Tag: Delta Blues

B.B. King

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“The Thrill is Gone”

There is way to much to talk about for one post so I will try and highlight just a few things of his early life and career. He first came to national prominence with his cover of Lowell Fulson (the West Coast blues legend) and the song “3 O’Clock Blues” in 1951 that went to #1 on the R&B chart. King combined his singular guitar talents with charismatic vocal delivery to give us a debut of one of the most important musicians of not only the Blues but any genre.

With King we have another of the great Delta Blues musicians, but he had a very unique route. This I think added to his abilities and grasp of the art of the Blues. B.B. King could not have been more aptly named as he is the true “King of the Blues”. Born on the Berclair cotton plantation near the town of Itta Bena, Mississippi, (Sept. 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015) and was named Riley (after his father’s deceased brother) what has been said to be just the middle initial of B, it is actually Ben. So he was Riley Ben King. The B.B. is actually shortened from “Blues Boy” which in turn was an abbreviation of his longer radio DJ and performing moniker of “Beale Street Blues Boy”. This, stemming from his time on WDIA Radio in Memphis.

He is not described very often as a Delta Bluesman and generally called himself a “blues singer”, but you won’t find a better example of living the Blues than B.B. King. However he is not a proponent of the idea that to sing the Blues you have to be Black and from the South. I read this quote attributed to him:

“People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die”

“Why I Sing the Blues” written by King with Dave Clark (1969).

His childhood was hard, his family was very poor and his mother left his father when he was 4, she died when he was 9, then raised by his Grandmother who died when he was 14 years old. That’s just about the age when he struck out on his own. He worked for a farmer named Flake Cartledge who insisted he go to school. Flake bought him his first guitar, but then didn’t pay him for 2 months as the $15 dollars was what he would have earned. It seems King felt Flake treated him well. He was briefly in the US Armed Forces during WWII but was released as his experience as a tractor driver meant he was more needed on the farm.

As did most at that time he got to listen to Blues records but grew up on Gospel music and sang at church. Later he was in two groups, the Elkhorn Jubilee Singers and The Famous St. John ’s Gospel Singers. His Blues career would start when he travelled with his cousin Birkett Davis after they left the Gospel group. Soon he met with another cousin, the established recording artist Bukka White. He took King to Memphis in 1946, but King could not make a living and went back to Mississippi.

“Precious Lord” written by Thomas A. Dorsey, George Nelson Allen and Thomas Shepherd. First released in 1959 on the album B.B. King Sings Spirituals.

Upon his return in 1948 that’s when things started to pick up, he was a regular on the Sonny Boy Williamson II radio program. If you are thinking this is a familiar name, it’s not the same one that tutored Muddy Waters, he was the first and known as Sonny Boy Williamson I. This was not the real name for either one of them, but Sonny Boy Williamson II took the name to capitalize on Sonny Boy Williamson’s success.

King became more and more popular and sang live on radio, in local clubs and as mentioned was a DJ as well. Which takes us back to where he got his name of B.B. King.

While in Memphis King met one of the finest electric guitar players in history, T-Bone Walker. He was then sold on the idea of getting his own eclectic. Here we have the transition and the legend of his Gibson guitar he named Lucille.

“If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar”

B.B. King

“Lucille”

For much of his performing life, it was being on the road and playing some 250 gigs a year. He released 43 Studio albums and 138 singles. He charted 33 albums on the Billboard 200 and 25 on the Blues Albums Chart. Although he placed 32 songs on the Hot 100 he never cracked the Top 10. “The Thrill is Gone” was his highest at #15. There is way to much to talk about for one post so I will leave with some more songs, until next time.

John Lee Hooker

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John Lee Hooker with a version of “Boogie Chillin'” and a backing band of remarkable talent.

John Lee was born the son of a sharecropper in Tutwiler Mississippi on August 22, 1917. Although accounts vary. He died at age 83 on June 21, 2001. He combined his Delta Blues upbringing with Hill Country Blues which had a more rhythmic groove to the music, the end result being “Boogie Blues”. Listen to “Boogie Chillen’” as performed in the above video clip. It was his first recording which he wrote and was released in 1948 and it will give you a good idea where a song like “Boom, Boom” came from.

While many of the Delta greats landed in Chicago, Hooker would end up in Detroit in 1943. He worked at the Ford plant and also as a Janitor at a Steel Mill before releasing his first song in 1948. I should note there are a few other Delta/Blues artists from the South that ended up in Detroit as well, contemporaries such as; Bobo Jenkins, Little Sonny, Boogie Woogie Red and Baby Boy Warren. A bit more of an R&B artist was the Alabama born Nolan Strong (& The Diablos) who was Smokey Robinson’s biggest influence.

For the most part Hooker was raised in the Clarksdale area of Mississippi were he learned the Delta Blues. At age 14 he ran away from home and played on Beale Street in Memphis. From this humble beginning, his song “Boom, Boom” released in 1962 is one of the most recognizable Blues Standards and at 85 versions and growing. He was an illiterate man but he authored over 50 songs, and 53 of his original songs have been covered by other artists. An arrangement of the song was used as the theme for NCIS New Orleans.

In 1951 there were two charts published by Billboard Magazine for R&B that only tracked the top ten songs each week. The first was “Best selling retail Rhythm and Blues Singles” the other called “Most played Juke Box Rhythm and Blues records” John Lee Hooker songs were was right in the mix with the Dominoes, Ruth Brown and Charles Brown.

He is a four time Grammy winner, plus a Lifetime Achievement Grammy among many other accolades. He is one of greatest guitarist of all time as well as an inductee into the Blues and R&R Hall of Fame. A true original talent and one of the coolest people ever, just watch this clip from the greatest Blues movie ever, ‘The Blues Brothers’.

If you think of ZZ Top and particularly “La Grange” (1973) btw, it’s written about the brothel immortalized in the play and film ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas‘. But if we compare it to John Lee Hooker who developed his own talking, hard driving, rhythm boogie blues style (pretty much unrelated to actual ‘Boogie Woogie’) you can certainly hear his very strong influence.

One of the greatest songs in Rock History is from the Who with “My Generation” (1965) written by Pete Townshend. Like with many of the British bands of that era the song has inspirations from American music. Townsend credits Mose Allison “Young Man Blues” (1957) with the spark to write the song and Roger Daltrey used John Lee Hooker’s somewhat ‘stuttering style’ for the vocal inspiration.

There are so many great covers of his songs and brilliant duets etc. with John Lee himself but to further demonstrate the scope of his influence I will leave you with just two more clips. First, Van Morrison joining Hooker and doing his original song “Wednesday Evening Blues”. Then a guitarist known as Guitar Rei, born in Japan, grew up in New York and does an amazing job with “Boom, Boom”. She goes off script a bit but so did John Lee on most occasions when he did this song live.

Big Joe Williams

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“Low Down Dirty Shame” by Big Joe Williams

Joseph Lee “Big Joe” Williams (October 16, 1903 – December 17, 1982). Known for his own unique creation, the ‘nine string guitar’ You can see he added the tuning pegs to the headstock of a six string guitar in the above video clip. His had a homemade set up of a pickup and coiled wires around his guitar, then attached to his beat-up old amplifier, and it gave him a sound like no other. While I can’t prove he invented it, I also cannot find anyone that played a nine string guitar before or during the time of Williams. It is still rare but they do custom make them and several recording artists have been known to use them.

Williams was a contemporary of many of the Delta players I have been talking about and his life intersects with one of his teachers, Charlie Patton. In turn Williams would tutor and travel with a younger (by ten years) Muddy Waters and David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards.

His travels would often take him to St. Louis, Missouri. It was there he had a relationship with Blues singer Bessie Mae Smith. I can only find one recording of her but Williams has said (at times) she had something to do with composing his song “Baby Please Don’t Go” that he wrote and recorded in 1935. However the official song credit remains solely with Williams.

We certainly know that many of the songs from the Delta were influenced in some way by African American “field holler” as well as “work songs”. Blues songs were also informed by Black Gospel/Spirituals, this despite and according to the ‘Church’, the Blues are it’s antithesis. In this way “Baby Please Don’t Go” is no different.

What we do know for certain, it is one of the most influential songs from the Delta Blues. During the 1960’s alone there were 35 versions of the song recorded. There are currently 237 versions. Here is a live performance by Williams.

Next we have “Baby Please Don’t Go” performed by ‘Them’ in 1964 with a young Van Morrison as their lead singer. This would be Them/their (sorry) first hit in the UK reaching #10 in February of 1965. It appeared briefly on the Billboard Bubbling Under chart but managed to reach Top 40 on some West Coast Radio charts.

The next clip is Bob Dylan’s “Baby Please Don’t Go”, recorded during the ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ sessions in 1961 and 62. This song was an outtake and not released until 1991. It should not come as a surprise that Dylan started his career doing covers of Blues songs. To date he has re-recorded at least 200 songs written and first performed by others. I can’t say 100% but I have read more than once that it was on the advice of Big Joe Williams that Dylan moved away from covering songs and started to write and record his own compositions. We most certainly know that the two were very close.

Here is one of several duets on Spivey Records from 1962. Dylan and Williams with “Sittin’ on Top of the World” (Walter Vinson, Lonnie Chatmon). Williams on guitar and Dylan on harmonica.

Williams was not a prolific songwriter but his cover versions are memorable. And, despite his somewhat curmudgeonly personality his powerful voice and unique guitar playing allowed him a busy career and he was in high demand during the Folk revival. He lived and played in Chicago for several years.

Williams is in my top five favorite Delta Bluesman, John Lee Hooker is on that list as well. So here is a perfect intersection with a cover of “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Hooker from 1959.

Howlin’ Wolf

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“How Many More Years” written and recorded by Howlin’ Wolf (1951)

Chester Arthur Burnett (June 10, 1910 in White Station, Mississippi– January 10, 1976), known as Howlin’ Wolf . Here is another of the great Delta Blues singers. As a teen he was tutored on guitar by Charlie Patton, who was the very first name I talked about in this series. Using bits and pieces from songs by The Mississippi Sheiks, Tommy Johnson and Patton himself Wolf put a song together in the early 1930’s. “Crying at Daybreak” was part of his repertoire as toured the South with many of the names I have mentioned. He gained a reputation for his harmonica playing and was an early adaptor of the electric guitar. He was a large man and had quite the theatrical stage presence as well.

There is a certain amount of mystery surrounding his life story, in particular the late 1930’s up to 1941 when he in went into the army. He may have killed a man to protect a woman and may have gone to jail but we’re not sure. We do know there was another Blues singer from Texas named J.T. Smith who also went by the name of Howlin’ Wolf but very little is known of him.

What we do know is that Ike Turner who was at the time a talent scout for RPM/Modern Records found Wolf. He recorded the songs “Riding in the Moonlight” and “Morning at Midnight” and it charted at #10. He also recorded songs for Sam Philips at Sun Records, “How Many More Years” charted #4 and he also recorded “Crying at Daybreak”. Philips seemed quite high on Wolf but it was Leonard Chess that took over his contract and had him come to Chicago.

He reworked “Crying at Daybreak” while at Chess Records in Chicago and titled it “Smokestack Lightning” in 1956. It peaked at #8 on the R&B chart. There are 64 versions of this song but it is a perfect example of what most often happened with Black music from the South. Not a single American artist covered this song until it was discovered by bands in England.

Howlin’ Wolf had gone to the UK for a number of performances in 1964 and he of course did “Smokestack Lighting” and it made quite an impression. The first band to cover the song was Manfred Mann in 1964, followed by the Yardbirds and then The Animals.

There is a live recording at The Fillmore from 1968 (released in 1999) by a very good but short lived American group called Quicksilver Messenger Service. They are of particular note as members Skip Spence and David Freiberg would go on to help form Jefferson Airplane and lead singer Chet Powers, as Dino Valenti, he was the guy who wrote the song “Get Together” covered by The Youngbloods in 1967 that became a #5 hit in 1969.

While a big influence at Chess Records and in the Clubs his record sales did not do as well after his arrival, in great part due to poor promotion by the Record Company, but he cut many great sides and made a good living touring nevertheless.

“Killing Floor” written and performed by Howlin’ Wolf (March,1965). This song really shows off how immensely talented he was. Recorded in August of 1964. Here is a link to a live performance. There are 56 versions of this song. If you were taking notes this was the song I made a pretty lame hint at when I referenced “the cutting room floor” in my editing process from the introductory post Delta Blues Revisited. Hey, I don’t even know myself where I am going half the time.

“Killing Floor” by the late and great Jeff Healey. ‘The Jeff Healey Band from Live at Grossmans 1994, released in 2011.

“Red Rooster” was written by Willie Dixon and is Wolf’s most covered song with 133 versions. A total of 56 of Howlin’ Wolfs songs have been re-recorded. Names such as Dion, Delbert McClinton, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Cream, Ten Years After, Canned Heat, Joe Bonamassa, Koko Taylor, Grateful Dead, B.B. King and more have done his songs.

“Red Rooster” was first released by Howlin’ Wolf in 1961 but it did not chart. It was first covered by Sam Cooke, he titled it “Little Red Rooster” in 1963 and it charted #11 on the Hot 100 and #7 on the R&B chart.

The Rolling Stones released it as “Little Red Rooster” in the UK (only) and reached #1 in December of 1964. This was the first and only time a Blues song has topped a chart in the UK. As you can see, Wolf is another of the very influential Delta Blues artist.

Follow this link to Music Mondays by Leon.

Muddy Waters

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Written by Muddy Waters, first released in 1941, by The Library of Congress. “I Be’s Troubled” by McKinley Morganfield, his first recording and the only song where his real name was used.

McKinley Morganfield know as Muddy Waters (April 4, 1913, Rolling Fork, Mississippi – April 30, 1983). Another slide guitarist and singer who began his career in the Delta but is best known as a Chicago blues musician and one of the most recognizable names in blues. His Grandmother gave him the nickname “Muddy” and at school they added the “Waters” which he later adopted as his stage name.

I have mentioned his name when talking about Son House (b. 1902-1988) who was certainly a big influence. He was born and raised in the same area as Robert Johnson who was born just two years earlier in 1911. However it was playing harmonica and touring with the great Big Joe Williams that gave Muddy his greatest Delta Blues experience.

He moved to Chicago in 1943 and as most Blues singers did he got a day job and was fortunate enough to team up with the already established Big Bill Broonzy (who served as a mentor) for gigs on weekends. Muddy had a distinctive and slightly more upbeat approach to the Blues and recorded his first commercial songs in 1946 but it would be his move to Chess Records that launched his first success.

“Long Distance Call” by Muddy Waters and His Guitar (1951)

At Chess he would play with other now legendary names such as Willie Dixon who is the most covered Blues singer/songwriter of all time. Also Little Walter, Otis Span and when Howlin’ Wolf moved to Chicago from Memphis in 1954 a friendly but sometimes fierce rivalry developed. By the 1960’s Muddy was the leading Chicago Blues player and he employed a young guitar player named Buddy Guy.

After a brief lull in this career he released a couple of great albums (One with Howlin’ Wolf) and won his first Grammy in 1972. He would be idolized by Johnny Winter and become an influence on a generation of Blues guitar players, songwriters and singers. When Muddy married Marva Jean Brooks in 1977, Eric Clapton was the best man.

It was Muddy Waters’ 1950 song “Rollin’ Stone” that inspired the name of The Rolling Stones and everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Led Zeppelin and ZZ Top cite him as a big influence on their music and have covered his songs.


“Got My Mojo Working” by Muddy Waters, written by Preston Foster (March 1957). Here is a live recording from the CBC in 1966, bonus points if you know who is introducing the song! That is another Delta Blues legend, James Cotton on harmonica.