetery caretaker C. Howard who claimed to have been present at the burial) paid for by musician John Fogerty through the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in July, 1990. The spelling of Patton's name was dictated by Jim O'Neal who also composed the Patton epitaph.

There apparently exists only one photograph of Charlie Patton, although its authenticity is disputed. Rights to it are owned by a collector named John Tefteller.

The question of Patton's ethnicity is of minor debate. Though he was most likely African-American, because of his light complexion there have been rumors that he was Mexican, or possibly full-blood Cherokee (Howlin' Wolf endorsed this theory.)

AllMusic

If the Delta country blues has a convenient source point, it would probably be Charley Patton, its first great star. His hoarse, impassioned singing style, fluid guitar playing, and unrelenting beat made him the original king of the Delta blues. Much more than your average itinerant musician, Patton was an acknowledged celebrity and a seminal influence on musicians throughout the Delta. Rather than bumming his way from town to town, Patton would be called up to play at plantation dances, juke joints, and the like. He'd pack them in like sardines everywhere he went, and the emotional sway he held over his audiences caused him to be tossed off of more than one plantation by the ownership, simply because workers would leave crops unattended to listen to him play any time he picked up a guitar. He epitomized the image of a '20s "sport" blues singer: rakish, raffish, easy to provoke, capable of downing massive quantities of food and liquor, a woman on each arm, with a flashy, expensive-looking guitar fitted with a strap and kept in a traveling case by his side, only to be opened up when there was money or good times involved. His records — especially his first and biggest hit, "Pony Blues" — could be heard on phonographs throughout the South. Although he was certainly not the first Delta bluesman to record, he quickly became one of the genre's most popular. By late-'20s Mississippi plantation standards, Charley Patton was a star, a genuine celebrity.

Although Patton was roughly five foot, five inches tall and only weighed a Spartan 135 pounds, his gravelly, high-energy singing style (even on ballads and gospel tunes it sounded this way) made him sound like a man twice his weight and half again his size. Sleepy John Estes claimed he was the loudest blues singer he ever heard and it was rumored that his voice was loud enough to carry outdoors at a dance up to 500 yards away without amplification. His vaudeville-style vocal asides — which on record give the effect of two people talking to each other — along with the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice would become major elements of the vocal style of one of his students, a young Howlin' Wolf. His guitar playing was no less impressive, fueled with a propulsive beat and a keen rhythmic sense that would later plant seeds in the boogie style of John Lee Hooker. Patton is generally regarded as one of the original architects of putting blues into a strong, syncopated rhythm, and his strident tone was achieved by tuning his guitar up a step and a half above standard pitch instead of using a capo. His compositional skills on the instrument are illustrated by his penchant for finding and utilizing several different themes as background accompaniment in a single song. His slide work — either played in his lap like a Hawaiian guitar and fretted with a pocket knife, or in the more conventional manner with a brass pipe for a bottleneck — was no less inspiring, finishing vocal phrases for him and influencing contemporaries like Son House and up-and-coming youngsters like Robert Johnson. He also popped his bass strings (a technique he developed some 40 years before funk bass players started doing the same thing), beat his guitar like a drum, and stomped his feet to reinforce certain beats or to create counter rhythms, all of which can be heard on various recordings. Rhythm and excitement were the bywords of his style.

The second, and equally important, part of Patton's legacy handed down to succeeding blues generations was his propensity for entertaining. One of the reasons for Charley Patton's enormous popularity in the South stems from his being a consummate barrelhouse entertainer. Most of the now-common guitar gymnastics modern audiences have come to associate with the likes of a Jimi Hendrix, in fact, originated with Patton. His ability to "entertain the peoples" and rock the house with a hell-raising ferociousness left an indelible impression on audiences and fellow bluesmen alike. His music embraced everything from blues, ballads, ragtime, to gospel. And so keen were Patton's abilities in setting mood and ambience, that he could bring a barrelhouse frolic to a complete stop by launching into an impromptu performance of nothing but religious-themed selections and still manage to hold his audience spellbound. Because he possessed the heart of a bluesman with the mindset of a vaudeville performer, hearing Patton for the first time can be a bit overwhelming; it's a lot to take in as the music, and performances can careen from emotionally intense to buffoonishly comic, sometimes within a single selection. It is all strongly rooted in '20s black dance music and even on the religious tunes in his repertoire, Patton fuels it all with a strong rhythmic pulse.

He first recorded in 1929 for the Paramount label and, within a year's time, he was not only the largest-selling blues artist but — in a whirlwind of recording activity — also the music's most prolific. Patton was also responsible for hooking up fellow players Willie Brown and Son House with their first chances to record. It is probably best to issue a blanket audio disclaimer of some kind when listening to Patton's total recorded legacy, some 60-odd tracks total, his final session done only a couple of months before his death in 1934. No one will never know what Patton's Paramount masters really sounded like. When the company went out of business, the metal masters were sold off as scrap, some of it used to line chicken coops. All that's left are the original 78s — rumored to have been made out of inferior pressing material commonly used to make bowling balls — and all of them are scratched and heavily played, making all attempts at sound retrieval by current noise-reduction processing a tall order indeed. That said, it is still music well worth seeking out and not just for its place in history. Patton's music gives us the first flowering of the Delta blues form, before it became homogenized with turnarounds and 12-bar restrictions, and few humans went at it so aggressively.

by Cub Koda

Starr Gennett

On June 14, 1929, Charley Patton descended into Richmond’s “Starr Valley” and stepped inside the recording studio along the railroad tracks. The man who many call "King of the Delta Blues," the greatest of all the blues performers from Mississippi, had come to Richmond to make his own recordings for the very first time. With his guitar in hand, Patton leaned into the microphone and began to sing: "It's a little bo weevil, she's moving in the air, Lordy/You can plant your cotton and you won't get half a cent, Lordy".Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues ignited the short (1929-34) but significant recording career of Charley Patton, who was born in 1887 on a farm between Edwards and Bolton, Mississippi. Although details of his earliest years are sketchy at best, he seems to have been born into the Chatmon family, his birth father Henderson Chatmon having sired Lonnie and Sam, of Mississippi Sheiks fame, and hokum blues specialist Bo Carter. His mother was Amy Patton, who with her husband Bill Patton and young Charley, moved to the Dockery Plantation outside Ruleville, Mississippi in 1897. It was in the communal setting at Dockery that Charley received his musical upbringing and learned and created the songs that would carry him through the rest of his life. He learned to play guitar here, and between Dockery and the Webb Jennings Plantation in the nearby town of Drew, there resided a veritable Who's Who of blues musicians. Pioneers of the idiom such as Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson, Dick Bankston, and Roebuck "Pops" Staples (patriarch of The Staples Singers) were within easy reach during these years. In this environment, musical cross pollination was likely, and it is clear that Patton influenced them all. Son House would come down to visit from his home in the Clarksdale area, and he admits he learned from Patton. The great Howlin' Wolf was another Dockery denizen, and took guitar lessons from Charley Patton. Wolf’s vocal style even resembles Patton’s gravel-throated rasp.

Patton had a varied repertoire from which to draw by the time he left Dockery—not only blues songs, but ballads, ragtime numbers, and traditional tunes born of both black and white cultures. Bill Patton was an elder at the church on the plantation, and though by no means a religious man, Charley was schooled in spirituals. More than a mere blues singer, Charley Patton was a songster, a man who easily tapped into this diverse background, all the while creating his own songs. Throughout the early 1920s he came and went from Dockery, plying his craft around the Mississippi Delta at fish fries, dances, and jook joints, on the streets, and even at logging camps in the region. He is remembered as a great entertainer, one who delighted audiences with his "clowning," dancing on his guitar, or playing behind his back.

Patton moved to Merigold, Mississippi in 1924 and took up housekeeping with one of his common-law wives while maintaining the life of a troubadour. Five years later he left Merigold for Clarksdale and at this time came into the acquaintance of one of the most important figures in 20th century American music, H.C. Speir. Speir was a white man who ran a furniture store on Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi. He sold Victrolas and as was the custom of the time, phonograph records to play on the machines. Because he catered to a black clientele, his market was in "race" records, which featured the blues and sanctified sounds of African-American culture of the period. More significantly, Speir scouted talent for early race labels, including Gennett, which recorded William Harris, Speir’s first “find,” in 1927 in Birmingham, Alabama. H.C. Speir's other "discoveries" include many of the biggest names among blues, hillbilly, and even gospel pioneers. The shape of the musical landscape we know today would be far different if not for Speir. Patton came into contact with Speir, who was impressed enough to dispatch Charley north to commit his songs to shellac. Paramount utilized Marsh Laboratories in Chicago as their recording studios, but decided to construct their own facilities in Grafton, Wisconsin, not far from company headquarters in Port Washington. During this transitional period, Paramount contracted with Gennett Records to record Paramount artists, and as a result, Charley Patton came to Richmond’s Whitewater Gorge in the late spring of 1929.

Patton laid down some of his finest and best-selling sides on June 14, 1929, a total of fourteen in all. Singing along with his guitar, Charley told animated tales of bo weevil and his wife gone to wreak havoc through the land of King Cotton, and autobiographical tales of trying to keep one step ahead of the local sheriff. "When you get in trouble, there's no use of screaming and crying...mmmmm/Tom Rushen will take you back to Cleveland a-flying," he sang in Tom Rushen Blues, about real-life Sheriff O.T. Rushing. In Pea Vine Blues, Patton’s lyrics are about a branch of the Southern Railroad that connected Clarksdale with Greenwood, and ran through many of the towns in which he lived and traveled. Pony Blues, the first song actually released from the Richmond session (b/w Banty Rooster Blues), was a number known to Patton for many years. Charley's hard-living lifestyle was reflected in his selection of other songs to record. The lyrics of Spoonful Blues deal with the protagonist's willingness to kill his lover's man over cocaine. The bawdy Shake It And Break It But Don't Let It Fall Mama features choruses such as: "You can snatch it, you can grab it, you can break it, you can push it/Any way that a fellow can get it./I ain't had my right mind, since I blowed in town./My jelly, my roll, please mama, don't you let it fall".

In contrast, the remaining songs in the session were concerned with mortality and spiritual matters. Prayer of Death — in two parts! — begins with a somber introduction spoken by Charley: "The Prayer Of Death. Tone (toll?) the bell! Time to just tone (?) the bell again. Tell them to sing a little song like this". The first side contains sparse lyrics, while the second opens with lines alternately sung and spoken, then continues: "Ever since my mother's been dead/Trouble's been rolling all over my head/I've been 'buked and I been scorned/I've been talked about sure as you're born," and after a repeat, "Hold to God's unchanging.../Pin your hopes on things eternal." In the final two numbers, Charley Patton seems to find even more solace in life everlasting. Lord, I'm Discouraged finds him lamenting, "Sometimes I get discouraged. I believe my work is in vain. And then, hope. But the Holy Spirit whispers, and revive my mind again." The chorus: "There'll be glory, what a glory when we reach that other shore./There'll be glory, what a glory, praying to Jesus evermore./I'm on my way to glory, that happy land so fair/I'll soon reside with God's army, with the Saints of God up there".

Charley Patton may have seen the Light, but he continued to live hard and fast. He had a large appetite for alcohol, and troubles with the law were not uncommon. His throat was slashed badly in a 1930 altercation in Cleveland, Mississippi, from which he recovered. Around this same time in Lula, Mississippi, Charley met and "married" the last of his common-law wives, one Bertha Lee Pate, a blues singer half his age, and theirs was a tempestuous relationship. The old jailhouse still stands in Belzoni, Mississippi where Charley and Bertha Lee were both incarcerated following a particularly bad fight. Charley recounted the story in his High Sheriff Blues.

Patton recorded many more records for the Paramount and Vocalion labels in the next few years, at Grafton, Wisconsin, and at studios in New York City. He was often accompanied by Son Sims on fiddle or Willie Brown on second guitar. Bertha Lee added vocals to some of the dates as well. Patton and Bertha Lee traveled to New York for what would be his final sessions on January 30th and February 1st in 1934. The couple had settled in tiny Holly Ridge, Mississippi in 1933, and by this time Charley was suffering from a heart ailment that left him chronically breathless and often drained after performances. Upon Charley’s return from the sessions in New York City, his health began to deteriorate rapidly, and he was hospitalized in Indianola, Mississippi on April 17, 1934. He died at a house at 350 Heathman Street in Indianola on April 28, 1934. He is buried next to a cotton gin in a Mississippi Delta cemetery in Holly Ridge.

Charley Patton was a giant of American roots music, a major influence on his contemporaries and on the generations that followed. Performers who left the South in the Great Northern Migration carried Charley’s music to cities such as Detroit and Chicago, where it was handed down and adapted in ensuing decades. Patton left indelible impressions on Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, and Honeyboy Edwards, who is still alive and playing to this day, not to mention the more contemporary Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, and Bob Dylan, whose Frankie And Albert, Dirt Road Blues, and High Water (for Charley Patton) pay tribute to Patton’s music. Although Patton never officially recorded for Gennett Records, he did make his debut recordings in the Gennett studio and significantly contributed to the rich Gennett legacy as a result.

Author: Don Ely, Rochester, Michigan

Southern Music

Charlie Patton was the first great Delta bluesman; from him flowed nearly all the elements that would comprise the region’s blues style. Patton had a course, earthy voice that reflected hard times and hard living. His guitar style - percussive and raw - matched his vocal delivery. He often played slide guitar and gave that style a position of prominence in Delta blues. Patton’s songs were filled with lyrics that dealt with more than mere narratives of love gone bad. Patton often injected a personal viewpoint into his music and explored issues like social mobility (pony Blues), imprisonment (High Sheriff Blues), nature (High Water Blues), and morality (Oh Death) that went far beyond traditional male - female relationship themes.

Patton defined the life of a bluesman. He drank and smoked excessively. He reportedly had a total of eight wives. He was jailed at least once. He traveled extensively, never staying in one place for too long.

Patton’s standing in blues history is immense; no country blues artist, save Blind Lemon Jefferson, exerted more influence on the future of the form or on its succeeding generation of stylists than Patton. Everyone from Son House, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Elmore James can trace their blues styles back to Patton.

In a since, Charlie Patton, in addition to being a bluesman of the highest caliber, might also be the first rock & roller. Patton was far from passive when he performed in front of an audience. It was not uncommon for him to play the guitar between his knees or behind his back. He also played the instrument loud and rough. Patton jumped around and used the back of his guitar like a drum. He was a showman and made histrionics part of his act. Patton was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980.

Robert Santelli -- The Big Book of Blues : A Biographical Encyclopedia

Charlie Patton by R. Crumb

This is underground comic book genius R. Crumb's retelling of the life of Delta bluesman Charlie Patton, based on the biography by Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow.

References

Southern Music
Starr Gennett

Discography

AllMusic

Bio - Lyrics - Discography

charleypatton.4t

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Mississippi Fred McDowell

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 02:56:00 +0000

My name is Fred McDowell. They call me Miss'ippi Fred McDowell. But it, my home's in Ro[ss]ville Tennessee. But it don' make any different, it soun' good to me. I seem like I'm at home in there when I'm in Miss'ippi? An' I do not play no rock'an'roll y'all. I jus' play jus' straight an' natchel blue? An' whenever you get somebody, y'know, want to plo:w for you, just call for Fred McDowell, yeh. I wa raised on the farm, y'unnerstan'? Now only way you can rock Fred, you have to put him in a rocking chair, or either lay me down, y'unnerstan, yeh. Heh, that's my type of rockin', yeh heh heh.

Wiki Bio

Fred McDowell (January 12, 1904 - July 3, 1972), called "Mississippi Fred McDowell", was a Delta blues singer and guitar player.

McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, near Memphis. His parents, who were farmers, died when McDowell was a youth. He started playing guitar at the age of 14 and played at dances around Rossville. Wanting a change from ploughing fields, he moved to Memphis in 1926 where he worked in a number of jobs and played music for tips. He settled in Como, Mississippi, about 40 miles south of Memphis, in 1940 or 1941, and worked steadily as a farmer, continuing to perform music at dances, picnics and the like. Initially he played slide guitar using a pocket knife and then a slide made from a beef rib bone, later switching to a glass slide for its clearer sound. He played with the slide on his ring finger.

While commonly lumped together with "Delta Blues singers," McDowell actually may be considered the first of the bluesmen from the North Mississippi region--parallel to, but somewhat east of the Delta region--to achieve widespread recognition for his work. A version of the state’s signature musical form somewhat closer in structure to its African roots (often eschewing the chord change for the hypnotic effect of the droning, single chord vamp), the North Mississippi style (or at least its aesthetic) may be heard to have been carried on in the music of such figures as Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, as well as the jam band The North Mississippi All-Stars, while serving as the original impetus behind creation of the Fat Possum record label out of Oxford, Mississippi.

Mississippi Fred McDowell - John Henry, From: NaOH123

The 1950s brought a rising interest in blues music and folk music in the United States, and McDowell was brought to wider public attention, beginning when he was recorded in 1959 by Alan Lomax. McDowell's recordings were popular, and he performed often at festivals and clubs. McDowell continued to perform blues in the North Mississippi blues style much as he had for decades, but he sometimes performed on electric guitar rather than acoustic. While he famously declared "I do not play no rock and roll," McDowell was not averse to associating with many younger rock musicians: He coached Bonnie Raitt on slide guitar technique, and was reportedly flattered by The Rolling Stones' rather straightforward, authentic version of his "You Gotta Move" on their 1971 Sticky Fingers album.

McDowell's 1969 album I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll was his first featuring electric guitar. It features parts of an interview in which he discusses the origins of the blues and the nature of love. This interview was sampled and mixed into a song (also titled I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll by Dangerman in 1999.McDowell died of cancer in 1972 and is buried at Hammond Hill M.B. Church, between Como and Senatobia, Mississippi.

Slide guitarist Bob Log III named him as his main influence and the person who led him to play guitar.

AllMusic Bio

When Mississippi Fred McDowell proclaimed on one of his last albums, "I do not play no rock & roll," it was less a boast by an aging musician swept aside by the big beat than a mere statement of fact. As a stylist and purveyor of the original Delta blues, he was superb, equal parts Charley Patton and Son House coming to the fore through his roughed-up vocals and slashing bottleneck style of guitar playing. McDowell knew he was the real deal, and while others were diluting and updating their sound to keep pace with the changing times and audiences, Mississippi Fred stood out from the rest of the pack simply by not changing his style one iota. Though he scorned the amplified rock sound with a passion matched by few country bluesmen, he certainly had no qualms about passing any of his musical secrets along to his young, white acolytes, prompting several of them — including a young Bonnie Raitt — to develop slide guitar techniques of their own. Although generally lumped in with other blues "rediscoveries" from the '60s, the most amazing thing about him was that this rich repository of Delta blues had never recorded in the '20s or early '30s, didn't get "discovered" until 1959, and didn't become a full-time professional musician until the mid-'60s.

He was born in 1904 in Rossville, TN, and was playing the guitar by the age of 14 with a slide hollowed out of a steer bone. His parents died when Fred was a youngster and the wandering life of a traveling musician soon took hold. The 1920s saw him playing for tips on the street around Memphis, TN, the hoboing life eventually setting him down in Como, MS, where he lived the rest of his life. There McDowell split his time between farming and keeping up with his music by playing weekends for various fish fries, picnics, and house parties in the immediate area. This pattern stayed largely unchanged for the next 30 years until he was discovered in 1959 by folklorist Alan Lomax. Lomax was the first to record this semi-professional bluesman, the results of which were released as part of a American folk music series on the Atlantic label. McDowell, for his part, was happy to have some sounds on records, but continued on with his farming and playing for tips outside of Stuckey's candy store in Como for spare change. It wasn't until Chris Strachwitz — folk blues enthusiast and owner of the fledgling Arhoolie label — came searching for McDowell to record him that the bluesman's fortunes began to change dramatically.

Two albums, Fred McDowell, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, were released on Arhoolie in the mid-'60s, and the shock waves were felt throughout the folk-blues community. Here was a bluesman with a repertoire of uncommon depth, putting it over with great emotional force, and to top it all off, he had seemingly slipped through the cracks of late-'20s/early-'30s field recordings. No scratchy, highly prized 78s on Paramount or Vocalion to use as a yardstick to measure his current worth, no romantic stories about him disappearing into the Delta for decades at a time to become a professional gambler or a preacher. No, Mississippi Fred McDowell had been in his adopted home state, farming and playing all along, and the world coming to his doorstep seemed to ruffle him no more than the little boy down the street delivering the local newspaper.

Mississippi Fred McDowell - Goin Down to the River, From: NaOH123

The success of the Arhoolie recordings suddenly found McDowell very much in demand on the folk and festival circuit, where his quiet, good-natured performances left many a fan utterly spellbound. Working everything from the Newport Folk Festival to coffeehouse dates to becoming a member of the American Folk Blues Festival in Europe, McDowell suddenly had more listings in his résumé in a couple of years than he had in the previous three decades combined. He was also well documented on film, with appearances in The Blues Maker (1968), his own documentary Fred McDowell (1969), and Roots of American Music: Country and Urban Music (1970) among them. By the end of the decade, he was signed to do a one-off album for Capitol Records (the aforementioned I Do Not Play No Rock 'N' Roll) and his tunes were being mainstreamed into the blues-rock firmament by artists like Bonnie Raitt (who recorded several of his tunes, including notable versions of "Write Me a Few Lines" and "Kokomo") and the Rolling Stones, who included a very authentic version of his classic "You Got to Move" on their Sticky Fingers album. Unfortunately, this career largess didn't last much longer, as McDowell was diagnosed with cancer while performing dates into 1971. His playing days suddenly behind him, he lingered for a few months into July 1972, finally succumbing to the disease at age 68. And right to the end, the man remained true to his word; he didn't play any rock & roll, just the straight, natural blues.

by Cub Koda

ArtistDirect Bio

If any of the commercial labels like OKeh or Paramount had discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell back in the 1920s or 1930s when they were busy putting out 78s by the likes of Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Skip James, he very well might be thought of today as the absolute best of the old Delta and country blues players. His slide tone was as pure or purer than any of them, and they were indeed his contemporaries (Robert Johnson was actually seven years his junior), but McDowell had to wait for Alan Lomax to visit Como, MS, in 1959 to be discovered. Over the next decade McDowell distinguished himself as a master of the country blues (and country gospel) medium, delivering performance after performance of emotionally balanced versions of the old Delta catalog and turning in breathtaking slide guitar work on both acoustic and electric guitar. This fine collection includes scattered live performances by McDowell recorded between 1963 and 1969, but even though the set is somewhat patched together, it still feels like a coherent whole, and a pretty accurate portrait of this amazing blues player clearly emerges from it all. McDowell's signature "You Got to Move" is here (listed as "You Gotta Move"), as well as a thundering version of Bukka White's "Shake 'Em on Down" that is every bit as exciting as White's original, a sprightly take on "I Asked for Whiskey, She Gave Me Gasoline," and a majestic acoustic version of "Going Down the River." A subtly balanced singer, McDowell is nothing short of elegant when he pulls out the slide, and no country blues player has ever done it better. It's virtually impossible to find a bad Fred McDowell album, and this patchwork affair is no exception. His natural grace and elegance shine through no matter how he is packaged.

Steve Leggett, All Music Guide

Mephis History Bio

Fred McDowell was born in Rossville, Tennessee, just east of Memphis in January, 1904. Orphaned while still a youth McDowell picked up the guitar at age 14. Although he played at dances and picnics it was not a real source of income. Most of his income was from the back-breaking work of a farm laborer.

The life of a musician in Memphis was much less taxing physically than the life of a farmer. Like many young people in the early part of the early 20th century, McDowell made his way to the city and began to make his way as a musician in 1926. McDowell played a guitar based mainly on slide. He originally used a pocket knife, but moved on to (believe it or not) a beef rib bone. Ultimately he used a glass slide in the manner of the early slide-blues musicians. These slides were normally made of "medicine bottles" which at that time were tall and slim. Fred McDowell sliced his glass slide down to the point that he could play slide "lead or melody" while still striking chords. The open tunings he used reduced the need for complex chord fingering.

During the World War II era Fred McDowell left the music profession and took the ultimate fallback in those days, farmwork. As fate would have it an expedition to the South by Alan Lomax and Crew recorded a number or Fred's songs which eventually led to him being a part of the so-called "re-discovery" of blues artists. It was actually an unearthing of existing blues artists by a brand new fan-base.

McDowell performed for a number of years, including playing on the electric guitar, but always his mantra was "I do not play no rock and roll". He, in fact, made that the title of an album recorded in 1969. He does not appear to have been offended by rock and roll, he simply did not play it. He was honored by the Rolling Stones recording of his "You Gotta Move". He should have been honored deeply since other bands, notably Led Zepplin, stole liberally from the older blues musician without giving up a penny of the royalties.

Fred McDowell's later life contained a good deal more recognition and respect than his early life. Sadly he died from cancer at the age of 68 in 1972. He appears to have anticipated the music of Elmore James and modeled a much-imitated style of two-fingered picking with raked chords and slide interludes.

Mississippi Fred McDowell is buried at Hammond Hill M.B. Church, between Como and Senatobia, Mississippi.

The following is Fred McDowell in his own words:

"I couldn't tell you exactly the date I was born. I was born in Rossville, Tennessee... I was about 21 when I left Rossville. There I was plowing with a mule. My father was a farmer and I worked with him. We were working twelve acres, growing cotton, peas and corn. I went to Memphis from there. I just got tired of plowing. I went there to look around, and after I got there I started working the Buckeye Oil Mill, sacking corn. Yellow corn, oats, sweet peas, and all like that. They had a great big plant out there. I stayed there about three years, I think. Then I loafed around, stayed with different people, friends. I worked for the Dixon brothers hooking logs on the track.

Fred McDowell - My babe, From: slideman77

"Worked in Chickasaw stacking logs for barrels. Worked at the Illinois Central shop in Memphis building freight cars. All this time I was picking up guitar...

"I was just a young man when I started playing guitar. In my teens, I was. I used to go to dances. I used to sing to the music whilst others was playing. When they'd quit, I'd always grab the guitar, go to doing something with it. I was watching them pretty close to see what they were doing. My older sister-- I nearly forgot-- played a little guitar, but she didn't teach me anything. I didn't get a guitar of mine until 1941. When I was learning, when I was young, I was playing other people's guitars...The way I got my first guitar-- Mr. Taylor, a white man from Texas, he gave me a guitar. I was working in a milk dairy in White Station, near Memphis. This was right before I'd moved to Mississippi. I wasn't making money from music. Just playing around for dances and like that...

"I learned a lot from one fellow, Raymond Payne, in Rossville. He was really good. Played regular style, not bottleneck. I got that bottleneck style from my uncle. He was an old man, the first person I ever saw play with that. He didn't play with a bottleneck, though. You know this big bone you get out of a steak? Well, he done let it dry and smoothed it off and it sounded just like that bottleneck. That's the first somebody I saw play like that. This was in Rossville. I was a little bitty boy when I heard him do that, and after I learned how to play I made me one and tried it too. Started off playing with a pocketknife. I just remembered him doing it. He didn't show me. Nothing. I never could hardly learn no music by nobody trying to show me. Like, I hear you play tonight. Well, next week sometime it would come to me... what you was playing. I'd get the sound of it in my head, then I'd do it my way from what I remembered...

"I made up a lot of the songs I sing. It's like you hear a record or something or other. Well, you pick out some words out of that record that you like. You sing that and add something else onto it. It's just like if you're going to pray, and mean it, things will be in your mind. As fast as you get one word out, something else will come in there. Songs should tell the truth... When I play-- if you pay attention, what I sing the guitar sings, too. And what the guitar say, I say." - Fred McDowell

The following is a quote from Alan Lomax, the main researcher in the "blues rediscovery" movement of the 1940s and 50s:

"Fred was surprised when I admired his music sufficiently to visit him for several evenings and record everything he knew. In true country fashion he kept telling me that he couldn't play nearly as well as other men he knew. In my estimation he is simply a modest man, for in him the great tradition of the blues runs pure and deep."

Lord, if I should hap'n a-die, baby

Before you think my time have come Lord,

if I should hap'n a-die,

baby 'Fore you think my time have come I want you bury my body

Down on Highway 61.

References

A Webpage for Linguistsand other Folks

(Prof. Peter L Patrick, PhD University of Essex)

Discography

Lyrics

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Black Ace

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:49:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Black Ace was the most frequently used stage name of American blues musician Babe Kyro Lemon Turner (b 21 December 1907, Hughes Springs, Texas – d 7 November 1972, Fort Worth, Texas), who was also known as B.K. Turner, Black Ace Turner or Babe Turner.

He was raised on the family farm, and taught himself to play guitar, performing in east Texas from the late 1920s on. During the early 1930s he began playing with Smokey Hogg and Buddy Woods, a Hawaiian-style guitarist who played with the instrument flat on his lap. Turner then bought a National steel guitar, and began playing what one later critic called "Hawaii meets the Delta," smooth and simple blues.

In 1937 Turner recorded six songs with Hogg and pianist Whistling Alex Moore for Chicago'sDecca Records in Dallas, including the blues "Black Ace". In the same year, he started a radio show in Fort Worth, using the cut as a theme song, and soon assumed the name.

In 1941 he appeared in The Blood of Jesus, an African-American movie produced by Spencer Williams Jr.. In 1943 he was drafted into the army, and gave up playing music for some years. However, in 1960, Arhoolie Records owner Chris Strachwitz persuaded him to record an album for his label. His last public performance was in a 1962 documentary, The Blues, and he died of cancer in 1972.

AllMusic

A solid guitarist and vocalist, Babe Turner AKA Black Ace built his own guitar as a child, then taught himself to play. He was also in a gospel choir in Hughes Springs, TX. Turner honed his skills playing at community functions during the '20s, then worked with Smokey Hogg at dances in Greenville, TX in the '30s. Hogg and Buddy Woods were frequent partners for Turner, who made several solo tours in the '30s and '40s. He appeared in the 1941 film The Blood of Jesus and 1962 movie The Blues. Turner had a show on Fort Worth radio station KFJZ from 1936 - 1941. He recorded for Decca in 1937. After a stint in the army during the early '40s, Turner's jobs were mostly non-musical, except for his film stints. He did make a 1960 LP for Arhoolie. Turner took his nickname from the 1936 recording "Black Ace."

Black Ace - Sweet Mama, From: Mandy39

Arhoolie Review

“In the late '30s, a Texan by the name of Babe Karo Lemon Turner released a single called `Black Ace Blues.' A Fort Worth radio station started to use the cut as a theme song and soon Turner assumed the moniker. Long before Jeff Healy piqued the music world's curiosity by playing guitar on his lap, Black Ace was playing a National steel guitar on his lap with a slide. He was one of only a few bluesmen who used this technique, the others being Kokomo Arnold and Black Ace's mentor, Oscar `Buddy' Woods. After only a few recordings in the '30s he remained dormant until Arhoolie Records' Chris Strachwitz ventured to his Fort Worth home in 1960 and brought the obscure bluesman back to the public's ear. Those recordings were originally issued the following year on Black Ace's only LP. With the fortunate advent of compact discs, we now have the pleasure of hearing the slide guitarist again some 30 years later. This disc features both the original sides from the '30s and those waxed in '60 including three never issued before. Except for one song left out from the '60s sessions, this is thus the complete Black Ace. Borrowing as much from Lonnie Johnson as Robert Johnson, Black Ace's style is much more city-like than the latter and less rough around the edges. While it is not as intense as Robert Johnson, it tends to be a little bit more listenable. Of the 70 minutes of music on this disc, almost all of it revolves around women, most of them bad ones. Even the Christmas songs `Christmas Time Blues' and `Santa Claus Blues,' beg not for better times or more money but, you guessed it, for the return of Black Ace's baby.

While his singing is impassioned and brooding, the real treat of Black Ace is his slide guitar playing. His Hawaii-meets-the-Delta playing style is both melodic and passionate, simple yet meaningful. A few instrumental numbers, `Bad Times Stomp,' `Ace's Guitar Blues' and `Ace's Guitar Breakdown,' focus on this aspect and leave questions as to just why this man is not openly enamored by today's guitarists like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton. With the clear recording of this compact disc, that may change.”

(Scott Cooper —Santa Cruz Sentinel)

References

Discography

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Blind Willie McTell

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:06:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

William Samuel McTell, better known as Blind Willie McTell (May 5, 1901 – August 15, 1959), was an influential American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

He was a twelve-string finger picking guitarist, and recorded from 1927 to 1955. One of his most famous songs, "Statesboro Blues", has been covered by artists such as Taj Mahal and The Allman Brothers Band. Jack White of The White Stripes considers McTell an influence (their 2000 album De Stijl was dedicated to him and featured a cover of his song "Your Southern Can Is Mine"), as did Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Bob Dylan has paid tribute to McTell on three occasions: first in "Blind Willie McTell" (recorded in 1983, released on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 in 1991), then with a cover of McTell's "Broke Down Engine" on his 1993 album World Gone Wrong. In his song "Po'Boy", off the 2003 album Love & Theft, Dylan again paid homage to McTell by appropriating the line "had to go to Florida dodging them Georgia laws" directly from the latter's "Kill It Kid"

Born in Thomson, Georgia, blind in one eye, McTell had lost his remaining vision by late childhood, but became an adept reader of Braille. He showed an inherent proficiency in music from an early age and learned to play the six-string guitar as soon as he could. His father left the family when McTell was still young, so when his mother died in the 1920s, he left his hometown and became a wandering busker. He began his recording career in 1927 for Victor Records in Atlanta.

Blues Legend 1: Blind Willie McTell, From: wewillwinit6times

In the years before World War II, he traveled and performed widely, recording for a number of labels under a variety of names. His style was singular: a form of country blues, bridging the gap between the raw blues of the Mississippi Delta and the more refined East Coast sound. The style is well documented on John Lomax's 1940 recordings of McTell for the Library of Congress.

In 1934, he married his wife Ruth Kate Williams (now better known as Kate McTell). She accompanied him on stage and on several recordings, before becoming a nurse in 1939. Most of their marriage from 1942 until his death was spent apart, with her living in Fort Gordon near Augusta, and him working around Atlanta.

Post-war, he recorded for Atlantic Records and for Regal Records, but these recordings met with less commercial success than his previous works. He continued to perform live in Atlanta, but his continued career was cut short by ill health, predominantly diabetes.

A record store manager, Ed Rhoades, met McTell in 1956 and captured a few final performances on a tape recorder. These were later released on Prestige/Bluesville Records as Blind Willie McTell's Last Session.

McTell died in Milledgeville, Georgia of a stroke in 1959.

A blues festival in McTell's honor is held annually in his birthplace, Thomson, Georgia.

New Georgia Encyclopedia

"Blind Willie" McTell was one of the great blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s. Displaying an extraordinary range on the twelve-string guitar, this Atlanta-based musician recorded more than 120 titles during fourteen recording sessions. His voice was soft and expressive, and his musical tastes were influenced by southern blues, ragtime, gospel, hillbilly, and popular music.

At a time when most blues musicians were poorly educated and rarely traveled, McTell was an exception. He could read and write music in Braille. He traveled often from Atlanta to New York City, frequently alone. As a person faced with a physical disability and social inequities, he expressed in his music a strong confidence in dealing with the everyday world.

McTell was born in Thomson on May 5, 1898. Few facts are known about his early life. Even his name is uncertain: his family name was either McTear or McTier, and his first name may have been Willie, Samuel, or Eddie. His tombstone reads "Eddie McTier." He was blind either from birth or from early childhood, and he attended schools for the blind in Georgia, New York, and Michigan.

While in his early teens, McTell learned to play the guitar from his mother, relatives, and neighbors in Statesboro, where his family had moved. In his teenage years, after his mother's death, he left home and toured in carnivals and medicine shows. In the 1920s and 1930s, McTell traveled a circuit between Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah, and Macon. This region encompasses two major blues styles: Eastern Seaboard/Piedmont, with lighter, bouncier rhythms and a ragtime influence; and Deep South, with its greater emphasis on intense rhythms and short, repeated music phrases.

McTell also journeyed from Georgia to New York City. Along the way he entertained wherever he could find an audience: passenger train cars, hotel lobbies, college fraternity parties, school assemblies, proms, vaudeville theaters, and churches. As he followed the tobacco market from Georgia into North Carolina, he played for farmers, buyers, and merchants at warehouses, auctions, livery stables, and hotels.

By the mid-1920s McTell was already an accomplished musician in Atlanta, playing at house parties and fish fries. He had also traded in the standard six-string acoustic guitar for a twelve-string guitar, which was popular among Atlanta musicians because of the extra volume it provided for playing on city streets.

By 1926 record companies had begun to take an interest in recording folk blues artists, mostly men playing solo with guitars—Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson from Mississippi, Peg Leg Howell and Blind Willie McTell from Georgia. Beginning with his first recording in 1927 for Victor Records and his 1928 recording session for Columbia, McTell produced such blues classics as "Statesboro Blues" (later made famous by the Allman Brothers Band and Taj Mahal), "Mama 'Tain't Long 'for' Day," and "Georgia Rag." In 1929 he recorded "Broke Down Engine Blues."

Like other musicians at the time, he recorded on different labels under various nicknames to skirt contractual agreements. Thus he was Blind Willie for Vocalion, Georgia Bill for OKeh, Red Hot Willie Glaze for Bluebird, Blind Sammie for Columbia, Barrel House Sammy for Atlantic, and Pig 'n' Whistle Red for Regal Records. The latter name came from a popular drive-in barbecue restaurant in Atlanta where he played for tips.

In the early 1930s McTell frequently played with Blind Lemon Jefferson throughout the South. He married Ruth Kate Williams, with whom he recorded some duets, in 1934.

In 1940 folk-song collector John Lomax recorded the versatile musician for the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress. These sessions, which have been issued in full, feature interviews as well as a variety of music.

McTell was the only bluesman to remain active in Atlanta until well after World War II (1941-45). With his longtime associate Curley Weaver, he played for tips on Atlanta's Decatur Street, a popular hangout for local blues musicians. His last recording was made in 1956 for an Atlanta record-store owner and released on the Prestige/Bluesville label. Afterward he played exclusively religious music. From 1957 to his death he was active as a preacher at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Atlanta. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 19, 1959, at the Milledgeville State Hospital.

In 1981 Blind Willie McTell was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame. Two years later, folksinger Bob Dylan paid homage to McTell in his song "Blind Willie McTell": "And I know no one can sing the blues / Like Blind Willie McTell." In 1990 McTell was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Each year, the city of Thomson hosts the Blind Willie McTell Blues Festival in honor of their hometown legend.

AllMusic Bio

Willie Samuel McTell was one of the blues' greatest guitarists, and also one of the finest singers ever to work in blues. A major figure with a local following in Atlanta from the 1920s onward, he recorded dozens of sides throughout the 1930s under a multitude of names — all the better to juggle "exclusive" relationships with many different record labels at once — including Blind Willie, Blind Sammie, Hot Shot Willie, and Georgia Bill, as a backup musician to Ruth Mary Willis. And those may not have been all of his pseudonyms — we don't even know what he chose to call himself, although "Blind Willie" was his preferred choice among friends. Much of what we do know about him was learned only years after his death, from family members and acquaintances. His family name was, so far as we know, McTier or McTear, and the origins of the "McTell" name are unclear. What is clear is that he was born into a family filled with musicians — his mother and his father both played guitar, as did one of his uncles, and he was also related to Georgia Tom Dorsey, who later became the Reverend Thomas Dorsey.

McTell was born in Thomson, Georgia, near Augusta, and raised near Statesboro. Willie was probably born blind, although early in his life he could perceive light in one eye. His blindness never became a major impediment, however, and it was said that his sense of hearing and touch were extraordinary. His first instruments were the harmonica and the accordion, but as soon as he was big enough he took up the guitar and showed immediate aptitude on the new instrument. He played a standard six-string acoustic until the mid-'20s, and never entirely abandoned the instrument, but from the beginning of his recording career, he used a 12-string acoustic in the studio almost exclusively. Willie's technique on the 12-string instrument was unique. Unlike virtually every other bluesman who used one, he relied not on its resonances as a rhythm instrument, but, instead, displayed a nimble, elegant slide and finger-picking style that made it sound like more than one guitar at any given moment. He studied at a number of schools for the blind, in Georgia, New York, and Michigan, during the early '20s, and probably picked up some formal musical knowledge. He worked medicine shows, carnivals, and other outdoor venues, and was a popular attraction, owing to his sheer dexterity and a nasal singing voice that could sound either pleasant or mournful, and incorporated some of the characteristics normally associated with White hillbilly singers.

Willie's recording career began in late 1927 with two sessions for Victor records, eight sides including "Statesboro Blues." McTell's earliest sides were superb examples of storytelling in music, coupled with dazzling guitar work. All of McTell's music showed extraordinary power, some of it delightfully raucous ragtime, other examples evoking darker, lonelier sides of the blues, all of it displaying astonishingly rich guitar work.

McTell worked under a variety of names, and with a multitude of partners, including his one time wife Ruthy Kate Williams (who recorded with him under the name Ruby Glaze), and also Buddy Moss and Curley Weaver. McTell cut some of his best songs more than once in his career. Like many bluesmen, he recorded under different names simultaneously, and was even signed to Columbia and Okeh Records, two companies that ended up merged at the end of the 1930s, at the same time under two names. His recording career never gave Willie quite as much success as he had hoped, partly due to the fact that some of his best work appeared during the depths of the Depression. He was uniquely popular in Atlanta, where he continued to live and work throughout most of his career, and, in fact, was the only blues guitarist of any note from the city to remain active in the city until well after World War II.

Bob Dylan - Blind Willie McTell, From: chimeman

Willie was well known enough that Library of Congress archivist John Lomax felt compelled to record him in 1940, although during the war, like many other acoustic country bluesmen, his recording career came to a halt. Luckily for Willie and generations of listeners after him, however, there was a brief revival of interest in acoustic country blues after World War II that brought him back into the studio. Amazingly enough, the newly founded Atlantic Records — which was more noted for its recordings of jazz and R&B — took an interest in Willie and cut 15 songs with him in Atlanta during 1949. The one single released from these sessions, however, didn't sell, and most of those recordings remained unheard for more than 20 years after they were made. A year later, however, he was back in the studio, this time with his longtime partner Curley Weaver, cutting songs for the Regal label. None of these records sold especially well, however, and while Willie kept playing to anyone who would listen, the bitter realities of life had finally overtaken him, and he began drinking on a regular basis. He was rediscovered in 1956, just in time to get one more historic session down on tape. He left music soon after, to become a pastor of a local church, and he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1959, his passing so unnoticed at the time that certain reissues in the 1970s referred to Willie as still being alive in the 1960s.

Blind Willie McTell was one of the giants of the blues, as a guitarist and as a singer and recording artist. Hardly any of his work as passed down to us on record is less than first rate, and this makes most any collection of his music worthwhile. A studious and highly skilled musician whose skills transcended the blues, he was equally adept at ragtime, spirituals, story-songs, hillbilly numbers, and popular tunes, excelling in all of these genres. He could read and write music in braille, which gave him an edge on many of his sighted contemporaries, and was also a brilliant improvisor on the guitar, as is evident from his records. Willie always gave an excellent account of himself, even in his final years of performing and recording.

by Bruce Eder

References

Wikipedia

New Georgia Encyclopedia

Discography

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Son House

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 05:06:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

The middle of seventeen brothers, House was born in Riverton, two miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Around age seven or eight, he was brought by his mother to Tallulah, Louisiana after his parents separated. The young Son House was determined to become a Baptist preacher, and at age 15 began his preaching career. Despite the church's firm stand against blues music and the sinful world which revolved around it, House became attracted to it and taught himself guitar in his mid-20s, after moving back to the Clarksdale area, inspired by the work of Willie Wilson. He began playing alongside Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson, Fiddlin' Joe Martin, and Leroy Williams, around Robinsonville, Mississippi and north to Memphis, Tennessee until 1942.

After killing a man, allegedly in self-defense, he spent time at Parchman Farm in 1928 and 1929. The official story on the killing is that sometime around 1927 or 28, he was playing in a juke joint when a man went on a shooting spree. Son was wounded in the leg, and shot the man dead. He received a 15-year sentence at Parchman Farm prison.

Son House - Death Letter, From: scmm42

Son House recorded for Paramount Records in 1930 and for Alan Lomax from the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. He then faded from public view until the country blues revival in the 1960s when, after a long search of the Mississippi Delta region by Nick Perls, Dick Waterman and Phil Spiro, he was "re-discovered" in June 1964 in Rochester, New York where he had lived since 1943; House had been retired from the music business for many years, working for the New York Central Railroad, and was completely unaware of the international revival of enthusiasm for his early recordings. He subsequently toured extensively in the US and Europe and recorded for CBS records. Like Mississippi John Hurt he was welcomed into the music scene of the 1960s and played at Newport Folk Festival in 1964, the New York Folk Festival in July 1965, and the October 1967 European tour of the American Folk Festival along with Skip James and Bukka White. In the summer of 1970, House toured Europe once again, including an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival; a recording of his London concerts was released by Liberty Records.

Ill health plagued his later years and in 1974 he retired once again, and later moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he remained until his death from cancer of the larynx. He was buried at Mt. Hazel Cemetery on Lahser south of Seven Mile. Members of the Detroit Blues Society raised money through benefit concerts to put a fitting monument on his grave. He had been married five times.

House's innovative style featured very strong, repetitive rhythms, often played with the aid of a bottleneck, coupled with singing that owed more than a nod to the hollers of the chain gangs. The music of Son House, in contrast to that of, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson, was emphatically a dance music, meant to be heard in the noisy atmosphere of a barrelhouse or other dance hall. House was the primary influence on Muddy Waters and also an important influence on Robert Johnson, who would later take his music to new levels. It was House who, speaking to awe-struck young blues fans in the 1960s, spread the legend that Johnson had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical powers.

More recently, House's music has influenced rock groups such as the White Stripes, who covered his song Death Letter (also reworked by Skip James and Robert Johnson) on their album De Stijl, and later performed it at the 2004 Grammy Awards. The White Stripes also incorporated sections of a traditional song Son House recorded, John the Revelator, into the song Cannon from their eponymous debut album The White Stripes.

Another musician deeply influenced by Son House is the slide player John Mooney, who in his teens learned slide guitar from Son House while Son was living in Rochester, New York. Several of House's songs were recently figured in the motion picture soundtrack of "Black Snake Moan" (2006).

Describing House's 1967 appearance at the De Montfort Hall in Leicester, England, Bob Groom wrote in Blues World magazine:

It is difficult to describe the transformation that took place as this smiling, friendly man hunched over his guitar and launched himself, bodily it seemed, into his music. The blues possessed him like a 'lowdown shaking chill' and the spellbound audience saw the very incarnation of the blues as, head thrown back, he hollered and groaned the disturbing lyrics and flailed the guitar, snapping the strings back against the fingerboard to accentuate the agonized rhythm. Son's music is the centre of the blues experience and when he performs it is a corporeal thing, audience and singer become as one.

AllMusic

Son House's place, not only in the history of Delta blues, but in the overall history of the music, is a very high one indeed. He was a major innovator of the Delta style, along with his playing partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown. Few listening experiences in the blues are as intense as hearing one of Son House's original 1930s recordings for the Paramount label. Entombed in a hailstorm of surface noise and scratches, one can still be awestruck by the emotional fervor House puts into his singing and slide playing. Little wonder then that the man became more than just an influence on some white English kid with a big amp; he was the main source of inspiration to both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, and it doesn't get much more pivotal than that. Even after his rediscovery in the mid-'60s, House was such a potent musical force that what would have been a normally genteel performance by any other bluesmen in a "folk" setting turned into a night in the nastiest juke joint you could imagine, scaring the daylights out of young white enthusiasts expecting something far more prosaic and comfortable. Not out of Son House, no sir. When the man hit the downbeat on his National steel-bodied guitar and you saw his eyes disappear into the back of his head, you knew you were going to hear some blues. And when he wasn't shouting the blues, he was singing spirituals, a cappella. Right up to the end, no bluesman was torn between the sacred and the profane more than Son House.

He was born Eddie James House, Jr., on March 21, 1902, in Riverton, MS. By the age of 15, he was preaching the gospel in various Baptist churches as the family seemingly wandered from one plantation to the next. He didn't even bother picking up a guitar until he turned 25; to quote House, "I didn't like no guitar when I first heard it; oh gee, I couldn't stand a guy playin' a guitar. I didn't like none of it." But if his ambivalence to the instrument was obvious, even more obvious was the simple fact that Son hated plantation labor even more and had developed a taste for corn whiskey. After drunkenly launching into a blues at a house frolic in Lyon, MS, one night and picking up some coin for doing it, the die seemed to be cast; Son House may have been a preacher, but he was part of the blues world now.

Son House - John the Revelator, From: bigbassmaster666

If the romantic notion that the blues life is said to be a life full of trouble is true, then Son found a barrel of it one night at another house frolic in Lyon. He shot a man dead that night and was immediately sentenced to imprisonment at Parchman Farm. He ended up only serving two years of his sentence, with his parents both lobbying hard for his release, claiming self defense. Upon his release — after a Clarksdale judge told him never to set foot in town again — he started a new life in the Delta as a full-time man of the blues.

After hitchhiking and hoboing the rails, he made it down to Lula, MS, and ran into the most legendary character the blues had to offer at that point, the one and only Charley Patton. The two men couldn't have been less similar in disposition, stature, and in musical and performance outlook if they had purposely planned it that way. Patton was described as a funny, loud-mouthed little guy who was a noisy, passionate showman, using every trick in the book to win over a crowd. The tall and skinny House was by nature a gloomy man with a saturnine disposition who still felt extremely guilt-ridden about playing the blues and working in juke joints. Yet when he ripped into one, Son imbued it with so much raw feeling that the performance became the show itself, sans gimmicks. The two of them argued and bickered constantly, and the only thing these two men seemed to have in common was a penchant for imbibing whatever alcoholic potable came their way. Though House would later refer in interviews to Patton as a "jerk" and other unprintables, it was Patton's success as a bluesman — both live and especially on record — that got Son's foot in the door as a recording artist. He followed Patton up to Grafton, WI, and recorded a handful of sides for the Paramount label. These records today (selling scant few copies in their time, the few that did survived a life of huge steel needles, even bigger scratches, and generally lousy care) are some of the most highly prized collectors' items of Delta blues recordings, much tougher to find than, say, a Robert Johnson or even a Charley Patton 78. Paramount used a pressing compound for their 78 singles that was so noisy and inferior sounding that should someone actually come across a clean copy of any of Son's original recordings, it's a pretty safe bet that the listener would still be greeted with a blizzard of surface noise once the needle made contact with the disc.

But audio concerns aside, the absolutely demonic performances House laid down on these three two-part 78s ("My Black Mama," "Preachin' the Blues," and "Dry Spell Blues," with an unreleased test acetate of "Walkin' Blues" showing up decades later) cut through the hisses and pops like a brick through a stained glass window.

It was those recordings that led Alan Lomax to his door in 1941 to record him for the Library of Congress. Lomax was cutting acetates on a "portable" recording machine weighing over 300 pounds. Son was still playing (actually at the peak of his powers, some would say), but had backed off of it a bit since Charley Patton died in 1934. House did some tunes solo, as Lomax asked him to do, but also cut a session backed by a rocking little string band. As the band laid down long and loose (some tracks went on for over six minutes) versions of their favorite numbers, all that was missing was the guitars being plugged in and a drummer's backbeat and you were getting a glimpse of the future of the music.

But just as House had gone a full decade without recording, this time after the Lomax recordings, he just as quickly disappeared, moving to Rochester, NY. When folk-blues researchers finally found him in 1964, he was cheerfully exclaiming that he hadn't touched a guitar in years. One of the researchers, a young guitarist named Alan Wilson (later of the blues-rock group Canned Heat) literally sat down and retaught Son House how to play like Son House. Once the old master was up to speed, the festival and coffeehouse circuit became his oyster. He recorded again, the recordings becoming an important introduction to his music and, for some, a lot easier to take than those old Paramount 78s from a strict audio standpoint. In 1965, he played Carnegie Hall and four years later found himself the subject of an eponymously titled film documentary, all of this another world removed from Clarksdale, MS, indeed. Everywhere he played, he was besieged by young fans, asking him about Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and others. For young white blues fans, these were merely exotic names from the past, heard only to them on old, highly prized recordings; for Son House they were flesh and blood contemporaries, not just some names on a record label. Hailed as the greatest living Delta singer still actively performing, nobody dared call himself the king of the blues as long as Son House was around.

He fell into ill health by the early '70s; what was later diagnosed as both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease first affected his memory and his ability to recall songs on-stage and, later, his hands, which shook so bad he finally had to give up the guitar and eventually leave performing altogether by 1976. He lived quietly in Detroit, MI, for another 12 years, passing away on October 19, 1988. His induction into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1980 was no less than his due. Son House was the blues.

by Cub Koda

Heaven on Earth
Feeling the power and glory of the great Son House
by Ted Drozdowski

Robert Johnson's been dubbed the King of the Delta Blues. And yeah, it's true that his slippery genius on guitar dealt the cards that blues stringslingers have been playing ever since, and that the hellhound that was on his trail is one of the music's indelible images, and that his recordings hold a simultaneous beauty and terror that few artists have been able to raise. One could argue that nobody rekindled the twined blaze of those emotions as brightly as Johnson until Kurt Cobain come along.

But to me, Johnson is more of the blues' flamboyant prince than its king. The king is a man who both inspired and outlived Johnson, whose rippling slide can be heard resonating in Johnson's quicksilver licks, but whose own style was an unstoppable rhythmic juggernaut, full of muting and popping and frailing. And whose songs went Johnson's devil's music one better by summoning angels and demons, and whose singing then gave vent to the sound of their apocalyptic battle for his soul. Today Johnson's voice, cranked in a darkened car traveling through the one-lane highways of the Delta at midnight, still induces the willies. (Muddy Waters recounted that he once saw Johnson and was so unnerved he fled the scene.) But the voice of the great Son House not only sounds as though it could split the earth asunder, it is also the sound of a soul utterly alone.

Like his contemporary and friend Charlie Patton, House told the stories of his life and his times in his songs. "Levee Camp Blues" talked of the dangerous workplaces along the Mississippi where infidelity, cruel bosses, drinking, gambling, and death were the only constants. Recorded in a general store at Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, by blues historian Alan Lomax in 1941 -- when he was 39 -- Son House sang about the emotional fallout World War II rained on soldiers and their families in "American Defense." That song even shows House's pre-blues roots, in the banjo strumming minstrelsy tradition. Twenty-four years later, after the '60s American folk-blues boom gave his career new breath, he authored and recorded a lament for the assassinated John F. Kennedy that again hewed closer to the minstrel's craft than the blues.

Even at that advanced point in his life he was still singing songs like "John the Revelator," a praise for the Biblical author set only to his voice, handclaps, and stomping feet, and "Preachin' Blues," a jab at the hypocrisy of organized religion, in the same set. It was a conflict House seemed to feel in every fiber of his body -- an impulse to get with religion and the feeling that it was an all-around sham. It reflected his corporal attitude: he was man who lived a very real life of hard labor and hard times, hard drinking and hard love. And he came from a culture where the church was the axis of society. Yet in deciding to be a bluesman, he exempted himself from welcome by the church-going community.

Son House - Sometimes I wish, From: zowieso

But for me the deep, chilly heart of House's music can be found in two songs: "Death Letter" and "Grinnin' in Your Face." The first is about love and regret -- about a man who gets a letter telling him his woman's dead, about his shock at seeing her laid out "on that cooling board," and the heartwrenching realization that he shouts out at its end: "I didn't know I loved her, 'til they laid her in the ground." If that sounds very heavy, it's because it is. Imagine loving someone but not being able to articulate or understand it until she's dead. Imagine the pain of having never told her, of never being able to tell her or touch her, and of eventually carrying those unrequited feelings to your own grave. What songwriter today can even begin to approximate such complex, heart-dragging emotions? And to pin them to House's voice, which seems to be shouting the story from the deepest pit of his soul? No wonder our era's Diva of Darkness, avant siren Diamanda Galás, has taken to covering the tune. This is the kind of razor-edged truth that real life's made of. So's "Grinnin' in Your Face," which tells of the betrayal and cunning that surrounds us, reminding us that "a true friend is hard to find." And there's a rippling want in House's quavering voice that lets us know he arrived at that conclusion after plenty of searching.
Hearing House perform is an emotional experience equaled by few in recorded music. Two CDs remain the measure of his power: Delta Blues, Alan Lomax's original Library of Congress recordings from 1940 and '41, on the Biograph label; and Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1965 Sessions, a compilation of the Death Letter LP and leftover tracks from the same dates, put out by Columbia in '92. Just before Christmas '95, Capitol added to the House legacy with Delta Blues & Spirituals by Son House, a live recording made in England of some of his most famous songs, plus conversation in which House's blues spirit seems to have been nipping spirits. Not a great performance, but an entertaining one -- it's fun to hear House explaining the carnal nature of the blues, and the dynamics of relations between the sexes.

By now, I hope you're sold on the importance of Son House and, if you don't already know his work, will go buy one of his albums and let a song like "Death Letter" change your life, or at least your value of it. Especially now that his former manager, Dick Waterman, has seen to it that money is getting out of Columbia's paws and into the hands of House's survivors, including his widow (his fifth wife).

But imagine being able to see House perform live -- potent and rocking in solid form before a small studio audience, filmed with clarity. It's awe-striking to watch him close his eyes and seemingly leap into a different world to summon forth "Death Letter" or "John the Revelator," his feet stomping time in unison, his right hand flying across and prodding the strings into a heavy grind and sweet keen. And all that's caught in a half-hour program split between House and Bukka White as part of Vestapol's Masters of the Country Blues series. Shot in 1968, it captures House old-but-vital, 20 years before his death at age 86. And though this tape is essential to anyone who loves music, let alone the blues, there's an even hotter performance on video -- a bootleg from an old New York public-television program that's circulated a bit. The show's split between House performing solo and a young Buddy Guy with his hot Chicago band. Here House is asked to comment on what Guy's group is playing. He makes a remark reminiscent of what Cab Calloway said about bebop. Cab called Bird's thing "Chinese music"; House calls Guy's music "monkeyjunk." But that doesn't stop him and Guy from duetting at the video's close, sitting side by side, House's dobro and Guy's acoustic guitar speaking a language both men understand.

Playing with Son House is an experience few have had. Besides Guy and the handful of musicians he recorded with, I know of only two others. One was Willie Brown, House's old running partner in the days when Robert Johnson was an aspiring musician who'd come to see them ignite crowds at fish fries. The other is Cambridge's resident country-blues dynamo, Paul Rishell, who met and played with House at Waterman's apartment for three days in April 1977.
"When I met him, he was a like a feral old man," recalls Rishell. "Very powerful. He had this sort of wild look in his eye, like Charlie Manson. He was scary. Here was a man who carried a gun and had once shot another man through the head and gone to prison for a year. He had five wives. And the strength of his humanity struck me; he was no longer an abstract blues musician, someone whose records I'd studied. I felt like he was on a hairtrigger, too. Like he could spring up from his chair and be on me in a second if he wanted to. He was just such a powerful presence. And somehow, I'm not sure, he gave me a stronger sense of the blues as an African music, something from another place.

"I was told that I could pour him a drink if he asked, but I couldn't let him drink it. He told me, `I got soft brain, boy. You know what that is?' That was from drinking too much liquor over the years; all he had to do was sniff it to get high. And when you'd leave the room, he'd shoot the whiskey down, and then he'd start talking in a French patois and want to go out. Apparently he'd spent some time in Louisiana and picked that up."

"When Son was singing songs about religion and the church," Rishell continues, "he was looking for loopholes. Like W.C. Fields. When Fields was dying, someone asked him why he was reading the Bible. And he explained he was looking for loopholes. Son said he was saved by the blues. But you know, he was an outlaw, like Jesse James. See, for most of his life, he couldn't live in his own community. When he was growing up in Mississippi, the church was a safe place, a sacred place. It wasn't until the integration struggles of the '60s that they started firebombing black churches. Before that, the church was the sanctuary, the be-all and end-all of the black community.

"Son was ostracized by that community. It says in the Bible, the carnal mind is an enemy of God, because it's not subject to the rule of God, to God's laws. And the carnal mind . . . that's what the blues is all about. The blues looks for Heaven on Earth, not a reward in Heaven. The blues says, `I'm gonna do it now! I'm gonna get high and get laid and I'm gonna play music!' And Son was a 100 percent carnal man. That was his whole thing, but in his old age he was ashamed of it. And it was a conflict for him.

"He told me that he was once living with a woman, and she was sick. After coming back from work one day, he told her, `I'm going out; you wanna come?' `No,' she said. `I'm too sick.' When he came home and went to bed, he could tell she was still sick. And he told me, `I woke up in the morning, and had to go to the commode. And I opened the door to the outhouse, and she had died there, sitting on the board.' I asked, `What did you do?' `Nothin' for me to do; she was dead. So I left; I just left.' Completely matter-of-fact.

"My deepest fears were his everyday life. Losing somebody like that, or getting lynched or murdered or shot at a dance or something. He lived like that and wrote his songs and made some money and -- in the days when it wasn't so easy for a black man -- traveled wherever he wanted. He was proud he'd been to Hollywood, just because he wanted to go. Even then, after he'd toured Europe in the '60s, he was still proud of the fact that he'd always gone wherever he wanted to go."

"His blues were intense, anguished, and powerful. Unlike his 30s playing partner Charley Patton -- a "clowning man" with a guitar -- Son House took his music mighty seriously. Sitting on a straight-back chair, he'd suddenly whip his head back, roll his eyes inside his skull, and slide a bottleneck up his guitar's neck. Veins bulging in his forehead, he'd moan, thump a bass note, and sing with the deep conviction of a sinner on judgment day. Seeing him in 1930 caused a teenage Robert Johnson to abandon harmonica for guitar. House cast a lifelong spell over Muddy Waters too. Eddie James "Son" House remained true to his Mississippi roots. His 1930 Paramount 78s captured unsurpassed Delta blues singing but brought him little money or recognition. He made superb field recordings -- solo and with a band -- in 1941 and 1942, and then followed a girlfriend to Rochester, NY, where he took a job on the New York Central Railroad. Blues researchers located House in 1964 and prompted him into playing again. The hard-drinking guitarist recorded passionately primitive albums for Columbia, Verve/Folkways, Vanguard, and other labels, giving concerts until deteriorating health forced his retirement in 1974. He lived with his family in Detroit until October 19, 1988, when the last great voice of first-generation Delta blues was finally stilled." - Jas Obrecht

Son House Portrait by Linda-Lou Nelson

References

Discography

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Blind Blake

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:13:00 +0000

Wikipedia Bio

"Blind" Blake (born Arthur Blake, circa 1893, Jacksonville, Florida; died: circa 1933) was an influential blues singer and guitarist. He is often called "The King Of Ragtime Guitar". There is only one photograph of him in existence.

Blind Blake recorded about 80 tracks for Paramount Records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was one of the most accomplished guitarists of his genre with a surprisingly diverse range of material. His complex and intricate fingerpicking has inspired Reverend Gary Davis, Jorma Kaukonen, Ry Cooder, Ralph Mctell and many others. He is most known for his distinct guitar sound that was comparable in sound and style to a ragtime piano.

Very little is known about his life. His birthplace was listed as Jacksonville, Florida by Paramount Records but even that is in dispute. Nothing is known of his death. Even his name is not certain. During recordings he was asked about his real name and he answered that his name was Blind Arthur Blake which is also listed on some of the song credits, strengthening his case on his real name, although there is a suggestion that his real name was Arthur Phelps.

His first recordings were made in 1926 and his records sold well. His first solo record was "Early Morning Blues" with "West Coast Blues" on the B-side. Both are considered excellent examples of his style. Blake made his last recordings in 1932, the end of his career aided by Paramount's bankruptcy. It is often said that the later recordings have much less sparkle and, allegedly, Blind Blake was drinking heavily in his later years. It is likely that this led to his early death at only 40 years. (The exact circumstances of his death are not known; Reverend Gary Davis said in an interview that he had heard Blake was killed by a streetcar.)

MediaGuide Bio

Not to be confused with Blind Arthur Blake, the blues singer and ragtime guitarist of the 1920s and 1930s, this Blind Blake recorded a series of album in the early 1950s amid the earliest phases of the calypso boom, backed by the Royal Victoria Hotel Calypso Orchestra. Curiously, there is a blues/ragtime feel to some of their material, though there's no way that they could ever be mistaken for players in either field. The calypso Blind Blake (use it sort of like "Country Johnny Mathis") was a fixture in and around Nassau in the Bahamas for 20 years before he cut his first record, and it was a little late to teach him much about showmanship. He had most of what he needed in his delivery of his songs, which included genuine island numbers as well as pieces like "The John B. Sail" (better known to most of us, especially Beach Boys fans, as "Sloop John B."). Blake never became a major star, lacking the smooth, pop-style appeal of Harry Belafonte or the compositional creativity of Irving Burgie, but he was one of the better authentic island musicians whose work made it to the United States in the 1950s. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide

AllMusic Bio

Blind Blake is a figure of enormous importance in American music. Not only was he one of the greatest blues guitarists of all-time, Blake seems to have been the primary developer of "finger-style" ragtime on the guitar, the six-string equivalent to playing ragtime on the piano. Blake mastered this form so completely that few, if any, guitarists who have learned to play in this style since Blake have been able to match his quite singular achievements in this realm. Blind Blake was the most frequently recorded blues guitarist in the Paramount Records' race catalog; indeed, Paramount waxed him as often as they could, as he was their best-selling artist. By the time the Paramount label folded in the fall of 1932, Blake had recorded an amazing 79 known sides for them under his own name and had contributed accompaniments to Paramount recordings by other artists such as Gus Cannon, Papa Charlie Jackson, Irene Scruggs, Ma Rainey and Ida Cox to name only a few.

One would surmise, given Blake's importance, celebrity status, popularity and sizeable recorded output that we would know something about the man. And after more than five decades of searching conducted by experts on behalf of Blind Blake, we still don't know anything verifiable about Blake which he doesn't tell us on his records. Practically all of what is "known" about Blind Blake outside of that is a combination of conjecture, rumor, slander and nonsense. At one point a theory was advanced that Blind Blake's true name was "Arthur Phelps" and it is under this name that Blake's entry is filed in Sheldon Harris' Blues Who's Who. But the theory is easily debunked by Blake himself, who states on his 1929 recording "Blind Arthur's Breakdown" that his name is "Arthur Blake." He briefly breaks into Geechee dialect during the course of "Southern Rag," and this advanced a theory that Blake was really born in the Georgia Sea Islands and spoke Geechee as a first language, accounting for his "uncomfortable negro dialect" on records like "Early Morning Blues." But there is nothing wrong with Blake's "negro dialect," thus it was easy to disprove this ridiculous notion.

Blind Blake is known to have had family in the area of Jacksonville, Florida and was likely born there; Blake may have grown up in Georgia. Blake was first seen in Chicago in the mid-1920s. His birth date is assumed to be sometime between 1895-1897, as the only existing photo of Blind Blake, taken at his first Paramount session in August, 1926, shows a man of about thirty. Interviews with some of the musicians personally acquainted with Blake only reveal that he had a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for liquor. No one has discovered any reliable account of what happened to Blind Blake after his last Paramount session in June 1932. The story that has Blake murdered in Chicago shortly after his Paramount date did not hold up after an intensive search of local police files. The most reasonable notion about what might've happened to Blind Blake after 1932 is that he drifted back to Jacksonville and lived a few years more, with 1937 suggested as a possible date of death. In the summer of 1935, Mary Elizabeth Barnicle led an Archive of Folk Song expedition into the area where Blake is likely to have resettled and canvassed it for black musicians, yet never encountered him.

Many of the recordings made by Blind Blake are singled out as classic early blues performances, too many to be listed in detail here. But a few that stand out include "Early Morning Blues," "Too Tight," "Skeedle Loo Doo Blues," "That Will Never Happen No More," "Southern Rag," "Diddie Wa Diddie," "Police Dog Blues," "Playing Policy Blues" and "Righteous Blues." Several of Blind Blake's original tunes are by now country-blues standards, and judging from the further developments in Atlanta-based Piedmont blues, Blake's influence there must've been formidable, even if it came only by way of recordings. Anyone who hears Blind Blake can't help but be astonished by his sincerity, his gentle, off-the-cuff humor and the sheer effortlessness with which he plays some of the most treacherously complex finger-work on the face of creation.
Blind Blake is not to be confused, incidentally, with Blake Higgs, a Bahamian Calypso artist who also recorded as "Blind Blake."

The King Of Ragtime Guitar: Blind Blake & His Piano-Sounding Guitar

By Jas Obrecht

NOTE: The following article is copyrighted and may not be duplicated in any form without permission of the author.

During the mid 1920s, the unexpectedly strong sales of Blind Lemon Jefferson's Paramount 78s sent record scouts scrambling to sign male blues artists. One of their best discoveries was Blind Blake, a swinging, sophisticated guitarist whose warm, relaxed voice was a far cry from harsh country blues. Some of Blake's 78s cast him as swinging jazzman or jivey hipster, while others walked the long, lonely road to the gallows. The man with the "famous piano-sounding guitar" is still regarded as the unrivaled master of ragtime blues fingerpicking.

"Lord have mercy, was he sophisticated!" says Jorma Kaukonen, who helped introduce Blake's guitar style to rock audiences during the '70s. "He would have been sophisticated in any era. I really like the completeness of his piano-style playing, his left- and right-hand moves. He could play a complete band arrangement by himself. That appealed to the lone-wolf mentality that I aspired to when I was learning his songs. Later on, it gave me depth for playing double-guitar and piano-guitar stuff with other people. It taught me a lot about putting music together."

"Blind Blake is a great player, a great musical figure," echoes Ry Cooder. "In the years where he was on top, he was fabulous. Blind Blake just had a good touch. He played quietly, and he didn't hit the guitar too hard. He had a nice feeling for syncopation. He's from down there in the Geechie country, and all those people have a real nice roll to what they do. He was a hell of a good player, and he had a lick that was great. And Blind Blake played all over the place, with all kinds of people, including Johnny Dodds, which is just way too much for me."

Not much is known of him. The single surviving photo shows a dapper bantamweight in a neatly pressed three-piece and bow tie, finger-picking a small-faced guitar beneath closed eyes and a frozen Buddha grin. With its deep body and distinctive bridge, the guitar in the photo is likely a Chicago-made Harmony, a good guitar then.

The Paramount Book Of Blues, a 1927 promotional booklet, provided this strangely punctuated bio:

"We have all heard expressions of people 'singing in the rain' or 'laughing in the face of adversity,' but we never saw such a good example of it, until we came upon the history of Blind Blake. Born in Jacksonville, in sunny Florida, he seemed to absorb some of the sunny atmosphere--disregarding the fact that nature had cruelly denied him a vision of outer things. He could not see the things that others saw--but he had a better gift. A gift of an inner vision, that allowed him to see things more beautiful. The pictures that he alone could see made him long to express them in some way--so he turned to music. He studied long and earnestly--listening to talented pianists and guitar players, and began to gradually draw out harmonious tunes to fit every mood. Now that he is recording exclusively for Paramount, the public has the benefit of his talent, and agrees, as one body, that he has an unexplainable gift of making one laugh or cry as he feels, and sweet chords and tones that come from his talking guitar express a feeling of his mood."

Paramount's ads in the Chicago Defender, a popular African American newspaper, emphasized Blake's guitarmanship: "He accompanies himself with that snappy guitar playing, like only Blind Blake can do," read copy for "Bad Feeling Blues." The company claimed that "Blind Blake and his trusty guitar do themselves proud" on "Rumblin' & Ramblin' Boa Constrictor Blues," while "Wabash Rag" was "aided by his happy guitar."

Some believe Blind Blake was born Arthur Phelps, but during the recording "Papa Charlie And Blind Blake Talk About It," Papa Charlie Jackson asks him, "What is your right name?" Blake responds, "My name is Arthur Blake." The name on the copyrights for "C.C. Pill Blues" and "Panther Squall Blues" is Arthur "Blind" Blake, which strengthens the case for Blake being his given name. He had a pronounced Southern accent and reportedly worked in south Georgia, Kentucky, along the East Coast, and in Bristol, Tennessee, before landing in Chicago.

"No matter where Blake was from, he ranks as a musical curiosity," wrote Steve Calt and Woody Mann in the liners for Yazoo's Blind Blake collection. "His records betray no basic musical orientation, and it's anyone's guess as to whether blues, guitar instrumentals, or even pop ditties were his original specialty. How he actually made his livelihood as a performer is another enigma. While most blind guitarists were soloists who used the helter-skelter phrasing of the street dancer, Blake's blues phrasing had the strictness of a dance or band musician. It is likely that ensemble playing (perhaps with a jazz band) had a real impact on his music."

Blind Blake made his first records for Paramount during the summer of 1926, playing solo guitar behind Leola B. Wilson's lazy vaudeville blues. "Mayo Williams, the Paramount scout, says that Blind Blake was sent up from Jacksonville by a dealer," reports blues researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow. "That's how he first got on record, and his records sold very, very well." Blake showed nerves of steel his first time before the recording horn at Chicago's Marsh Studios, playing outstanding solos on Leola's "Dying Blues" and "Ashley St. Blues."

A month later Paramount cast him as a solo artist. "Early Morning Blues" was a grim "leaving blues" reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson, while the 78's flip side, the brilliant "West Coast Blues," was a ragged dance tune injected with spoken asides such as "Whoop that thing" and "I'm gonna satisfy you if I can." Blake's releases no doubt astonished and influenced other blues guitarists, such as William Moore, who patterned his Paramount 78 of "Old Country Rock" on "West Coast Blues."

Blind Gary Davis likewise studied Blake's 78s. "The guitar was being played like a piano in almost all the areas of America except the Delta," explains Stefan Grossman, "meaning that the left hand was literally doing that boom-chick, boom-chick pattern. Blake was able to use his right-hand thumb to syncopate it more, like a Charleston. He was very, very rhythmic and incredibly fast--I don't know anyone who can get to that speed. That's Blake's real claim to fame, because his chord progressions are nothing fancy. But the thumb work is fantastic, and what he's doing with his right hand set him apart from everyone. Rev. Gary Davis said Blake had a 'sportin' right hand.' Davis took that and got into even more complicated modes."

"I suspect Blind Blake was a three-finger picker," offers Kaukonen, "and I have a sneaking suspicion he wore picks, because he had such a snappy, percussive sound and he's not popping the strings the way bare-finger players do. His favorite keys were C, G, and E, although I'm pretty sure he could play in any of them if he wanted to."

At his October 1926 solo session, Blake balanced down-and-out blues songs with the good-time hokum of "Too Tight" and "Come On Boys Let's Do That Messin' Around," which has an early example of a scat solo. He flexed his guitar prowess on his next 78, "Skeedle Loo Doo Blues" and the double-time sections of "Stonewall Street Blues." Paramount summoned Blake and pianist Jimmy Blythe to Leola Wilson's November session, which produced a pair of fine 78s. Less than six months after his entry into the record biz, Blake was playing behind the great Ma Rainey on "Morning Hour Blues," "Little Low Mama Blues," and "Grievin' Hearted Blues."

Early the next year Paramount featured kazoo--probably played by Blake himself--on "Buck-Town Blues" and brought in a bones percussionist for "Dry Bone Shuffle" and "That Will Never Happen No More." Blind Blake cut another seven songs during October '27. The smoothly syncopated "Hey Hey Daddy Blues," the hip horn imitations of "Sea Board Stomp," and the tour de force "Southern Rag" suggest that he woodshedded on guitar during his half-year recording hiatus.

"I'm goin' to give you some music they call the Geechie music now," Blake announced at the beginning of "Southern Rag," which is laced with images of planting rice, sugar cane, cotton, and peas. Some authors suggest that Blake slips into the Geechie and Gullah accents of Georgia's South Sea Islands during the track, but Wardlow disagrees: "I don't think he intentionally goes into the Geechie accent, but he was down from around that part of the country--South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida."

In November, Gus Cannon joined in on banjo for the minstrel tune "He's In The Jailhouse Now." During the 1950s Sam Charters asked Cannon for his memories of Blake. According to the book Sweet As The Showers Of Rain, Cannon responded: "We drank so much whiskey! I'm telling you we drank more whiskey than a shop! And that boy would take me out with him at night and get me so turned around I'd be lost if I left his side. He could see more with his blind eyes than I with my two good ones." Mayo Williams also reported that Blake liked to get drunk and fight.

In the spring of 1928 Blind Blake cut his most ambitious records. Jimmy Bertrand manned xylophone for "Doggin' Me Mama Blues" and warbled slide whistle on "C.C. Pill Blues," while the great Johnny Dodds soloed on clarinet. "Oh, that record!" enthuses Ry Cooder. "That's it, see. That's the whole thing right there. That's all you need to hear. And then you know: There's a whole world we've all missed and will never know." (The "C.C." stood for "compound cathartic.")
Dodds and Bertrand provided more crazy horn and percussion accompaniment on Blake's raggy "Hot Potatoes" and the swinging "Southbound Rag." Bertrand, Dodds, and Blake were also teamed on "Elzadie's Policy Blues"/"Pay Day Daddy Blues" with Elzadie Robinson, a cabaret singer and chorus girl from Logansport, Louisiana. Blake was soon back in the studio with blues moaner Bertha Henderson and gospel crooner Daniel Brown. Bertha's "Let Your Love Come Down" featured Blake playing stride piano with rocking solos. Working solo, Blake simultaneously played guitar and harmonica on "Panther Squall Blues."

Blind Blake may have earned up to $50 per Paramount side, but Little Brother Montgomery claimed that the guitarist's regular source of income during the late 1920s came from playing South Side Chicago house rent parties. With its piano in the living room, Blake's apartment at 31st and Cottage Grove became a gathering place where Montgomery, Charlie Spand, Roosevelt Sykes, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, and other musicians could slam moonshine and jam blues.

"I met Blind Blake in Chicago," Ishman Bracey told Gayle Dean Wardlow, "but I couldn't second him. He was too fast for me. Blind Blake, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, and Scrapper Blackwell--all of them guitar players was buckin' one another. Blind Blake was too fast."

Blake's 1928 releases such as "Ramblin' Mama Blues," "Back Door Slam Blues," "Cold Hearted Mama Blues," and "Low Down Loving Gal" suggest he had bitter feelings towards women. His anger took a scary turn on "Notoriety Woman Blues," during which he sang, "To keep her quiet I knocked her teeth out her mouth." By contrast, Blake's final recording that year, "Sweet Papa Low Down," was a bouncy Charleston with piano, cornet, xylophone, and Blake's own happy jiving.

The guitarist journeyed to Richmond, Indiana, in June '29 for a series of sides with Alex Robinson on piano. "Slippery Rag" rocked the house with driving chords and mind-boggling solos. "Fightin' The Jug" reinforced his reputation for being a heavy drinker:

"When I die, folks, without a doubt,

When I die, folks, without a doubt,

You won't have to do nothin' but pour me out"

That August, Blake was recorded at the height of his powers. He blasted toe-to-toe with Charlie Spand, Detroit's premier piano boogieman, on "Hastings St. (Hastings St. Boogy)," named after a street in the city's old black section. John Lee Hooker, who describes this track as "the real blues," speculates that Blake may have lived in Detroit at some point, since Blake mentions a specific address, 169 Brady, during the song and then says, "Must be somethin' there very marvelous, mm, mm, mm. I believe it's somethin' that'll make you feel oh boy and how!"

"Yeah, Brady was right off of Gratiot," Hook explains. "Detroit was jumpin' then, and Hastings Street was the best street in town. Everything you wanted was right there. Everything you didn't want was right there. It ain't no more now. It's a freeway now, called Chrysler Freeway. But that was a good street, a street known all over the world."

Blake's next selection, "Diddie Wa Diddie," is a classic ragtime blues, with each break a minor masterpiece. Blake masterfully heightened the song's rhythmic intensity by rushing to the root of a new chord an eighth-note before the next downbeat. With its beautiful lines, harmonic chimes, and bluesy bends, "Police Dog Blues" also showcases his consummate guitarmanship. He recorded "Chump Man Blues" at the same session. "Blind Blake was basically a ragtime guitar player," notes Stefan Grossman, "but then he had things like 'Chump Man Blues,' which is a blues in D. It's not as exciting as his playing in C or G, but it has an almost Bahaman, Joseph Spence sound."

Blind Blake made a few more sides in Chicago later that summer--a 78 featuring Tiny Parham or Aletha Dickerson on piano, the agile instrumentals "Guitar Chimes" and "Blind Arthur's Breakdown." "Papa Charlie And Blind Blake Talk About It," the first Blake 78 recorded at Paramount's new studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, joined two musical giants in a stuttering shuck-and-jive routine. With its exaggerated vocals and Jackson's utilitarian banjo strums overwhelming the arrangement, the song wasn't far removed from blackface minstrelsy. Blake was in fabulous form backing Irene Scruggs (billed as Chocolate Brown) during his next Grafton trip. Her "Itching Heel" no doubt struck a resonant chord among many women attached to bluesmen:

"He don't do nothing but play on his old guitar, While I'm busting suds out in the white folks' yard"Blake, in turn, responded to her verbal jabs with sped-up guitar parts.

Beginning with his May '30 solo sides, the sheen was mostly gone from Blind Blake's playing and singing. "When he started to drink too much--you can hear it towards the end--it just doesn't work anymore," observes Cooder. "He's physically past it, because you've got to be sharp to sound that good." He rekindled the old fire in "Righteous Blues" that December, and made a final appearance as a sideman in May '31 behind Laura Rucker. Blake cut three 78s under his own name that year, but no copies of "Dissatisfied Blues" /"Miss Emma Liza (Sweetness)" or "Night And Day Blues"/"Sun To Sun" are known to survive.

His two-part "Rope Stretchin' Blues" tells the woeful tale of a man who catches a stranger in his house, busts his head with a club, and winds up hanging for it.

The final Blind Blake release, the old Victorian music hall standard "Champagne Charlie Is My Name" backed by "Depression's Gone From Me Blues," which recycles the "Sitting On Top Of The World" melody, was recorded in Grafton during June 1932. But is it Blake? "Even though it says Blind Blake on the label on both sides," says Gayle Dean Wardlow, "it seems like that last record's a split side--one side is him, and one side is not him. 'Depression's Gone From Me Blues'--that's Blake. I think 'Champagne Charlie' is by someone else--it doesn't sound like Blake to me." Grossman concurs: "That 78 doesn't have his taste, his feel. Who knows? It might have been somebody else, even a different Blind Blake."

The bluesman's final fate is uncertain. "Blind Blake--now, that's another one that's a mystery," reported Georgia Tom Dorsey during the 1960s. "How he got out of the show [business], I don't know. But he was a good worker and a nice fellow to get along with, as far as I'm concerned." After Paramount folded in '32, Blake never recorded again. "I figure he went back to Jacksonville when his recording contract was over," says Wardlow. "No one's ever found out what happened to him. Gary Davis said that Blake was hit by a streetcar, and that's the only rumor of his death that I know of. Maybe he got robbed and killed, 'cause he was blind."
For a while, though, Blind Blake's records sold almost as well as Blind Lemon's, and he had a tremendous impact, especially in the Southeast. Personally, I'd like to believe Blind Blake lived the lines he sang in "Poker Woman Blues":

"Sometime I'm rich, sometime I ain't got a cent,

Sometime I'm rich, sometime I ain't got a cent,

But I've had a good time everywhere I went"

References

Discography

Crossroads Club 27 Downloads

Robert Pete Williams

noreply@blogger.com (Mr Arkadin) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:57:00 +0000

Wiki Bio

Robert Pete Williams (March 14, 1914 – December 31, 1980) was an American Louisiana blues musician, based in Louisiana. His music characteristically employs unconventional blues tunings and structures, and his songs are often about the time he served in prison. His song "I've Grown So Ugly" has been covered by Captain Beefheart, on his album Safe as Milk (1967), and by The Black Keys, on Rubber Factory (2004).

Robert Pete Williams - Scrap Iron Blues From lupine22

Williams was born in Zachary, Louisiana to sharecropping parents, and lived around the Baton Rouge area throughout his life. He was discovered in Angola prison, by ethnomusicologists Dr Harry Oster and Richard Allen, where he was serving a life sentence for shooting a man dead in a local club in 1956, an act which he claimed was in self-defense. Oster and Allen recorded Williams performing several of his songs about life in prison and pleaded for him to be pardonned. The pardon was partially granted in 1959, when Williams was released, although he could not leave Louisiana until he received a full pardon 1964. By this time, Williams' music had achieved some favorable word-of-mouth reviews, and he played his first concert outside Louisiana at that year's Newport Folk Festival. Williams went on to tour the United States, and played a number of shows with Mississippi Fred McDowell. He continued to play concerts and festivals into the late-1970s when his health began to decline. Williams died in Rosedale, Louisiana on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66.

Robert Pete Williams (April 1970) From BobHardy1

AllMusic Bio

Discovered in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Robert Pete Williams became one of the great blues discoveries during the folk boom of the early '60s. His disregard for conventional patterns, tunings, and structures kept him from a wider audience, but his music remains one of the great, intense treats of the blues.

Williams was born in Zachary, Louisiana, the son of sharecropping parents. While he was a child, he worked the fields with his family; he never attended school. Williams didn't begin playing blues until his late teens, when he made himself a guitar out of a cigar box. Playing his homemade guitar, Williams began performing at local parties, dances, and fish fries at night while he worked during the day. Even though he was constantly working, he never made quite enough money to support his family, which caused considerable tension between him and his wife — according to legend, she burned his guitar one night in a fit of anger.

Despite all of the domestic tension, Williams continued to play throughout the Baton Rouge area, performing at dances and juke joints. In 1956, he shot and killed a man in a local club. Williams claimed the act was in self-defense, but he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to Angola prison, where he served for two years before being discovered by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen. The pair recorded Williams performing several of his own songs, which were all about life in prison. Impressed with the guitarist's talents, Oster and Allen pleaded for a pardon for Williams. The pardon was granted in 1959, after he had served a total of three and a half years. For the first five years after he left prison, Williams could only perform in Lousiana, but his recordings — which appeared on Folk-Lyric, Arhoolie, and Prestige, among other labels — were popular and he received positive word of mouth reviews.

In 1964, Williams played his first concert outside of Louisiana — it was a set at the legendary Newport Folk Festival. Williams' performance was enthusiastically received and he began touring the United States, often playing shows with Mississippi Fred McDowell. For the remainder of the '60s and most of the '70s, Robert Pete Williams constantly played concerts and festivals across America, as well a handful of dates in Europe. Along the way, he recorded for a handful of small independent labels, including Fontana and Storyville. Williams slowed down his work schedule in the late '70s, largely due to his old age and declining health. The guitarist died on December 31, 1980, at the age of 66.

by Cub Koda & Stephen Thomas Erlewine

From a Prison Cell to the Avant-Garde

The New York Times, Sunday, August 7, 1994

By MILO MILES

Although Robert Pete Williams died in 1980 at the age of 66, he arguably remains the most avant-garde blues performer ever recorded. No punk rock band has ever matched the jagged, acerbic fury of the riffs Williams played 35 years ago. No rapper has approached his ability to evoke the torment of life in prison or bend language to cast an eerie spell over a chance encounter with a seductive woman. Williams could improvise precise, topical blues numbers with remarkable spontaneity. He had never been recorded when he was discovered in Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, convicted of murder. Like the country blues titan Leadbelly, Williams even sang his way to freedom.

Yet he was no more than a moderate success on the folk-revival circuit in the 1960s, and the very density and originality of his blues must have been part of the reason. His decision to take up the slide guitar was also ill-advised. Today he is a shadowy memory, unknown outside blues circles. The release of Williams's prison recordings in 1959 caused a sensation with an earlier generation of fans. By rights, equal excitement should greet the recent reissue of most of his earliest sides along with more than a dozen unreleased tunes on `I'm as Blue as a Man Can Be' (Arhoolie CD 394) and `When a Man Takes the Blues' (Arhoolie CD 395).

Blues revivals come and go, and the establishment of the House of the Blues chain of nightclubs is one sign the audience for the style is healthy. But too many of today's younger performers walk through the blues with a vocabulary imited to an ever-shrinking series of overused themes and guitar licks. Compared with such performances, Williams's blues comes as a draught of straight whisky after sips of warm soda. In particular, each of the field recordings made by the folklorist Dr. Harry Oster while Williams was still an inmate is gripping testimony. The first shock is the peculiar form of these blues. Williams repeats the first line at the beginning of each verse but boldly disregards the rest of routine blues structure.

Williams grew up just north of Baton Rouge, and like many Delta blues musicians he favors long, spidery phrases spiked with hard beats. And like those of fellow eccentrics Big Joe Williams and John Lee Hooker, his guitar accents twine around the particular cadences of his voice. `This Wild Old Life' from `I'm Blue as a Man Can Be' shows Williams at his most stubbornly independent.

While his singing could have a furry tone at times, here it cuts like a rusty razor as he describes the turmoil of wandering from town to town, homeless and alone. `I'm a poor boy here,' he sings. `Ain't got no place to go/ I've been riding around here a little while now/ In a little old one-horse town/ I don't know no one here, baby/ No one but myself.' The song consists almost entirely of a leaping riff that Williams expands, contracts and tweaks with rhythmic variations. Though structured with care, the performance conveys anxiety bordering on emotional chaos.

In `Please Lord, Help Me on My Way,' the same free-flowing structure, based on a more soothing guitar figure, suggests dignified contemplation: `Lord, when I'm in my cloak of gray/ For myself I don't want no worry.' Williams was as often prayerful as he was panicked. Most of the unreleased songs are Christian supplications, at once calmly reverent and riddled with images of death.

As the guitarist Henry Kaiser points out in his perceptive notes to `I'm as Blue as a Man Can Be,' the sparse chords and webs of rhythm in Williams's playing suggests the work of modern West African guitarists like Ali Farka Toure. Indeed, the tune `When a Man Takes the Blues' could be an English-language excerpt from one of Mr. Toure's albums. And the jangly `Hot Springs Blues,' among others, shows how much Williams inspired oddball white blues rockers like Captain Beefheart.

It is impossible to know why Williams's blues sound so African, but they do not support the old notion, now discredited, that so-called primitive blues were rough and shapeless and evolved into more regular, melodic forms. Williams played more conventional blues arrangements until he was 28, when he decided to alter his style. In 1965, he gave a widely quoted explanation, saying that `the sound of the atmosphere' changed his playing. `It could be from the airplanes or the moaning of automobiles,' he said, but anyway, the wind blew a different music to him that transformed his blues.

Robert Pete Williams (Live - 1966) From BobHardy1

A melancholy, introverted man, Williams had difficulty thinking of himself as a professional entertainer. By all accounts, when the blues feeling descended upon him, he could unearth tragedy and mystery in any subject in one famous example, his horror at how old his face had become in the mirror. At other times he could scarcely force himself to play, on stage or off.

Williams made a good number of albums after he was paroled but few of them are as harrowing as the prison sessions. He obsessively reflected on his years in jail, a period he considered an unjustly harsh extension of his hard-bitten existence. An anthology of prison blues, which will feature Williams's masterpiece, `Prisoner's Talking Blues,' is due this fall from Arhoolie. It can only add to the chills he has provoked for decades.

(Milo Miles is a commentator on world music for National Public Radio.)

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References

Discography

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