This week, I've been busy trying to finish up my reviews for the May issue of Blues Bytes, which should be out sometime next week, so in the meantime let's take a look at an older album that you might have missed the first time around.....
I've been a fan of Otis Rush almost as long as I've been listening to the blues. He was born in Neshoba County, Mississippi, around 15 - 20 miles north of where I live, so that played a role, but it was his combination of guitar and vocals really grabbed me upon hearing his Hightone Records release, Right Place, Wrong Time back in the late 80's. Later on, I picked up his live release from Blind Pig, Tops, and not long after that, I found his tracks on the Chicago! The Blues! Today! anthology from Vanguard Records and the Chess collection of early 60's Rush and Albert King recordings, Door To Door.
I also managed to round up a two volume set from Paula Records that collected Rush's early sides with Cobra Records, recorded in 1956 - 1958. As allmusic.com puts it....."If Rush had never recorded another note, his legendary status would remain intact based solely on these recordings." These tracks were later reissued as The Classic Cobra Recordings 1956 - 1958 by Varese Sarabande in 2000 and included the A- and B- sides of all of Rush's Cobra singles issued, plus alternate takes, all released with slightly improved sound from the Paula release, which was released in 1991.
Over time, I managed to fill in most of Rush's recordings that followed, including his two studio releases in 1994 and 1998, his Cotillion/Atlantic, Delmark and Evidence releases, and the controversial Alligator Records release originally released in Europe in the late 70's (Alligator overdubbed keyboards from Lucky Peterson in hopes of giving it a full, more modern sound). There were also a few live releases during the 90's and early 00's, as well, including a pair of DVDs.
However, I had difficulty tracking down his two sides recorded for Duke Records in 1962. Duke signed him and just sat on him, only recording one single for release at the time....I've always assumed that the label signed him, basically to sit on him where he wouldn't be able to cut any new records to compete with their other artists.
The A-side of that single, "Homework," appeared on a Duke Records compilation in the 90's, but that was it, until I discovered another winning CD from the UK label Jasmine a couple of years back. I Won't Be Worried No More - Otis Rush's Chicago Blues 1956 - 1962 captures 27 tracks from Rush's Cobra, Chess, and Duke recordings, and it should be required listening for anyone who digs Chicago blues.
Rush really had buzzard luck as far as recording. His sides for Cobra generated several tracks that charted on the R&B charts, and he was backed by some of the future legends of the blues, such as Willie Dixon, Lafayette Leake, Odie Payne, Jody Williams, Wayne Bennett, Little Walter, Little Brother Montgomery, Fred Below, and Ike Turner.
However, this is where the bad luck kicked in.......Cobra Records, which released Rush, Buddy Guy, and Magic Sam's first recordings, folded in 1958 due to money woes. Rush's Cobra output included several tunes that are considered blues standards today, including "Double Trouble," "My Love Will Never Die," "Three Times A Fool," "Keep On Loving Me Baby," and "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)." That's about as good a run as you can ask for in the blues world. All of those tracks are on this collection, along with most of his other Cobra output.....there are a couple missing, but they're hardly noticeable.
Rush signed with Chess Records in 1960, where that label recorded six sides, but only released two singles, one of which was a great one - "So Many Roads, So Many Trains." This collection included all six of Rush's sides, the same ones collected on the Door To Door album from 1970, plus two additional tracks that had only appeared on an LP for Blue Light Records. The Duke single, "Homework," is also included along with it's B-side, "I Have To Laugh."
Rush remained active until 2004, when he suffered a stroke. I got to see him in 2009, when the state of Mississippi dedicated a blues marker for Rush in his hometown of Philadelphia, MS. He was extremely moved by the honor as he sat with friends and family for the unveiling. He passed away in 2018 on September 29. His guitar work has inspired so many later guitarists and many of his songs have been recorded by other blues and rock artists.
Any of Otis Rush's recordings are worth a listen, but I Won't Be Worried No More - Otis Rush's Chicago Blues 1956 - 1962 captures his first eight years as a recording artist in one sitting and those tracks serve as an excellent introduction to not just Chicago blues, but to one of the genre's masters.
It's time once again for another edition of Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue. This makes our 24nd edition. For a long time, this was one of our favorite themes and it dates back to FBF's early days as a weekly email sent to co-workers. It serves as a great way to introduce new and old tunes to new and old blues fans.
For those unfamiliar with the format, we offer a song from the early days of the blues (Something Old), a song from a recent blues artist (Something New), a blues artist covering a rock song or vice versa (Something Borrowed), and finally, someone who epitomizes the blues.....usually a legendary artist (Something Blue). Here we go......
For Something Old, let's go way back to 1930 for "Everybody Oughta Make A Change," by Sleepy John Estes. I first heard this tune recorded by Eric Clapton on his Money & Cigarettes album in the early 80's. Born in Tennessee in 1899, he and his family moved to Brownsville when he was a teen. He lost his right eye soon after when a friend hit him with a rock. He started performing at 19 at parties and picnics while working in the fields during the day. He was usually accompanied by harmonica player Hammie Nixon and James "Yank" Rachell, who played guitar and mandolin. He played with both of these musicians for over 50 years.
His recording career, at least his first one began in 1929 and recorded tracks like "Drop Down Mama," "Milk Cow Blues" (a.k.a "Leaving Trunk"), and "Someday Baby Blues." He recorded for Decca Records and Bluebird Records, and later returned to record in the early 50's for Sun Records unsuccessfully. He was rediscovered by Bob Koester and Sam Charters in 1962, completely blind by then and destitute. He appeared in Charters' move The Blues and later recorded for Koester's Delmark Records.
Although he was in his late 20's/early 30's when he recorded his first sides, he sounded like an older man when he sang. A lot of the blues revivalists searching for artists in the early 60's sort of wrote him off because they figured he was dead, but he was very much alive and his later recordings were as powerful as his early recordings. I guess he grew into his voice. He passed away in 1977 from a stroke, but he was a big influence on artists like Robert Plant, Bob Dylan, and Taj Mahal. His early recordings and later recordings are uniformly fine, so if you're not familiar with him, check him out.
For Something New, how about a track from one of the young lions of the blues scene, 27 year old D.K. Harrell from Ruston, Louisiana. An amazing guitarist and singer, Harrell sang along to B.B. King when he first heard him at age two. He sang in his church as a boy, but continued to follow the blues. After he got his first guitar at age 12, he was writing songs by 16. He was inspired by King and you can hear a lot of him in his music, the tone of his guitar and his vocals. His first paying gig was at the B.B. King Symposium at Indianola, MS, where he got to play "The Thrill Is Gone," backed by King's band.
Harrell also is influenced by Albert King, Freddie King, Muddy Water and other and he has used a little bit of their style forging a distinctive style of his own. He release the excellent album The Right Man on Little Village Records in 2023 and it won acclaim from blues fans all over. Last year, he signed with Alligator and released Talkin' Heavy, which improved on his first release and made many Top Ten lists last year (including FBF's). Blues fans should love D.K. Harrell's music, which is a mix of traditional and contemporary blues. Here's "Grown Now," a single from Talkin' Heavy.
For Something Borrowed, let's stay close to the present time with a track from the B.B. King's Blues Summit 100 collection compiled by Joe Bonamassa. If you haven't heard this set and you're a blues fan, you are missing out. This is one of the best tribute albums I've heard because it honors its subject, is fairly reverential, and it seems like the participants are having a blast with the opportunity to acknowledge one of the true legends of the blues.
Our selected track is performed by jazz guitar legend George Benson, who actually doesn't play guitar on the track (Bonamassa and Josh Smith do a wonderful job in that capacity), but he turns in a marvelous vocal performance. Benson was one of my first guitar heroes and the reason that I started my long journey to listening to the blues via his excellent guitar/vocal recordings throughout the 70's. I got into jazz before I moved to the blues and his guitar work was a huge reason why.
Benson, at 83, is still playing in the states, but stepped back from international touring in 2024, having released an album of standards in 2024 that he originally started recorded in the late 80's, but completed it with his record label's encouragement. Joe Bonamassa continues to be incredibly prolific with his own recordings, but even more important is his work in bringing under-recorded blues artists back, such as Larry McCray, Eric Gales, Dion, and Jimmy Hall, with new releases on his Keeping The Blues Alive Records.
For Something Blue, here's the harmonica legend James Cotton. Cotton was born in Tunica, MS and was mentored on the harp by Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller version) after losing his parents at a very young age. When Williamson left Cotton to live with his wife in Milwaukee, he just gave his band to Cotton, still very young, and the band fell apart. He started playing harmonica in Howlin' Wolf's band in the early 50's, also recording his own single for Sun Records, "Cotton Crop Blues," in 1952.
He began playing in Muddy Waters' band in the mid 50's, though Little Walter played harp on most of Waters' recordings. By 1957, Walter and Cotton were alternating on the recording sessions. He formed his own band in the mid 60's with Otis Spann on piano, and they performed both blues and R&B tunes, adding a horn section for some tunes. Cotton was one of the few blues artists who really crossed over to the rock audience during this time, recording with Buddha Records and appearing at numerous festivals.
In the 80's, he recorded for Alligator Records, where this track comes from, a dynamite version of Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Ain't Doin' Too Bad." The album this track comes from, High Compression, was a cool album that was part traditional and part contemporary. Incidentally, Bland and Cotton found out that they were half-brothers shortly before Bland passed away. There's a great documentary about Cotton, Bonnie Blue: James Cotton's Life in the Blues, which can be seen on Tubi TV that you should check out if you're a fan of blues harp. Cotton remained active, despite losing his voice due to throat cancer, until shortly before his death in 2017. Even though he couldn't sing anymore, he could still blow the back off a harmonica.
When I started this blog in February of 2010, I honestly never figured I'd still be working on it sixteen years and 3 months later. I never even considered that we might reach 500 posts, or 1,000,000 views (we passed that number a couple of weeks ago), but here we are.
I don't really have a big anniversary post planned or anything...... just taking a look back at how Friday Blues Fix came to be.
The real origin of the blog was actually a group email from work. Around 2007 or 2008, I started sending a audio file or two to a couple of my co-workers who also enjoyed the blues on Friday mornings. Word got around and others asked to be included to the list, and soon I was including people who didn't work with me, so it got to be a pretty good-sized list of folks.
Sometime, along the way, I started including little information tidbits about the songs and the artists responsible. Since I listened to the blues a lot and read about the blues a lot, it wasn't that big a deal....I could usually knock an email out in a few minutes and everyone seemed to enjoy the information I was providing.
Near the end of 2009, I got an email from one of my bosses (who was on the Friday Blues Fix email list) saying that IT was complaining about file sizes being sent, which is kind of funny now, given the size files that go through emails these days, so he told me that I needed to stop sending them after the one that I had worked on for that Friday. At that point, the Friday Blues Fix email group concluded with little fanfare and hubbub.
While I was doing the emails, one of my co-workers, Brent Parks, said that I should consider starting a blog about the blues. He had started a few websites about different subjects, one of them being about the blues (he was a fan, too), and he thought it might be fun for me to try. For starters, he just attached some of my CD reviews from Blues Bytes and that was pretty cool. For kicks, I decided to do a Ten Questions with Larry Garner, who I had been corresponding with via email, and he included that on his site. I later recycled it as one of FBF's earliest posts back in 2010.
Also for kicks, we sat down and worked up a Friday Blues Fix ezine of sorts which included reviews, interviews, and blues news items. We never got past setting it up as a Word document prototype at the time and I kick myself for not keeping a copy of it because it would have been neat to see some 16 or 17 years later, but I haven't been able to track it down.
First FBF post - February 12, 2010
That's about as far as we got for a little while until one weekend early in 2010, I finally decided that I'd give it a try. I got into Blogger and started puttering around with a site, doing a lot of trial and error until I had it like I wanted it. In setting up a blog, I wanted to have something in place that (1) I enjoyed doing and (2) would be a solid source of information for both old blues fans and new ones.
One of the things that really helped me in doing the blog was that I had been listening to the blues faithfully for almost twenty-five years, and by that time I had covered a lot of ground. As I've said, I really enjoyed The Blues Brothers and the music that they played, so they led me to a lot of music that I'd never heard before. I think they led a lot of blues fans to the music during that period.
I had started leaning more into the soul, R&B, and blues-rock veins with Stax soul, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, and the Fabulous Thunderbirds after music started becoming more computerized and sterile in the mid 80's, but I've always liked to trace things back to their beginnings, so I managed to unearth a lot of great blues from the 50's, 60's, and 70's, and later on from the 20's, 30's, and 40's.
I had also read whatever I could find about the blues......as I've said many times, Peter Guralnick, Robert Palmer, Stanley Booth, Bill Ferris, Robert Gordon, Dick Waterman, and many other authors were indispensable sources of information for me.
Thanks to Bill Steber for allowing me to use his pictures for the blog header.
Another source who provided me with a lot of information many years earlier was a man from Houston named Jim Shortt. I met Jim on the old Blues Access message board - Blues Access was an excellent blues magazine that, with Living Blues, provided me with a lot of information about old and new artists and that message board was just wonderful to a relatively new listener. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Excello blues and that's how Jim and I connected. Jim knew a lot of the folks that I listened to and he also introduced me to the world of Duke and Peacock Records. He knew many of the artists who recorded on those sessions and he had endless stories about those guys and many others. I had started writing album reviews for Blues Bytes in 1999 and he was a big help to me in learning how to write reviews. We also exchanged mix CDs back and forth of our favorite artists (his were much cooler than mine).
Unfortunately, Jim passed away in 2008, a year or so before I decided to start this blog. I'd like to think that he would have probably contributed a few posts himself in the early years, like my friend Joe Goff, who I met through work. He contributed a couple of posts about B.B. King and Robert Nighthawk in the blog's early years. Sadly, I've lost track of Joe because he changed jobs several years ago, but I know he's still listening to the blues somewhere in a big way and I'd welcome any additional posts he'd like to contribute.
It was always a lot of fun to try and figure out what to write about each week. There was so much material to work with. Friday Blues Fix managed to publish every Friday for over seven years, until things just got too hectic in my everyday life. We had taken on some additional family responsibilities at home that took a lot of extra attention and that extended into some other family issues that developed along the way, so that, with work responsibilities took up most of my blogging time. I managed to crank out a few posts over the years and I was able to continue writing reviews for Blues Bytes during my spare time, so I wasn't completely away.
After a few fits and starts over the last couple of years, I'm hopeful that Friday Blues Fix is finally settling back into a groove. I appreciate those visitors who have stuck around through all the fits and starts, and welcome any new visitors to the blog who have showed up in recent months. I know that the blog is sort of an archaic way to communicate these days, but hey, I still listen to CDs so I'm sure there are others out there who still like to do things "the old way." Please be patient with us and stick around.....there's more to come, I promise.
Also, thanks to everyone who helped guide me into and through this process for their invaluable advice, suggestions, criticisms, and praise.
This week, FBF offers a bit of news and a couple of reviews for blues fans to check out........
A few months ago, some videos showed up on YouTube and few people were even aware of it. Ted Giola wrote about them on his Substack page, which attracted a lot more attention. According to Giola, sound restorer Nick Dellow managed to get his hands on a shellac master "test pressing" of Robert Johnson. The disk was made in 1940 from the original metal parts by George Avakian, a young producer at Columbia Records who was a big jazz and blues fan. They were left forgotten in Columbia's storage facility at Bridgeport, Connecticut. The YouTube video that Giola was describing was Take 2 of "Cross Road Blues," recorded by Johnson in San Antonio in 1936 (Take 1 was the track that was released). Check it out below. The sound quality is just amazing!
Here's Take 1 of "Come On In My Kitchen," also recorded by Johnson at San Antonio in 1936....Take 2 was the released take. Again, the sound quality is just amazing. The original pressings that most blues fans have on CD or LP are pretty clear, considering their age, but these really bring out the qualities of Johnson's guitar work and vocals even more. I'm hopeful that there are more of these sides to be heard and that Dellow will share them. You can check out his YouTube page for more even more classic blues recordings remastered and updated.
Last weekend, we were able to catch Tab Benoit and Samantha Fish during their recent visit to the MSU Riley Center in Meridian, MS. Both did a good job, but I would give the edge to Ms. Fish. They both had a great rapport with the audience, but I think her guitar work was more dynamic and daring and she had a bit more variation in her set list. A lot of folks I talked to felt differently about it (I think this was many of the attendees' first exposure to Samantha Fish), but, hey, that's the way it goes.
Here are a couple of Friday Blues Picks for you to check out.....
Rick Vito - Slidemaster (MoMojo Records): I've heard several of Vito's solo releases.....he's been a member of Fleetwood Mac and Mick Fleetwood's Blues Band and played on numerous sessions with Bonnie Raitt, John Mayall, John Fogerty, Christine McVie, Leon Russell, Boz Scaggs, Bob Segar (that's his slide guitar solo on "Like A Rock"), and many others. Slidemaster is an all-instrumental album and it features new songs by Vito mixed with some older tunes that he remixed and remastered, plus several choice covers, including two by Fleetwood Mac founding member Peter Green. Vito covers a lot of ground on these tracks, all of which are firmly rooted in the blues. His slide work is beautiful, almost singing on several tracks, and the two Green covers may send blues fans unfamiliar with the early edition of the band scrambling for their recordings. Definitely a must-listen for fans of guitar, especially slide guitar.
Eliza Neals - Thunder In The House (E-H Records): Neals is a Detroit-based vocalist with an appropriately soulful delivery. She is also a great songwriter, having learned at the feet of the legendary Motown songwriter Barrett Strong. I've listened to her last seven releases and she continues to improve with each subsequent album. This is her strongest effort to date....she co-produced with Michael Puwal, who provides superb guitar work throughout the album, and she also provides all the vocals on the disc, lead and background, with effective and impressive results. With great songs and powerful vocals, plus a dynamic stage presence, Eliza Neals deserves to be heard by blues fans. She's a real talent and this is an album that blues and blues-rock fans will enjoy.
