The Rev. Gary Davis, his 115th anniversary today

Today in 1896 the legendary Rev. Blind Gary Davis was born. Davis was a guitar player of great dexterity, although he favoured the 6 & 12 string acoustic guitar over the electric guitar.

In the 1930s Davis both influenced and  played with Blind Boy Fuller. No one is quite sure whether or not Davis was blind from birth or he became blind later, Davis would never confirm the details of his blindness when asked. By the late 1920s Davis had moved to Durham and was working the streets for change. Sometime in the early 1930s he found God and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1933, although he did not use the title in his pre war recordings. Davis made 15 solo sides in July 1935, almost all of which were religious songs, of which none sold in any quantity. He found no difficulty in combining the secular and spiritual sides of music, recording as Fuller’s second guitarist on his 1935 Blues records. 

Davis moved to New York in the latter years of the 30s where met up with, and worked with, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. From the 1940s onwards he recorded, sang and preached on the streets of Harlem, and like McGhee, Terry and many others Davis found new found fame in the 1960s when the folk revival was in full swing. . He became a regular performer in New York City's coffeehouses and folk clubs, like Gerdes Folk City continuing to record, cutting albums for larger labels including Folkways, Vanguard, Prestige, & Bluesville. He played many festivals, including Newport and died while on his way to perform in New Jersey in1972

Charley Patton – Delta Blues Original

Charley Patton’s legend strides across the Delta like no other Bluesman of his generation. He was already over 40 when he first recorded for Paramount in June 1929 at Grafton Wisconsin. Patton travelled extensively, which helps account for his influence. Tales of his singing, playing and life are numerous and all point to the fact that he was an original, one that many of the younger players looked up too. But above all else Charley was an ENTERTAINER. He was popular because he gave his audiences what they wanted, a mix of predominantly Blues based material that was delivered in showman’s style; Patton has even been called the first rock and roller.

Willie Brown, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Bukka White, Big Joe Williams, Pop Staples and David ‘HoneyBoy’ Edwards all came under Patton’s influence in some way. They may have played with him, known him as a friend, seen him perform or quite simply they aspired to be both as good and as well known as he was. He was particularly close to Willie Brown who travelled with him throughout the 1920’s playing house rent parties, picnics, juke joints, and workers camps. They often played for white audiences, especially in Lula. They initially used Dockery Farms as their base, it was where Patton’s Father had moved his large family in 1912.

Charley was confident in his ability as a musician, he even got some people’s backs up with his demands to be addressed as ‘Mister Patton’ – might uppity in some folk’s eyes. Whether it was arrogance or confidence we can never know, but as Paul Oliver attests  "Charley Patton is without question one of the most impressive and important of Bluesmen on record..." – and what must have it been like to have seen him live? He was a showmen, of that there is no doubt, but it was also what was required of these entertainers, in no way should it undermine our view of Patton’s musicianship or his status. What is clear from listening to his records that he was an original, he wrote wonderful songs and interesting lyrics; he also delivered them with a great deal more panache than most of his contemporaries. Amongst Delta musicians there was a degree of competition, they made their living from playing live, not from their record sales. With no royalty payments from their records, it was playing to their Delta audiences that earned them their living; records just helped to ‘spread the word’. A player had to give the audience a show and that is what Charley Patton did better than anyone.

After his first session at Paramount’s Grafton studios in June ‘29, Charley went back and added to the 14 sides he’d recorded with another 24 sides in October. Henry Sims a violin player went with him on his trip north and accompanied him on 4 of these sides. Some of these earlier sides were in fact religious, including the powerful, two part, Prayer of Death; these Paramount released as Elder J.J. Hadley. For Charley’s third release Paramount got highly creative in their marketing, and did his career no harm. They released Mississippi Boweavil Blues and Screamin’ and Hollerin’ The Blues as ‘The Masked Marvel’ and asked record buyers to guess who the artist was, their prize was another Paramount record of their choice ….for free.

A little over 6 months later Patton headed north once again, this time accompanied on the trip by Willie Brown, Son House and Louise Johnson. The consensus is that Charley and Louise were an item at the start of the trip, by the end she had switched her favours to Son……..life on the road! At this session Charley cut just four sides, it may have been that the cream of his material had been used up; the 1920’s equivalent of that difficult third album. The Depression was also underway and it may also have been the case that Paramount was limiting what it recorded, they did in fact have a backlog of unreleased Patton sides. Nearly four years were to pass before Charley got to record again. He went to New York to sides for Vocalion. He cut 36 sides over three days, ten of which were released at the time. These performances are not as good as Charley’s earlier work – he had a serious heart condition, he was just three months away from his death and he had a knife wound in his neck. His latest wife Bertha Lee accompanied him on some of these sides; sadly the masters of the unissued sides are missing.

Patton and Bertha Lee left New York and went back to Mississippi. Three months later on April 28th the 43-year-old Patton died at Holly Springs near Indianola. At his last recording session he recorded the prophetic Oh Death…….

Oh, hush, good Lordy, oh hush, somebody is callin’ me

Lord I know, Lord, I know my time ain’t long.

"Well my stepfather came home and told me.  I was sitting on the front porch rocking in a rocking chair and he said, ‘Rosetta, I have something to tell you’.  He said, ‘Don’t get upset, I have something to tell you’.  And Momma, she rushed to the door, she said, ‘What is it?  What are you going to tell her?’  He said, ‘Her father’s dead’.  And I know that they say he had asthma and a heart attack.  He went out to play that night, a Saturday night, he took a real sick attack and they rushed him home and he died before he got to the doctor back there."

Rosetta Patton in 2001

Ever wondered where the juke box got it’s name?

know what goes on in a juke house?

Boy don’t you know there’s gambling,

And a whole lotta drinking,

And a lotta hot women.

And I don’t want no boy of mine in a juke house.

 ‘Juke’ by Blind Mississippi Morris & Brad Webb

Ever wondered where the juke box got it’s name? From Juke or Jook Joints of course. Juke is a West African word meaning wicked or disorderly in one language, while in a Congolese language it means, a building without walls. It passed into popular usage amongst black Americans from the Southern States with a sexual overtone, it later came to describe a sort of dance.

To begin with Juke joints were found in rural areas and it has been suggested that there is a link to the jute fields and the jute workers that frequented makeshift bars. Long before there was blues music that we would recognise as such. These places usually had a bar that fronted onto the street, often with a dance floor and a back room for gambling or other activities; some Juke joints doubled as a brothel..

“We had these little juke joints, little taverns at that time. On a weekend there was this little place in the alley that would stay open all night. We called them Saturday night fish fries, they had two or three names, they called ‘em juke houses or suppers”

Muddy Waters

The need for music in such a place is obvious. During the 1930’s itinerant blues players used Juke Joints as their regular gigs, they were where many of the younger players first got inspired to pick up an instrument and learn to play it. It was in a Juke that Robert Johnson watched Son House, while Tommy Johnson saw Charley Patton play.

Honky Tonks, Barrelhouses & Juke Joints

A Honky Tonk is the red neck equivalent of a Juke Joint. The difference between the two? The music you’ll find on the Jukebox and the colour of the women in the beer adverts. Barrelhouses are much the same and take their name from the fact that the beer was kept in barrels! Often more associated with pianists they were somewhat more likely to be found in towns.

 “The biggest thing around Vicksburg was Curley’s Barrelhouse. At the time you could hear Little Brother Montgomery”

Willie Dixon

Juke Boxes

The naming of the juke box was of course no accident; they are the ideal way of providing music in such establishments. Juke Boxes were invented in 1927 by The Automatic Music Instrument Company when they created the world's first electrically amplified multi selection phonograph.

Hoochie Coochie Man

For many bluesmen that found new fame in the 1960s, having originally recorded in the post war country blues boom, along with those who were discovered in the post war Chicago blues boom, the pinnacle of their career was the American Folk Blues Festivals that toured in Eurpoe. Bass player and composer Willie Dixon was the man who acted as unofficial agent for the German promoters who put these tours together. Willie had a little black book in which were the phone numbers of every player on the Chicago scene, it also had the numbers of their girlfriends so he could always track them down. When asked what was his favourite gig that he had played it was not one of the European shows. According to Willie it was a nudist camp just outside Colorado Springs in 1949. Maybe it was what inspired him to write You Can’t Judge a book By Its Cover for Bo Diddley.

The Blues and some Fresh Cream please. . .

Cream were among the first rock bands to embrace the Blues in every sense. They were inspired the great Delta bluesmen who had gone before them and paid tribute to them. It's clear though that not everyone quite understood what they were doing at the time. In their review of Cream’s first album, Fresh Cream, the NME were none too sure. “The Cream….really startle the ears with their changes of volume and tempo as they play.” The NME also appeared just a little confused as to the pedigree of the band's music. “In Willie Dixon’s Spoonful you can almost visualize Chinatown at times.”

The Burying Ground

When I was filming a TV series about the Blues we went in search of Robert Johnson’s grave. In all we visited three places, at which he may have been buried. One has a head stone erected by Sony Music (above) at another location there was a headstone paid for by the members of ZZ Top. We were finally taken to a place where there was no headstone and is just one of those graveyards that ‘could’ be the place.  We were also told of two other places he might be buried, one of which may be the place that an 85 year old lady called Rosie Eksridge says is the spot where her husband helped to bury Johnson in a graveyard, it’s about 3 miles from Three Forks, Mississippi. 

See that my grave is kept clean

It was in 1928 that  Blind Lemon Jefferson sang about the need for his grave to be kept clean; it was just a year before he died. Fast forward nearly seventy years and two people did see a grave was kept clean but the spelling on the headstone was corrected and the dates were corrected as well.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was born in North Mississippi near Memphis in 1904 and settled further south  in the Como area around 1940. He farmed and played music for fun and was not one of those blues players who made any records in the pre-war period. He was 'discovered' in the late 1950s and was recorded by Alan Lomax in 1959 on a trip through the South accompanied by his girlfriend, the English singer Shirley Collins.

Through the 1960s Fred played festivals including Newport and came to Europe as part of the American Folk Blues Festival. Fred wrote 'You Gotta Move' that was covered by the Rolling Stones and in the sixties he showed Bonnie Raitt how to improve her slide guitar technique. His playing style was an inspiration for others in the Delta including R L Burnside and much later The North Mississippi All Stars who covered Fred's 'Drop Down Mama'.

Dick Waterman who did so much to help many of the blues singers during the early 1960s, including rediscovering Son House, decided to do something about Fred's grave in the early 1990s. The old one had the wrong dates and spelled Fred's name as McDewell. Dick and Bonnie Raitt – they were and girlfriend boyfriend back when she got to know Fred in the late sixties and through her early career – paid for  a new gravestone. Today you can visit the grave site which is just off I-55 the interstate between Memphis and New Orleans.

Southern Blues Rock

Duane Allman’s appearance on Eric Clapton’s Layla album came a few months after the release of The Allman Brothers debut album. It featured Muddy Water’s ‘Trouble No More’, their own compositions including the wonderful ‘It’s Not My Cross To Bear’ and the sublime ‘Whipping Post’. The band’s second album included Muddy’s ‘I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man’, but was the release of the bands third album in the summer of 1971 that broke them to a wider audience, it is also one of the finest live albums of the rock era. The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East recorded in New York in March 1971 featured band originals alongside Willie McTell’s ‘Statesboro Blues’, Elmore James’ ‘Done Somebody Wrong’, and T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday’. The twin lead guitar work of Duane Allman and Dicky Betts has been the model for just about every twin led guitar band that has followed.

Four days after the album went Gold, in October 1971, Duane Allman crashed his motorbike and died from his injuries. The bass player on At Fillmore East, Berry Oakley, was also killed in a motorbike accident a year later. The Allman’s proved to be the model for a whole string of Southern (Blues) Rock bands that followed. 38 Special, Lynyrd Skynyrd (produced by Al Kooper), Molly Hatchett and The Marshall Tucker Band all made more than a passing nod to the Blues. After that the whole Arena rock phenomenon took off and bands like REO Speedwagon, Journey, Foreigner, Heart, Styx and Peter Frampton were soon selling gazillions of albums and seats, with none to many blues references.

Blues Guitars

Each and every genre of music has its own distinctive guitar sound. Jimi Hendrix Fender Stratocaster in the 60s and in the 70’s the Les Paul was the guitar of choice for heavy metal and hard rock bands. Back in the 1920’s and 30s things were altogether different. Without the benefits of amplified sound the guitar players had one very special requirement, they needed to be LOUD to cut through the noise of the crowd, the National Resonator guitar has been more closely associated with the blues than any other. The National was around four times as loud as a conventional wooden guitar, pretty handy if you wanted to make yourself heard on a street corner, in a tent show or against the noise of a juke joint.

In the late 1920's it was three men in Los Angeles that created the National Resonator guitar. George Beauchamp, an LA musician, had the original idea of creating a Hawaiian guitar, which sat on a stand, and had a horn attached to the bottom. Two brothers, John and Rudy Dopyera, started to work with him, Beauschamp’s first idea failed, as the brothers knew it would. John experimented with a design that used three very thin conical shaped aluminium resonators inside an all-metal body, he applied to patent his ‘tricone’ guitar in 1927.

Beauchamp found the investors, and the National String Instrument Company was formed. Production began in 1927, and by 1928 they were producing hundreds a week; at the peak nearly 50 instruments a day were made.

In 1928 Tampa Red was the first Blues artist to record with a National steel resonator-type guitar. Listen to  ‘Denver Blues’ from 1934 to appreciate the man they dubbed ‘The Guitar Wizard’. 

The Single Resonator Model

Problems soon emerged when Dopyera rejected Beauchamp’s idea of making a guitar with a single resonator. Beauchamp thought this the perfect design for a lower cost instrument and with the Depression just around the corner he was proved right. The single cone type, patented by Beauchamp in 1929, saved National from bankruptcy.

The National was intended for Hawaiian and Jazz players but it became the favoured guitar of the great Blues guitar players of the late 1920’s and 30s. Beauchamp's patent caused a rift between the two parties and Dopyera left National. In 1928, John Dopyera began to work on a wooded-bodied guitar with a single cone. He called this the DOBRO; made up from Do(pyera) and bro(thers). Then in 1932 the companies merged and became the National-Dobro Company. The cones of a National were volcano shaped, while a Dobro was dish shaped. The wooden-bodied Dobro were marketed as an inexpensive alternative to the metal Nationals, with Dobros becoming associated with acoustic country music and artists like Jimmie Rodgers and Roy Acuff.

Cliff Carlisle was the first to record playing a Dobro.

Blues Artists and their Nationals

The cost of a National in the 1930s varied according to the model. A Duolian cost $32 to $35, a Triolian $45 to $50 and a Style O around $65.00. The tricone has a smoother tone, with greater, richer, sustain (the notes last longer). The single resonator had a sharper, and clearer sound, it had much more attack.

Tampa Red:                          Tricone guitar

Son House:                          single resonator, either a Triolian or Duolian

Bukka White:                       square neck tricone

Bo Carter:                             Style N

Blind Boy Fuller:                   Duolians

Peetie Wheatstraw:              Tricone

Scrapper Blackwell:              Triolian

Bumble Bee                            Style O

Black Ace:                             Tricone

Reverend Gary Davis:          single cone

Oscar "Buddy" Woods:       A Tri-plate

Chess & Checker R&B No.1’s

Chess and it's sister label, Checker managed ten No.1s on the American R & B charts. The labels two biggest Blues star, Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters never did manage to top the R&B chart. The Wolf’s biggest hit was How Many More Years, which made No.4 in early 1952; the best for Muddy was a No.3 in 1954 with I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.

Chess 1458             Jackie Brenston       Rocket ‘88                             1951

Checker 758             Little Walter               Juke                                  1952

Chess 1531             Willie Mabon             I Don’t Know                      1952

Chess 1538             Willie Mabon             I’m Mad                                1953

Checker 811             Little Walter               My Babe                            1955

Checker 814             Bo Diddley                Bo Diddley                         1955

Chess 1604             Chuck Berry              Maybelline                            1955

Chess 1653             Chuck Berry              School Day                           1957

Chess 1683             Chuck Berry              Sweet Little Sixteen             1958

Checker 1105          Little Milton                We’re Gonna Make It       1965

Tales from the Prog Rock Ocean

When Yes supported Cream at their farewell concert in 1968 it was an important step for Prog Rock. For most people this music, that was to take hold of the rock world in the early 70s, was about as far away from the Blues as you can get. Yes issued double albums with tracks that lasted for the whole side of an LP, opened their live shows with extracts from Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird Suite’ and took themselves awfully seriously. If the Blues was originally music to dance too, Prog Rock was music to listen to in the confines of your own home, probably wearing very expensive headphones.

Besides Yes there was ELP (Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Colosseum, Manfred Mann’s Earthband, King Crimson, Pink Floyd and The Moody Blues. But scratch any Prog rock legend, as well as many lesser lights, and there’s a Bluesman lurking not too far below the surface.

In 1968 Jon Anderson, calling himself Hans Christian as a struggling solo artist for Parlophone, released a single entitled ‘The Autobiography of a Mississippi Hobo’. Yes’ drummer, Bill Bruford, played with the Savoy Brown Blues Band. Carl Palmer’s first band was The King Bees, from which he graduated to Chris Farlowe’s Thunderbirds. The Pink Floyd connection is well known through their name, but they also cut an acetate in 1965 of ‘I’m A King Bee’ and recorded ‘Jugband Blues’ on their second album in June 1968. The list is endless, but the fact is that this curiously British musical style has its roots firmly in the Delta.

But, as it’s name suggests, the Prog rock practitioners saw themselves as progressing, and that is what the 70s were all about, musical progression. The Blues, despite being very popular in some quarters, was seen as a somewhat arcane musical form by the majority, while some even had the nerve to say it was predictable. . .watch this space!

Paramount Records

One name for many fans of the pre war blues music that was spawned in the Mississippi Delta before moving to Memphis and Chicago that resonates loudly is Paramount Records. The label began life in 1916, founded by the New York Recording Laboratory of Port Washington, Wisconsin. The company was a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Chair Company, who made not just chairs but also other furniture including cabinets for phonographs. The idea behind Paramount Records was that they should give away recordings as an inducement to buy their phonograph cabinets. It was not the first label to start releasing records under the banner 'Race records', that honour goes to OKeh, who coined the name ‘race’ series to describe records made by Black artists for sale to what was almost exclusively a Black audience.



Paramount began releasing records by Black artists in 1922, a year after OKeh. They appointed Mayo Williams, a black college graduate, as talent scout and he immediately signed a number of 'Classic Blues singers' and soon Paramount was releasing records by Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox and May Rainey.

Williams wanted to find a male singer and went to Maxwell Street in Chicago where he came across Papa Charlie Jackson and his 6-string banjo, busking on a street corner. Jackson was taken into the studio and his success led to the company looking for other male talent and it was not long before Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake began recording for the label.

Paramount used ‘field scouts’ to seek out new talent, although this was a somewhat grand name for men like H.C. Speir who ran hardware and grocery stores across the Southern States, they were also the stores that sold records.  These men kept their eye out for locals who could play and it was through Speir that Paramount recorded Tommy Johnson, Ishman Bracey and most important of all, Charley Patton.

In 1930 Patton took Son House, Willie Brown and Louise Johnson to Grafton to record in the company’s new studios.
Paramount unlike most of its rivals did not undertake field recording trips, they preferred their artists to come to Chicago (until it closed in 1929) and New York (which closed around 1926) and then Grafton.

Paramount had a number of subsidiary labels that it used to issue existing recordings with pseudonyms – it was kind of recycling the Blues. Amongst them were National and Broadway. The Herwin Brothers in St Louis 'leased' Paramount recordings to issue on their Herwin label.



During its 10 years in business Paramount released over 1100 records and while they were cheap and their quality was often poor, with a high surface noise, many are much prized by collectors today (as often as not because they sold in such small numbers).

Parmount stopped recording in 1932, like many Blues artists they too were a victim of the Depression.

The origins of 'Dust My Broom'

Trying to recall when and where you first heard the quintessential electric blues riff that opens ‘Dust My Broom’, and who was playing it, is difficult. It may have been the early 50’s version by Elmore James or Fleetwood Mac’s late sixties offering. Some may recall an unknown blues band at a club they visited in their youth, a few people know that it’s true origins is in the 1930’s with Robert Johnson, or is it?



In early December 1933 Roosevelt Sykes accompanied Carl Rafferty, a man about who we know absolutely nothing, on ‘Mr Carl’s Blues’. What we do know is this session was significant in the history of the Blues. ‘Mr Carl’s Blues’ contains the immortal lines, “I do believe, I do believe I’ll dust my broom. And after I dust my broom, anyone may have my room”.

Many years later, as historian’s dissected Robert Johnson’s songs to understand his influences, it was generally assumed that he based ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’ on Kokomo Arnold’s ‘Sagefield Woman Blues’. Kokomo’s song has words similar to ‘Mr. Carl’s Blues’ but was recorded some ten months after Rafferty’s effort. In truth we may never know who ‘did it first’, but recorded evidence points to Mr Carl Rafferty accompanied by Mr. Roosevelt Sykes.

Back then performers swapped songs, heard others perform and lifted what ranged from bits of a song to the complete thing with no thought to copyright – a concept few recognized as important. The blues have an oral tradition that meant that this happened as a natural process.

Recordings of blues songs are our historical markers that signify when something was done first, but it doesn’t mean the performer who recorded it was the originator of a song, all it proves was that they got into the studio first – as often as not that was a matter of luck as record companies went to towns and cities across the Southern States looking for performers to record.



Several schools of thought exist as to the meaning of “Dust My Broom”. It could concern cleaning a rented room before you leave, shades of the itinerant musician or it is simply a sexual reference. Singer, Son Thomas said, “It was an old field holler to tell everyone, except the people the hollerer didn't want to tell, that he was running away.”



American Field Recordings

In the early 1920s most of the major record companies recorded the women Blues singers in New York, during the periods that artists including Bessie Smith, Ma Rainy, Ethel Waters and Ida Cox worked the city’s theatres. It was OKeh, an independent label started in 1918, that released Mamie Smith’s 'Crazy Blues' (OKeh 4169) in November 1920; rather than one of the big two labels, Columbia and Victor.

In 1921 record sales reached 100 million for the first time and by 1923 Columbia was more active in the Race recording field than Victor. It was Bessie Smith, Clara Smith and Papa Charlie Jackson that gave Columbia the edge. Paramount were also on the ascendancy, they were the most effective of all the labels in exploiting the vast untapped market for recordings by black performers.

Paramount’s artists from the South headed north to the company’s recording studio in Chicago, the other labels all maintained studios in New York City. After the initial success of the classic Blues singers the labels had to look farther afield for artists to record. The first field trips were in 1923, with more taking place in 1924 and 1925. But it was the discovery, in 1926, of Blind Lemon Jefferson, which stirred the labels into a frenzy of field recording. Interestingly, although Blind Lemon was discovered in Dallas he, in true Paramount fashion, was taken to Chicago to record.

Scouts from the record companies travelled throughout the South in the search for new artists. These men would either arrange for an artist to travel north to a company’s home base or alert the company so that a mobile recording unit could record the artist the next time they were in the area. Neither were these field trips exclusively to record black artists, or blues singers. They recorded gospel and religious music as well as Hillbilly artists - the forerunners of country performers.

The mobile units visited cities for periods ranging from a few days to a few months, often setting up their recording unit in a hotel. The time taken to alert potential recording artists of the labels visit somewhat dictated the length of time they spent in any one city. Some artists would recall when a company made their annual or bi-annual visit to the town, and made sure they were around. Field recording also inadvertently encouraged the practice of artists adopting pseudonyms in order to record more sides for different labels.

Sporadic field trips took place late into the 1930’s, which is how Robert Johnson first made a record. The Library of Congress were also running their own, more academic, trips in the 1930’s and 40’s. The opening of local recording studios helped to put an end to the trips. This also gave raise to another phenomena that would drive the whole history of the Blues and Rock and roll, the local independent record label.


Field trips were a very important aspect in the history of the Blues and popular music. Without them the story of the Blues would have been very different, some artists would never have recorded; history would have passed them by.

The Blues is Everywhere .....Kokomo, what's in a name?

Kokomo was the pseudonym for a classically trained pianist named Jimmy Wisner (b.8.12.31 Philadelphia). The graduate of Temple University had formed a jazz trio in 1959 backing Mel Torme amongst others. He had the idea to ‘rock the classics’, while not original, but as sometimes happens it was a one off idea that worked. He played the melody of Greig’s Piano Concerto and he did it in A minor, hence the singles name, 'Asia Minor'. Unable to get a release through an established label, big or small,Wisner decided to start his own - Future Records. It became a local hit and soon got a national release through London subsidiary label, Felstead. It made No.8 in America in spring 1961 and No.35 in Britain. Wisner had adopted the Kokomo name to protect his jazz reputation, and at the time of the singles release he never gave an interview or had a picture published. There were four more Kokomo singles during 1961 and the start of 1962 but none even got close to making the charts.

Wisner did not return to jazz, he stayed in mainstream pop, arranging and producing. Amongst the records he worked on were Len Barry’s, '1-2-3', The Cowsills, 'The Rain The Park and Other things', as well as several more by one of the quintessential harmony groups of the ‘60’s, Spanky and Our Gang. Wisner also co-wrote the Searchers last UK No.1, 'Don’t Throw Your Love Away' and worked with Streisand, Al Kooper, Iggy Pop and played the organ on Freddy Cannon's 'Palisades Park'.

Kokomo was not an original name. In February 1936 Kokomo Arnold accompanied Peetie Wheatstraw on record for the first time, but it was far from Kokomo’s first session. He first recorded back in 1930 on the same day as Sleepy John Estes. This first recording, by the then 29 years old Georgia native was released as Gitfiddle Jim, Kokomo was known, at this time, by his given name, James Arnold.
Arnold was a left handed slide guitarist, who was living in Chicago and working as a bootlegger, did not cut another record for four years when he cut 'Old Original Kokomo Blues' from which he took his nickname; Robert Johnson later reworked the song as 'Sweet Home Chicago'. Arnold himself had based the song on, 'Kokomo Blues', a 1928 recording by that other bootlegging guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. On the flip side was 'Milk Cow Blues', which would also be reworked by others, including Bob Wills and Elvis Presley. Kokomo, as well as being a place, was a popular brand of 1920s coffee, and has had an interesting and a diverse place in the annals of pop music. Besides Jimmy Wisner in 1975 there was a band named Kokomo, containing two of Joe Cocker’s Grease Band in the line-up, they had fleeting success on the rock circuit. Then in 1988, 24 years after their first U.S. No.1, the Beach Boys had their last U.S. No.1. From the Tom Cruise movie ‘Cocktail’, 'Kokomo' was written by Mike Love from the Beach Boys, John Phillips from the Mamas and Papas, and Scott McKenzie who had a huge hit with 'San Francisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair)'. Terry Melcher, who produced Taj Mahal’s first band, The Rising Sons in the 60s, co-wrote and produced 'Kokomo'.

“The Robins a black  doo-wop group in LA, cut ‘Smokey Joe’s Café’ written by Lieber &Stoller. It influenced me a heck of a lot when I went to write Kokomo

Mike love