Bukka White

Born Booker T Washington White, Bukka first recorded in 1930 and between then, and his final recording session in 1940, he released 9 records. Born in 1909, Booker was the son of a railroad worker, his first record was The New Frisco Train, coupled with The Panama Limited; White’s guitar captures the moving train to perfection.

Booker was a musical veteran by the time he first recorded having left home at 13 and gone to Chicago playing on the streets with a blind guitarist. By the late 20s he returned to the Delta, and inspired by Charley Patton he was back with the Blues.

As his one release did not sell very well Victor did not bother to release any more of the 1930 session. White made a living as an itinerant musician, as well as a baseball pitcher and a boxer. Seven years later Booker went to Chicago and cut Pinebluff Arkansas and Shake ‘em on Down for Vocalion. Unfortunately it was not success that was banging at his door, it was the Police. He had apparently shot a man, sometime before the recording session, he was sent to Parchman Farm Prison. In 1939, while he was in there John Lomax recorded two songs with White.

By late 1939 White was out of prison and able to record and in an effort to ‘modernise’ White’s sound Washboard Sam was drafted in. Bukka and Washboard recorded 12 wonderful sides. Bukka’s Jitterbug Swing, Parchman Farm Blues and Special Streamline Special are diamonds amongst pearls.

Despite this amazing music White disappeared back to obscurity, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s. He then received the adulation he deserved, but never could have imagined back in 1939, while he was in Parchman Farm Prison.

Muddy Waters

“No I ain’t no millionaire but I had a lot of managers that became millionaires.” – Muddy Waters

Bandleader, songwriter, guitarist, singer, song interpreter and the prime mover of the Chicago electric Blues scene hailed from the Mississippi Delta, like almost all the great electric bluesman of the post war era. He was also a good man who helped many younger or struggling musicians as they later bore witness. But whatever else he was, he will forever be the once and future King of the Chicago Blues.

Born McKinley Morganfield he grew up and worked on the Stovall farm teaching himself the harmonica and later the guitar and from around 1935 he was playing in juke joints and dances in and around the Clarksdale area. In mid summer 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Muddy at Stovall's for the Library of Congress; Muddy sang Country Blues and Burr Clover Country Blues.

In 1943 Muddy, who had got his nickname from his grandmother, because he was always playing in a nearby creek as a child, moved north. He took the train to Chicago’s Illinois Central Station; initially finding work in a paper factory. Muddy began playing for tips on Maxwell Street soon after arriving in the city; Big Bill Broonzy helped the country boy break into the urban scene. Muddy started playing with Eddie Boyd, as well as backing Sonny Boy Williamson No.1 at the Plantation Club. A switch from acoustic to electric guitar in 1944 galvanised Muddy’s career. He continued to play traditional Delta bottleneck, but the electric guitar transformed his sound and helped to ‘invent’ post war Chicago Blues.

In 1948 Muddy cut ‘I Can't Be Satisfied’ and ‘Feel Like Going Home’, which Leonard Chess released on the Checker label. ‘Feel Like Going Home’ was a reworking of Son House’s ‘Walking Blues’. Muddy had huge respect for House and this is another song Muddy must have sung countless times before this recording. The record sold out in a day, going on to make No.11 on the R&B charts in September 1948. Chess was anxious not to upset a winning formula and despite the fact that Muddy had his own band he continued to record Muddy as a duo, or with Leroy Foster on guitar.

By the late 1940s his band included Leroy Foster on guitar or drums, Big Crawford on bass, Jimmy Rogers on guitar and harmonica and not long afterwards Little Walter Jacobs was added as the featured harmonica player. Muddy was only in his early 30s but he became the patriarch of the Chicago blues scene. With the pick of the city’s musicians in the 1950s, it was more a question of who didn’t play in Muddy Waters Band than who did. The Muddy Waters Blues Band was recording as an entity by 1951, the epitome of the hard-edged, driving electric Blues band of Chicago, a cornerstone of what we call rock music today.

In 1951 ‘Louisiana Blue’s became the second in his run of sixteen chart hits, which included classics like, ‘I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘Just Make Love to Me’, ‘Mannish Boy’,  ‘Forty Days and Nights’ and ‘They Call Me Muddy Waters’, in which he sings “I’m the most bluest man in this whole Chicago town”…..few would disagree.

In 1959 Muddy released Muddy Sings Big Bill, a tribute album to his former mentor who had died a year earlier. The following year at the Newport Festival Muddy performed the song, predominantly to a White audience, and it was captured for his album Muddy Waters at Newport; one of the great live albums and a favourite of many blues’ fans. As the band powers through the song the crowd can be heard responding to their brilliance with spontaneous shouts. Just listen to how he puts power into ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Workin’.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Muddy’s band was the city’s premier recording outfit, a veritable academy of the Blues. Among those who played with Muddy were guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Luther Tucker, and Earl Hooker; harmonica players Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton and James Cotton, Willie Dixon on bass; pianists Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, and Pinetop Perkins along with drummer Fred Below.  Another was Buddy Guy who played on Muddy’s wonderful 1964  album, Muddy Waters Folk Singer.

Muddy like many of his contemporaries toured Britain and Europe in the 1960s as part of the American Folk Blues Festivals; his reception was better than when he had previously visited the UK at the invitation of Chris Barber in 1958, the jazz trombonist. Many people in the jazz fraternity, who were the keepers of the blues flame in fifties Britain, decided it was a travesty for Muddy to play with amplification. Somehow these blues zealots decided that the only pure blues was acoustic – thank goodness ideas changed.

In May 1964 Otis Spann cut a single at Decca studios in London with producer Mike Vernon. On ‘Pretty Girls Everywhere’ and ‘Stirs Me Up’ Otis was accompanied by Muddy Waters on rhythm guitar and Eric Clapton on lead. Some years later Eric recalled "they were both very friendly, and they had beautiful shiny silk suits, with big trousers!"

As the Blues languished somewhat in the late 60s, then so did Muddy’s career. In the 1970s he collaborated with Johnny Winter, Muddy’s career took an upturn with the release of the album Hard Again in 1977, winning him a Grammy. A second album, I'm Ready, was followed by a tour of the U.S. including a performance at the White House for Pres­ident Jimmy Carter.

Muddy passed away in his sleep aged sixty-eight in 1983. His influence as well as the respect that he commanded among the Rock community was acknowledged when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

 “He was such a sweet man, people like that shouldn’t ever have to die.” – Buddy Guy

Ain’t That Just Like A Woman

Louis Jordan, the man known as ‘The King of the Jukeboxes’ scored his first R&B hit, I’m Gonna Leave You On The Outskirts of Town, back in 1942. His hits continued throughout the war years, with songs like Five Guys Named Moe, Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?, G.I. Jive and Caldonia.  Born in 1908, Louis hailed from Arkansas and followed his father into the famed Rabbit Foot Minstrels, playing saxophone. He later worked with bandleader Chick Webb and also with Louis Armstrong’s Orchestra, before forming his Tympany Five (although there were usually eight or nine members in the band!), and signing to Decca in 1939.

No Blues, or for that matter black, artist who came after Louis Jordan could escape his influence. Even if they did not care for his music or directly borrow elements of his style, they witnessed his success and his stardom, and they most definitely wanted some of it for themselves. Perhaps more than anything else, then, Louis Jordan was an inspiration.

B.B. King has publically acknowledged his debt to Jordan and Chuck Berry has demonstrated Jordan’s musical influence. Berry ‘borrowed’ from Louis’s guitarist, Carl Hogan, but Louis was far from being Chuck’s only influence. When you hear the introduction to Jordan’s 1946 No.1 hit, Ain’t That Just Like A Woman, you will think, where have I heard that before. Fast forward ten years to Chuck Berry’s, Roll Over Beethoven.

Louis’s career tailed off during the 50s, and although he continued to perform with many different combinations of musicians, his glory days were over. By the early 70s Louis had cut back on much of his activity and he died of a heart attack in 1975. 

Bea Booze

Like Memphis Minnie before her and Bonnie Raitt in more recent times Bea Booze was a rarity, a guitar playing woman blues singer. She hailed from Baltimore and was born Muriel Nicholls in 1920, although little is known of her early life before she recorded for the first time in March of 1942 in New York City.

Sammy Price, a Texan pianist and bandleader took Bea to Decca Records, for whom he played many sessions and worked with the likes of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Helen Humes and Peetie Wheatstraw. Her first couple of releases tapped into the wartime zeitgeist, but neither Uncle Sam, Come and Get Him and War Rationin’ Papa made much impression; nor did a third release, one with no wartime reference.

It was Bea’s fourth Decca release, See See Rider Blues that got her noticed and briefly launched her into the spotlight when it made No.1 on the Harlem Hit Parade for 4 weeks in January b1943. It was Ma Rainey’s 1924 version of this blues standard that was the first to be widely recognised. The song dates back to around 1913 when Shelton Brooks published I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, Ella Fitzgerald and Elvis Presley are among those that have recorded versions of See See Rider and its derivatives.

Bea could not repeat her success or even come close despite going on tour with Louis Armstrong and Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy. She did record more songs, even as late as the early 1960s with Sammy Price. Despite her lack of further success the woman who died in 1975 should be remembered for this evocative rendition of one of the great blues songs.

Bessie Smith Passed Away Today

On 26 September 1937, the day before John Hammond was to leave for Mississippi to take Bessie back to New York to record, she and her lover were driving on Route 61 just north of Clarksdale, Mississippi, when their car had an accident. They ran off the road and down a steep embankment created by the Yazoo flood plain. Bessie broke her ribs in the crash and as she lay by the side of the road a truck ran over her right arm, nearly severing it.

For many years the rumour circulated that her life could have been saved, if she had not been refused treatment at a "whites only" hospital in Clarksdale – 14 miles from the crash site.  Much of the blame for this story must be attributed to John Hammond. He wrote an article in Downbeat magazine claiming Bessie died after being denied admission to a hospital because of her colour; Hammond later admitted his article was based on hearsay. Bessie was in fact treated by a white doctor, at the blacks only hospital on Sunflower Avenue in Clarksdale, but her injuries were too severe, and she had lost too much blood, and she died.