moon traveller herald

 On the passing of Luther Guitar Junior Johnson Christmas Day 2023 at 83 - I post here some excerpts from liner notes I wrote for his 1984 Rooster Record: “Doing the Sugar Too.”  He was a hard-working and riveting performer with a great sense of Time, Dynamics, Emotion, and Blues.  And a thoughtful individual I recall, as a read a bit of the liner notes.  Cringing too, as it's pretty clear I must have asked him some pretty dumb questions. But he fielded them manfully, and they tell a story. He came up from Mississippi to West Side Chicago, and played extensively with Magic Sam, but most notably with Muddy Waters, playing a role as something of a bandmaster for most of the 1980s, counting off numbers in one of Muddy Waters’ greatest ensembles. Here are some portions of the notes: Luther pursues a sound that represents his feelings. “I take my guitar and go into a sound,” he says. “I pick up an acoustic and think about different arrangements of music.” He sometimes com...

  Keeper of the Flame – JB Hutto This is something I wrote in 1981 for a publication called Sweet Potato. It was the first time I ever got paid for something I wrote. JB Hutto is a musical powerhouse. A small man in a red gabardine shirt and gray sports cap, he pops his eyes and grins to the back seats as he plays. It's late on a weeknight at Cambridge’s soon to be defunct Speakeasy, and the crowd is thinned in preparation for the next day's work. But JB is somehow spurred on, jumping from the stage with ferocious good fun. He is soon dancing on one foot, snaking through the audience and to his guitar cords’ limit. The man has his own style of playing and young guitar players typically line the stage watching his hands. He's the king of slide stylists today. Only Muddy Waters performs slide with such skill and he often plays the instrument with cold frugality. But JB’s playing is abundant and his leads map a tune’s wildest borders. Theatrical antics can mask it from ...

  I was idly Web surfing and I found this in the Records of the Wisconsin Historical Society. A beautiful poster promoting Sunnyland Slim appearance at Gordon Commons at the University of Wisconsin in Madison way back in the day (Donation: $1.50; beer 25 cents). Playing with Sunnyland were my friends Harry Duncan and Paul DeMark A story to this one has to do with the billing of "Little" Eddie Taylor - one of the Chicago greats - a story that I will pass on for now. Posters were a People's Art Form back in those days. You would post them on telephone poles, you would cop them after the event, you would put them on your wall, you would study them, and think about what they meant. Posting this today especially because it is Sunnyland Slim's birthday anniversary. As we often say: "He was a man amongst men." Strong character, strong heart, strong voice. Now a strong memory. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM58549# Eddie Taylor story - Paul DeMark

  A person standing NeXT to a van. Description automatically generated with medium confidence In the category of something completely different. I found this picture of New Orleans piano great Jack Dupree yesterday, and I thought it was cool to pick up on. I never saw Jack, but I have a few of his records, which show he belongs in the pantheon of piano professors. The pic showed up in a Twitter feed that asked people to cite American blues players that went to Europe and more or less stayed there (Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, Luther Allison are just some of those listed along with Jack). I like the picture cause, well, he has a simple kind of car but he has pride enough to stand with it. Maybe he’d have liked a Cadillac, but this one would save on gas, and it looks like it could haul equipment too.  Does it make him look shorter or taller than he would in front of a Cadillac? (Your call.) And sign says it all: Champion Jack Dupree, Blues Pianist of New Orleans, LA.U.S.A." {Little...

The first time I posted this up, the vid came down, so here goes again. The whole video is quite historic and excellent from beginning to end if you are into roots, ethnic music or just into music. Ry Cooder's number around the 8 minute point is a fave of mine. I also liked his description of encountering it.  Which follows. [I have a little NLP trascriber known as Otter that is like magic for stuff like this...] Ry Cooder on Joe Williams’ Sloppy Drunk . I bought the record in 1960 I think it came out. I was a young boy. And I used to go down to this little record store in a house these two ladies had. And they had it in an old bungalow house downtown Los Angeles, that I had to take two buses to get to. Regular bus and and electric bus. And they let you play the records on a little Webcor schoolhouse record player. I put the needle over there, took it out of the sleeve and you know and put the LP down the record itself and then put the needle on and Sloppy Drunk JUMPED OFF! Never h...

i. The news came by Internet, and then passed on by voice. Cecelia told me a great is gone. So, teardrops will fall. I am here today to mourn a most soulful and heartfelt musical talent. That is because Peter Green is dead at 73. I count him as a giant of the Blues. Certainly, among people from across the Atlantic, he was one of the bravest and brightest to contribute to the Blues. Green was the founder of what was and is now called “Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac” – convenient naming as the eventual, successful, and very Californian Fleetwood Mac bore slight resemblance to Green’s blues bashing open-for-anything original. That would be the late 1960s. Green and cohorts John McVie, Mick Fleetwood and Jeremy Spenser came out of the London blues scene of 1967 somewhat in the wake of Cream. Previously, Green had replaced Eric Clapton in John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, and had proved replacing “God” was possible, as Mayall’s band missed not a beat with Peter Green on guitar. ...

Jack Vaughan 3 · City Hospital Blues This "Talk Song" goes back about 10 or 15 years at least. The story is that my Uncle Charles was on Intravenous Feeding for 30 days in Boston City Hospital during the 1919 Influenza Pandemic. I had been listening to an LP of Cecelia's - the "Arhoolie Bad Luck N' Trouble" release, which included the haunting Essie Jenkins' "Influenza Blues"-- and came to re-imagine my uncle's illness, through the spectre of Essie's poetic rumination. So, it is her Influenza blues through the lens of a family history. I was reluctant to trot this out, though it came to mind as we are in our own COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020. But I am glad to post it now along with some explaination. As we know it, the IV feed was new and experimental technology at the time. My uncle was obviously in very difficult straits. As we know it, my grandmother spent most all of the 30 days at Charles's bedside praying, and for us his rec...

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 be...

Earl Hines with Charlie Carpenter, WWII. This is brief anecdote, one I have discussed with Sam B. There was a fellow who used to visit Slim. I’d be staying there and, about mid-morning he’d come by. We remember him as “Pumpkin” or “Punky,” didn’t know his proper name. Not too tall, had an eye that looked the other way, was relaxed and mellow. He’d been involved in Vaudeville, perhaps, Came over most mornings for coffee. I have come to wonder what his full name might have been. Sam remembers him as a decent piano player – boogie woogie style, but slow and harmonic , maybe a bit of time breaker. For my part, I have always remembered something  Punky told me. We may have been just chatting, and he or Slim mentioned perhaps that he’d known Louis Armstrong. Punky (as I recall his name, memory is hazy) then told me he’d been in vaudeville and met Bing Crosby. He told be a story about meeting Bing in the 1920s, and then again later on. The story stayed with me. He meets Bing C...

The pioneering blues singer and guitarist B. B. King, who won over a dozen Grammy Awards and is perhaps best known for the song “The Thrill Is Gone,” died on Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89. Mr. King was born in 1925, the son of sharecroppers in Mississippi. He had a career that began in the 1940s, kicked into high gear in the last years of the 1960s, and continued full-throttle until last fall, when he canceled a tour citing poor health. The British singer-songwriter and guitarist Eric Clapton, who drew inspiration from Mr. King as a young musician and collaborated with him on the 2000 album “Riding With the King,” shared a tribute to Mr. King on his Facebook page. On BB King's passing .. Norman Wilde at Soulville really hipped me to BB King. Remembering: at Soulville you could get a free 45 if you bought an LP. I'd get the Blues Project, or the Dirty Blues Band...he would slip in "Dont Answer the Door," "(I'm Going to Move to) The Ou...

I remember hearing ''Dust My Blues'' -- on the grey Kent 45 thanks to Norman Wilde, who would select my free 45 to accompany an LP I'd buy at Soulville Records next to the Veneitan theatre on Main Street in Racine in 1967.  Norman was supposed to put promos in the LP bag, and there were some good ones, but he would find actual 'oldies' of Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James. I've put a lot of miles on, and seen many ramifications and enhancements and extrapolations. But I've come back to that chord of Elmore James as  if it is the only harmonic. Jack and Norman (shown here) were hipster gurus of life and blues and jazz. They made Soulville, a narrow dark store full of record covers, a truly extraordinary place. Norman set me on a path with those genius 45s, that he passed on to me as Jack was good naturally looking out the window. Recall I saw George Wallace with three Secret Service men go into barbershop next door one day. To get haircut downtown on...

Robert Junior Lockwood was one of the last blues originals, Along in age and bound to leave eventually, Robert Junior has now taken leave at 91 . Robert Junior was special. I got to meet him in the days when I came to know Sunnyland Slim, and worked on The Sunnyland Blues. In my experience, Robert was imposing on one level, with a marked sense of self, and tremendously curious and open on another level too. He was nice just to take the time to field some questions, but he was furthermore kind in taking the trouble to figure out who I was. He was wise to parse his time. My note taking and record keeping have always been scattered. In the days of putting together the Sunnyland Blues, it was really bad. I couldn’t find all the material I’d gathered during the research period, actually went through a fire along the way, which Robert understood, and I had to push to get the things done with what I had right at hand. The time that Robert shared was of a wonderful help in writing that book, b...