The Blues Store 2: Classic Blues and Legendary Bluesmen

The blues were the fountainhead of 20th century popular music.

On This Page: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sonny Boy Williamson II, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, Jazz Gillum, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Tampa Red, Leroy Carr. And see Blues Roots on our Jazz Pages

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Origins of The Blues continued

We strongly suggest that you review the information provided on Amazon carefully before selecting your choices. Artists develop and draw upon their own repertoires of standard numbers which appear, in various interpretations, on a succession of albums. It is worth studying the available information to avoid unwanted duplication (although the variations are often interesting in their own right). On the other hand, compilation albums and sets can be of varying degrees of comprehensiveness, a factor that is often reflected in a wide range of prices. Where appropriate, we have tried to give choices that cater to every budget.

Artists on our Blues Legends pages are arranged in order of their dates of birth.

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Blind Lemon Jefferson

1897(?)-1929. Born in Coutchman, Texas.

Born blind and known for all his life as Blind Lemon, this great singer and songwriter spent his early years playing and travelling from town to town in Texas. In Dallas he met Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and the two played together in Texas brothels. Jefferson was a major inspiration for a young Lightnin’ Hopkins. His discovery by Paramount Records brought him to Chicago and the majority of his recordings were for the Paramount label – some seventy-nine recordings, each of which achieved in the region of 100,000 sales. Blind Lemon Jefferson is now regarded as one of the best folk blues singers of the 1920s.

Before his death in 1929 Jefferson influenced some of the greatest blues and jazz artists of the day, including Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. He died on a Chicago street in a snowstorm, probably from a heart attack. He was buried in the Wortham Negro Cemetery in Texas, at the heart of the area where he first began playing and performing.

The Complete 94 Classic Sides / Blind Lemon Jefferson

Format: 4 Disc Box Set. 91 Tracks.

The Best of Blind Lemon Jefferson / Blind Lemon Jefferson

Format: 1 Disc. 23 Tracks.

Black Snake Moan / Blind Lemon Jefferson

Format: 1 Disc. 20 Tracks.

King of the Country Blues / Blind Lemon Jefferson

Format: 1 Disc. 23 Tracks.

Moanin' All Over / Blind Lemon Jefferson

Format: 1 Disc. 9 Tracks.

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Sonny Boy Williamson II

1897(?)-1965. Born Aleck ‘Rice’ Miller near Glendora, Mississippi.

There is some doubt over the real date of birth of Aleck Miller. In the early 1940s Rice Miller began performing under the name Sonny Boy Williamson, to exploit the name and fame of the Tennessee-born harmonica player. It is thought that he falsified his birth date so that he could claim to be the original Sonny Boy. By allowing the benefit of the doubt, his position in our blues pages may be a little out of sequence!

Rice Miller was born to a sharecropping family on the Sara Jones Plantation, near Glendora. Already adept at the harmonica, he began hoboeing around the southern states in the 1920s, playing at parties, lumber camps and juke joints. During the 1930s he came into contact with Blind Lemon Jefferson, Elmore James and Robert Johnson (Sonny Boy was playing with Johnson at the Three Forks roadhouse when Johnson took a fatal drink from a strychnine-laced bottle of whisky). He also lived with Howlin’ Wolf’s sister for a while and taught Wolf to play harmonica. But the most important partnership from these years was with Robert Johnson’s protégée Robert Lockwood Jr. In 1941 Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood began to broadcast on King Biscuit Time, a radio show sponsored by the makers of King Biscuit flour. The show attracted massive audiences in the Delta, incidentally reaching so far unrecorded artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and BB King. King Biscuit Time made a star of Williamson, and his band toured the Delta and featured on other radio shows.

Williamson first recorded in 1951, for the Trumpet label, and cut a number of classic tracks before Trumpet went into liquidation in 1955. Sonny Boy’s contract was sold to Chess, where he recorded alongside Robert Lockwood, Elmore James and Muddy Waters for Chess subsidiary Checker. His touring expanded beyond the Delta and in the early 1960s he reached Europe as part of the American Folk Blues Festival package. His time in England coincided with the peak of British blues. He was lionised by The Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton and also recorded with The Animals and The Yardbirds. His Eyesight to the Blind was the only song not written by a band member to be included in The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1975, available from our Film Store). Back in the USA, Williamson returned to King Biscuit Time for a short period until his death in May 1965.

The Best of Sonny Boy Williamson / Sonny Boy Williamson II

Format: 1 Disc. 20 Tracks.

King Biscuit Time / Sonny Boy Williamson II

Format: 1 Disc. 18 Tracks.

The Harp from Deep South / Sonny Boy Williamson II

Format: 1 Disc. 22 Tracks.

Cool, Cool Blues: The Classic Sides 1951-1954 / Sonny Boy Williamson II

Format: 4 Disc Box Set. 102 Tracks.

Live in England / Sonny Boy Williamson II with The Yardbirds & The Animals

Format: 1 Disc. 20 Tracks.

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Son House

1902-1988. Born Eddie James House in Riverton, Mississippi.

Son House moved with his mother from Mississippi to Louisiana while still a boy. He began preaching in Southern Baptist chapels at the age of fifteen, but was drawn towards the blues despite the church’s antipathy to the disreputable world of juke houses and seedy night haunts. He taught himself guitar in his middle-twenties and joined the Mississippi/Memphis circuit, playing alongside Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Willie Brown, Leroy Williams and others between the 1920s and 1940’s, with a brief time-out on Parchman Farm for manslaughter in 1928/29. Son House’s style had a more than passing reference to the work songs of southern penitentiaries, powerful, rhythmic and sometimes accompanied by bottleneck slide. He recorded around ten songs for Paramount Records in 1930 and Alan Lomax recorded some nineteen tracks for the Library of Congress in 1941/42.

Moving to New York in 1943, House gradually passed out of the public eye until he was rediscovered in 1964 at the height of the country blues revival. Although retired from music (he was working for the New York Central Railroad) House was drawn back into the business on a wave of enthusiasm for his early work, appearing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 and the New York Folk Festival in 1965. European tours followed, including a gig at the Montreux Festival in 1970. By this time he was recording for the Columbia and Roots labels. His health failing, he retired again in 1974.

Son House died in Detroit from cancer of the larynx in 1988, outliving most of his contemporaries and many of those who had come under his influence, including Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson (reputably it was House who began the rumour that Johnson had sold his soul to the devil!).

A Proper Introduction to Son House: Delta Blues / Son House

Format: 1 Disc. 21 Tracks.

Original Delta Blues / Son House

Format: 1 Disc. 21 Tracks.

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Blind Willie Johnson

1902(?)-1945. Born in Temple or Marlin, Texas.

At the age of five Blind Willie Johnson announced his intention to be a preacher and at the same time made himself a cigar box guitar. These two elements defined his life and his music: his musical roots were in gospel and spirituals and he spent much of his life preaching and singing on the streets of Beaumont, Texas.

Johnson was blinded when he was seven years old, by a handful of lye thrown during an argument between his father and stepmother. Near destitute and obliged to earn his living on street corners, he quickly mastered twelve-string guitar and has been hailed as one of the greatest exponents of slide guitar. At age 25, Johnson married singer Angeline Johnson, who sometimes performed with him and is reckoned to have accompanied him on some of the 30 commercial sides recorded for Columbia between 1927 and 1930. Poor until the end, Blind Willie Johnson died of pneumonia in 1945 after spending two weeks sleeping in a wet bed in the ruins of his home after it had been destroyed in a fire.

Johnson’s songs have since been covered by many artists, from both the pure blues tradition and from blues-based rock ‘n’ roll. The latter include Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, The Grateful Dead, the White Stripes and Mason Jennings. Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground was included on the recording sent with the 1977 Voyager spacecraft and was used in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series and in The West Wing, in the space programme context. The track also appeared in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005 qv). Ry Cooder based his slide guitar backing track to Paris, Texas (1984 qv) on the same composition, describing it as the ‘most soulful, transcendent piece’ of all American music. The last two movies are available from our Film Store.

The Complete Blind Willie Johnson / Blind Willie Johnson

Format: 2 Disc Set. 30 Tracks.

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Skip James

1902-1969. Born Nehemiah Curtis James in Yazoo City, Mississippi.

Skip James was raised on the Woodbine Plantation close to Bentonia, Mississippi. His bootlegging father abandoned the family in 1907, after attracting the interest of local revenue agents. James was given his first guitar at the age of 10 and in this late teens took basic piano lessons from a cousin. His musical skills were developed through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, and supplemented the money he earned on construction, lumber and levee camps.

He spent the early 1920s in Weona, Arkansas, working as a pianist and pimp under the influence of the similarly occupied Will Crabtree. In 1923 he played piano in a Memphis brothel but moved back to sharecropping in Bentonia in 1924 and, with Prohibition on the statute book, followed the family tradition by manufacturing and bootlegging ‘white lightning’. He also played guitar at dances, developing a three-finger picking style similar to that of Charlie Patton. His playing took him as far afield as Jackson, Mississippi, and it was here that he auditioned for the record store owner and Paramount talent scout HC Speir. The result was the 1931 session that included I’m So Glad, So Tired (previously recorded by Lonnie Johnson as I’m So Tired of Livin’ All Alone) Devil Got My Woman, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues and 20-20 Blues (the foundation for Robert Johnson’s 30-20 Blues) The recordings were marked by his virtuoso finger style and falsetto vocals, the last echoed by Robert Johnson in his Vocalion sessions. Speir failed to persuade James to continue recording – the musician had become reunited with his father, now a Baptist minister, and a reformed father and son moved to Plano, Texas, where Skip James failed to graduate from the seminary.

For thirty years Skip James drifted in and out of music until he was rediscovered in 1964, along with Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, as part of the US blues revival. In that year James appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and went on to travel the concert circuit and record for Takoma, Melodeon and Vanguard through the 1960s. The British band Cream had a hit with I’m So Glad, which produced a windfall for James although he disliked the version. The soulful Hard Time Killing Floor Blues was covered by Chris Thomas King in O Brother Where Art Thou, (2000, available from our Film Store). Skip James is buried in Mercon Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

The Complete Early Recordings / Skip James

Format: 1 Disc. 18 Tracks.

Hard Time Killing Floor Blues / Skip James

Format: 1 Disc. 12 Tracks.

She Lyin' / Skip James

Format: 1 Disc. 16 Tracks.

Skip James Live: Boston 1964 & Philadelphia 1966 / Skip James

Format: 1 Disc. 15 Tracks.

Today / Skip James

Format: 1 Disc. 12 Tracks.

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Jazz Gillum

1904-1966. Born William McKinley Gillum in Indianola, Mississippi.

Orphaned in infancy, Bill ‘Jazz’ Gillum was taken in by his uncle, Ed Buchanan. Although a church deacon (which gave Bill the opportunity to learn the harmonium) Buchanan’s treatment of Gillum and his brothers led them to run away before Bill was eight years old. Gillum ran away from a second set of proxy parents when he was eleven and made his way to Minter City, where he worked as a field hand and in a drug store, at the same time playing harmonica on the streets for hand-outs.

Jazz Gillum left Mississippi for Chicago in 1923. For ten years he alternated between menial jobs and occasional night club spots. Big Bill Broonzy brought Gillum to the attention of the Bluebird division of Victor Records in 1934. Two sides were recorded, but less than spectacular sales seemed likely to end the relationship. However, within eighteen months a British talent scout tried to recruit Jazz Gillum for the Regal Zonophone label and Bluebird’s interest was renewed. Gillum recorded 65 tracks for Bluebird up to 1942, playing under his own name, or as harmonica sideman alongside Big Bill Broonzy, Blind John Davis and other session musicians.

Gillum served in the US Army between 1942 and 1945, returning to Bluebird to record more sides up to 1950. Through the rest of the 1950s Jazz Gillum virtually disappeared from the music scene. Although rediscovered and recorded by Memphis Slim in 1961 his career never revived. Jazz Gillum died of a gunshot wound to the head in March 1966.

Jazz Gillum Vol 1 1936-1938 / Jazz Gillum

Format: 1 Disc. 23 Tracks.

Jazz Gillum Vol 2 1938-1941 / Jazz Gillum

Format: 1 Disc. 25 Tracks.

Jazz Gillum Vol 3 1941-1946 / Jazz Gillum

Format: 1 Disc. 25 Tracks.

Jazz Gillum Vol 4 1946-1949 / Jazz Gillum

Format: 1 Disc. 25 Tracks.

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Mississippi Fred McDowell

1904-1972. Born in Rossville, Tennessee.

Unusually for a significant blues artist of his generation, Fred McDowell made no recordings during the halcyon days of the 1920s and 1930s. Born into a farming family, he abandoned agriculture for a time in the 1920s, taking to the life of a travelling musician and moving from job to job while playing for change on the streets and at fish fries and house parties. This lifestyle continued when he returned to farming in the 1940s and settled permanently in Como, 20 miles south of Memphis. It was not until 1959 that McDowell was ‘discovered’ and recorded by folk collector Alan Lomax, who tapped into a rich repository of undiluted Delta blues.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was playing guitar and discovering the versatility of slide technique by the age of 14. His first experiments were with a pocket knife, soon to be followed by a hollowed out rib bone; but eventually he moved on to a glass slide, which made for distinctive clear reverberation. A half century of semi-professional playing without benefit of the music industry left McDowell untainted by the commercial pressures that were brought to bear on many artists. He remained in contact with the pure roots of blues and when the first Lomax recordings were released by Atlantic they attracted attention by their patent authenticity. McDowell was taken up by Chris Strachwitz of the newly founded Arhoolie label, who recorded two milestone albums in the mid-1960s. The Atlantic and Arhoolie releases made for a successful entry onto the festival and club circuit, with McDowell notably performing at the Newport Folk Festival and as part of the American Folk Blues Festival in Europe.

For all his purism, Fred McDowell was sympathetic to up-and-coming rock musicians. He taught slide guitar to a young Bonnie Raitt, who went on to record several of his songs; and he is reported to have been impressed by the genuine feel of the Rolling Stones cover of You Got to Move on their Sticky Fingers album. And in 1969 he recorded his first album featuring electric guitar, but entitled (in case there should be any doubt) I Do Not Play No Rock ‘n’ Roll. Still performing, Mississippi Fred McDowell was diagnosed with cancer in 1971. He died in the following year.

The Best of Mississippi Fred McDowell / Fred McDowell

Format: 1 Disc. 18 Tracks.

First Recordings / Fred McDowell

Format: 1 Disc. 14 Tracks.

Steakbone Slide Guitar / Fred McDowell

Format: 1 Disc. 10 Tracks.

My Home Is in the Delta / Fred McDowell & Annie Mae McDowell

Format: 1 Disc. 17 Tracks.

I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll: The Complete Sessions / Fred McDowell

Format: 2 Disc Set. 20 Tracks.

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Tampa Red Whittaker

1904-1981. Born Hudson Woodridge in Smithville, Georgia.

Born in Georgia and raised by his grandmother’s family, the Whittakers, in Tampa, Florida, the ‘Guitar Wizard’ had already worked the southern theatre circuit when he moved to Chicago in the mid-1920s. Ambitious to break into the northern music scene, Tampa Red held down day jobs and played on the streets and in clubs until he was eventually taken on as an accompanist to Ma Rainey. This brought him together with pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey and in 1928 the pair recorded It’s Tight Like That, a ragtime-grounded piece of bawdy that gave Vocalion Records a hit. Tampa Red and Dorsey went on to cut other sides as the Hokum Boys, and their sound became fashionable during the Great Depression. In parallel, Red worked as a session musician on a great many recordings by feature artists, including Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Minnie. With the end of prohibition Tampa Red became a star of Chicago’s live music circuit, playing with his own band or recording with his friends, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind John Davis.

The early recordings were distinctive for the combination of bottleneck slide with a National Tricone metal bodied resonator – acoustic amplification in the days before electrics – and Red’s style was to herald the transition from country blues to the more sophisticated musicianship of the post-war years. A further step in this direction came with the switch to electric guitar in 1940, well in advance of the adoption of the amp by Muddy Waters and others in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Tampa Red’s later recordings were covered by Elmore James, BB King, Robert Nighthawk and Fats Domino. Always a drinker, Red sank into chronic alcoholism following his wife’s death in 1953. There was a resurgence of interest with the blues revival of the late 1950s, but nothing of any real note was recorded. Red died, destitute, in Chicago in 1981.

Our selection of CDs cover the most important period of his career, but note that a chronological series of 15 volumes is available from Amazon or from various other sellers via Amazon. Enter Tampa Red into our Amazon search box and all will be revealed!

Tampa Red 1928-1946 / Tampa Red

Format: 1 Disc. 10 Tracks.

Keep on Jumping 1946-1952 / Tampa Red

Format: 1 Disc. 19 Tracks.

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Leroy Carr

1905-1935. Born in Nashville, Tennessee.

Long before John Hammond or Alan Lomax headed south in search of Robert Johnson and helped create the mythology of the Delta bluesmen, Leroy Carr was taking the blues in a new direction. The pianist and songwriter had recognised that with technological innovation the record industry did not necessarily need the powerfully projected voices of the traditional country blues singers and that the way was open for a more urbane approach. The singer-songwriter’s laid-back piano was partnered with the melodious jazz guitar of Francis ‘Scrapper’ Blackwell to produce some of the most popular music of the day, looking forward to Harlem and the Cotton Club rather than backwards to the Mississippi mud.

Short lived but tremendously influential, the Nashville-born artist was raised in Indianapolis, where he first teamed up with Scrapper Blackwell. His first recording, How Long, How Long Blues, was released by Vocalion in 1928 and was an instant hit. He continued successfully with Vocalion into the 1930s, with the highest number of releases around 1934. He died shortly afterwards, at the age of 30, probably of an alcohol-related condition.

The piano combo style produced a host of imitators and his songs were covered by artists from across the musical spectrum. Count Basie made piano solos from Carr’s hits. T-Bone Walker reflected Carr’s smooth sophistication. And Carr’s lyricism as a songwriter inspired post-war crooners and close harmony groups such as Nat King Cole and the Ink Spots; and nourished the soul ballads of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Otis Redding. When Columbia released a compilation of Leroy Carr’s recordings at the beginning of the 1960s, white audiences avid for the earthy rawness of Delta blues thought Carr lacking in credentials. But black audiences were more appreciative, as were the body of blues musicians who had, and have, covered Carr’s songs: Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, Eric Clapton and many more. Leroy Carr may have helped moved blues into the populist and anodyne mainstream, but this, too, is part of the history of the blues.

Prison Bound Blues / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 20 Tracks.

Leroy Carr Vol 1 1928-1929 / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 24 Tracks.

Leroy Carr Vol 2 1929-1930 / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 24 Tracks.

Leroy Carr Vol 3 1930-1932 / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 22 Tracks.

Leroy Carr Vol 4 1932-1934 / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 23 Tracks.

Leroy Carr Vol 5 1934 / Leroy Carr

Format: 1 Disc. 22 Tracks.