From Radio Weblog: Sunnyland in Boston Liner Notes 2004

By the time he died in 1995, Sunnyland Slim’s life-long efforts as a performer, gregarious ambassador, and keeper of the blues flame had made him the patriarch of Chicago blues. His star rests largely on his early recordings and to an even greater extent his later performances. This collection seeks to broaden the view of Sunnyland, featuring his work at sessions held in Boston in 1979 when Sunnyland Slim [born Albert Luandrew] was 72.

In some blues histories, the Mississippi-born pianist will be remembered as the man who brought Muddy Waters to the attention of Leonard and Phil Chess at Aristocrat Records in Chicago in 1947. In Slim’s telling: “I got Muddy off the truck.” [Waters was delivering Venetian blinds when his relatives got Slim’s call for the Aristocrat sessions.]

For reasons hard to identify, Sunnyland did not continue to record as a leader for the Chess brothers after his 1947 and 1948 sessions with Waters - after Aristocrat became Chess Records. With writer-arranger Willie Dixon, the brothers established the preeminent blues record company, mostly on the basis of Muddy’s recordings - undertaken in their studio at 2120 South Michigan Blvd. While they may have been frugal in some respects the Chess brothers lavished time and effort for practice and arrangement, and at 2120 there was honed the Chicago sound, polished at the same time it was tough, with stellar production, and carefully crafted intros and endings. Sunnyland took a different path.

Sunnyland would be the first to tell you: He was a hustler. Sunnyland had to hustle for gigs, sessions, groceries.  He had to get the job, get the players, get them there, and keep them on course.  His voice was more impressive than his piano work, but his voice was only the amplifier for his spirit - his most electrifying instrument of all. Unlike the great piano player and Waters' accompanist Otis Spann, Sunnyland could not just show up for gigs, and start chording on the ivories. And, again, when it came to recording, it was not about just showing up -- he was intimately involved in every aspect of records. After 1947 he vigorously plied the record medium in Chicago, doing sessions for Tempo Tone, Opera, Hytone, Apollo, JOB, Blue Lake, Vee Jay, and Cobra, to name a few. He acted variously as leader and accompanist – and often as arranger, taking on many of the tasks of a producer. Selling pressed records out of a car trunk could also be part of the job description. At house parties, playing cards and selling half-pints was also in the mix.

Around him in orbit was a mighty ensemble that included Little Walter, Leroy Foster, Floyd Jones, Big Crawford, Robert Lockwood Jr., Snooky Pryor, J. B Lenoir, J. T. Brown, Walter Horton, Eddie Taylor and others. The recordings had a tough edge and an on-the-run feel quite different than that of Chess. Session time for Slim and his cohorts was booked and was immediately counted against the bottom line. Among classics he helped create were Highway 61, Sunnyland Train, and When I was Young [as a leader]; and such numbers as Dark Road and Korea Blues, by Floyd Jones and J.B. Lenoir, respectively, [as an accompanist].

As Dudlow and down home as the Chicago sound could be, Slim always added some classic blues runs that could have just as well introduced a number by Ma Raney or Bessie Smith in the first commercial blues era. And the jazz sense of Basie and Ellington, especially in instrumentals, was also part of the Slim parcel.

Slim took the methods learned in the 1950s independent scene into his early work in the 1970s for his own Airway label - this is after recording voraciously for labels national and international, large and small. Notable non Airway results included Slim’s Shout, with King Curtis, Slim’s Got a Thing Going On, with members of the Canned Heat Blues Band and others, and various sessions as part of the American Folk Blues series. Some of the work exhibits narrowness more than expansiveness, as copyright issues, having gained greater weight in Slim’s estimations, by now had greater influence on his song selection. Some of the sessions were clearly hurried, and some early Airway pieces fell somewhat short in production values.

That’s the backdrop for Boston Breakdown. Having met Sunnyland in the late ‘70s, and having had the opportunity to hear compositions he was working on at his ever-active home in Chicago, I thought it was worthwhile to try and capture a new view of Slim by booking a generous amount of practice and session time in a state-of-the art recording studio in Boston. I recall particularly his ‘shortening-bread’ riffing on a Wurlitzer electric piano, as he worked on Just You and Me, handwritten and falling leaf-like from his ready homegrown songbook, a difficult but different [for Slim] number that got him and me to get into the studio. Producer John Nagy was just off some major success with Deleware blues rocker George Thorogood and we enlisted Nagy to engineer the sessions. We planned three days in the studio.

The economics of blues in 1978-79 were such that recording in Boston meant Slim would not be recording with his usual, established Chicago sidemen. Instead he would be joined by young Boston-based blues players, all headed for notable musical careers of their own. Bob Margolin, then of the Muddy Waters Band, and Ronnie Earl, Sarah Brown and Terry Bingham, all former members of Boston’s Rhythm Rockers, had played with Slim in clubs, and they formed the nucleus. Chicago singer Dawna Rae, then living in Boston, joined in the sessions, and brought with here Rosie Rosenblatt, who’s unexpected appearance on blues harp really fleshed out the sessions.

What came out of the date, in fact, is an often moving testament to Slim’s vision of the blues, which was always large enough to incorporate younger players while still adhering to some classic manners and serious rocking.

Of course Sunnyland Slim had a lot to teach the would-be intrepid young co-producer, Jack Vaughan. As soon as we entered the Dimension Sound studio’s on Centre St. in Boston’s Jamaica Plain district, he assumed a marked sharpness and directness. It was immediately apparent that – even tough the time was paid-for and pre-booked – no labored tuning or special placement or false starts or multiple takes were in the cards. “You can’t chew money like grass, Jack,” he advised me. One day in the studio, and one day mixing [with a single overdub] was the final sum.

He would attack – not sneak up on – the matter at hand. You could not be, as his friend Little Brother Montgomery would say, “a time breaker’ – and he eyed the studio clock ever intently.

Slim’s approach to the studio was the same as his outlook on solos. As he told my friend Paul DeMark, who was unable to make the Boston sessions, the thing for the soloist to remember is to “get in and get out.”  The approach was a bit disconcerting to me, as I had prepared a slew of Gant charts for the project. Clipboards went flying like errant cows in a cinematic cyclone.

Once we were on track, of course, he could be loose. Slim would break up the seriousness at times with his usual crazed Woody Woodpecker chortle. Toward the end, he passed around some Mogen-David wine, which in his sometimes splintered parlance was “Morgan-Davis” wine. He might tell us he’d “got so drunk [not turue] last night that I staggered in my sleep,” or tease Sarah or Donna that he was going to start calling her ‘Temptation.’

We did not wholly hit the mark. As Slim said of Just you and Me, “it needs some good horns.” His reflections here draw a picture of his view on the records business. “That song can be made a monster song. But it take encouragement by the right peoples. You got to get it out there where Mr. Charlie – somebody - knows to get it over,” he said. Although we hoped we might place Boston Breakdown with a hot blues label, it did not happen. A few of the numbers subsequently appeared on Airway AR-4548 and LP AR-4747. I recall one label exec calling it ‘too modern’ and another calling it ‘too old timey.’ The work went into the Airway vault from which it now emerges.

We hope you will agree there is a lot to recommend Boston Breakdown. There is Get Further Little Brother, which was spurred by recollections of a robbery in the SourthSide BlackPStone Ranger days that unfortunately visited Sunnyland and his friend Lee Jackson [a knife wound near the heart nearly killed Slim]. There is the aforementioned Just You and Me. There is Tired But I Haven’t Got Started, which features a brooding solo by Ronnie and a wailing passage by Rosie. There is a wonderfully seamless solo handoff between Bob and Ronnie and on the title song. Sarah’s standup base drives Past Life.

People who want to know Slim will surely linger on a number such as Decoration Day, intensely sung here as a tribute to mentor Sonny Boy Williamson [I], and offered here as well as a life lesson for the musicians gathered around him. Advises Slim: “You must come – you shall go.” All thanks to electric media!

As the years passed away, and his fellows, the blues originals, passed away too, Sunnyland could evince a certain glumness. When I called to tell him of radio reports that Muddy Waters had died, he simply could not believe it. Looking once from Mission Hill at a broad expanse of Boston and the Blue Hills, I remember him bemoaning the bluesmen’s many passings. He said: ”Their ain’t nobody left but me, Jack” - this with no less than Robert Lockwood Jr. catching a cat nap in the other room!  We think there a few more blues people left, and some more to come. In efforts such as this one, Sunnyland Slim etched his mark on a tree of blues that is still flowering.

–Jack Vaughan, Boston, 2004