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| One of the most influential blues artists of all, Charley Pattons spirit and essence extend into many other branches of music. Blues writer Robert Palmer claims Patton is among the most important musicians twentieth-century America has produced. Known for his all-powering gravelly vocals and rhythmic guitar playing Patton became the first great star and original king of the delta blues. Robert Johnson may generate more myth and mystery, but a fierce devotion stands by Pattons monumental influence to this day.
Pattons gruff, barking baritone vocals call to mind Tuvan throat singers. Listen closely and you will hear plenty more going on. There is expressiveness in his vocals that catches the listener off guard with effects that are emotionally packed. His singing incorporates vaudeville-style vocal asides, the effect of two people talking to each other. The result imbues the performances with drama and comedy, conveying a sense of involvement with the material and with the audience.
As a guitarist, Patton was just as distinctive. He varied his attack with propulsive beats and syncopated rhythms (a direct link to John Lee Hooker boogie style). His right hand playing was especially fluid and featured impressive thumb work. Sometimes he accented the playing by banging his guitar, clapping hands, stomping feet, or popping bass strings (a technique which preceded funk bass players by 40 years). His slide playing was also prominent, used to emphasize vocal phrasings and influenced such other blues notables as Son House and Robert Johnson.
Unlike other itinerant blues musicians of his era and region, Patton was a bona fide celebrity. His reputation as a barrelhouse entertainer became larger than life, tearing up juke joints and local functions. Such theatrics as playing the guitar behind his head or tossing the instrument in the air and catching it without missing a beat would later affect other blues and rock and roll musicians. This aggressiveness transcended to his lifestyle as well. Charley epitomized the typical bluesman as a heavy drinker, womanizer, and brawler.
Patton spent most of his life on the Dockery plantation near Ruleville, Mississippi. There he learned to play blues guitar from an older musician named Henry Sloan. Fellow blues players like Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Willie Brown often came to listen and learn from Patton. Though he quickly became popular in the Delta, he did not get a chance to record until 1929 when Paramount talent scout H.C. Spier sought him out. His first and most popular record was Pony Blues. Other songs like Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues and Screamin and Hollerin the Blues were good sellers. Many of Pattons songs were of crafty social commentary akin to traveling the back roads of the Delta, witnessing local incidents of drought, insect plague, a mill fire, or a personal night in jail.
His music embraced everything from blues, ballads, ragtime, to gospel. Patton made close to 60 recordings. Some feature Willie Brown on second guitar, others with Henry Sims on fiddle. Unfortunately, the original quality of the master recordings has been lost forever, sold off as scrap metal in the late 30s. All that remain are the original 78s made of inferior materials, putting noise reduction technology to the test.
Some of the blues musicians Patton influenced most were Bukka White, Tommy Johnson, Big Joe Williams, and Howlin Wolf. |
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| A dominant figure in electrified blues and the post-war Chicago blues scene, Muddy Waters was a superlative singer, songwriter, and powerful slide guitar player. Waters took the roots of African-American Mississippi music, plugged it into an amplifier and created an electric orchestra, forever changing the landscape of popular music. His bands were a breeding ground for some of the biggest names in the blues, including Little Walter, Otis Span, Jimmy Rogers, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Buddy Guy. Waters recordings for Chess Records became the blueprint for future generations of blues and rock musicians.
McKinley Morganfield was born in a Delta enclave called Jugs Corner, Mississippi on April 4, 1913. When his mother died at the age of three he was sent to live with his grandmother in Clarksdale. As a child playing on the banks of a local creek he earned the nickname Muddy Waters. Life on the Delta cotton plantations was harsh and Waters was moved by blues music very early in life, learning how to sing while working in the fields for fifty cents a day. He picked up the harmonica first and started learning the guitar when he was seventeen.
Waters was soon digging the bottleneck guitar playing of Son House and soaking up the recordings of Robert Johnson. In short shrift he had mastered bottleneck guitar playing and was pinning down a subtle and sonorous singing style. He began performing at house parties and fish fries with a local string band which included fiddler Henry Son Simms, a past collaborator of Charlie Pattons.
In 1941, the Library of Congress sent a team headed by Alan Lomax to collect field recordings of rural folk blues. They recorded Waters, then twenty six years old, at his plantation home, cutting two tracks called Country Blues and I Be Troubled. Both potent slide blues songs acknowledged a debt to House and Johnson with a distinctive edge and impressed Lomax enough to return a year later for more recordings. Lomaxs endorsement convinced Waters that he could make a real go of it and in1943 he caught the train north to Chicago, leaving the cotton fields forever.
Chicago had a thriving blues scene, though changes were in the air. Waters played acoustic back-up for Sonny Boy Williamson and met Big Bill Broonzy, who helped him get small gigs in Chicagos South and West side slums. By 1944 Waters had switched to electric guitar and beefed up his Delta bottleneck sound with fatter tones and a richer baritone. His first recordings for Columbia Records made little impression, but when Chess agreed to record I Can’t Be Satisfied/Feel Like Going Home Waters success was sealed and the post-war Chicago blues scene was ignited.
Waters trail-blazed the Chicago blues scene, surrounding himself with other talented musicians from the rural south, creating the classic Chicago combo of guitars, harmonica, piano, bass, and drums. It was a model for heavy amplified blues with distorted, sizzling guitars and sledgehammer beats, a sound that perfectly exemplified the anguish and isolation of the black man in the white mans big city of the north. Waters culled together some of the greatest players ever - harp genius Little Walter, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and pianist Otis Span. In those days they called themselves The Headcutters, hitting bars and asking to sit in with the house band, inevitably blowing them off the stage.
The working class clubs of south side Chicago were raucous environments where black audiences were free to whoop, shout, dance, and brawl, usually all at once. To compensate Waters and the other musicians had to play amplified and loud. Their big sound started as a method to be heard, but remade the way blues could be played. Muddy applied tight-to-the-mike, moaning vocals while wailing guitar licks, pounding bass, piano, and drums backed him. Later, Little Walters howling, amplified harmonica filled out the barrage. It was a sound that literally rocked the house.
Throughout the 1950s Muddy and his band perfected their raw and rollicking ensemble approach, recording many seminal Chicago blues sides like Mannish Boy, Got My Mojo Working, Long Distance Call, and Hoochie Coochie Man. Faces in the band came and went, but Waters always attracted more top notch talent like Sammy Lawhorn, Luther Johnson, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Pinetop Perkins to step in. Chess stable songwriter Willie Dixon often supplied tailor-made compositions which fostered a classic urban blues sound. The only bluesman who could challenge Waters’ tenure was Howlin Wolf and understandably the two Chess artists became long-standing rivals.
Waters first tour of England in 1958 coupled with a growing fascination in folk blues by a young white generation re-energized his career in the 1960s. This led to full-fledged acceptance by rock and roll audiences who recognized Waters as a pioneer. In one of the great examples of live blues, Waters and band took the 1960 Newport Folk Festival by storm with a cool, hard-charging performance that showed the audience what their sound was all about. A sound that would soon influence modern rock. |
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| John Lee Hooker music is kin to that long revered lineage of Delta blues artists Charley Patton , Son House, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Marked by crude, over-amplified guitar riffs, rhythmic foot stomps, and a deep, penetrating-to-the-marrow voice, Hookers primitive sound was immediately identifiable and compelling. It became known as the Hooker boogie and it literally got the house jumpin. This laid back, bare bones style would influence the next wave of blues guitarists and a generation of 60s blues rockers like the Rolling Stones, The Animals, and Canned Heat.
John Lee Hooker was one of ten children, born on a farm outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi. In an age of mid-wives and birth records jotted down in family bibles accurate records do not seem to exist for his exact date of birth. Hooker himself changed his birth date from time to time. As a young boy he sang in his fathers church and developed a fondness for gospel. His introduction to blues was through a boyfriend of his sisters who visited regularly. Hooker was smitten by the sound and was delighted one day when the boyfriend gave him an old, worn Silvertone as a gift. Typically, his parents objected to his playing the guitar and the blues.
After his parents separated Hookers mother remarried. Will Moore became John Lee stepfather. More importantly, Moore was a bluesman who played guitar and would influence Hooker immeasurably with encouragement and techniques. Moores affiliations with other musicians like Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson also left an impression. Hooker claimed the first song he learned was Pattons The Peavine Special.
At about age fifteen, Hooker realized opportunity lay elsewhere so he moved to the nearest big city, Memphis, Tennessee. There he ushered in a Beale Street theatre and tried his hand at playing music on street corners. His parents soon brought him back to Mississippi when they learned of his circumstances, but John was not to be held down. Several weeks later he hightailed it to Cincinnati. It did not provide much musical exposure, but became a stepping stone to his next move to an even bigger city.
In 1943 Hooker migrated northward to Detroit, feeling Chicago was already saturated with heavy blues names the likes of Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Big Joe Williams. In Detroit the car industry ruled and Hooker quickly landed work at an auto plant as a janitor. On weekends he played his brand of transplanted Delta blues in the bars and clubs. As lean as those years were, Hooker became more intent on turning professional. His down home style of blues was not widely popular in those days, except for the blue collar sector. The infamous Hastings Street was a regular habitat for gigs.
One musician who helped Hooker get up to speed was the great T-Bone Walker. They met in a Hastings Street bar that Walker was booked into and became instant friends. One day the already proven blues star presented Hooker with his first electric guitar, a gift that would change his life and fortunes. By 1948 his name was making waves around Detroit. More upscale bookings were coming his way. When a small-time record dealer with ample connections named Elmer Barbee walked into a bar where John Lee was performing, wheels were set in motion. Barbee invited him to record demos in a makeshift record store studio and introduced him to an independent record label owner named Bernie Besman. So began a momentous four year recording partnership and some of Hookers loosest and meatiest rural blues.
The kind of solo sides Besman and Hooker laid down were represented by the historic cut Boogie Chillen, a song that would be emblematic of Hookers sound. There was no denying its appeal, with his steady foot stomp keeping the beat and the guitar spewing a hypnotic primal riff, the groove was infectious. On top of it, he sang like an outlaw, a sly moaning vocal dishing out a defiant narrative of his parents deliberation to Let that boy boogie woogie, cause it‘s in him and it‘s got to come out!. Those thick as mud guitar lines were liberating in their simplicity, but there was a subtle complexity underneath. Enough to influence an entire wave of young blues guitarists including the likes of Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy.
Even though Hooker was making records, the returns were miniscule. He was actually earning more for live performances. In an effort to circumvent the often crooked ways of record companies Hooker recorded generously for a wide variety of labels, under an array of pseudonyms like Delta John, Texas Slim, John Lee Booker, Birmingham Sam, and Boogie Man. Yet, it was always the same trademark sound. Boogie Chillin was a huge hit across the country. The can not-fail recipe was recalibrated for other hits like Sally Mae, Crawlin King Snake, Im in the Mood, and Hobo Blues.
Until now Hooker had played mostly unaccompanied. By the mid-50s he was touring and recording with a rotating roster of sidemen like guitarists Eddie Kirkland and Eddie Taylor, pianist Bob Thurman, drummer Tom Whitehead, and Jimmy Reed on harp. With the momentum of R&B/soul acts like Ray Charles and James Brown charging onto the scene Hooker moved to Chicago and signed with an ambitious new label, Vee Jay Records. A full band now in tow he recorded sides with a more robust framework, yet a cleaner, more blistering sound. Backed by Vee Jay and a band, Hooker racked up more hits like Dimples, Baby Lee, and I Love You Honey.
By the end of the decade Hooker was slowly revolving back to his roots with a long-playing collection of acoustic country blues reaching back to his Delta youth. The result would launch Hookers blues on album and introduce him to a whole new audience at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival. John Lee Hooker had arrived, though he was hardly at the apogee of his fame. That would be reiterated and magnified several more times in successive decades. |
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| A songster, blues musician, and consummate entertainer, Furry Lewis was a true original. Acknowledged as a master of slide and finger-picking guitar styles as well as a witty personality and raconteur of the blues gestating heyday, his music stemmed from ragtime, Delta blues, and the flavorful sounds of hometown Memphis jug bands. Lyrically, Lewis served up vivid images of social issues and folklore, laced with humor that still have staying power. Furry Lewis was one of the few blues artists who remained just as dazzling a performer in his eighties as in his Beale Street youth.
Walter Furry Lewis was born to sharecropper parents on March 6, 1893 in Greenwood, Mississippi. His father left the family before he was born. The rest of the family relocated to Memphis when Walter was six years old. By fifth grade he had given up school to help support the family income. His first guitar was fashioned from a 2 x 4, a cigar box and some screen door wires twisted around bent nails. From this homespun model he taught himself the basics.
Memphis was also home to the renowned musician W.C. Handy, who must have spotted the young boy promising talent and bought him a genuine Martin guitar to sustain his dedication. As a teenager Lewis was eager to get out and perform so he hit the road hoboing and playing for tips. In 1916, while jumping a freight train to save money, his foot got caught and his leg was severed.
Sporting an artificial leg and realizing his itinerant musician days were over, Lewis returned to Memphis and began playing on street corners and in local clubs. He hooked up with fellow Memphis players like Jim Jackson, Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band, and Gus Cannon Jug Stompers. It was the golden age of Beale Street, a mecca for music clubs, gambling houses, saloons, and free-flowing liquor. It became Lewis stomping grounds and schooling. Memphis being a river city, the junction between Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas attracted the roustabouts off riverboats and all the wide open spending that came with them.
Lewis also joined traveling medicine shows, helping to attract crowds while the snake oil salesman delivered his pitch. For Furry it became an all-consuming course in how to entertain. In addition to telling jokes and doing sketches he developed a variety of guitar skills, adding bottleneck style by sliding a knife blade over his strings, finger-picking, flat-picking, or playing on his lap Hawaiian style. Even flashy showmanship like playing behind his head. He added a variety of accompaniment techniques to suit a particular vocal need and learned to project his voice to the back of the house without a mike. While the pitchman sold liniments and elixirs, Furry sold the blues.
Lewis recording career began with two trips to Chicago to record for the Vocalion label. These sessions produced both solo sides and some with second guitar and mandolin. He would eventually record a total of 23 songs for the Vocalion and Victor labels between 1927 and 1930 including definitive versions of Stack-O-Lee, Kassie Jones, and John Henry. His own compositions like Judge Harsh Blues and I Will Turn Your Money Green were well-crafted, with lyrics that could be both humorous (Been down so long, it looks like up to me.) and dark (I believe I'll buy me a graveyard of my own/I'm gonna kill everybody that ever done wrong.). The latter used to great effect by psychobilly blues singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce in the early 80s.
Unfortunately these sides sold poorly and with the Depressions dent in the record industry Furry Lewis faded into obscurity, working as a street sweeper for the Memphis Sanitation Department for a living. However, Lewis enjoyed a resurgence late in life. His rediscovery in 1959 by blues historian and record producer Sam Charters proved that he had not lost any of his musical talents and led to more recognition than he would ever imagined.
With Charters at the helm he recorded two albums in 1961, his rich baritone and brilliant guitar work fully intact. Lewis moved into the spotlight of festivals and concerts during the 60s and was immensely popular as a colorful character of a bygone era as much as his proficiency at the blues. In the early 70s he toured with rock acts like Leon Russell, The Rolling Stones, and the Alabama State Troupers. Furry Lewis remained musically active and essential until his death in 1981. |
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| Considered one of the most influential artists of the Memphis blues scene, Frank Stokes was often referred to as the King of Beale Street. An impeccable guitarist and entertainer, Stokes recorded solo and as one half of the Beale Street Sheiks.
Melodically and rhythmically the Sheiks were the classic duo of pre-Depression era Memphis blues, inspiring a succession of guitar picking pairs, most notably Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe. Some of the sharpest guitar interplay the blues has to offer.
Born in White Haven, Tennessee, Frank Stokes was raised in Mississippi after the death of his parents. He ended up in Hernando, Mississippi as a youth and picked up guitar along the way. Hernando was stomping grounds to some solid blues players, including Jim Jackson, Robert Wilkins, Elijah Avery, and Dan Sane, who Stokes would eventually team up with. Stokes supported himself as a blacksmith between weekend trips to nearby Memphis to play music.
By the turn of the century Stokes had moved permanently to Memphis where the music scene was in full swing. Busking solo on the street corners and in parks, he drew on a wide repertoire of styles associated with black rural traditions like early blues, minstrel, string band, ragtime, and popular songs. A grab bag of styles attracted more listeners. During this period he also toured the south with tent shows and did a stretch with a blackface comedian and songster in the Doc Watts Medicine Show.
In the early 1920s Stokes joined forces with fellow Beale Street guitarist, Dan Sane. In an effort to compete with the ensemble-style bands of the day and to simply be heard amongst the din of local saloons and parties, the two musicians joined forces and became The Beale Street Sheiks. The duos sound was old blues with a sprinkling of old time songster styles from their medicine show roots. It was not blues of a personal nature, but blues meant to amuse and entertain. As the vocalist, Stokes was grandiose, a melodic hollerer with a trademark warble capping his phrasing. But it was the guitar interplay of Stokes and Sane which truly dazzled. Stokes driving, chordal rhythms were flowingly complemented by Sane brisk choruses and flat picking.
Their tightly meshed guitar duets earned them a recording contract with the Paramount label from 1927 to 1929. The nineteen tracks the Sheiks recorded were witty and clever lyrically and chalk full of flavorful guitar breaks. Songs like You Shall, Take Me Back, and Taint Nobodys Business, were perfect examples of their catchy brand of blues. Stokes also recorded solo for Victor at the same time, tackling more thematic material like I Got Mine and Mr. Crump Dont Like It, about the Memphis mayors unwelcome attempts to clean up Beale Street. Fiddler Will Matts contributed to these solo sessions.
The Beale Street Sheiks courtship with fame was short-lived due to the onset of the Depression and changing tastes of record buyers. Both men retreated to the tried and true circuit of street corners, fish fries, and house parties. During the 30s and early 40s Stokes performed in medicine shows and for Ringling Brothers Circus. He retired from music in 1951 due to poor health. |
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| During the jug band rage of the late 1920s Gus Cannon Jug Stompers surpassed all competition. Cannon full-range repertoire of musical traditions, from string band, ragtime, and country folk, to blues and pop ballads dictated the spirit. He was also a multi-talented instrumentalist, particularly fluid on fingerpicked banjo. The Stompers trump card was harmonica ace Noah Lewis blowing powerful, melodic rushes full of bluesy innovation. Their sound was bursting with frolic and feeling. Indispensable for any collection of rural traditional music.
Gus Cannon was born in Red Banks, Mississippi, the youngest of ten sons to sharecroppers. The Cannon boys were raised with fiddle and banjo music and brother Tom taught Gus some basics on both instruments. At the age of twelve, Gus and Tom moved to Clarksdale to pick cotton at a time when the Delta blues was beginning to take shape. Gus first took to the fiddle and the playing of Jim Turner, a part-time member of W.C. Handys local band. His first banjo was a makeshift instrument from an old guitar neck and a bread pan. He began by mimicking local musicians and learned to finger pick from a banjo player named Bud Jackson.
Working in the fields by day and performing music at plantation dances at night, Cannon steadily refined his playing skills and repertoire of blues, minstrel, and string band songs. When the farming season wound down he took work with traveling minstrel and medicine shows, honing his craft and meeting other musicians like Jim Jackson and Robert Wilkins along the way. On one of his travels he met a teenage boy wailing on harmonica on the road. His name was Noah Lewis, from Henning, Tennesse. Lewis powerful harp skills impressed Cannon immediately. When Cannon expressed an interest in playing together Lewis introduced him to a thirteen-year-old guitar player named Ashley Thompson. Lewis and Thompson had already been playing local dances and picnics with some success. They formed a string band trio and played small towns around Tennessee until 1913 when Cannon returned to the medicine show circuit.
Cannon had always used Memphis as a stop off point, but during the 20s he began frequenting Beale Street music bars and saloons more regularly. Beale Street was a bonanza for jobs, musicians, songs, and all the excitement and debauchery a man could wish for. It was also the cradle of development for jug band ensembles. Jug band music had escalated since the turn of the century, with dashes of jazz, country, and pop, it roots dipped in ragtime, the sound was still evolving by the mid-20s and meshing with blues. Men like Will Shade, Charlie Burse, Jack Kelly, and Cannon became band organizers. A Beale Street pool hall, owned by one Howard Yancy, was a headquarters for musicians to assemble and practice. Yancy usually acted as a booking agent.
A bustling live music scene developed and jug band music branched out from Beale Street bars to neighborhood juke joints, city parks, private parties, store openings, and medicine shows. The music became popular with whites and blacks and encompassed a growing range of instruments. The requisite guitar, jug, and harmonica were intermixed or switched with such instruments as mandolin, banjo, piano, kazoo, and washboard.
Will Shade Memphis Jug Band were the first Memphis outfit to become popular and secure a recording contract in 1927. By then Gus Cannon was veering more towards blues-based material and had already made some recordings that same year with Blind Blake under the moniker Banjo Joe and featuring the first example of bottleneck slide on a banjo. Based on the success of the Memphis Jug Band, Victor recording scout Ralph Peer approached Cannon about starting his own jug band. Cannon wasted no time in contacting his old string band mates, Noah Lewis and Ashley Thompson. As Lewis blew furious blues harp and Thompson handled guitar and vocal chores, Cannon plucked brightly on five-string banjo likewise blowing decorously into a paraffin can rigged by harness around his neck. In January of 1928 Cannon’s Jug Stompers recorded four sides: Minglewood Blues, Big Railroad Blues, Springdale Blues, and Madison St. Rag.
With Lewis unexpected blues influence anchoring their good-timey ambience, the Jug Stompers had one up on the other jug bands in Memphis. Their initial sides sold well enough that they were asked to record again in September that year. Thompson never made it to the session and a guitarist named Elijah Avery was asked to fill in for the next ten sides. But Cannon was probably happier when he ran into an older colleague and guitarist Hosea Woods, from his medicine show days. Woods replaced Avery for consequent recordings and with his singing abilities and similar background in minstrel material the Jug Stompers ably continued recording until 1930. Some of their most novel and enduring music came from this line-up, including Walk Right In, Mule Get Up in the Alley, and Prison Walls Blues.
By then the Great Depression had thrown a pall over the recording industry and the popularity of jug bands was diminishing. The Jug Stompers career ground to a halt. While the other Stompers withdrew to normal rural lives, Cannon played solo in and around Memphis for some years and supplemented his income with manual labor jobs. In 1956 he reappeared with an album for the Folkways label. Happy to oblige the demand for traditional folk and blues in the 1960s, he resumed performing at festivals and clubs. In 1963, a folk-pop group called the Rooftop Singers made Cannon Walk Right In a number one hit song. The Grateful Dead also paid homage with several versions of Jug Stompers songs, most notably, Minglewood Blues. Gus Cannon was ninety six years old when he passed away in 1979. |
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| Blues enthusiasts who scramble for more intricate and melodic guitar riffers should seek out Bo Carter. Known more for an abundance of thinly masked sexual references in his lyrics, Carter was a fluid and imaginative fingerpicker related to proto-ragtime picking. His singing too was expressive and full of clever phrasings that complimented the suggestive nature of his songs. Carter was also a part-time member of the successful string band, the Mississippi Sheiks, but his solo recordings show off one of the more popular and dexterous musicians of 1930s Mississippi blues.
Armenter Bo Chatman was born March 21, 1893 on a plantation outside Bolton Mississippi. He came from a very musical family - all thirteen children were musically inclined. His father was Ezell Chatmon, uncle of Charlie Patton, and played guitar and led his own string band while the children were growing up. His mother played fiddle and brothers Lonnie and Sam were regular members of the Mississippi Sheiks. Bo played with the Sheiks periodically, but was better known for his solo recordings. He used the name Bo Carter as an alias.
Carter began playing bass viol, fiddle, and banjo and took to the guitar rather late in life. His solo recording career began in 1928 and included a repertoire of bawdy blues and ragtime, with a strong attraction to hokum influences. On the one hand, his marked success was due to a facility for risqué lyrics, rife with sexual metaphors and double-entendres. Songs like Pussy Cat Blues, Banana in Your Fruit Basket, and Ram Rod Daddy with their nudge-nudge, wink-wink aspect most definitely contributed to the popularity of his more than one hundred recordings. The themes were indicative of country blues in that era, though Carters extremes were definitely ahead of their time.
Much more essential was Carters superior talents as a guitarist. He played a steel guitar in an original and dexterous picking style, employing a variety of keys and tunings. Though not as technically proficient as Blind Blake or Blind Lemon Jefferson, his licks were consistently inventive and his melodic sense vibrant. Listening closely to these underlying accompaniments is the real reward.
Even though his reputation for novelty lyrics preceded him (most likely to earn a decent living), Carter also recorded more meaningful blues songs like Sorry Feeling Blues, Policy Man Blues, and Corrina, Corrina, which he was the first to record in 1928. In the late 1920s he started going blind and by the mid-30s had turned to singing on the streets of Memphis for a living. As musical tastes changed Carter’s recording career came to a close in the early 40s. He died in poverty in 1964 at the age of seventy one. |
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| The popularity of Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s heralded the true arrival of country blues to a mass audience. Jefferson was a genuine musical vagabond, traveling extensively to take his music to the people. Recordings reveal a deftness for intertwining the rhythms of voice and guitar. His guitar technique was, in a word, unpredictable, and most guitarists would be hard pressed to replicate it. Best known for blues gems like See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, and Match Box Blues, his self-penned compositions were a vivid social commentary on the south in the early 1900s.
The seventh child of sharecropper parents, Jefferson was born Lemmon Jefferson on September 24, 1893 in a small community called Couchman, Texas. Most reports claim Jefferson was born blind, but there is nothing to confirm this. He learned to play the guitar as a teenager and as was the fate of most sightless musicians, played on street corners for tips. Even as an itinerant, his reputation as a singer-guitarist attracted regulars, and friends suggested he try to forge a proper career with his remarkable abilities.
Jefferson possessed a bulky frame, anywhere from 200 to 250 pounds and to make ends meet he did a short stint as a professional wrestler. Promoted more as a novelty act than anything, wrestling was short-lived once he began earning money for his music. He became well-known for roaming the southern states, frequenting small towns, entertaining picnics and Saturday night parties with spirituals, work songs, and folk tunes in the southern tradition.
In 1925 Jefferson was invited to record for Paramount Records at the recommendation of a Dallas piano player and record store employee. His second release Got the Blues/Long Lonesome Blues established Lemon as the first best-selling black bluesman and set off a search for more male blues singer-guitarists. Suddenly Jefferson had a new Ford with a chauffeur and a bank account. In less than four years he recorded nearly a hundred sides and along with Blind Blake they became the biggest selling country bluesmen of the 1920s.
This widespread success was attributed to both his guitar playing technique and his singular vocal style. Jeffersons guitar attack was once referred to as crazy quilt riffing, a reference to the intricate melodic structures marked by irregular phrasing and shifting rhythms. He also employed single-string arpeggios, boogie-woogie bass runs, and jazz style improvisations that were beyond most guitarists of his or any era. The vocal half of his sound exhibited penetrating range and tonal subtlety, mannerisms that would help characterize blues singing for years to come.
Jefferson was also a talented songwriter and one of the first to record many of his own compositions. His songs covered a wide range of topics and lyrics were peppered with graphic metaphors: If your heart ain’t rock, it must be marble stone, or I feel like jumpin through a keyhole in your door, to site a few examples.
Jeffersons untimely death is shrouded in mystery and a handful of plausible tales circulate. Most versions place his death in the winter of 1929 during a brutal Chicago blizzard, though whether he was mugged and left to freeze, suffered a heart attack, was killed in a car crash, or simply lost his way and froze to death is anybodys guess. The legend claims he was found with his hand frozen to the neck of his guitar. |
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| Blind Boy Fuller was a founder of the ragtime influenced East Coast Piedmont blues and became one of the most popular blues recording artists of the 1930s. He was fluid at melding ragtime, slide blues, and pop into a distinct and regional interpretation of the genre. A prolific songwriter, his catchy countryman compositions addressed concerns of rural blacks on the farms and in the big cities. Fuller also brought notice to his recording sidemen, Reverend Gary Davis, Bull City Red, and Sonny Terry. His music served as a spirited model for many up-and-coming Piedmont blues musicians.
Fullers real name was Fulton Allen, born in Wadesboro, North Carolina on July 10, 1907. Allen was not born blind, but perhaps because of his blindness, began to play guitar in earnest. Though he had picked up some guitar skills as a boy, it was not until his late teens that he was seen playing on street corners and at house parties. In 1926, supposedly from congenital disease, he began losing his eyesight. By 1928 complete blindness forced him to earn a living playing music wherever possible.
In the late 20s and early 30s Allen moved around sporadically, peddling his blues in various towns in North Carolina. He settled in a town called Durham for an extended period and around this time became acquainted with the bluesman Reverend Gary Davis, who influenced his guitar work and songwriting. In the winter of 1934, while playing on the Durham streets, he was noticed by a part-time talent recruit for ARC Records named J.B. Long. It was Long who tagged Allen Blind Boy Fuller and drove him, Rev. Gary Davis, and a washboard player named George Washington (aka Bull City Red) to New York City for their first recording session.
Blind Boy Fuller blues were based on a variety of styles and though he was adept at rag songs, he helped forge a regional blues style called Piedmont. Piedmont blues drew from ragtime, string bands, traveling medicine shows, and popular songs and was nurtured in east coast states like Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The guitar technique resembled that of the banjo or West African kora with its more melodic finger picking method. Unlike Delta blues, Piedmont musicians plugged sad lyrics into upbeat music, creating a happier sounding blues form. Fuller was versatile at finger picking or bottleneck slide, typically on a National steel guitar. Combined with his supple, high-spirited vocals and novel lyrics Fullers songs were a popular remedy for the times.
With the success of his first session Fuller returned for several more, both solo and with Davis and Red as sidemen. Long remained in a managerial role and made sure that Fuller was recorded in the right circumstances. In 1937 Fuller befriended harmonica player Sonny Terry and the two recorded together, kindling Terry career and fame. Fuller recorded output was formidable and his popularity equally so. The bulk of his more than 130 sides were recorded between 1935 and 1938 including such standards as Step It Up and Go, I‘m a Rattlesnakin Daddy, Trucking My Blues Away, and Rag Mama Rag, which would inspire The Bands song of the same name in 1968.
In 1938 Fuller became ill and was diagnosed with syphilis and a severely damaged liver and kidneys, requiring hospital care. His final studio session in June of 1940 was a rousing effort backed by his old friends Bull City Red and Sonny Terry. Perhaps Fuller knew the end was near. He died the following February of blood poisoning due to a kidney disorder. |
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| Blind Blake was the Southeast regions answer to country blues guitar genius. Only Blind Lemon Jefferson sold more records during the 1920s. Possibly the best ragtime guitarist ever, Blake left a raft of masterly recordings that combined elements of blues, ragtime, jazz, and minstrel, prompting the evolution of the Piedmont blues style. His elaborate finger picking technique was similar to playing ragtime piano on six strings and nobody has dominated it in such a way since.
Talk about an enigma. So little is known of Arthur Blind Blake life that it is as if a ghost of rare talents came and went, leaving only the music as confirmation. What little has been pieced together is based on conjecture. The period of his recordings from 1926 to 1932 provides the most solid clues to his origins. Based on a single known photograph from his stretch with Paramount Records, it is approximated that he was born in the early 1890s. Various reports allude to his birthplace as Jacksonville or Tampa, Florida. One of his recordings has Blake speaking Geechee dialect, suggesting a theory that he may have come from the South Georgia Sea Islands, though this is doubtful.
We can also glean from his music that he traveled widely, picking up various musical styles like country blues, skiffle jazz, music hall, and ragtime, all of which he incorporated into his repertoire fluently. Other bluesmen confirm sightings in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia before actually arriving in Chicago sometime in the mid-1920s. One thing is certain, Blake made a indelible impact with his guitar playing. In the summer of 1926 he got his start backing vaudeville blues singer Leola B. Wilson. Paramount was quick to sign him as a solo artist and a month later he recorded the double sided Early Morning Blues and West Coast Blues. The latter became a minor hit and propelled him into the limelight.
Blake recorded around eighty solo sides for Paramount over the next six years and was also a favorite stable guitarist for the likes of Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, Ida Cox, Johnny Dodds, and Gus Cannon. His extraordinary trove of recordings turned Blake into Paramount’s best-selling artist not to mention influencing other blues musicians and the evolution of the genre itself. Songs like Southern Rag, Too Tight, Diddie Wa Diddie, and Sweet Jivin Mama, all exemplify his sweeping range of styles and dexterity.
That dexterity classed him as a master of ragtime blues finger picking which basically imprinted the ragtime piano technique onto guitar strings. His left hand provided sophisticated rhythmic patterns while syncopating with the right hand thumb. It was this right hand action and his speed that put him in another realm. Skills that when matched with his array of polygenetic references placed Blake at the forefront of guitar finger picking.
When he was not recording for Paramount, Blake supplemented his income by playing South Side Chicago house rent parties. His own apartment became a jamming den where the likes of Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes, Tampa Red, and Scrapper Blackwell would turn up regularly to booze and play the blues. None, supposedly, could keep up to Blakes dazzling speed on the strings. Nor could they keep up to his love of whiskey. He apparently enjoyed getting drunk and fighting.
Due to the stock market crash Paramount Records collapsed in 1932 and Blake never recorded again. He left Chicago as mysteriously as he had arrived, most likely returning to Florida where he died unnoticed. No evidence exists as to how or when. What we are left with is his exceptional body of work and that is what really matters. |
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| Big Bill Broonzy built his reputation on a bedrock of virtuoso skills - as a guitar player extraordinaire, accomplished singer, and prolific songwriter. He became a leading figure in pre-World War II blues, ultimately incorporating rural Mississippi blues with a more refined, big city sound that called Chicago home. Broonzy articulated his songs with a warm, rich vocal tone and clear diction while his brisk and inventive guitar picking became intrinsic lessons to aspiring guitarists everywhere. He was also one of the first blues artists to make it big overseas, the orginal blues ambassador, undoubtedly influencing a whole new generation of British blues rockers a decade later.
William Lee Conley Broonzy, along with his twin sister, were the thirteenth and fourteenth of seventeen children, born June 26, 1893 in Scott, Mississippi. The Broonzys were sharecroppers and Bill father, Frank, was a deacon at the local Baptist church. The family worked the Delta plantations until Bill turned eight, then moved to Langdale, Arkansas, lured by the promise of better food and work.
His passion for music was galvanized by an older street musician who played a cigar box fiddle. Before long young Broonzy had made his own homemade fiddle and was sneaking off to the nearby woods to practice, away from the pious eyes and ears of his strict parents. Any music outside of a Baptist hymn was considered devils music. Bill persevered with his fiddle and earned tips at local dances and picnics. By the age of twenty-one he was married and had put his fiddle aside, set on becoming a preacher. Yet when faced with the choice of preaching or earning money, he opted for the obvious. As Bill once told Alan Lomax: But Christians one thing and money’s another.
Broonzy answered the call at fish fries and local dances. Often tagged too good to play for blacks, he was coerced into shows for white people. The army drafted him in 1917, sending him to fight in the trenches of France. Two years later he returned to Arkansas with a bigger sense of the outside world. The oppressiveness of the south only rankled him and Bill knew the only answer was to leave. One night in January, 1920 he caught a freight train north and never looked back.
It was a period of mass migration of rural blacks to northern cities searching for better fortunes. Jazz and blues musicians alike were landing in Chicago and the climate was right for a potential blues career. Broonzy took various jobs as a foundry molder, cook, and train porter and eventually fell in with other musicians who encouraged him to learn guitar. He applied himself dutifully from then on, playing the nightclubs and gin mills of Chicago’s South Side by night while hanging on to his day jobs to make ends meet.
Those early days saw Broonzy playing ragtime and hokum, fervently spurring dancers to the floor with tunes like Pig Meat Strut, Brownskin Shuffle, and Saturday Night Rub. His first recording was House Rent Stomp for Paramount Records in 1927. This led to a bustle of recordings for different labels well into the 1930s in addition to session guitar work for other Chicago-based blues legends like Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, and Sonny Boy Williamson. Though he never saw much money for his own records. The sides sold well, but record executives usually pocketed the royalties, leaving Broonzy bitter about the industry. Other blues performers were recording his songs, giving nothing back in return. Later in his career, as a mentor for young up-and-coming blues talents like Muddy Waters, Bill would teach them to guard against such contractual cheating.
Fame materialized in the form of two New York City concerts in 1938 and 1939. John Hammond was putting together a collection Carnegie Hall performances called From Spirituals to Swing and wanted Robert Johnson to participate. When Hammond learned that Johnson had died several weeks earlier Broonzy was brought in as a replacement. The shows were a critical success, his first in front of a white audience, and brought him notice as a figurehead of Chicago blues.
With his star rising Broonzys style matured into a more country-flavored blues. He recorded both solo and with sidemen like Joshua Altheimer, Blind John Davis, and Memphis Slim. He was at the peak of his compositional powers, penning hundreds of songs on order from the record company, including hits like Key to the Highway, Medicine Man Blues, Just a Dream, Lookin For My Baby, and Make My Getaway, Broonzy was deemed an accomplished songwriter of country meets big city blues.
Songs seemed to flow relentlessly until the late 40s when tastes in blues were changing to a more amplified, less personalized sound. Big Bill blues were steadily shoved aside, but his extensive state-side touring was already leading to foreign pastures. In 1951 Broonzy traveled to England to perform and discovered fresh audiences appreciative of his traditional brand of country blues. This led to added renown and future touring in the rest of Europe, shaping Broonzy into a kind of legendary blues ambassador, and eventually allowing other blues artists to tour there successfully. In the process he transformed his image into a folk revivalist, wearing the workman overalls of his cotton field roots and playing the traditional tunes and spirituals that these new audiences craved.
It was a role he prospered at during the 1950s, in concerts and on recordings, effectively linking the bookends of his four decades as a blues artist. In 1957 Broonzy was diagnosed with lung and throat cancer, but it didn’t stop him from continued performing, even if it pained him. He died in August of 1958 at the age of sixty five. |
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| Generally referred to as a guitar-playing evangelist, Blind Willie Johnson was one of the greatest bottleneck guitarists ever. His powerful, coarse-throated vocals convey an intensity and eeriness that has to be heard to be believed. Though his career was brief, he recorded a body of haunting gospel blues masterpieces that have been covered continuously by blues and rock musicians alike. His recording of Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground) was placed on the 1977 Voyager 1 as an example of Sounds of Earth, should it be intercepted by alien life forms.
Details of Johnsons life are shrouded in mystery and not a lot can be verified. He was born some time in 1897 near Brenham, Texas. Willie was drawn to the prospect of being a preacher at a very early age, yet music was also a strong attraction and his first guitar was improvised from a cigar box. Johnsons real mother died when he was a child. The story goes that his stepmother blinded Willie at about seven years old by throwing lye in his face during a fight with his father.
Despite this hardship, Johnson managed to teach himself to play guitar. His father would take him into the town of Hearne and leave him on a street corner to play music with a tin cup tied around his neck. He followed his early religious leanings and became a Baptist preacher and in 1927(?) was married to a young singer named Willie B. Harris . They moved to Dallas and began performing together with Miss Harris singing background soprano. In December of that year Johnson began the first of four recording sessions for Columbia Records. (earlier records list his second wife Angeline as background singer on these recordings, but this has since been proven false)
Over the next three years Johnson recorded 30 songs that would serve as the template for gospel blues. He sided with sacred music and never recorded a secular song, yet what one hears is blues phrasing inflamed with religious imagery. His slide guitar playing was masterful with flawless fret strength and agility, originally using a pocket knife to mimic his voice. And what a voice - a passionate, spooky growl referred to as a gruff false bass that commanded immediate attention (he seldom sang in his natural tenor). Johnson became known for such contributions as Motherless Children Have a Hard Time, If I Had My Way, John the Revelator, Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed, and Dark Was the Night. His songs have been covered by the likes of Ry Cooder, Eric Clapton, Taj Mahal, and Bob Dylan, to name a few.
Johnson did not record after 1930, though he did continue performing into the 1940s, working the people on street corners, in churches, at train stations. In 1945 a fire burned his house to the ground. He continued sleeping in the ruins, became sick from exposure, and died of pneumonia. |
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| Bessie Smith rightfully earned her title of nobility, "The Empress of the Blues." One of the first major recording artists of the genre, Bessie captured the spirit of classic blues singing with her powerful voice and superb delivery. Her independent nature and forthright personality seemed to be channelled right into her songs, revealing a quality of speaking from the heart. She helped turn the blues into an art form and has inspired generations of singers in a variety of musical styles. The greatest female blues singer of all time? Most people would agree.
Bessie Smith origins may have been a catalyst in shaping her hard edge blues singing. Born into poverty in 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, she hit the streets singing for spare change at a young age. The Smith family lived in a one room shack and life was so impoverished that by age nine Bessie father, mother, and two of her brothers had passed away. Bessie passion for singing the blues led to talent shows and touring. In 1912, a minstrel troupe was passing through town and Bessie passed an audition to join the troupe on the road. Here she came under the tutelage of Gertrude Ma Rainey, referred to as the Mother of the Blues for developing a womens blues style in traditionally male genre.
Though Rainey was able to teach Bessie a thing or two about the blues, their relationship was reportedly competitive at best and eventually Bessie outshone the older singer with her greater range and versatility. She poured herself into the vaudeville circuit for the next ten years, maturing from chorus line parts and then a duo to a crowd-pleasing solo act. Eventually, like most singers of the day, Bessie headed north and settled in Philadelphia. She began developing her stage show in the New York/New Jersey market and cultivated a loyal following.
Bessie recording career took off at a time when record companies were grasping the potential for black artists. Labels like Okeh Records were pouncing on anyone who could sing the blues in order to tap into the black community of record buyers. After several failed attempts at recording contracts Bessie landed a gig with Columbia. Her first record, Down Hearted Blues, was also a smash hit, selling an unprecedented 780,000 copies.
Bessie vocal sound was raw and steeped in emotion and perfectly suited to the blues. She effortlessly bent notes to convey depth and feeling. She created a self-assured and defiant style of delivery with a hint of vulnerability. Such a sound was a conduit for the bleak times of unchecked racial and female prejudice and the tumult of her private life. She tackled themes of violence, heart ache, and death with such powerful range. One could sense the autobiographical undertones as she bared her soul in such songs as Empty Bed Blues, and Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.
Columbia Records made Bessie Smith an exclusive artist for the next decade, recording over 160 sides and solidifying her status as a leading live performer. By 1924 she was earning a whopping $2000 per week, the highest paid black entertainer in the country. She toured nation-wide in revues for major black theatres and personified the blues diva on the big screen in St. Louis Blues. Bessie attracted top notch musicians like Benny Goodman, Ornette Coleman, Eddy Lang, and Sidney Beckett to accompany her. But her best work may have been with Louis Armstrong on such standards as St. Louis Blues, I Aint Gonna Play No Second Fiddle, Reckless Blues, and You Have Been A Good Old Wagon.
Despite her obvious success, Bessie off stage life was turbulent. Several failed marriages, bisexual affairs, physical abuse, and bouts with alcoholism all contributed to a volatile private life and, inevitably, her art. As with so many blues artists of the period, she was a victim of the Depression eras flagging record sales and by 1931 her career was on the skids. Producer John Hammond found Bessie playing seedy Harlem theatres in 1933 and recorded what proved to be her last triumph, including the party anthem Gimme a Pigfoot. With the advent of swing music, in the mid-30s Bessie’s vocal style was no longer in vogue. In the midst of a planned comeback, Bessie was killed in a driving accident traveling from Memphis to Clarksdale, Mississippi. She was 43 years old.
Bessie Smith set the bar for all female blues singers to follow and is remembered as the first important blues and jazz singer. Her vocal gifts allowed her to transcend her blues singing rivals and create an original sound and intensity that many singers have yearned to imitate. Bessie lived her blues as well as sang them and her highly personal style influenced countless vocalists including Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, and Etta James. |
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| A major exponent of Delta blues with a sound that was as enormous as the man himself. Howlin Wolf was a powerhouse of raw, untamed energy and his live performances were legendary. The vision of a 6 ft. 3 in., nearly 300 lb black man hollering from the dungeon and ripping madly on harmonica was no less than the genuine blues apostle.
He successfully introduced his country blues style to urban audiences and helped define the Chicago blues sound. His influence on American and British blues and rock artists is immeasurable. Eerie and magical, ferocious and intense, you have not heard the soul of the blues until you have heard the Wolf. Howlin Wolfs real name was Chester Arthur Burnett, born June 10, 1910 near West Point, Mississippi. Three year old Chesters grandfather told tall tales of wolves in Mississippi, sending the frightened boy howling to his room. From then on his family called him Howlin Wolf. His earliest introduction to music was singing in the Baptist church each Sunday, yet it wasnt until Chester was 18 that he received his first guitar. Wolfs rural plantation upbringing turned into an ideal setting for blues mentors. Charley Patton lived on a nearby plantation and took a shine to the young man, teaching him the rudiments of the Delta blues style. In 1933, when the family moved to a plantation near Parkin, Arkansas, Wolf met Sonny Boy Williamson, who taught him how to play harmonica. Wolf also crossed paths and performed with Robert Johnson. However, Patton left the most indelible imprint. Wolf, adopted his rasping vocal style and even copied a performance trick of lying on his back while whooping and hollering. After a four year stint in the army Wolf was discharged in 1945 and went back to farming in Arkansas, but within three years he had formed his own band and began forging a reputation in Delta juke joints. He moved to West Memphis and landed a spot on a local radio station. One of the people who heard him was Sam Phillips of the future Sun Records. Phillips was awed by the potent vocals and knew he had to record Wolf. In January of 1950 they cut two sides, Moanin at Midnight and How Many More Years. They were simultaneous hits, selling 60,000 copies and Wolf career was off and running. Wolf continued to record with Sam Phillips and those early sides captured him at his most kinetic and savage. His red-blooded howls and moans literally oozed with wickedness and chased with buzz-saw harmonica it was like a wild animal let loose. Accompanying him were Willie Steele organic drumming and Willie Johnsons sizzling guitar. Together they put a feral edge to the blues while Phillips eagerly laid it all down. Some of these Sun recordings were leased to Chess Records in Chicago and by 1952 Wolf was enticed to sign with Chess and migrate north. The early 50s were the glory days of Chicago blues and Wolf, along with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Elmore James were the cream of the scene. But it was Waters who became Wolfs biggest adversary, competing for songs at Chess and popularity in Chicago clubs. Wolfs raucous backwoods, southern blues contradicted Waters cooler, elegant style. Their rivalry even extended to who got the best songs from Chess house songwriter Willie Dixon. By now Wolf had called on Hubert Sumlin to join him in Chicago from Memphis. Sumlin would become Wolfs premier collaborator and his fervid guitar leads would perfectly accentuate the big mans raw sound. Wolf even paid for Sumlins guitar lessons. He thought nothing of taking care of his band’s needs. Wolf was just as intent on bettering himself, studying at night school and taking music lessons. His performances would become legendary. He took a song and overwhelmed it, put his whole being into it. For those who saw him live it was spiritual bordering on frightening. The Wolf yodel took its cue from the likes of Tommy Johnson and Jimmie Rogers, only it resembled more a possessed whoop. Meanwhile his band grooved with captivating hooks and galumphing rhythms that both black and white audiences could relate to. The mid to late 50s saw Wolfs band fine-tuning their craft in Chicago clubs and on the road. Eventually, they hit the charts in 1956 with Smokestack Lightnin and Evil. By 1959 Wolfs electric blues were taking on a rock and roll intensity and fueled by Willie Dixons pen the hits came fast and furious. Songs like Back Door Man, Spoonful, The Red Rooster, Howlin For My Baby, Shake for Me, and Wang Dang Doodle, all became rollicking hits. Howlin Wolf would ultimately become inspiration to a new generation of rock and roll blues players like The Rolling Stones, Captain Beefheart, Eric Clapton, The Doors, and Led Zeppelin. His primal energy and potent sound have been credited with laying the foundation for rock ‘n roll. He died of cancer on January 10, 1976. Written by Tim Kirker. |
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