History of the Blues
A journey to the roots of the devil's music
Part One
The blues is an easy music to play, but a very hard one to feel
If you don't know the blues, there's no point picking up a guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music
(Keith Richards)
The blues is the tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and no longer be sad
(B.B. King)
Intro
Mississippi Delta Blues
My idea of paradise is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues
(Mark Knopfler)
Three hundred and sixty-six, almost 367. This long and tangled story begins with an approximate number, the total in kilometres separating Vicksburg from Memphis. Along the now-paved roads of Highway 61, swamps and towering forests once ruled the land, capable of halting even General Ulysses S. Grant at the head of his army marching down from the north. In the Mississippi Delta region there is no wealth. Only a staggering number of slaves brought from a distant Africa. In the 1920s, very few had an electrical hookup, let alone a telephone, a car, a radio. While America was heading toward its first great economic catastrophe, the Mississippi Delta looked like the Third World, amid endless cotton fields and catfish ponds.
The history of the blues is surely one of the hardest to tell, because it's practically impossible to pin down where it began. Many storytellers trace it all back to the so-called field hollers, cries shouted out by African-American slaves in the cotton fields of the American South. But we could go back even further, to Africa, where instruments were played that were still unimaginable for the twelve-bar form. The devil's music, the blue music of sorrow. The blues wouldn't exist without Africa. But neither would it exist without the dirt-poor American South. Ultimately, it's a state of mind, the sound that lit the long fuse of twentieth-century popular music.
Isolated, broken, uprooted. That's how the slaves brought from Africa felt as, at the dawn of the new century, they worked the fields for the wealthiest landowners. It's the tragedy of individuals stripped of any social fabric, any stable community. When they sang "I woke up this morning," there was no joy in it, only sorrow for a condition of complete alienation. If the heart of the blues lies in Africa, its actual shape took form in the American South, in the Delta region, where everyday tragedy played out. Unlike the jazz of New Orleans - born within a mixed community in full ferment - the blues is a solitary music, created by lone men practising call and response, echoing the songs (or laments) of the cotton fields.
It's precisely these nostalgic, anguished songs that were lovingly transcribed by a Harvard archaeologist named Charles Peabody, the first protagonist of this long and tangled story. Not a musician, but a man who arrived in Coahoma in May 1901 to begin excavations of Native American remains. His Notes on Negro Music, published in 1903 in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, represent the earliest documented testimony of the blues, with annotations on the songs of the slaves toiling in the Delta plantations.
These little songs and pairs of verses were both an expression of a general constant, attributable to the ways, customs and facts of Black life, or to a special adaptation improvised on the spur of the moment, concerning a subject of interest at that time
But the earliest testimonies about the blues appear even before Charles Peabody, not so much as musical annotations, but rather about that state of mind which is like a sonic big bang. Born in the summer of 1837, Charlotte Louise Bridges Forten Grimké was a fierce African-American activist, poet and educator. Charlotte wrote her diaries before the end of the Civil War, between 1861 and 1865, extremely rare examples of the life of a Black woman who lived as a free person in the northern states. From her writings comes probably the first recorded use of the word "blues," meant as a mental and spiritual condition of sadness or depression. Charlotte was teaching in the state of South Carolina and had recently come home from a religious service, "with the blues," because she felt "very lonely". She had in mind some songs sung by African-American slaves during forced labour, in a style that generally paired the aching voice of a single singer with a chorus. Songs like "Poor Rosy," which "cannot be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit". In fact, this is the first time anyone recorded something that describes the blues.
Poor Rosy, poor girl. Rosy broke my heart. Heaven must be my home, I can't stay in hell one day longer
We might say this is how the blues was born: songs sung by African-American slaves to accompany their work in the fields, songs "that cannot be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit." Blues music was born from "worksongs", testimonies of a still-oral culture – the first recordings of African-American slave songs date back to 1867, a few years after the end of the Civil War – songs with no fixed structure, often about homesickness and the hardships of field labor.
1865 is a fundamental year in the history of the blues, not because it can be said to be its actual year of birth, but because at the end of the Civil War African-American slaves began to enjoy a (however minimal) freedom of expression. For instance, one of the instruments generally tolerated by slave owners was the banjo, regarded by Western slaveholders as being on a par with a European instrument like the violin. After the Civil War, a slave who managed to get hold of a banjo had considerably more opportunities to perform in public, especially during breaks from work on Saturday nights or at the so-called medicine shows, traveling performances organized by white promoters to sell tonics and miracle cures. The typical call and response structure, understood as group singing, began giving way to solitary singing, intoned at different, more personal tempos. On the cotton plantations arose the so-called hollers – or field hollers – whose vocal style was described by journalist and architect Frederick Law Olmsted in 1853 as: "A long, loud musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into a falsetto."
The first recordings of the hollers style would not arrive until 1930, but the shift from the typical worksongs to a more solitary form of singing (though still often accompanied by a chorus) was decisive in marking the birth of the blues.
The father, the mother and the empress
From the Delta to the metropolis
Lascia che la tua anima inizi a cantare
(Ma Rainey a Bessie Smith)
It's 1873. In Florence, Alabama, a baby boy is born: William Christopher Handy. He cannot yet know that one day he will call himself The Father of the Blues. Handy was born into a deeply religious household, the kind where musical instruments were believed to belong only to the devil. Without his parents' permission, William bought his first guitar with savings from his job, before mastering the cornet, an instrument very similar to the trumpet. After landing a teaching post at the Teachers Agriculture and Mechanical College in Normal, Handy enjoyed touring with his Mahara Minstrels, before receiving a letter from Clarksdale, Mississippi, with an offer too good to refuse: to lead the local band of the Knights of Pythias, a mutual aid organization. At almost thirty, it was the chance of a lifetime, heading south to discover the roots of blues music in the Delta region.
One night, while waiting for a delayed train, W.C. Handy noticed "a lean, ragged Black man with a haunting sadness on his face. As he played, he pressed a knife against the strings of a guitar." In the early decades of the 1900s, the guitar was the primary instrument for creating what Handy himself called "the strangest music I had ever heard." In fact, it was the instrument best suited to techniques for altering sound, such as the metal objects used by Hawaiian guitarists with the first Spanish models imported by Europeans in the second half of the 19th century. It was precisely these so-called Hawaiian guitars that spread across the United States, along with the technique of playing them with a metal object, which became dominant in the Delta among a host of slide guitarists who mastered the art of the bottleneck.
With the mindset of a teacher and curious researcher, Handy spoke with his "lean, ragged Black man." As he listened, William realized that this musical form – a twelve-bar harmonic scheme – had never yet been officially recognized. It was something ancestral, hidden away in the swamps of Mississippi. But it was perhaps still too monotonous a form to be shared with the wider public, one accustomed to orchestral marches.
During a live show in Cleveland, the unthinkable happened: the audience loudly demanded that a brief performance by three local amateur musicians, armed with guitar, mandolin and double bass, be added to the set. Handy agreed, and the three took the stage, mocked by the rest of the orchestra. The monotonous sound was the same one he had heard at the station, utterly raw and primitive. But when the song ended, the crowd went wild, making William realize that the blues form could work. The Knights of Pythias thus began performing across the most disreputable states of the South, speeding up the sound even further with piano in the boogie-woogie tradition.
Back in Memphis in 1909, W.C. Handy brought the blues to the clubs of Beale Street, playing with his ever-expanding orchestra in front of every kind of audience. "Mr. Crump" is the title of the piece composed as an anthem for the election campaign of Democratic candidate Edward Crump, rewritten three years later and published as sheet music under the title "The Memphis Blues." The inclusion of the twelve-bar blues, combined with the syncopated rhythm that would give rise to the foxtrot, brought the song enormous success – never truly capitalized on commercially by Handy, who had sold the rights for "just" 100 dollars. "The Memphis Blues" hugely boosted William's popularity, allowing him to expand his band to over 60 members.
In 1914 came "St. Louis Blues," another incredible hit with its tango-like cadence inspired by spirituals, one of the most frequently recorded songs up until the 1920s.
At the threshold of forty, W.C. Handy moved into offices at the Gaiety Theatre in New York, carrying the influence of Delta blues into the far more worldly, glittering world of Times Square. In the Big Apple, the poor, desperate roots of Mississippi gave way to the modernity of the metropolis, where the blues was reinterpreted in a more sensual, wicked key, particularly by bold female figures with voluptuous forms. While Handy would go on to call himself – more or less rightfully – the father of the blues, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey is one of the few who can rightfully claim the title of mother of the devil's music. Born in Columbus, Georgia, in the spring of 1886, Gertrude Pridgett began performing before the age of 16 in the notorious minstrel shows, traveling performances rife with racial stereotyping, where Black performers had a rare chance to sing and play in front of an audience. It was 1923 when Ma Rainey was noticed by J. Mayo Williams, the African-American producer at Paramount Records. She immediately signed a contract to record eight songs, including "Bad Luck Blues," "Bo-Weevil Blues" and "Moonshine Blues," backed by composer and arranger Lovie Austin and a band called the Blues Serenaders. "Ma's" vocal style was unusually powerful, helped along by a commanding physical presence. Her moaning blues faithfully reflected the suffering of the South, bringing the twelve bars face to face with vaudeville, amid gaudy costumes, whiskey bottles and sexual relationships considered highly unorthodox for 1920s America. By the dawn of the Great Depression, she had recorded over a hundred seminal songs for the new urban blues, such as "Daddy Goodbye Blues" and "Travelin' Blues."
With the crucial contribution of her Georgia Jazz Band, Ma Rainey toured the States from north to south, captivating both Black and white audiences alike. During the 1924 sessions she sang "See See Rider Blues" and "Jelly Bean Blues" with Louis Armstrong, blending the most popular musical forms with the harmonic scale of the blues. In 1927 she landed a dixieland-flavored hit with "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", before recording "Prove It on Me", widely considered the first recording to explicitly address bisexuality and lesbian desire.
Ma Rainey's stage presence was overwhelming: she and her band came to earn over 300 dollars for a single week's work, touring dozens of states aboard a private bus. In 1928, after the decline of vaudeville, Paramount decided to terminate her contract, deeming her old-fashioned stage blues no longer marketable. Having retired to Columbus, the mother of the blues died of a heart attack in 1939. Legend has it that she was the one who discovered (some say even kidnapped) a promising young girl from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to teach her how to sing the blues. That same girl would later be nicknamed the Empress of the Blues.
Born in the spring of 1894 into extreme poverty, Bessie Smith experienced the intimate tragedy of the blues from childhood. Before she turned ten she had to face the death of her father William, a devout preacher, followed by those of her mother Laura and her brother Bud, who fell ill within the crumbling walls of a shack in Chattanooga. The large Smith family was raised by older sister Viola, and Bessie took to wandering the streets from a very young age alongside her brother Andrew, an amateur guitarist. The two performed as buskers on the streets of Tennessee, scraping together enough money for food. Until she met Frank Walker, a talent scout on Columbia Records' payroll. It was February 15, 1923: at nearly thirty years old, Bessie stood in front of a microphone for the first time in a professional recording studio, cutting the single "Down Hearted Blues", which would sell nearly 800,000 copies within just six months. Backed by a saloon piano, Bessie Smith's voice filled the room with a power never heard before, relying on a tragic vibrato that immediately led the press to call her "the blues singer who is truly blue".
Unlike Ma Rainey, whose strength rested on a fascinating, almost devilish Southern lament, Bessie had a deeper, more powerful voice that quickly caught the attention of music promoters chasing easy money. Columbia Records offered her a lavish contract worth nearly 2,500 dollars a year, in exchange getting over 150 recordings on which she was backed by the great musicians of her time, from Louis Armstrong to saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. But Bessie Smith's success was owed above all to her unmissable live shows, in the grand theaters of the T.O.B.A. circuit or under tents similar to those used at religious revivals. Her fees were sky-high, so much so that Bessie can safely be called the highest-paid blues artist of her era.
From 1923 hits like "Baby Won't You Please Come Home" to the iconic version of "St. Louis Blues", Smith's output was remarkably prolific, selling copies across the whole United States. Bessie's humble origins gave these songs a direct, forceful way of speaking about slavery, capitalism and female independence. For this very reason, both she and Ma Rainey are still regarded as gender-bending icons of the early-1930s blues era. Strong, brazen, scandalous personalities who captivated white audiences with the intimate power of a genre born in poverty and now topping the (not yet invented) record charts.
Persuaded by Billie Holiday's mentor, John Henry Hammond, Bessie agreed to record a few swing-oriented tracks for Okeh Records. But numbers like "Gimme A Pigfoot And A Bottle Of Beer" (1933) didn't fully live up to Hammond's expectations, and he decided to end the collaboration. These were the last recordings by the Empress of the Blues, who in September 1937 was involved in a terrible car accident on Route 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale. While her new partner Richard Morgan miraculously escaped unharmed, Bessie Smith lost blood and suffered numerous injuries. According to accounts of the events, surgeon Hugh Smith arrived on the scene shortly after, examined the singer's critical condition and ordered a friend to rush and call an ambulance. She was taken to a hospital for African-Americans where her arm was amputated, but there was nothing more to be done. One of the earliest dark legends of American blues carries the whiff of a conspiracy: Bessie Smith might have survived had she been taken immediately to a whites-only hospital, much closer by. Her grave would remain unmarked until 1970, when it was finally given a headstone with money from Janis Joplin, a devoted admirer of the Empress of Chattanooga.
First Stars
From Blind Lemon Jefferson to Charley Patton
Se avessi registrato dischi solo per il mio piacere, sarebbero state tutte canzoni di Charley Patton
W.C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith. The United States discovered the tragic depths of the blues through hugely successful artists, stage animals commanding staggering fees. That was obviously not the life lived at the same time by the poor musicians of the Delta, those desperate lives anchored to a guitar, playing in the silence of the Mississippi swamps.
Strangely enough, the artist who would bring rural blues to the center of American record-industry interest actually came from Texas, from a tiny town called Coutchman. The eldest son in a large family of farmers, Lemon Henry Jefferson was born blind in 1894. From childhood he practiced the guitar, playing tirelessly on the street, outside barbershops or in public parks during picnics. In his early twenties he moved to the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas, where he met other musicians such as Lead Belly and began his own climb toward fame. According to the none-too-reliable biographical accounts of the time, he was noticed by a Dallas record-store clerk and immediately recommended to Paramount Records, who invited him to record his first tracks at their Chicago studios. Recorded between late 1925 and early 1926 under the pseudonym Deacon L. J. Bates, "I Want To Be Like Jesus In My Heart" and "All I Want Is That Pure Religion" were songs closer in tone to spirituals and gospel. When Lemon tried again, in March 1926, he lit the fuse: "Got The Blues", "Booster Blues" and "Dry Southern Blues" were his first takes on a raw, unfiltered blues coming straight from the poorest corners of the country. Together with other recordings — above all "Long Lonesome Blues" — success came quickly for Blind Lemon Jefferson, despite Paramount's crude recording technology.
In 1926 sales figures should be taken with a grain of salt, and yet it was said that Lemon could shift records at a six-figure pace almost immediately. Paramount Records was the leading label for blues artists, able to put so-called race records on the American market — a format launched for the first time by Okeh Records with the recording of "Crazy Blues/It Is Right Here For You", sung in the ringing voice of Mamie Smith, recognized as the first African-American woman to record a blues song, in 1920. At first no one believed Mamie could appeal to both Black and white tastes, but then came truckloads of records sold and the firm conviction that this raw music would be a genuine hit.
Blind Lemon's exquisite guitar style, combined with his mournful voice and working-class lyrics, made his fortune among Paramount's race records, which capitalized on his sudden fame across roughly a hundred tracks recorded between 1926 and 1929.
Blind Lemon Jefferson's success surely stemmed from his mournful lyrics, which expressed burning desire with an immediacy never before heard on record. From the traditional Texas gambling song "Jack O' Diamonds" to the proto-rock and roll of "MatchBox Blues", Lemon's voice rings out loud and clear, with arrangements rooted in gospel tradition but paired with ideas and a guitar style of remarkable complexity. A talent for crafting songs full of sarcasm and for reworking pieces from the gospel and folk tradition in his own way, enriching them with guitar ideas that were technically very demanding.
Right up to his final hit, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean", Lemon Jefferson's artistry helped spread the blues gospel across the states surrounding the Delta, before his sudden (and legendary) death at the end of 1929. At 10am on December 19th, Blind Lemon was found dead on the street, apparently from acute myocarditis. Rumors immediately began circulating, though, of a suspected poisoning by a jilted lover, while others spoke of a heart attack brought on by a violent snowstorm, or of a brutal murder committed by his driver to steal a large sum of money he was carrying.
Barely two months before Blind Lemon Jefferson's mysterious death, the definitive crash of the New York stock exchange, after years of a booming market, plunged the United States into the abyss of the Great Depression, with devastating consequences across the most disparate areas of social, economic and political life. Following the success of Bessie Smith and Lemon himself, Paramount Records began to retreat, as the race records market suddenly seized up, leaving numerous African American musicians out of work. Records were pulled entirely from catalogs, and radio stations stopped broadcasting music in genres like the blues. And yet, in June 1929, in Richmond, Indiana, the recording sessions began for one of the most famous and flamboyant bluesmen straddling the 1920s and 1930s.
In Hinds County, near Edwards, it was probably 1891 when little Charley came into the world, officially born to William Patton and Sara Garrett. At around 150 kilos, William was a wealthy man by Delta standards, the owner of land and even a store. Charley was raised strictly from the start, according to the most religious standards of upbringing. His features didn't much resemble those of many of his Mississippi peers: lighter skin, a slight build. Uncontrollable rumors circulated, in fact, claiming he was actually the son of Henderson Chatmon, grandson of a white planter and head of a large family of musicians. Although considered African American, young Charley was linked to the most varied ancestries, from Mexican to Native Choctaw. At six, he moved with his family north, to the vast plantation founded by William Dockery in Sunflower County, where the fearsome Parchman penitentiary loomed. Appearances aside, the Dockery plantation was the best place to be if you wanted to become the father of the Delta Blues.
As a boy, Charley Patton was wild, always out and about across the county causing trouble, drinking and provoking. Despite standing barely five foot six, he had a strong personality, bordering on arrogance. He started playing guitar performing in taverns, town squares and on the Dockery plantation itself, where he drew attention for his outrageous way of playing the instrument, sometimes behind his head, sometimes pounding it like a drum. Poorly tolerated by several of his contemporary bluesmen, Charley proudly carried around his deep, powerful voice, unimaginable for someone of his stature. His shows were explosive and above all hedonistic, because Patton was someone who lived the blues with energy and audacity. That's why, toward the end of the 1920s, he decided to send a letter to H.C. Speir, owner of a music store in Jackson with connections to several labels (including the famous Paramount), to flag new talent coming out of Mississippi in particular.
Speir liked to call himself a talent broker, since he carefully combined his two great loves, Black music and money. Also nicknamed the godfather of the Delta Blues, Speir began his fruitful collaboration with local musicians through his meeting with William Harris, who recorded just sixteen tracks between 1927 and 1928. His first recording session was organized in Birmingham, Alabama, on a scorching July day: "I'm Leaving Town" put on record a concentrate of styles that would become typical of Harris - vocals recalling slave hollers, an almost dance-like beat, and generally a looser, more catchy approach to the blues. From "Kansas City Blues" (a version of Jim Jackson's original) to "Early Morning Blues", Harris closed out his brief career at the Richmond, Indiana studios. About his life (and death) only conjecture can be made, since crucial details are still missing to this day to piece it together.
A Mississippi native, Henry Columbus Speir discovered in Harris's raw talent a musical vein that could bring him enormous fortune. Straight from his store on Farish Street in Jackson, he carefully selected the mysterious figures who showed up at his door looking for a demo to send along to record labels like Paramount or Okeh. When he opened Charley Patton's letter, H.C. Speir set off for the Dockery plantation with an offer too good to refuse: over a hundred dollars for at least four tracks to record on disc. Patton's vocal and instrumental talent captivated Speir, who immediately decided to bring him to the attention of race records producers who were hungrily hunting for new blues artists following Blind Lemon Jefferson's sudden success.
Among the leading record labels of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Paramount Records trusted Speir almost blindly. It arranged Charley Patton's trip to Richmond, Indiana, where his first recording session was scheduled for June 14, 1929. Amid the usual technical difficulties of recording music in 1929, Patton pulled off a feat practically unheard of among record men: finishing as many as 14 original tracks in a single session. Starting with the first single chosen, the seminal "Pony Blues", Charley Patton was a raging torrent, with his absolute recklessness when it came to chords and verses, his constant innuendos and racy quips that made Paramount's eyes light up. "Mississippi Boweavil Blues", "Screamin' And Hollerin' The Blues", "Banty Rooster Blues": suddenly the American label found itself with an incredible wealth of killer singles, practically some of the purest expressions of Delta blues ever recorded.
The decision was made to package the recorded material across multiple singles (with two sides each). For instance, "Pea Vine Blues" paired with "Tom Rushen Blues", to flood the race records market with the lascivious, rural, hypnotic style of the new phenomenon Charley Patton, also known as J.J. Hadley or Masked Marvel, pseudonyms born of a Paramount publicity stunt, since the label didn't want to saturate the market with a single name. They even launched a prize contest giving away a record to whoever guessed who was hiding behind the masked marvel.
At the end of the recording session in Richmond, Patton returned home to the Dockery plantation with a sum of money unthinkable for the other African Americans there. Between fleeting romances and epic drinking bouts, Charley kept performing live, and soon after began roaming through neighboring states because of a fiery affair with a married woman. H.C. Speir himself launched a kind of manhunt in the fall of 1929, since Paramount was pushing hard for a second studio session. Speir's mission succeeded: Patton was recruited again, this time accompanied by a childhood friend, violinist Henry "Son" Sims. In November, at the studios in Grafton, Wisconsin, eleven more tracks were recorded, starting with the archetypal rural blues ballad "Elder Greene Blues", where Patton is "forced" to rein in his guitar flourishes to keep pace with Sims's violin. The Grafton production was less groundbreaking than the Richmond sessions, with a series of darker, rawer recordings like "When Your Way Gets Dark", but also new rural gems like "Hammer Blues". On tracks like "Devil Sent The Rain Blues", Charley Patton proved himself a complete musician, capable of playing within the most traditional frameworks and not just by his own rules. The Grafton session continued into December, with Paramount executives pushing Patton's singles as the best ever heard in the United States. Charley's angry, biting voice reached its peak: tracks like "Green River Blues", the proto-rock and roll "Going To Move To Alabama", and above all the tragic, syncopated two-part masterpiece "High Water Everywhere" - a chronicle of the great Mississippi flood two years earlier - cemented his musical art in the history of American popular music.
By the time Patton finished his second recording session in Grafton, the Wall Street crash had already struck the States, dragging the major record labels down with it. Sales collapsed, artist contracts were suddenly terminated. Blind Lemon Jefferson's mysterious death sent everyone into a panic, and Paramount found itself needing to squeeze even more out of Charley's talent, hastily recalling him to Wisconsin in May 1930. But this time the mountain brought forth a mere mouse, since only four tracks were recorded, alongside guitarist Willie Brown. From "Moon Going Down" to the hypnotic, driving "Dry Well Blues", Patton stuck this time to the tasks of traditional blues, unable to resolve a situation that was, of course, impossible. He then moved to Holly Ridge, Mississippi, with his new partner Bertha Lee.
A blues singer, Bertha had a temper as fiery as Charley's: the two fought often and violently, so much so that they both ended up in jail at the start of 1934. W. R. Calaway of Vocalion Records paid their bail to bring Patton to New York City, where between January 30th and February 1st he recorded his last ten solo tracks. Starting with the mournful "Jersey Bull Blues", the New York session delivered Charley's final gems, helped also by Vocalion's cleaner sound. Above all, the duets with his partner Bertha Lee, sulfurous blues hypnosis running from "Oh Death" to "Troubled 'Bout My Mother".
Back in Holly Ridge with Bertha, Charley Patton died near the Heathman-Dedham plantation at the end of April. His death certificate cites a serious mitral valve condition, while the news went unreported in any newspaper, despite the substantial advertising Paramount had paid for over the years. Patton's grave, only funded decades later by John Fogerty, would go on to become the very first stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail, the historic musical route celebrating the legends of American blues.
Caged, at Parchman Farm
Bukka, Willie and Son
Son House, certo che era il mio idolo. Pensavo fosse il miglior chitarrista del mondo
(Muddy Waters)
Devastated by the cascading effects of the Great Depression, record labels specializing in blues music try to keep their balance between total collapse and the necessary discovery of new talent. While Paramount Records is put up for sale to H.C. Speir, its talent scouts keep traveling to the Delta to talk to Patton and seek out the best among his fellow wandering musicians. By the end of May 1930, once again in Grafton, Wisconsin, the studio's leading man isn't Charley, but a failed preacher named Son House.
Edward, or Eddie James House Jr., was born just north of Clarksdale after mid-March 1902, the second of three sons of Eddie House Sr., a Baptist preacher with a taste for alcohol and popular music, who played in a band with his many brothers.
Still a boy, Edward "Son" – nicknamed that way to distinguish him from his father – was seized by religious mysticism, attending church devoutly and scorning instruments dedicated to the blues, the devil's music. After moving to New Orleans following his parents' separation, young Eddie deepened his devotion to Baptist religious practice, beginning to preach sermons as early as age fifteen. After marrying an older woman before he was even twenty, Son took up all manner of manual labor: sharecropper, steel mill worker, tractor driver, cook. His fondness for alcohol and women, however, put him constantly at odds with his religious calling, even though he did become a fully ordained Baptist minister.
The turning point comes in 1927, when he first hears the sound of some of his drinking companions – the suspects are Willie Wilson and James McCoy – handling the guitar in an unusual way, with a bottleneck. Increasingly inspired, and after also hearing the country style of Rube Lacey, Son House decides to embrace the blues he had so long despised, getting hold of a cheap guitar and a piece of glass to play it the same way. He practices constantly, and the results are remarkably good.
According to one biographical account, between 1927 and 1928, Son House is playing at a venue for African Americans – the so-called juke joints where alcohol flows freely – when an armed man suddenly bursts in and shoots him in the leg. Eddie fires back, killing his attacker, and ends up in the maximum-security prison known as Mississippi State Penitentiary, or Parchman Farm. His sentence is 15 years, reduced to just two thanks to the intervention of his powerful white landlord. It's 1930 when he's strongly advised to leave Clarksdale: Son House heads to Lula, Mississippi, where he meets Charley Patton, who has meanwhile fled the Dockery plantation. The personal and professional relationship between Eddie and Charley isn't entirely clear, but when Paramount Records travels to Lula to convince Patton to record more material, Eddie is right there. At the Grafton studios, Son House records about a dozen songs, starting with "Walking Blues" and above all the two parts of "My Black Mama", which best showcase his extraordinary vocal gifts paired with a slide guitar style all his own.
The preacher's fire burns strong in Son House's early recordings, and in the masterpiece "Preachin' The Blues" he lays bare all his inner contradictions: on one side the religious spirit, on the other the irresistible pull of the devil. The Grafton sessions also produced the legendary "Clarksdale Moan" and "Mississippi County Farm Blues", tracked down by collectors only in 2005 after decades of searching, and regarded as something of a holy grail of Delta blues. None of the singles Son House recorded for Paramount would achieve even a vague hint of commercial success, nothing close to the output of Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton. Eddie himself seems to have no interest in fame, content to play around town for pleasure and return to manual labor, working for instance as a tractor driver on various Mississippi plantations.
Son House's career as a musician would be revived more than ten years later thanks to the crucial calling of one of the many pivotal figures in blues history: Alan Lomax. Texan by origin, Alan is the third son of the esteemed John Lomax, a former English professor and pioneer of American folklore studies. An avid collector of race records, Alan joins his father, who is conducting extensive fieldwork in search of traditional sound on behalf of the Library of Congress. Armed with a mobile recording studio, father and son travel through the poorest states in the US, visiting plantations, but above all grim penitentiaries like Parchman Farm. It's here that the Lomaxes find a true goldmine for their studies of Mississippi blues, stories of broken lives, alcoholic drifters and five-star musicians. And it's in one of these prisons that, in May 1939, John and Alan's research leads them to an inmate named Booker T. Washington White, also known by the nickname Bukka, a phonetic rendering of his own name, given to him by his parents in honor of the African American activist and educator of the same name.
Born in a place never precisely identified somewhere between Aberdeen and Houston, Mississippi, Booker T. Washington had a decidedly troubled youth. He married Jessie Bea at the age of 16, only to watch her die tragically less than four years later from a sudden case of appendicitis. He began drifting as a hobo aboard freight trains across several southern states, scraping by through professional sports (boxing and baseball) and humbler jobs like porter work. Guitar in hand, he played around at street parties, until he met Charley Patton, whom he would later call "a great man". He was spotted by talent scout and record salesman Ralph Lembo, who brought him to the Victor studios for his first recording session in 1930. With a brand-new guitar, Bukka recorded at least a dozen songs, not all of which survived, since Victor chose the singles "The New Frisco Train" and "The Panama Limited", which brought to light his hobo-style approach paired with guitar work that clatters along almost like a speeding train. During the Memphis session with Victor, two more songs were recorded featuring the second voice of Memphis Minnie, though these veer toward country-gospel and spiritual.
The songs chosen by Victor failed to achieve the hoped-for success, hit hard by the effects of the Wall Street Crash on the entire American record market. White left Memphis, setting music aside until 1937, when Vocalion producer Lester Melrose invited him to Chicago to record a new single. There was, however, a problem: Bukka had recently been sentenced to two years, to be served at Parchman Farm for a never-fully-clarified shootout. It's unclear whether White violated his parole to record in Chicago, or whether Melrose himself managed to obtain special permission from the authorities. Blues history is grateful either way, because Booker managed to record the seminal "Shake 'Em On Down", which with its sensuous rhythm and classic twelve-bar progression tells of his past as a drifter and extortionist on the freight trains. The single was released paired with "Pinebluff, Arkansas" and relaunched Bukka's ambitions as a major blues figure at the end of the 1930s.
According to biographers' accounts, Bukka White became something of a star within Parchman Farm prison, relieved of the heaviest labor and devoted to teaching his guitar style. When John Lomax arrived at the penitentiary in search of new talent to record, the guards immediately gave his name, even though he was initially reluctant to play for the Library of Congress. "Po' Boy" and "Sic 'Em Dogs On" were recorded in prison, African American music standards reworked with his powerful, bitter voice, shaped by the harsh experience of incarceration.
Released from Parchman at the end of 1939, Bukka returned to Chicago to see Lester Melrose in an attempt to relaunch his career on the Vocalion label. The producer asked him for new material, bringing him into the studio in March 1940, and was stunned by White's new musical ideas. "District Attorney Blues" and above all "Parchman Farm Blues" are the new gems of acoustic blues, expressing a darker, more sorrowful tone after his years behind bars. From "High Fever Blues" to "Fixin' To Die", the Vocalion session is a Delta treasure, but it still doesn't bring Bukka commercial success: he would keep playing around at parties but go unnoticed for two decades before his rediscovery in the early Sixties.
After assisting his father John with the recordings of Bukka White at Parchman penitentiary, Alan Lomax continued his research into African American sound for the Library of Congress. In the summer of 1941, at Klack's Store in Lake Cormorant, a new session was organized with Son House, who had in the meantime spent years retired in the area driving tractors, following his first session in 1930 for Paramount and the death of Charley Patton. Eddie showed up in the company of some musician friends, notably Fiddlin' Joe Martin (mandolin), Leroy Williams (harmonica) and above all Willie Brown (guitar), one of the most fascinating and mysterious figures in Mississippi blues. Born in Clarksdale in 1900, Willie Lee Brown is regarded by scholars as one of the finest slide guitarists of his time, though he never became a first-rank star because he preferred accompanying other musicians rather than performing as a soloist. In 1930 he recorded for Paramount Records the hypnotic, raw "M & O Blues" alongside the scorching "Future Blues", immediately making clear his superb slide style, perhaps one of the most complex and structured of the 1920s and 30s. Brown's figure has taken on the contours of legend, since it's practically impossible to reconstruct his movements. One of the thorniest disputes among blues historians concerns the recording of two more songs credited to Kid Bailey, "Rowdy Blues" and "Mississippi Bottom Blues". Some argue that it's Brown's guitar accompanying Bailey (the stylistic resemblance is obvious), while others are absolutely convinced that Kid is in fact Brown himself, with a less rasping, less gravelly voice.
From "Levee Camp Blues" to the unusually long "Government Fleet Blues", Son House's recordings for the Library of Congress represent another landmark moment alongside Patton's sessions at the Grafton studios. His powerful vocals paired with the twelve-bar rhythm carry the Delta's legacy to one of its highest expressions, enriching the sound with Williams's harmonica and Brown's second guitar. The rhythm is decidedly more modern compared to the solo guitar heard up to that point, though House doesn't neglect tradition, as in "Camp Hollers", which recalls the field hollers sung by enslaved African Americans at work in the fields.
Son House's recording sessions for the Library of Congress continued in July 1942 in Robinsonville, Mississippi. Under Alan Lomax's watchful eye, House recorded another handful of classics in the Delta tradition, from "Special Rider Blues" to the minimal "Depot Blues", with a more controlled, mature vocal delivery, even venturing into more folk-leaning territory, as in "American Defense" and "Am I Right Or Wrong". With the magnificent darkness of "The Pony Blues" and above all "The Jinx Blues" (split into two parts), Son House bids farewell to the music scene and public attention, moving to Rochester (NY) to work as a cook for the Central Railroad.
The devil took my woman
Great Depression Blues
Someone said I sound like an old lady, and I felt truly insulted. I try to sound like Skip James
Born in early 1896 near Terry, Mississippi, Tommy Johnson came from a large family of musicians. Not yet fourteen, he moved to Crystal Springs, where he began to teach himself guitar. One night, wandering the roads, he met a man who offered him a deal: he would tune Johnson's instrument to grant him unprecedented talent. In exchange, Tommy would hand over his soul after death. It's 1914, and the young Johnson performs alongside his brothers at parties, before marrying and settling in Drew, near the Dockery plantation. In one of the most densely blues-soaked areas of Mississippi, he meets musicians like Charley Patton and Willie Brown. Resuming his wandering, he moves to Jackson, where he auditions before H.C. Speir. Tommy's playing convinces the famous talent scout, who decides to recommend him to Ralph Peer of Victor Records. A first recording session is thus organized at the Memphis studios in early 1928, producing the single "Cool Drink Of Water Blues," a hypnotic, mellifluous country lament driven by a kind of falsetto yodel. Johnson's vocal style, paired with an utterly intricate guitar technique, surprises the Victor engineers when the far more rhythmic "Big Road Blues" kicks in. A second single follows, built around the dark gem "Bye Bye Blues," convincing Ralph Peer to continue the recordings that same summer.
For Victor, several more tracks fundamental to the Delta blues tradition are recorded, chief among them the unsettling yet lighthearted ode to addiction "Canned Heat Blues." The Memphis session is the last for Victor, which lets Johnson go into the arms of Paramount, who the following year desperately needs to fill the void left by the death of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Once again it's H.C. Speir who sends Tommy to Grafton, given his considerable live success. At the end of 1929, more songs by the guitarist from Terry are recorded, not all of them devoted to the blues style — the single "I Wonder To Myself," for instance, veers toward ragtime with kazoo accompaniment. Johnson's trademark falsetto rings out again in "Slidin' Delta," only partly recovering the deep unease of "Morning Prayer Blues" to embrace a more jazzy style ("Black Mare Blues") without much in the way of original ideas left, as in "Alcohol And Jake Blues," which copies the structure of "Canned Heat Blues." The Great Depression wipes out the record market, leading Paramount to cut ties with several musicians unable to sell like Blind Lemon. Johnson abandons recording sessions to return to wandering the American South, playing at parties and dances. Overcome by the demon of alcohol, Tommy dies of a heart attack shortly after a live performance in 1956 — one of the first souls collected by the devil's music.
Between the 1920s and 1930s, the number of blues artists who barely manage to record a handful of singles is immense. Amid missed opportunities and the record industry's financial troubles, only a few manage to be truly prolific. One of them is certainly Joseph Lee "Big Joe" Williams, among the first bluesmen to use an amplifier to beef up the sound of his homemade nine-string guitar. Born near Crawford in 1903, Williams began wandering between Mississippi and Alabama as a boy, briefly joining the Rabbit Foot Minstrels to play wherever he could, from brothels to labor camps. Unlike many musicians of his time, Big Joe had no desire to work, preferring to roam with guitar in hand to scrape together some money. Arriving in St. Louis in 1934, Williams met record producer Lester Melrose, who decided to back him, signing him to Bluebird Records.
It's February 25, 1935, when Big Joe enters the recording studio to cut his first six tracks, from "Little Leg Woman" to "Stepfather Blues," fiercely dedicated to the stepfather who had thrown him out of the house nearly twenty years earlier. Williams' guitar technique isn't the most intricate, but his music is almost primitive, sketched out between whip-crack rhythm and passionate singing. Faithful to a more country-leaning approach to Delta blues, Big Joe returns to the studio the following October, this time joined by a second guitar (Robert Lee McCoy) and the excellent harmonica player John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, also known as Sonny Boy Williamson I, to distinguish him from the name-stealing impostor Rice Miller. "Baby Please Don't Go" is the track that breaks the bank, far more structured than the previous ones but above all one of the most imitated songs of the years to come. Big Joe doesn't abandon the fire of tradition — as on the fiddle of "Stack O' Dollars" and "Wild Cow Blues" — unleashing all his passion over the almost hillbilly groove of "Worried Man Blues." Williams returns to the studio after nearly two years, in 1937, once again with Sonny Boy's harmonica on tracks like "I Know You Gonna Miss Me" and the twelve-bar standard "Rootin' Ground Hog." While preserving a very traditionalist approach, Big Joe had honed his country-blues verve over the years, reaching full maturity with the devilish "Crawling King Snake" from the 1941 sessions.
The Wall Street crash brings devastating consequences for the American recording industry, hitting race record sales particularly hard. The major labels are forced to slow down their recording sessions, shutting the door on countless blues musicians. Imagine the look on H.C. Speir's face when yet another Black musician walks into his Jackson store convinced he'll make it big in an already depressed record market. The young man who crosses the threshold in early 1931 is named Nehemiah Curtis James, so confident in his abilities that he doesn't even bother playing a commercial, upbeat number. His one and only shot is a dark ballad called "Devil Got My Woman," performed in a tragic vocal style, almost a demonic falsetto. Speir wavers — he can't turn this one away either. He contacts his friend Arthur Laibly at Paramount Records, explaining that — despite all the market's difficulties — this particular musician deserves a chance. He introduces him as Skip James.
Among the most fascinating and unsettling figures in the entire history of the blues, Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James has no interest whatsoever in other musicians of his time. He isn't interested in money, at least not the kind that comes from his art. Born an only child in 1902 on a plantation near Bentonia, close to Jackson, Skip is a young man in love with his independence, having run away from home at fourteen to wander — armed with knife and pistol — through neighboring states. He has the shameless luck of not having to work the fields, even attending high school. And yet he calls himself "a vile bastard," a young man who firmly believes in his immense talent while scorning everyone else. In the mid-1920s he works occasionally as a laborer, soon discovering that bootlegging liquor pays far better. When he returns to Bentonia, he starts dealing whiskey while playing his first original compositions at night, with a unique guitar style — his guitar tuned to E minor, as taught to him by his friend Henry Stuckey — and an androgynous voice never before heard among Delta bluesmen.
After trying to record for Okeh in 1927, Skip turns to teaching guitar and piano, maintaining an almost constantly contemptuous, even hostile attitude toward his students. When, in early 1931, he shows up in Grafton for his first recording session for Paramount, he couldn't be more sure of himself, having convinced Speir at an extremely difficult moment for the record industry. Indeed, James's repertoire is already incredibly vast, ranging from ragtime- and barrelhouse-tinged rhythms — "22 20 Blues" and "How Long Buck" — to furious accelerations, as in "I'm So Glad," which years later will earn him a fortune thanks to Eric Clapton's Cream's more famous version.
Laibly is genuinely captivated by the dark atmospheres created by Skip's falsetto voice, which speaks of his broken love affair in the seminal "Devil Got My Woman" and, above all, of the current economic and social situation in the monumental "Hard Time Killing Floor," chosen by Paramount as the debut single but never rewarded with commercial success precisely because it was deemed too pessimistic.
A master of blues piano ("If You Haven't Any Hay Get On Down The Road") and of the guitar tuned to E minor, Skip James gives Paramount a total of eighteen tracks over the course of the Grafton session, from the skeletal "Cypress Grove Blues" to the devilish "Special Rider Blues." None of these recordings will achieve even the faintest form of success, since even a giant like Paramount finds it enormously difficult to promote an artist, however talented Skip James may be. By the end of the year his life changes drastically after meeting his father, a devout reverend opposed to the typical bluesman lifestyle. Skip will never become a preacher, but he grows passionate about gospel and leaves behind alcohol and, above all, music. His 1931 recordings remain legendary in the decades to come, while the now-former whiskey bootlegger vanishes from the American music scene, just like that woman taken away by the devil.
Me and the Devil
The Legend of the Delta Blues
For me Robert Johnson is the most important blues musician who ever lived. I've never found anything so deeply intense. His music remains the most heartbreaking cry I think can be found in the human voice
(Eric Clapton)
Reconstructing the life of Robert Leroy Johnson is an almost futile endeavor, given that dozens of historians and folklore scholars, including John Lomax himself, have tried and not always with great results. Nearly ninety years on from the historic recording session in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, what matters is no longer who Robert Johnson was, but what he left behind for popular music worldwide.
Probably born in the town of Hazlehurst in May 1911, Robert was the illegitimate son of Julia Major Dodds and Noah Johnson, the fruit of a forbidden love affair after Charles Dodds, a well-off craftsman, was forced to leave Hazlehurst due to a dispute over land ownership in the area. At just two years old, the boy was taken to Memphis, where he was reunited with his stepfather, who had in the meantime changed his name to Charles Spencer. Until the age of ten, Robert attended primary school, where he learned the basics of grammar, history and arithmetic. But his greatest passion from the very start was music, and blues in particular. Around 1920, Robert moved with his mother Julia first to Arkansas and some time later to Robinsonville. Also publicly known as Little "Dusty" Robert – since Julia had by then taken up a new relationship with Will "Dusty" Willis, an illiterate farmer younger than her – Johnson continued his education into the late 1920s, learning to play instruments such as the harmonica and the jaw harp. Asked to recall his memories of the young Robert, Son House describes an irritating kid who often snuck into live music nights to play the harmonica while accompanying himself on guitar. House, who had in the meantime settled in Robinsonville, where his musical partner Willie Brown lived, tells of the brash antics of a young bluesman with absolutely no technical ability. Despite being scolded by his fellow musicians, Robert didn't give up, and decided to temporarily leave Robinsonville to continue his wanderings and refine his guitar style. House himself would meet Johnson again some time later during a show in Banks, and was stunned to notice an utterly astonishing improvement in his playing.
How did Robert Johnson turn from an irritating kid with no particular talent into an incredible blues star? It's one of the most famous legends in blues, and certainly the most unsettling and well-known one. It's the very same story told by Tommy Johnson's brother: anyone who wants to learn to play anything just has to take their instrument and go to where one road crosses another, to a crossroads. It's important to get there a little before midnight, and start playing something completely alone. A big, burly Black man will then show up, take hold of the guitar and start tuning it. Then he'll play a piece and hand it back to its rightful owner, who will then be able to play divinely whatever he wants. But there's a price to pay: that musician's soul will become the exclusive property of the devil. This story would be spread by Robert himself, eager to give his career as a professional bluesman a boost after noticing that record labels loved diabolical associations as a way to drum up sales.
Johnson threw himself headlong into music, especially after the tragic death of his young wife Virginia in 1929. Initially inclined to lead a quiet life split between marriage and work, Robert became convinced that he was damned, that Virginia's death had been a divine punishment for having struck a deal with the devil's music.
Behind the incredible improvements Robert Johnson achieved after Son House's criticism was undoubtedly a deep study of the bluesmen of his time, starting with House himself and moving on to the art of Skip James. Johnson greatly benefited from lessons with Ike Zimmerman, who claimed to have learned to play inside cemeteries – perhaps the real mysterious figure that legend associates with the prince of the underworld. By the time he returned to Robinsonville, young Robert had become a genuine songwriter, moving beyond standard blues to compose complex pieces that left his old detractors stunned. From 1932 onward, Robert went back to wandering, often in the company of his musician friend Johnny Shines, crossing the States with no fixed destination. On his travels he used dozens of different aliases, driving to distraction the biographers who would later try to reconstruct his movements in the final years of his life. Robert played virtually everywhere, trying to dazzle audiences and, above all, to woo the women captivated by his sonic charisma.
As happened to many other artists of the time, the pivotal encounter in Robert Johnson's life was with H.C. Speir, when the musician from Hazlehurst walked into his Jackson store in 1936. Robert made his intentions clear from the start: he wanted to become a star of the American record market. Impressed by the skills Johnson showed during his audition, Speir contacted Ernie Oertle, a talent scout for the Arc label specializing in the southern states. Oertle found Johnson at the end of the year and personally took him to San Antonio for a first recording session at the Gunter Hotel. On 23 November 1936, the first recording session in room 414 of the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio brought Robert Johnson's compositional talent into sharp focus. A total of eight tracks were recorded for Arc and later released also by the Vocalion label, ranging from the honeyed falsetto of "Kind Hearted Woman" and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" to the suggestive, double-edged "Terraplane Blues", the only song to generate a decent number of sales. In between came a first batch of masterpieces such as the bouncy "Sweet Home Chicago" – which perhaps more than any other shows his ability to craft actual songs rather than mere blues templates – and the halting "Ramblin' On My Mind", which shows off his slide skills.
The recording session at the Gunter Hotel resumed a few days later, from 26 to 27 November 1936. Robert started with "32-20 Blues", a reworking of Skip James's "22-20 Blues", before launching into the two most lighthearted, danceable tracks. The roaring "They're Red Hot" and the galloping "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" are rooted in the street performances of the so-called Medicine Shows, effectively anticipating rhythm and blues. These were just relaxed interludes, though, because the 27 November session includes some of the darkest, most apocalyptic songs in his entire repertoire, from "Dead Shrimp Blues" to the seminal "Cross Road Blues", which sets to music his encounter with the devil at the crossroads. From the anguished slide guitar of "Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil)" to the eternal damnation of "If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day", Johnson gives a helping hand to the poor biographers desperately trying to reconstruct his personal inner tragedy.
Once the San Antonio sessions were over, Robert went back to wandering and dropped off the radar, while the single "Terraplane Blues" achieved decent commercial success in 1937. Listeners began wondering about the very existence of its author, and Arc decided to ride the wave, summoning Johnson to the Brunswick Records offices near Dallas City Hall. On 19 June 1937, Robert picked up where he'd left off, with the physical and mental unease of "Stones In My Passway", which echoed the tone and style of "Terraplane Blues", still at that point his only commercial hit in the States. The Dallas session, however, also made room for his more romantic side, unfolding across a handful of nostalgic-sounding tracks: "From Four Until Late", the brief "Honeymoon Blues" and, above all, the touching admission of loneliness that is "Love In Vain". With the somber "Hell Hound On My Trail", we return to the myth of the artist hounded by hell, in the vein of his mentor Skip James, while "Little Queen Of Spades" and "Malted Milk" are so lighthearted and gentle that they hardly seem to come from the same pen.
A lover of whisky and love affairs, Robert met his own personal gallows on a Saturday in August, in the year 1938. Let's be clear from the start: no one will ever know exactly what happened. One story tells of him being found slumped in a corner, guitar under his arm, in a jukehouse just outside Greenwood. Despite being urged on, he was unable to play, feeling very unwell. At dawn he was carried to his room, where he began writhing and spitting blood from his mouth, as if possessed by a demon. The devil coming to settle his account. In truth, he had drunk poisoned whisky, given to him on the orders of a jealous husband. Many years later, close to 1970, his death certificate was found, stating that a "Negro" had died of syphilis. In the end, it hardly matters. The 29 recordings Robert Johnson left to posterity are the finest sonic monument that Delta blues fans could ever hope to honor him with.
Sweet Home Chicago
From the Delta to electric blues
Everyone starts out imitating their idols. For me it was Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters
One of the most influential figures in the archaeological excavation of American blues is undoubtedly Alan Lomax, son of musicologist John Lomax and a tireless traveler in search of traditions and folklore. Aiming to document the musical culture of African Americans in the South, Lomax loaded heavy recording equipment into his car and set off toward the Delta to hand down to history musicians who were completely unknown at the time. One of the most versatile of these was undoubtedly Huddie William Ledbetter, better known by the nickname Leadbelly, probably born in early 1888 on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana. Moving to Texas at the tender age of five, "Hudy" learned to play an accordion given to him by his uncle from an early age, and began wandering through brothels and dance halls with a 12-string guitar, in search of better fortune. Leadbelly was a natural braggart, fond of drink and women, boastful and prone to brawling. His first run-in with federal law came in 1918, when he was jailed in Texas on a murder charge. Despite denying the accusations, he was sentenced to twenty years, then released after seven, reportedly thanks to a song he played for Governor Pat Neff. A few years later Huddie was back behind bars: it was 1930, this time in Louisiana, on a charge of attempted murder. It was at Angola prison, in 1933, that he first met Alan and John Lomax, who were irresistibly drawn to his multifaceted talent and his ability to blend very different styles across the blues spectrum. Two recording sessions were organized in prison with the Lomax equipment, between 1933 and 1934. These are the sessions that would end up in the prestigious Library of Congress, hundreds of tracks recorded behind bars that would eventually lead the Lomaxes themselves to intercede for his release with a petition signed and sent to Governor Oscar K. Allen.
Blessed with a powerful, wide-ranging voice, Leadbelly moved effortlessly from the chain-gang rhythms of "Take This Hammer" to the minstrel-show sound of "Goodnight Irene", one of his biggest hits in the years that followed. Gospel-soul numbers like "Midnight Special" or near-spoken-word syncopated pieces like "Black Betty" fascinated the Lomaxes, who decided to bring him straight to New York to have his repertoire recorded for the American Record Corporation. He found some commercial success, from the proto-rock and roll of "Rock Island Line" to skeletal folk tragedies like "The Gallis Pole" and "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". The trouble was that Arc was pushing hard for him to record blues numbers, while his art ranged remarkably wide by the standards of the time.
In 1939 he was imprisoned again for violence. After his release in 1940, Leadbelly returned to New York's emerging folk scene and joined Woody Guthrie and the young Pete Seeger. In 1949 he began a tour of Europe, but fell ill before it ended: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, of which he died at the end of the year at the age of 64. His legacy goes far beyond the blues genre, given the sheer number of his songs covered by the biggest names in international music between the 70s and 90s.
On the road in search of American folklore, Alan and John Lomax stopped, one Sunday afternoon, in front of a near-collapsing shack on the Stovall plantation, a few miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi. It was the last day of August, 1941. The Lomaxes met a man named McKinley Morganfield, born in the spring of 1913 and raised from a very young age by his grandmother Della, after the tragic, sudden death of his mother shortly after his birth. Nicknamed "Muddy" for his unusual habit of playing in the mud of a nearby creek, McKinley learned to play harmonica from a very young age, living his childhood in utter poverty on the more than two thousand hectares of the plantation owned by Colonel William Howard Stovall. He was drawn to music through Baptist religious rites, and began strumming the guitar. His main instrument, however, remained the harmonica, which he played alongside Big Joe Williams on a first tour of the Delta in the early 1930s. Muddy was not yet eighteen, but he was already a sharp kid, having already learned to bootleg liquor to make some extra money. That's why, when two distinguished white gentlemen showed up at his door, he had more than a few suspicions: federal agents? Tax inspectors?
McKinley "Muddy Water" Morganfield — later permanently Muddy Waters, apparently due to a printing error on one of his future records — had no idea of the fortune literally knocking at his door. After years spent dreaming of being like his idol Son House, these two gentlemen now wanted him to play for them, talking about some mysterious Library of Congress coming from Washington DC. One of the first songs Muddy performed was called "Country Blues", which up to that point had served to entertain dancers and customers in joints specializing in fried fish. His voice, combined with his bottleneck technique, nearly knocked the Lomaxes out of their chairs. Where had this McKinley come from? Why was the style of the following "I Be's Troubled" so full, raw and unvarnished? The Library of Congress thus got a two-sided record, paying Muddy a full twenty dollars, along with the satisfaction of a first recording. Tired of living on the plantation, he decided to follow his calling and move to the big city of Chicago, in 1943.
Between the late 1930s and early 1940s, Chicago's music scene was dominated without question by swing, drawing both Black and white audiences to the many dance halls that ruled the city's lively nightlife. The young Muddy, having fled the plantation after the life-changing arrival of the Lomaxes, landed in the big city with his first repertoire steeped in Delta blues — music far too sad and skeletal for such a glamorous, spectacular scene, where a certain Nat King Cole was on the rise. Muddy immediately began making the rounds of clubs to find a place to perform, but met only rejection. He was forced to work in a paper mill, still bringing home enough money to live more than decently by the standards of a Black man from the Delta. But he had a hot temper and was extremely boastful: he was determined, no matter what, to become a musician, so he started performing at private parties. His uncle gave him an electric guitar, considerably trickier to play than an acoustic, but more importantly, the death of grandmother Della brought him an insurance policy payout, which he used to buy a Chevrolet. Owning a car made him popular among fellow blues musicians, whom Muddy would drive around to gigs. In exchange, he got to perform more often with artists like John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, a native of Jackson, Tennessee, and one of the chief champions of the harmonica as the blues' lead instrument. Backing seminal songs like "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", Muddy built his reputation on the Chicago blues scene, returning to the recording studio in 1946 with the obscure label 20th Century to cut the crafty "Mean Red Spider", which blended the blues scale with horns closer to the swing world.
Success was slow to arrive, so a second chance, accidental encounter was needed, much like the one with the Lomaxes at the Stovall plantation. According to legend, Muddy received a strange phone call while at work: his mother had tragically passed away and he needed to come home at once. Of course, his mother had been dead for years, but Muddy rushed home anyway and found waiting for him a pianist from Mississippi known as Sunnyland Slim. Slim was also from Mississippi and had been around the Chicago scene much longer, moving between clubs and recording sessions for artists like Ma Rainey. When he greeted Waters, he had an offer that simply couldn't be refused: producer Leonard Chess wanted them both for a recording session for the Aristocrat label. Of Polish origin, brothers Lejzor and Fiszel Czyz had arrived in Chicago in 1928, joining their emigrant father, Josef, who sold empty bottles at his Wabash Junk Shop.
Americanized as Leonard and Philip Chess, the two young men didn't speak a word of English, but they quickly understood that the combination of bottle sales (this time full of liquor) and music for African Americans was potentially explosive. Leonard decided to open a nightclub called the Macomba, later joining the Aristocrat label as a record producer. When Waters first showed up, Leonard wasn't convinced: the guitar wasn't seen as a lead instrument and was deliberately buried beneath Slim's piano. But the early recordings sold, and Chess reconsidered some of his views, giving Muddy more room for electric guitar on the tracks he had recorded for Lomax, "I Can't Be Satisfied" and "I Feel Like Going Home". Dismissed by critics, Muddy's smooth electric versions became huge hits among Chicago listeners, who stormed record stores, forcing them to limit sales to one copy per customer. Waters came close to the Race Records Top 10 in 1948, "forcing" Leonard Chess to keep riding the new wave of electrified Delta blues. Ignoring the critics' doubts, Muddy revisited his nostalgic streak on "Down South Blues" and "Train Fare Home", another fantastic sonic building block in the new life of American blues.
Two years later, in 1950, the climb continued: "Louisiana Blues" reached number ten on Billboard's R&B chart, while singles like "Rollin' And Tumblin'" and "Rollin' Stone" sold like wildfire, quickly becoming true icons of the African American musical landscape. Thanks to the contributions of harmonica player Little Walter, Otis Spann on piano and Elga Edmonds on drums, the Muddy Waters Blues Band was among the best — if not the best — around.
While flexing the muscles of the new electric blues, Waters owed more than a few drinks to bassist and composer William James Dixon, who first arrived in Chicago in 1936 hoping to break into the world of boxing with his imposing build. Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the summer of 1915, Willie started out as a boy with the harmonica and then the bass, in the gospel group Union Jubilee Singers. Having moved to Chicago in his early twenties, Willie won the Illinois State Golden Gloves Heavyweight Championship, but soon left the boxing world behind after a furious dispute with his manager.
During one of his gym workouts he met blues musician Leonard Caston, who convinced him to devote himself entirely to music. Armed with a one-string bass — to be played strictly with a tin can — Dixon first joined the Five Breezes and then the Big Three Trio, recording for Columbia Records shortly after the war. In the early 1950s, Willie was hired by Chess as a composer and talent scout, essentially a kind of deus ex machina behind the success of several bluesmen of the era. From "I Can't Quit You Baby" to "Little Red Rooster", all the way to the world-famous "I'm Your Hoochee Coochee Man", Dixon's body of work pushed traditional blues toward the genre's future in the heart of Chicago.
It's 1954. Chess Records releases the single "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man", a Willie Dixon composition recorded by Muddy Waters that changed blues forever, in Chicago and, more broadly, throughout popular music. The martial rhythm of harmonica, voice and electric guitar turned African American music into a global movement, blowing out the eardrums of white audiences when Waters performed at the Leeds Festival four years later. When he reworked Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man" into the tribal "Mannish Boy" (1955), Waters was at the very top of the global blues world, right through to his legendary appearance at Newport in 1960, when he was forced to grant an encore of the iconic "I've Got My Mojo Working", the ultimate summa of his esoteric-macho swagger.
The king of boogie
Boom boom
John Lee Hooker became a dear friend of mine, and I loved his work from the very first time I heard it. He truly was an icon. He lived life to the fullest. I miss him a great deal
Born in Clarksdale, on a date that remains uncertain somewhere between 1917 and 1923, John Lee Hooker can rightfully claim to be the first bluesman "to launch the boogie." Over the course of a childhood shrouded in mystery, John Lee claimed to have learned his unmistakable groove from his stepfather, Will Moore, a sharecropper originally from Louisiana. According to yet another legend in this long saga, Will supposedly played alongside the likes of Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, teaching his stepson the first rudiments of guitar starting in 1930. In truth, there's no documentation whatsoever - not even in the vast Lomax archives - of Will Moore as a bluesman, a reputation likely inflated by John Lee's later storytelling. Blessed from an early age with a deep, distinctive voice, John was actually the biological son of Reverend William Hooker, who never came to terms with his son's calling toward secular music. After a fierce ban on bringing even a single musical instrument into the house, the boy was the only one of Minnie Ramsey's children to choose a new life with the sharecropper Will Moore instead.
Raised on the Fewell plantation, John soon discovered that this wasn't the life for him. As the story goes, a gypsy woman once met him and predicted a future of great fame and fortune. None of his friends would have bet a cent on it. Introverted and solitary, Hooker trained himself day after day, going back and forth from Clarksdale, preferring the porch of his small home on Isaquena Street to jam sessions with other blues musicians of the era. It was 1933 when John Lee decided to move to Memphis, quickly landing a job as a theatrical stagehand on the famous Beale Street. Music remained a private, personal matter, one that barely let him scrape together a few coins in the odd jukehouse. Evidently, Memphis wasn't the place of destiny the gypsy had foretold. Hooker then moved first to Knoxville and then to Cincinnati, getting by with various jobs and dreaming of stepping into one of the studios of the famous local label, King Records. Arriving in Detroit toward the end of the 1940s, John Lee was drawn more by the wages of the booming auto industry than by any chance of becoming a true bluesman.
In the "Motor Town," John Lee Hooker was finally able to take flight, despite his complete lack of pedigree. He abandoned his solitary habits, throwing himself into the fray of the area's many nightspots, from the Apex Bar to the Caribbean Club. Early versions of songs like "Boogie Chillen", "Sallie Mae" and "Crawlin' King Snake" sent audiences into raptures, drawing the attention of industry insiders above all. One of them was Elmer Barbee, owner of a record shop on Lafayette Street. Intrigued by the buzz surrounding this new blues phenomenon, Barbee went down to the packed Apex Bar to hear John Lee Hooker live, and came away thunderstruck. Together with his bandmates James Watkins and Curtis Foster, Hooker began recording his first acetates in the back room of Barbee's shop.
It's 1948: Barbee introduces Hooker to Bernard Besman, a record producer of Ukrainian descent who had turned Pan American into the Sensation label. Besman isn't put off by Hooker's countless quirks in the recording studio - the stutter, that foot tapping away frantically. He lets John Lee's music flow freely, in a kind of spoken-word form, with no embellishments or frills. It proves to be the key to success.
When the single "Boogie Chillen" is released - thanks to the involvement of the Bihari brothers, owners of the Los Angeles label Modern - the American musical landscape lights up like a supernova. In February 1949 it reaches number one on the Billboard R&B chart, played on the radio hundreds of times a day. Sales are said to reach a million copies. "Boogie Chillen" is the new sound of Detroit: raw, relentless, the future of the blues looking back to the roughness of the Delta flatlands. Besman calls Hooker back into the studio to cut further singles, from "Hobo Blues" to "Hoogie Boogie", all of them marching up the charts like little soldiers.
The reckless fame of this new bluesman leads Barbee to devise a scheme for making money hand over fist: ignoring the contract with Besman and having Hooker record for various labels under different pseudonyms. From Texas Slim to John Lee Booker, he cuts hundreds of tracks (original and otherwise), leading listeners of the time to believe there's a whole new wave of boogie blues sweeping the city. But every wave eventually recedes: aside from the new single "Huckle Up, Baby", DJs and listeners begin to tire of the sound, just as venues stop offering more lucrative fees. It almost seems as though Hooker has become a victim of his own ravenous drive, until 1951, when he triumphs again on the charts with the single "I'm In The Mood", far closer to soul than to blues tradition.
By mid-1952, Hooker had already recorded hundreds of songs, yet he'd never managed to actually earn money from his torrential output. When his relationship with Besman comes to an end - the producer moving to California to pursue other ventures - Hooker finds himself nearly penniless, since Besman had claimed almost everything for himself, convinced he alone was responsible for a success that otherwise would never have come. Three years later, in 1955, as the American sound is about to give itself over body and soul to Chuck Berry's rock'n'roll, Hooker settles down with the Vee-Jay label under a single, exclusive contract.
Founded by Vivian Carter and James Bracken, Vee-Jay had already drawn considerable attention with the early output of Jimmy Reed, a Mississippi native and purveyor of a groove not too dissimilar from Hooker's own. From "High And Lonesome" to "Jimmy's Boogie", all the way to the hit "You Don't Have To Go", Reed battled the demons of alcoholism with a sound purer and more traditional than John Lee's, helping Vee-Jay take off on the record scene starting in 1953. Work at Vee-Jay's Chicago offices is often fraught, torn between two towering figures, Hooker and Reed, who hold very different conceptions of boogie blues. "I'm John Lee Hooker" is the first long-playing record to hit the market, in the summer of 1959, ahead of his appearance at the Newport Folk Festival before what was certainly the largest audience of his entire artistic career.
While his recording career becomes, if anything, even more scattered - Hooker was never an artist loyal to any one label - the single "Boom Boom" reaches number sixteen on the US R&B chart in 1962, cut for Vee-Jay and surely one of the finest expressions of his dirty boogie blues. Sealing once and for all the legend of the stuttering bluesman is his arrival in the Old Continent, in the midst of the sonic ferment of the mid-1960s. When he arrives in the UK, Hooker is paid tribute by young rockers like Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, who had drawn heavily from American blues with the reverence that only musical heirs can show toward the founding fathers from the swamps of the Delta.
The Howling Wolf
Lightning on the Chimney
Let me put it this way: the most incredible thing I ever witnessed was Chester Burnett during one of those sessions in my studio. My God, watching the fervor on that man's face as he sang was beyond compare
(Sam Phillips)
In the early 1950s, the Memphis Recording Service run by Sam Phillips is the right place to try and become a legend of music. From Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash, the future brightest stars of the rock'n'roll firmament passed through his label, Sun Records. It runs through the music scene like a mantra: if you really want to become somebody, you have to knock on the door at 706 Union Avenue. That's exactly what a big, burly man named Chester Burnett does one day, armed with his trusty harmonica that looks so tiny in his hands. Unlike pretty young men like Elvis, Chester has already reached middle age, and can barely read or do sums. Born in June 1910 in White Station, Mississippi, Chester is the son of a sharecropper and a cook with a passion for spirituals. His grandfather nicknamed him Wolf, to keep him in line and stop him ending up like Little Red Riding Hood. But Chester has always toed the line, breaking his back in the fields to pay for room and board to his irascible great-uncle Will Young, who took him in reluctantly after his parents separated.
Burnett has little time for music, making do with whatever he can find, even tin buckets. He eventually buys a harmonica for a few cents, and only gets his first guitar at 18. Five years earlier he had run away from the Young household to find his father on a plantation near Dockery, where the legendary Charley Patton lives and plays. Patton takes a liking to him, offering crucial advice on how to carry himself on stage, while Chester begins attending his first parties where he can perform without any real ambition. In 1933 he moves with his father's family to Arkansas, where he keeps working the fields, breaking his back day after day. Just as he decides it's time to get serious about music, he's drafted into the United States Army, only a few months before Pearl Harbor.
Discharged at the end of 1943 due to various health issues, Burnett first moves to Tennessee and then to Arkansas, going back to work in the fields. He keeps playing in his spare time, and his passion grows from 1948, when he moves again to West Memphis. There he forms his band, with Willie Johnson on guitar and Willie Steele on drums. Under the old nickname Howlin' Wolf, Chester tours the various clubs of Memphis fronting the House Rockers, one of the most electric outfits on the blues scene of the late 1940s. Wolf's fame starts to grow with his first radio plays: a Memphis disc jockey advises the famous Sam Phillips to give him a listen. In May 1951, at over forty years old, Burnett cuts his first two sides, including the iconic "Moanin' At Midnight", which definitively launches the howling wolf. Together with the B-side, "How Many More Years", the single tops Billboard's R&B charts, prompting Phillips to drag him back into the studio in 1952 to record (for Chess Records) "The Wolf Is At Your Door" and "Howlin' Wolf Boogie". Chester's already imposing figure looms larger over the Memphis circuit, until the Chess brothers decide it's time for the big leap, to Chicago, in the winter of '54, the city of electric blues where a certain Muddy Waters holds sway.
When Wolf arrives in Chicago, brought there by Leonard Chess, his relationship with star Waters is good, so much so that Muddy himself invites him to stay at his house at first. In the spring of 1954, his first recording session in the new city produces the hypnotic single "No Place To Go", released alongside the danceable "Rockin' Daddy". The record sells well and brings Burnett back into the studio to record the Willie Dixon classic, "Evil Is Going On". Chester's powerful voice raises the stakes, showing Chicago listeners that Muddy Waters is by no means the only king of blues in town. At this point, it's essential to put together a new top-tier band, following the one that had become famous in West Memphis. Jody Williams is chosen on guitar, while Hosea Lee Kennard takes the keyboards. Above all, Wolf picks a young Delta transplant, Hubert Sumlin, destined to become one of the blues guitarists most admired by the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix. With this brand-new lineup, Wolf books some dates at venues historically ruled by Waters, such as the Zanzibar, stunning audiences with his lewd poses and constant movement on stage. A blatantly erotic energy that leaves everyone speechless. His recording output continues in the autumn of 1954 with the new singles "Forty-Four" and "I'll Be Around", but the real smash is "Smokestack Lightnin'" (1956), a howling groove that nearly cracks Billboard's R&B top 10 that spring. The track is essentially the summa of Howlin' Wolf's art, and by this point in his career he has become a genuine rival for blues supremacy in Chicago. Waters decides to poach Sumlin for a very long tour across the States, which ends with the guitarist's return home after a none-too-subtle death threat made to Muddy by the Wolf.
Between the mid and late 1950s, Wolf keeps up his long touring run, punctuated by singles such as "Bluebird" and "Howlin' Blues". By the dawn of 1960, his creativity seems to have wilted, so he decides to record several songs written by Willie Dixon, perfectly suited to his rough, hefty voice. "Wang Dang Doodle", "Back Door Man" and "The Red Rooster" are the new masterpieces that will influence generations of rock musicians, as will his last original composition, "Killing Floor" from 1964, which will live on immortally in later versions by Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.
The three kings of blues guitar
Riley B., Albert and Freddie
I grew up on a cotton plantation and I know what poverty means. That's why I play the blues
(B.B. King)
It's September 16, 1925. Albert Lee King can't decide what to name his firstborn son. On the Berclair plantation, near the town of Itta Bena, Mississippi, Albert wants to show gratitude toward his landlord, Jim O'Reilly. So he decides to call him Riley, with a letter B planted in the middle, later doubled up in the nickname Blues Boy, B.B. King. At just four years old, Riley ends up living with his elderly grandmother, before the tragic death of his mother Nora Ella in 1934. Until the age of 14, when his father Albert resurfaces to take him along with his new family to Lexington, Riley grows up practically on his own, working the fields and listening to his first musical idols, chiefly Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson. Thanks to the support of Reverend Archie Fair, a family friend, he starts strumming the guitar, dreaming of becoming a preacher through music. When he moves back in with his father, he spends hours listening to the radio, setting aside the few coins needed to buy his first guitar and start playing in a gospel group. Working the fields is necessary to survive, so he decides to head back into the heart of the Delta, toward Indianola, where he can scrape by breaking his back. Around the age of twenty he also takes a wife, probably to avoid the draft after the outbreak of war. His ambition is to become a famous musician: in 1946 he takes everything he has and runs off to Memphis, chasing his big dream.
Riley King arrives in Memphis in 1946, heading to the home of his cousin Bukka White, who welcomes him warmly, finding him a job as a welder and, above all, buying him a Gibson guitar and an amplifier. Finally equipped to break through in the city, King soon goes back to his wife Martha, only to reappear two years later in West Memphis to convince Bert Ferguson, in charge of programming at local radio station WDIA. Ferguson hires King to come up with a jingle for his alcoholic tonic, Pepticon. Blues Boy's (or rather, B.B.'s) visibility grows on the famous Beale Street, after recording his first single for Bullet Records, "Miss Martha King", dedicated to his wife. When Bullet fails miserably, Ike Turner recommends him to the Bihari brothers (Modern Records), who bring him into the recording studio with Sam Phillips at the Memphis Recording Service.
His first hit is the tear-jerking "Three O' Clock Blues", which becomes an unexpected success, reaching number one at the end of 1951 and staying on the charts for several months. B.B. King's new style and approach to the blues is evident, drawing on the teachings of his idols alongside a new soul-inflected interpretation with Ike Turner's contribution on piano. Toward the end of 1952, the success of "Three O' Clock Blues" is matched by the equally romantic ballad "You Know I Love You" and then by the more upbeat "Please Love Me".
Between 1951 and 1956, B.B. King places an impressive string of hits on the charts, from the frenetic beat of "Woke Up This Morning" to the intense slow burn of "Sweet Little Angel". This marks the beginning of his second life on the road, when he decides to buy a bus to take his band around the United States at a pace of over three hundred dates a year. During a concert in Arkansas, two spectators fight over a woman and cause an explosion by knocking over a kerosene stove. King runs back into the flames to rescue his Gibson guitar, which from that moment on is renamed Lucille, just like the woman the two men were fighting over.
After his second marriage, in 1958 he lands two more hits for the Kent label, "You've Been An Angel" and "Please Accept My Love", followed two years later by "You've Got A Right To Love My Baby" and "Sweet Sixteen". King is unhappy, however, with the financial treatment from the Bihari brothers, who pay very little in advances and, crucially, don't pay him royalties for his compositions. It's 1961 when he decides to make the definitive leap, signing with ABC-Paramount and receiving an advance of over $25,000 for his future records. The new label's mission will be to bring B.B. King to white audiences, turning him into a national hero the way it had done with Ray Charles.
The hits of the period, "Sneakin' Around" (1962) and "Help The Poor" (1964), lead up to November 21, 1964, when he performs at the Regal in Chicago in one of the finest concerts of his entire career.
Despite financial troubles – the taxman accuses him of tax evasion – and the theft of his bus in Georgia, King doesn't fall off the crest of the wave, especially live, with his classics always present, as if embodying the spirit of the blues at every show. From "Everyday I Have The Blues" to "Worry, Worry", B.B. King's slow blues conquers the States, but above all wins over legions of new rockers, from John Lennon to Eric Clapton, who open the doors of the new long-haired circuits to him. King thus starts playing venues frequented by groups like Rolling Stones and Cream, finally reaching the white audience so long pursued by ABC. Sealing his definitive worldwide success is the single "The Thrill Is Gone", an old Roy Hawkins recording that begins rotation on African-American radio stations before exploding into the pop charts' top twenty, a far harder feat for a Delta bluesman to achieve. The track earns B.B. King his first Grammy Award; it's 1970, and his fame marks the conquest of blues within the advancing new rock scene spanning the United States and England.
Born between 1923 and 1924 on a cotton plantation in Indianola, Albert Nelson grew up amid the early hardships of field work and an early passion for gospel singing, performing alongside his guitarist father in churches between Mississippi and Arkansas. Like many of his peers, Albert spent his adolescence picking cotton and driving a heavy bulldozer – one of his later nicknames would be precisely The Velvet Bulldozer – to earn a living and afford his first guitar, which cost little more than a dollar. His career as a musician began with the Groove Boys, a group based in Arkansas, where he had moved with his mother at the age of eight. It's 1953, and Albert Nelson becomes Albert King, in an attempt to be associated with his supposed blood brother B.B. King. He moves to Indiana, where he plays drums on Jimmy Reed's early recordings, and above all manages to cut his first single for Parrot Records, the honeyed "Bad Luck Blues". The record is a flop, selling very little and convincing Parrot's management that there's no point pursuing his career further. So he heads back to Arkansas to work with his first bandmates, the Groove Boys.
A few years later, in 1956, Albert decides to try his luck again, moving to Brooklyn, Illinois, a short distance from bustling St. Louis. With his new band, he performs in various nightclubs, sharing the stage with Ike Turner and catching the attention of bluesman Little Milton, who offers him a contract with his label Bobbin in 1959. Between the late '50s and the very early '60s, a handful of singles come out on the St. Louis label, from "Why Are You So Mean To Me" to "I Get Evil", but none manage to crack the R&B charts. His first real success, however, isn't far off: in 1961 the single "Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong" is released on King Records, featuring Ike Turner on piano. King's warm voice, paired with his enveloping guitar work, carries the record all the way to number 14 on the Billboard R&B chart.
But it's hardly a breakthrough. King's career seems to hinge solely on live performances across the Midwest, so he decides to move to Memphis for his definitive big leap. This is home to a label destined for legend, Stax Records, founded by Jim Stewart in 1957 and later run together with his sister Estelle Axton. Stax puts at King's disposal the ensemble known as Booker T. & the MGs. Starting with the single "Laundromat Blues" (1966), Albert's new output for Stax would offer American listeners a more modern, fresh blues steeped in soul and R&B, tailor-made to attract radio play. The breakthrough comes fully with the seminal album "Born Under A Bad Sign", released in 1967, containing the Stax singles that revolutionized the blues and caught the attention of the era's great rock musicians. From the title track to "Crosscut Saw", the album was hailed by critics as a "monument to the blues", an unprecedented collection of dazzling songs, driven by the unmistakable sound of King's Flying V and by an exceptional backing band made up of Booker T. Jones, Isaac Hayes and Steve Cropper.
The third reigning figure in this story within a story was born in 1934 in Gilmer, Texas, with the given name Fred King. He began playing guitar at just six years old, taught by his mother Ella Mae. In 1949, at age 15, he moved with his family to the south side of Chicago, and a few years later started working in a steel mill, purely to make ends meet. In the big city, Freddie frequented the various nightclubs where the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf performed, captivated by the electric sound coming out of the Delta. It was then that he decided to form a band, the Every Hour Blues Boys, together with guitarist Jimmy Lee Robinson. His first recordings, however, were made in 1953 for Parrot with the Blues Cats, and were never officially released.
King's career officially begins with the single "Country Boy" (1956), released on the small label El-Bee. His ultimate ambition, though, is to record for Chicago's premier blues label, Chess, which turns him down because his vocal style is deemed too close to B.B. King's. Freddie doesn't give up, and in 1959 he meets Sonny Thompson, pianist and top producer at King Records, who introduces him to label owner Syd Nathan, who in turn passes him on to subsidiary Federal Records. It's 1960: King lands the hit "Have You Ever Loved A Woman", an intense ballad backed with the B-side "You've Got To Love Her With A Feeling". The same Federal session also produces the instrumental "Hide Away", which the following year reaches number five on the R&B chart and an astonishing number 29 on the pop chart, an utterly unpredictable feat for an instrumental blues track.
Blessed with a powerful, warm soul voice, Freddie rides the wave of success and throws himself headlong into instrumental blues, cutting more than thirty singles through the mid-'60s. When his contract with Federal expires, King moves back to Texas, to Dallas, to launch an American tour and later sign with Atlantic in 1968. His work would never again match the success of "Hide Away", but King would be revered by great American and British rockers alike as a blues deity, and would be featured at numerous concerts until his premature death from pancreatitis at age 42.
Outro
Blues Revival
Over the years I dabbled with people like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, my mind exploded. It was something I had been missing in my life. That music led me to cast everything else aside and focus exclusively on the soul and honesty of the blues
Naturally, readers who have made it this far will already be tallying up the artists not even mentioned in passing in this story. Point one: it would be presumptuous to even attempt to write anything exhaustive on the subject. For every Robert Johnson who managed to become a legend, there are hundreds of other musicians who never even got the chance to record their own music. Poor African-Americans enslaved on plantations, some of whom may have had an even more powerful touch than Robert's. Point two: there are several branches in the history of the blues, not just Delta, Memphis or Chicago, but also Texas or Baton Rouge. From Buddy Guy to Taj Mahal, there are countless blues patriarchs, and they more than likely deserve a chapter of their own. Point three, the most important: this story starts from the banks of the Mississippi because it wants to return to the most rural origins, the ones that have reached us today only thanks to historians, critics, journalists and young rockers of the '60s and '70s. Suddenly, people like Son House were being welcomed like deities at sixties festivals, and new bluesmen like Eric Clapton were drawing heavily on Freddie King to shape the music of Cream. This is what's generically called the blues revival, a movement of rediscovery of forgotten (or never-known) artists, paying tribute to musicians who effectively invented rock music as we know it today.
(to be continued…)
Ride the wave of great music
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09/03/2026
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Mauro Vecchio, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Blues on OndaRock
Go to artist pageMiscellaneous
Discography
Listening Guide
W.C. Handy
The Memphis Blues (1912)
St. Louis Blues (1914)
Mamie Smith
Crazy Blues (1920)
Ma Rainey
Bo-Weavil Blues (1923)
Broken Hearted Blues (1926)
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1927)
Victim Of The Blues (1928)
Bessie Smith
Down Hearted Blues (1923)
St. Louis Blues (1925)
Careless Blues (1925)
Yellow Dog Blues (1925)
Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out (1929)
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Dry Southern Blues (1926)
Long Lonesome Blues (1926)
"Black Snake Moan (1927)
Matchbox Blues (1927)
Penitentiary Blues (1928)
William Harris
Early Morning Blues (1927)
Kansas City Blues (1927)
Tommy Johnson
Big Road Blues (1928)
Bye Bye Blues (1928)
Canned Heat Blues (1928)
Lonesome House Blues (1928)
Charley Patton
Pony Blues (1929)
Mississippi Boweavil Blues (1929)
Banty Rooster Blues (1929)
Tom Rushen Blues (1929)
Prayer Of Death Part 1 & 2 (1929)
Hammer Blues (1929)
Green River Blues (1929)
Going To Move To Alabama (1929)
High Water Everywhere Part 1 & 2 (1929)
Jim Lee Blues Part 1 & 2 (1930)
Dry Well Blues (1930)
High Sheriff Blues (1934)
With Bertha Lee
Oh, Death (1934)
Yellow Bee (1934)
Son House
My Black Mama Part 1 & 2 (1930)
Preachin' The Blues Part 1 & 2 (1930)
Levee Camp Blues (1941)
Government Fleet Blues (1941)
Shetland Pony Blues (1941)
Special Rider Blues (1942)
Depot Blues (1942)
The Jinx Blues Part 1 & 2 (1942)
Bukka White
The New Frisco Train (1930)
The Panama Limited (1930)
Shake 'Em On Down (1937)
Po’ Boy (1939)
Parchman Farm Blues (1940)
Fixin' To Die Blues (1940)
Willie Brown
M & O Blues (1930)
Future Blues (1930)
Skip James
Devil Got My Woman (1931)
Illinois Blues (1931)
I'm So Glad (1931)
Hard Time Killing Floor (1931)
Special Rider Blues (1931)
Big Joe Williams
Stepfather Blues (1935)
Baby Please Don't Go (1935)
Worried Man Blues (1935)
Crawling King Snake (1941)
Robert Johnson
Kind Hearted Woman Blues (1936)
Sweet Home Chicago (1936)
Ramblin On My Mind (1936)
If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day (1936)
Little Queen Of Spades (1937)
Traveling Riverside Blues (1937)
Leadbelly
Midnight Special (1940)
Rock Island Line (1944)
Where Did You Sleep Last Night (1944)
Sonny Boy Williamson I
Good Morning Little Schoolgirl (1937)
Muddy Waters
I Feel Like I'm Going Home (1948)
I Can't Be Satisfied (1948)
Train Fare Home (1948)
Rollin' And Tumblin' (1950)
Baby Please Don't Go (1953)
I'm A Hoochie Coochie Man (1954)
Mannish Boy (1955)
Got My Mojo Working (1956)
Willie Dixon
"Hoochie Coochie Man" (1954)
I Can't Quit You Baby (1956)
Little Red Rooster (1961)
You Shook Me (1962)
Bring It On Home (1963)
John Lee Hooker
Boogie Chillen (1948)
Hoogie Boogie (1949)
Hobo Blues (1949)
Huckle Up, Baby (1950)
Boom Boom (1962)
Jimmy Reed
High And Lonesome (1953)
Jimmy's Boogie (1954)
You Don't Have To Go (1955)
Howlin’ Wolf
Moanin' At Midnight (1951)
How Many More Years (1951)
The Wolf Is At Your Dog (1952)
No Place To Go (1954)
Evil Is Going On (1954)
Smokestack Lightnin' (1956)
The Red Rooster (1962)
Killing Floor (1964)
B.B. King
Three O' Clock Blues (1951)
Please Love Me (1953)
Woke Up This Morning (1953)
Sweet Little Angel (1956)
You've Been An Angel (1958)
Everyday I Have The Blues (1959)
Sweet Sixteen (1960)
The Thrill Is Gone (1970)
Albert King
Bad Luck Blues (1954)
Why Are You So Mean To Me (1959)
Blues At Sunrise (1960)
Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong (1961)
I Get Evil (1962)
Laundromat Blues (1966)
Born Under A Bad Sign (1967)
Crosscut Saw (1967)
Oh, Pretty Woman (1967)
Freddie King
Have You Ever Loved A Woman (1960)
You’ve Got To Love Her With A Feeling (1960)
Hide Away (1961)
Latest features
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Edoardo M. Cappuccio
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Gabriele Brombin
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