Great Blues Albums: Snooks Eaglin, New Orleans Street Singer

“Snooks has got it all, including possibly the coolest name in blues history”
(Slide guitarist Martin Harley)

Snooks Eaglin was born Fird Eaglin Jr. around 1936, and lost his sight shortly after his first birthday. Nevertheless, he taught himself to play guitar as a child by listening to the radio and by the time he was 10, he was singing and playing in local Baptist churches. When he was 11, he won a talent contest at a radio station with his version of 12^th Street Rag and then dropped out of school three years later to become a professional musician.

He was a talented guitarist, singer and performer, being dubbed the “human jukebox” for his ability to play a vast range of songs, rarely sticking to a set list and regularly taking requests from his audience. Eaglin often claimed his repertoire included 2,500 songs!

On the guitar Eaglin could play finger-picking blues, jazz, R&B or Hendrix-like rock. He’d amaze people by playing melody, bass and chords, seemingly all at once. Keyboardist /producer Ron Levy said, “He can play any song just off the top of his head. If he can think about it and hear it in his head, he can play it perfectly.” Levy goes on to recount how at a party “Snooks was sitting in the corner playing, and he sounded great. But after a while I noticed that he was missing a couple strings on his guitar but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He still sounded great!”

Eaglin recorded and toured inconsistently over his long 50-year career, but his first recordings, released by Folkways in 1959 as New Orleans Street Singer, showcase Eaglin’s prodigious talent both in terms of his guitar chops and his vocal performance.

These recordings were made by folklorist Harry Oster, who had found the 22-year-old Eaglin playing in the streets of New Orleans. If club or studio work was sparse, Eaglin would often would play on the street for tourists in the French Quarter. Although Eaglin had played in a band for many years, in these recordings he plays in an acoustic blues style, just him and his guitar. Eaglin proves himself to be an exceptionally accomplished guitarist, with a sophisticated, metronomic strumming style perforated by complex and fast runs. His singing, although a bit reminiscent of Ray Charles, is all his own – it’s laid back, a bit throaty, a bit soulful and thoroughly captivating.

There are 16 tracks on the album, a combination of traditional blues songs and covers of R&B songs of the period. It kicks off with a jaunty version of Careless Love, followed up by the slow blues of Come Back Baby, written and recorded by singer and pianist Walter Davis in 1940, but made popular shortly before Eaglin recorded this album by Ray Charles on his debut album in 1956.

The album has a lovely balance with slow songs and songs you could dance to, and throughout, even with songs like St. James Infirmary or Trouble in Mind, there’s a positive, upbeat feel to it all, fuelled by Eaglin’s much-to-be-admired guitar work.

His guitar chops are especially on display on the instrumental number High Society, which features some amazingly fast runs up and down the fretboard.

There’s one serious song on the album. I Got My Questionnaire, later covered as Uncle Sam Blues by Jefferson Airplane, about a man called up to go to a war not of his own choosing. Pretty topical then – and now.

Said Uncle Sam ain’t no woman
But he sure can take your man
Well, they got him in the service
Doin’ somethin’ he don’t understand

The album finishes with the upbeat Look Down That Lonesome Road. Eaglin’s rhythmic strumming and nicely phrased vocals will leave you with a smile on your face.

Eaglin’s Seventh Day Adventist faith loomed large in his life. His seventh day observance kept him from playing on from Friday evening to Saturday night, and he wouldn’t perform on religious holidays either, winning him admirers for sticking to his convictions. He recorded and performed gospel songs throughout his life – check out the moving I Must See Jesus.

By all accounts, he was both a delight and a marvel to see perform. New Orleans guitarist Camile Baudoin has said, “When Snooks plays, that’s all I can do is laugh, makes me feel so good. Nobody plays like Snooks Eaglin. Nobody.”

Snooks Eaglin passed away in 2009, so we don’t have the privilege of seeing him perform live. But we have recordings like The New Orleans Street Singer where we get to hear his musical genius.

Track Listing (Folkways FA-2476, 1959)
01 Careless Love
02 Come Back Baby
03 High Society
04 Let Me Go Home Whiskey
05 Trouble in Mind
06 St. James Infirmary
07 I Got My Questionnaire
08 The Drifter Blues
09 Rock Island Line
10 Every Day I Have the Blues
11 Sophisticated Blues
12 See See Rider
13 One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer
14 A Thousand Miles Away From Home
15 I’m Looking for a Woman
16 Look Down That Lonesome Road

Great Blues Albums: Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues

“Mississippi John Hurt’s music is as fresh today as when he first recorded it in 1928”
Philip Ratcliffe, biographer.

Photo: Joe Alper

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings (Columbia/Legacy)

Mississippi John Hurt was known only to a small group of music aficionados outside the State where he lived for most of his life, until he was 71. What was known of him was the music on six 78rpm records made in 1928.

These songs we can now enjoy on Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings.

Born in 1892, John Hurt, whose parents were freed slaves, was the last of a large family of ten. His mother Mary Jane Hurt and her children moved to Avalon in Mississippi when John was a baby and he lived there for most of his life. He picked cotton for long hours when he was a child, but began playing the guitar when he was nine when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 – a major purchase given that a day’s wages for black labourers was under a dollar. John referred to it as “Black Annie”, which he insisted was the brand name of the instrument, and he became an accomplished picker as a teenager, going on to play at local dances (never juke joints).

His guitar style became the inspiration for generations of acoustic guitar players, after his rediscovery in the early sixties after more than thirty years simply working as a farmer. Many of today’s professional artists started their journey of seriously studying guitar by learning the style of John Hurt.

For many, hearing him play for the first time, it sounds like there is more than one guitarist. He keeps a steady alternating bass going, combined with melodies and harmonies picked out on the treble stings, and throws in intricate hammer-ons and slides. Although he developed his guitar style around the same time as Mississippi bluesmen like Son House or Charlie Patton, his more constrained and relaxed approach is far removed from theirs.

There are some similarities between Hurt’s style and the Piedmont style of picking characteristic of musicians like Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker from North Carolina, or John Cephas from Virginia. But his friend Jerry Ricks didn’t think John had ever heard any of these musicians and we can’t be sure how he developed what is a very characteristic style. You just know who it is within a couple of bars of any song he’s performing, and you know if anyone is playing in his style.

By all accounts, John was a lovely man, easy-going and friendly, with a gentle smile. He was a great story teller and very humorous, and his deep religious faith was a strong foundation in his life, particularly in later years. His granddaughter, Mary Frances Hurt Wright, said, “My Daddy John had a supernatural spirit that had a far greater effect on people than his music alone.

“I can still visualize Daddy John playing on the dusty circle drawn stage of our front yard, totally absorbed in his music. While the people clapped and stomped their feet in agreement with the music, Daddy John’s smile would widen like a stone thrown in a pond.”

And Larry Hoffman, musician and author, said of him: “It seems as if this gentleman was to enrich every life he touched…His great kindness, generosity and gentle spirit has made him a folk legend, and we remember and treasure him through his music – the loving spirit that flows through time and the generations as does his unforgettable music.”

By the early 1920s, John had teamed up with a white fiddle player, Willie Narmour, to play at local dances, with a repertoire that included blues, spirituals, ballads, and ragtime tunes.

Narmour was picked to record after a fiddle contest by visiting Okeh agents. He then introduced them to Hurt, who agreed to go to Memphis to record. Ten months later, at the age of 35, he was asked to come to New York to record some more. Here he recorded some twenty songs, from which 6 records were released (12 sides in all). John was paid $240. Another song, Big Leg Blues was released at a later date and is included in The Complete Okeh record.

The 13 songs on the album feature simply John singing in his laid-back manner and playing his guitar in his iconic style. The album contains a number of his most famous songs like Frankie, Candy Man, Louis Collins and Stack O’Lee, as well as a couple of spirituals, Blessed Be the Name and Praying on that Old Camp Ground. It’s a glorious mixture of murder songs, blues, and Christian songs, all delivered with good humour, fine musicianship and considerable style.

The album opens up with Frankie, written by Bill Dooley from St Louis in 1899, about an event said to have taken place in a St Louis bar room in the 1890s. “Good girl” Frankie Baker shot and killed Allen (Albert) Britt, a ragtime pianist, for his infidelity with Alice Pryar. “He was my man, and he done me wrong.”

John Hurt’s Stack O’Lee Blues – variously known as Stagolee, Stackalee, Staggerlee – is probably the definitive version of the countless recorded versions of the tune. John explained the background to the song to Tom Hoskins in 1963, as he also does in his introduction to the song on the Mississippi John Hurt: Legend album.

Hurt said that Stackolee and Billy Lyons were white men and the fight took place down in a mine where Stackolee was aiming to rob the miners who were gambling. Jesse James, claimed Hurt, accompanied Stackolee, and also shot one of the miners,. I’m not sure how that exactly tallies with the confrontation in the song about the stealing of Stacklolee’s “ten-dollar Stetson hat.” But the story in the song seems to stand by itself anyway, and it rips along nicely, driven by Hurt’s rapid and rhythmic guitar picking.

Louis Collins was written by John Hurt about a real event. His friend Jerry Ricks reckoned it was about a cousin of John’s, but Hurt himself said it had happened in Memphis. Collins, Hurt said, “was a great man. I know that, and he was killed by two men named Bob and Louis. I got enough of the story to write the song,”

The two Louises in the song had me confused every time I listened to it until I heard John Hurt’s explanation. First, Mrs Collins is weeping “to see her son Louis leaving home” to go to “the old graveyard” after his killing, But in the verse that accounts for Louis’s death, we get, “Bob shot once and Louis shot two, shot poor Louis, shot him through and through.” So, it seems, there were two Louises, one shooter and one shot. Somehow, once again, the violence of the song is counterbalanced by Hurt’s gentle singing and nifty guitar work.

Candy Man, a song full of gleeful sexual innuendo was written by Hurt on the way to New York City for the Okeh sessions. He recalled having written it in pencil and that the lyrics were typed up for him at the recording studio. The comedy in the song is accented by Hurt’s seemingly innocent vocals which accentuate the song’s comic effect perfectly. As one writer put it, he sounds so kind and sincere that you can almost convince yourself that he doesn’t actually mean anything sexually suggestive at all!

Avalon Blues was also written on this New Trip trip, a nostalgic yearning for John’s home town – “Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind.” The bright lights of New York city might be attractive – “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine,” but it’s nothing compared to Avalon and his “pretty mama.”

Okeh never called on John to record again.  The 1930s saw economic collapse and the Great Depression, and along with that a record sales slump. Hurt’s Okeh recordings were unlike anything else recorded at the time and didn’t translate into big sales. He retreated into rural Mississippi life and obscurity.

If was only after producer Harry Everett Smith included some of those old recordings on the Anthology of American Folk Music, which led Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart to track Hurt down in 1963, that John Hurt was to have a proper music career, playing universities, coffee houses and the 1963 Newport Music Festival.

Alas, it was short lived, with Hurt passing away in 1967. It was enough, however, to make him one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Mississippi John Hurt remains an iconic figure in the country blues. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1990, and continues to inspire new generations of guitarists, and his gentle spirit lives on in his music – these Okeh recordings, after nearly a hundred years, still sound great and have a great attractive charm.

Check out Philip R. Ratcliffe’s detailed biography

These tribute albums are also worth listening to:

The story of John Hurt’s Guitar – John Oates

Mississippi John Hurt Documentary

Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His times, His Blues, by Philip R. Ratcliffe

Great Blues Albums: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan made a big impact in what was a short career, sadly dying in a helicopter crash in 1990, after featuring in a concert along with his elder brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray.

Despite living only long enough to produce six studio albums (two released posthumously), he breathed new life into the blues rock genre and left a lasting mark as a guitarist who has inspired subsequent generations. Vaughan drew his inspiration from the pantheon of great blues guitarists, like the three Kings, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

“I started out,” he said, “trying to copy licks from Lonnie Mack records. He was a really big influence for me. And my older brother Jimmie used to bring home records by B.B. and Albert King, Albert Collins and guys like Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy – all of ’em.”

He was able to synthesize all these influences into his own unique style rooted in blues, rock, and jazz, but yet was clearly in the tradition of the great Texas bluesmen. John Hammond (Sr.) said of him, “Stevie is in that great Texas tradition of T-Bone Walker. It’s a wonderful tradition. T-Bone, who I first saw back in 1936, used to do what Stevie does now – play the guitar behind his neck and everything else.”

Although, refreshingly at that time in the early 80s, Vaughan eschewed technological musical wizardly, dry ice, fog and lasers, stripping the music back to its essentials of guitar, bass and drums, he was an extravagant on-stage showman, with his distinctive Tex-Mex bandido get-up and pained guitar-solo face. But it was his virtuosic guitar playing that rightly endeared him to fans, both during his life-time and after.

Texas Flood was the debut studio album by Vaughan and his Double Trouble band mates, Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums. Released on June 13, 1983 by Epic Records, the album took its name from one of the record’s songs, first recorded by  Larry Davis in 1958. There are ten songs on the original release, with six written by Vaughan. The CD version released in 1999 added 5 more songs.

Jackson Browne had seen and been impressed with the band when it played the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1982. After taking up Browne’s offer of some days of free use of his own recording studio in LA, the band recorded a demo which caught the attention of John H. Hammond and landed them a recording contract with Epic Records. Texas Flood was the first album made, recorded in the space of three days again at Jackson Browne’s studio.

The album garnered Grammy Award nominations – the album for Best Traditional Blues Performance, and the song Rude Mood for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Critical reception was generally excellent, with Stephen Thomas Erlewine describing it as having a “monumental impact” and suggesting it “sparked a revitalization of the blues.” Texas Monthly called Vaughan “the most exciting guitarist to come out of Texas since Johnny Winter,” although Winter himself was less than positive, saying that he thought Vaughan didn’t have a distinctive style.

There’s no doubt about Texas Flood’s success, however – the album went to #38 on the Billboard 200 chart and went platinum in Canada and double-platinum in the United States, selling over 2,000,000 units. It became a 2021 inductee into the Grammy Hall of Fame in recognition of its historical significance.

The album kicks off with some rockin’ rock’n’roll with Love Struck Baby and you’re hooked straightaway. Before you’ve time to catch your breath, we’re into one of Vaughan’s signature tunes, Pride and Joy, showcasing his fine songwriting and, of course, his guitar chops.

Photo: Marty Lederhandler

The title track is up next, slower in tempo, but the guitar work no less fiery and emotional. This is old school blues, but it’s got a characteristic SRV stamp on it. As well as Vaughan originals, the album has a Howling Wolf song, Tell Me, driven now by Vaughan’s urgent guitar rather than the piano of the original, and a little more up tempo.

Oddly, Vaughan includes a children’s nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb, now transported into a blues setting but it’s largely an opportunity for Vaughan’s guitar soloing. We get a couple of instrumentals, too, in Lenny, a slow, shimmering electric guitar exercise, and Testify, with Vaughan going at break-neck speed up and down the fretboard.

For the most part, it’s breath-taking, toe-tapping (or dancing if you’re so inclined) stuff, all Texas brashness and explosive energy. No wonder it went down a storm and put Stevie Ray Vaughan on the map.

He was the victim of his own success, sadly, descending further into the drugs and alcohol addiction that nearly claimed his life before he managed to get clean and begin touring again in 1986.

He recorded his fourth album, In Step, with Double Trouble in 1989 – “I’m finally in step with life,” he said, “in step with myself, in step with my music.” That was to be Vaughan’s last recording – tragically, he was killed in a helicopter crash with four others in August 1990. A huge loss to his family, but also to the wider music and blues world. Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker dedicated their next albums to his memory.

Track list:

Love Struck Baby
Pride and Joy
Texas Flood
Testify
Rude Mood
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Dirty Pool I’m Cryin’

Great Blues Albums: Muddy Waters, The Real Folk Blues

The Real Folk Blues, released in 1966, is a combination of twelve of Muddy Waters’ recordings from 1949 to 1954, but it’s all quality stuff and the album was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2017 as a “Classic of Blues Recordings.”

Chess took the opportunity with the folk and blues revivals of the early sixties to promote Muddy to a new and younger generation of music fans, his last chart hit with Chess having been in 1958. In 1964, they released Waters’ only acoustic album, Folk Singer, and then, two years later, The Real Folk Blues.

The album includes Canary Bird, named in honour of his wife, Geneva, and originally released on the Aristocrat label in 1949 with Ernest “Big” Crawford on bass. As well as Clarksdale, the song mentions Stovall Plantation, where Muddy Waters lived in a sharecropper’s shack for the first thirty years of his life. It’s delightfully raw, with Waters’ voice to the fore.

Another early song is Gypsy Woman, from 1947, which features Sunnyland Slim on piano. There’s a definite Robert Johnson feel about this one, both in terms of the blues turnarounds and Water’s singing. As there is in an early Water’s version of Johnson’s Walking Blues, sparsely arranged with just his singing and characteristic slide guitar.

The album kicks off with Mannish Boy, first recorded in 1955, with that famous harmonica lick. The song is a classic, included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.” “I’m a man,” Muddy asserts, “I’m a full grown man.” Like most African Americans of his day, Muddy Waters had still been referred to as a boy even when grown, especially in his native Mississippi. “No b-o-y,” he sings – now free of the extreme Southern racism and oppression and a successful musician in Chicago, Muddy Waters could assert his black manhood. (For more on the song Mannish Boy, click here.]

Screaming and Crying recorded in September 1949, featured “Baby Face” Leroy Foster who played guitar with his hands, and bass drum and hi-hat with his feet! It’s a nice slow tempo blues driven by Little Johnny Jones’s rolling piano, where Muddy bemoans the loss of his past life, his mother, his wives and his happy home. It’s truly the blues!

There is a 1950 version of Rollin’ And Tumblin’, a blues standard, first recorded in 1929 by  Hambone Willie Newbern for Okeh Records. This is the song that Robert Johnson adapted as If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day in 1936 in his third recording session in San Antonio. Waters recorded two versions of the song in 1950 and I believe this is the one recorded for Aristocat, with the bass accompaniment by Ernest Crawford. Subsequent rock takes on the song, like Cream’s, are based on Muddy Waters.

Willie Dixon’s The Same Thing is another fine inclusion, featuring Otis Spann on piano and Dixon on bass, as is the classic Just To Be With You, with great lines like “[I will] Fight a shark with a toothpick,” and “I’d call my mother-in-law honey.”

The album closes with You Can’t Lose What You Never Had, another one with loss after loss – woman, money, burned-down home – piling up to deliver the blues. It features some tasty slide guitar from Muddy and is a fine way to finish what amounts to a classic – and quality –  collection of early Muddy Waters’ recordings.

Great Blues Albums: Willie Dixon, I Am The Blues

Along with Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon defined the sound of Chicago blues. A prolific song-writer, particularly during the years when Chess Records were at their peak, his songs were performed by a who’s who of blues royalty, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. His Little Red Rooster and I Just Want to Make Love to You were both recorded by the Rolling Stones, the former with the distinction of being the only blues song to reach No.1 on the UK singles charts (1964).

Willie Dixon knew what the blues were all about, having been incarcerated for minor offences on two occasions in Mississippi, the first when he was only 12. In his book, I Am the Blues. he says, “That’s when I really learned about the blues. I had heard ’em with the music and took ’em to be an enjoyable thing but after I heard these guys down there moaning and groaning these really down-to-earth blues, I began to inquire about ’em…. I really began to find out what the blues meant to black people, how it gave them consolation to be able to think these things over and sing them to themselves or let other people know what they had in mind and how they resented various things in life.”

On another occasion, Dixon served thirty days at the Harvey Allen County Farm, near the infamous Parchman Farm prison, he saw prisoners mistreated and beaten. Those, he said who were “running the farm didn’t have no mercy – you talk about mean, ignorant, evil, stupid and crazy. This was the first time I saw a man beat to death.” Dixon too was cruelly treated receiving a blow to his head that made him deaf for about four years.

Dixon arrived in Chicago from Mississippi in 1936, and after a boxing career, singing in a gospel group and in a successful trio, he ended up working for Chess Records, producing, arranging, leading the studio band, and playing bass. His first big break came when Muddy Waters recorded his Hoochie Coochie Man in 1954, which became his biggest hit, Dixon going on to become Chess’s top song-writer.

Dixon eventually recorded his own version of some of these blues songs that he’d written for others to perform in his 6^th album in 1970, an album which eventually was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986. I Am The Blues, which shares the title with Dixon’s autobiography, has nine of Dixon’s best songs, including Hoochie Coochie Man, Spoonful, Little Red Rooster and I Can’t Quit You Baby.

Produced by Abner Spector, the album features Willie Dixon (vocals and bass), Walter Horton (harmonica), Lafayette Leake & Sunnyland Slim (Piano), Johnny Shines (guitar), and Clifton James (drums).

Dixon proves himself to be a fine blues vocalist throughout. He arrives growling, Howlin’ Wolf-style, on the first track, Back Door Man, shows fine control on the slow I Can’t Quit You Baby, adds a playful note on The Seventh Son, and gives The Little Red Rooster a nice barnyard feel. You don’t feel in any way like you’re short changed from versions of songs by the artists who made the songs famous.

The arrangements throughout give room for each of the fine instrumentalists. Lafayette Leake’s and Sunnyland Slim’s piano work is very cool and never feels overbearing. The piano and bass driving Hoochie Coochie Man gives it a slightly different feel from the Muddy Waters version, and provides a nice counterpoint to the harmonica riff. Walter Horton’s expressive and sweet harmonica weaves in an out of the songs expertly – Dixon said the shy, gentle Horton was the best harmonica player he ever heard. Johnny Shines adds some nice guitar work along the way, especially on I Can’t Quit You Baby and The Same Thing.

Overall, it’s classic Chicago blues, with artists at the top of their game, seemingly really enjoying themselves in the recording process. It’s a piece of blues – and indeed, given the debt it owes to Willie Dixon, rock’n’roll history.

Dixon once said, “The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits…The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.”

Dixon’s legacy is found not only in the blues songs he composed recorded by the likes of Waters and Wolf, or in this gem of an album we’ve been looking at, but in the way his songs were covered by major rock’n’roll artists and influenced their output.

Quite rightly, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. In 2007, Dixon was honoured with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail in Vicksburg.

Great Blues Albums: Gary Moore, Still Got the Blues

Gary Moore’s 1990 album, Still Got the Blues is next up in our series of classic blues albums. It was the most successful album of Moore’s career, selling over three million copies worldwide and heralded a change in direction for the guitarist and a return to his blues roots. It featured collaborations with Albert King, Albert Collins and George Harrison and reached No. 83 on the Billboard 200 in February 1991, and then was certified gold by the RIAA on November 1995.

Moore was from my home town, Belfast, but I only saw him perform once, on June 26, 2004, in the Belfast Odyssey Arena. His was the stand-out performance of seven in support of Bob Dylan, in a production that began around 2 pm and lasted until about 10:30. I really couldn’t be bothered with the other performances, to tell the truth, but Gary Moore was outstanding. (Dylan was on form that evening as well, in fine voice, with an excellent band and a fan-pleasing set that included an acoustic version of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, Like A Rolling Stone, and All Along The Watchtower.)

Moore straddled the stage, legs apart, guitar slung low, hair cascading to his shoulders, like the guitar-god he was and gave us nine of his greatest hits, including Oh Pretty Woman, Still Got the Blues and his signature tune, Parisienne Walkways. The guitar playing was sublime and his facial contortions all we hoped for. “People make fun of me for doing that,” he said, “but it’s not contrived. When I’m playing, I get completely lost in it and I’m not even aware of what I’m doing with my face – I’m just playing.”

Reputedly, Moore was a modest man with few pretensions, who kept a low public profile and was happiest at home in Sussex. Typical is what he said of his gigs with Dylan on that tour: “At the Odyssey in Belfast, I tried to walk up the steps at the side of the stage to see who was in Dylan’s band. The bouncer said ‘You’re not allowed up there!’ and that was the end of that. The stage was quite high and I couldn’t really see, so I spent the next 20 minutes jumping up and down to get glimpses of what was going on!”

But he was an incredible guitar player – voted one of the greatest guitarists of all time by Total Guitar, but egregiously absent from Rolling Stone’s flawed list of 100 Greatest Guitar Players.

Gary Moore was born in Belfast in 1952, but left just before Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” started in 1969, going to Dublin to become a musician. His dad had bought him his first guitar, a second-hand Framus acoustic, when Moore was 10 years old. Though left-handed, he learned to play the instrument right-handed and by 15, he was the best guitarist in his home town. After stints with Skid Row and Thin Lizzy, he began his solo career in the 1970s, playing hard rock and heavy metal before returning to the blues with Still Got the Blues as the 90s began. The idea for the album had come when it had been jokingly suggested to Moore than he do a whole blues album after being heard noodling the blues in his dressing room on a previous tour.

Moore playing Peter Green’s Les Paul

The album got made and the rest, as they say, is history. Still Got the Blues was extremely successful and re-launched Moore’s career as a blues rock artist. Moore followed it up with After Hours in 1992 which went platinum in Sweden and gold in the UK, and then three years after that with Blues for Greeny, a tribute album to his friend and mentor Peter Green. A slew of other blues albums appeared in the 2000s – Back to the Blues (2001),  Power of the Blues (2004), Old New Ballads Blues (2006), Close as You Get (2007), and finally Bad for You Baby (2008). Sadly we lost Gary Moore in 2011 when he died with a heart attack.

The original release of Still Got the Blues consisted of nine songs, but the CD version added three more, including that That Kind of Woman, unmistakably a George Harrison song, with Harrison, a friend of Moore’s playing on it. There was a further augmenting of the album in 2002 with five more songs, including Elmore James’s The Sky is Crying, a tribute by Moore to Stevie Ray Vaughan, who died in 1990, which Moore attacks with some incendiary playing.

The album kicks off with a toe-tapping, rock’n’roll number, Moving On, featuring some tasty slide guitar. This is followed by Albert King’s Oh Pretty Woman, written by A.C. Williams, from King’s acclaimed 1969 album, Born Under A Bad Sign, Moore giving the song much more attack and edge. The interplay of his guitar and the horns is brilliant and the guitar solo, with its huge string bends and fast runs, is guaranteed to have the hair on the back of your neck sit up.

King played on the track and reputedly told Moore off for playing too many notes – “Think ten notes but play five.” Seemingly Moore was prepared to take the advice on board, recognising he’d come from a heavy rock scene where the more notes played the better. King, however, was impressed with Gary Moore – “I didn’t think he could play. I thought he was just another kid trying to get off into the blues guitar world… but listening to that kid play the wildest things… Golly Moses, where did he come from?”

A couple of songs later we get Moore’s own Still Got the Blues, with that sweet, searing and transcendent guitar introduction. It’s a beautiful song, well-constructed musically and intelligent lyrically but, of course it’s the extended guitar solo two-thirds the way through that stays in the memory – utterly transfixing and heart-wrenching. The song was released as a single and reached No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1991.

 

Moore pays homage to B.B. King in King of the Blues, “born in Indianola, Mississippi 1924,” (though King was born in 1925) with “Lucy by his side.” As well as the big guitar sounds, full of energy and emotion, there are the quieter, night-time blues of As the Years Go Passing By and Midnight Blues, with Moore’s guitar work restrained and tasteful, but still utterly soul-searching.

Throughout the album, Moore seems to play as if his life depended on it, each note utterly crucial. The combination of the strong songs, the collaborators, the associations, Moore’s incredible guitar work, the horns at time giving it a big band vibe, and Moore’s excellent vocal performance make it something of a masterpiece of blues rock.

Gary Moore proved himself to be a masterful exponent of the blues, and his extraordinary talent and devotion to his craft is sorely missed. We look forward to Provogue’s release of a new album, featuring previously unreleased material, How Blue Can You Get on 30 April, to mark the ten years since Gary Moore passed away.

 

Great Blues Albums #1 – B.B. King, Live at the Regal

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B.B. King’s Live at the Regal is on every blues fan’s list as one of the greatest blues albums ever. It’s a live album of ten songs recorded from a concert by B.B. in the Regal Theatre in Chicago on 21^st November 1964, and it captures King, aged 39, at the height of his powers. His singing and guitar work is immaculate and his engagement with the audience hugely entertaining.

I saw B.B. King just a couple of years before he passed away, playing the Grand Rex Theatre in Paris. It was the first time I’d seen him, and it was a great thrill – we really did feel like we were connected to the history of the blues that night, even though B.B. didn’t play his guitar as much or as well as he might have as a younger man. Fair enough! When you’ve reached his legendary status, I’ll take what I can get. His singing was still very good, at times sweet, at times powerful, and his good-humoured interaction with the audience was good to see. I’d have liked one of those guitar picks he tossed into the crowd, but I was too far away!

My daughter bought me a vinyl copy of Live at the Regal for Christmas, and it was a delight to slip it on to the turntable and hear the songs in lovely warm, crystal-clear stereophonic sound. On this album you get B.B. as I didn’t get him that night in Paris, that characteristic, crisply-picked guitar answering his vocals, which range versatilely from tender to gritty to falsetto. B.B. King is one of those rare guitarists you can recognize from hearing just one or two notes.

Was he playing Lucille that night? Well, not one of the black signature models that Gibson brought out – they only appeared in 1980 – but from the photographs on the album sleeve, he appears to have been playing a Gibson 335 sunburst and with a Bigsby vibrato device. Not that King ever seemed to need the latter – he got great vibrato from just his fingers on the fretboard.

Doubtless you’re familiar with the Lucille story – but just in case: when B.B. was playing a dance hall in Arkansas in the winter of 1949, a fight broke out and a barrel half-filled with burning kerosene set in the middle of the dance floor to keep things warm was overturned, setting the place on fire. Everyone, including King raced outside, but in his panic, B.B. had left his guitar behind, so he dashed inside to rescue it. He later found out that the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, so he named his guitar, and all subsequent ones, Lucille as a reminder never again to do something as stupid as run into a burning building or fight over a woman!

King, in his biography, Blues All Around Me, said that before this particular concert, he had played the Regal “hundreds of times before,” and felt that he had played “hundreds of better concerts than the one taped at the Regal.” He was surprised at the critical response to the record, but said he was happy to receive the praise. However this particular night rates in the thousands of concerts King has played, the fact is it captures the man in top gear, playing with an outstanding band – Duke Jethro on the piano, Leo Lauchie on the bass, Kenneth Sands on the trumpet, Johnny Board and Bobby Forte on tenor sax, and Sonny Freeman on drums.

Apparently, Jethro’s organ, which he was originally schedule to play, broke down, so King said he should just play the piano. Jethro told B.B. that he didn’t know how to play the piano, only to be told, “Well, just sit there and pretend; that’s what you do most of the time anyway!”

The band that night was in sterling form – B.B., when introducing them, says admiringly, “I think they’re wailin’ out there!”

Recognition of the stature of Live at the Regal has come from Rolling Stone Magazine, which put it at number 141 on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums Of All Time,” and in its addition in 2005 to the Library of Congress’s list of recordings chosen for permanent preservation with the National Recording Registry.

The album kicks off with Every Day I Have the Blues, after broadcaster and music promoter Pervis Spann introduces B.B. King as the “king of the blues.” It’s exciting stuff from the get-go, the brass in tip-top form duelling with King’s timeless guitar licks before the man kicks in with that beautiful tenor voice.

By the time the full guitar solo kicks in the crowd are already whooping and whistling. The crowd cheering throughout the album, actually, adds to the excitement and atmosphere and never seems distracting from the music. It’s just the way a good live album should be.

The album works its way through a veritable collection of B.B. King hits, including the slow blues of Sweet Little Angel (included in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll) and How Blue Can You Get, King’s guitar reaching right inside you and wringing every ounce of emotion out.

The album captures a couple of great moments where B.B. interacts warmly with the audience – at the start of It’s My Own Fault and How Blue Can You Get – doubtless only a fraction of his chat during the evening, but showing that he was a consummate entertainer with a natural rapport with his audience. But for the most part, King let the sincerity of his singing and the piercing quality of his guitar do the talking.

Photo Credit: Solarpix / PR Photos

Obviously you can’t see it with this record, but King used to contort his face when he played his guitar – his wife Martha used to call him Ol’ Lemon Face because of that. King said of himself, “I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I’m in torture, when in truth, I’m in ecstasy. I don’t do it for show. Every fibre of my being is tingling.” And that commitment to the music is what you’re hearing on Live at the Regal. “I wanted my guitar to connect to human emotion,” he said once. And you can feel that as you listen to this album.

If you’ve not listened to this album – do so without hesitation! If you’ve not listened to it in a while, get it out of your record collection and play it again. And don’t just play a couple of songs – play the whole thing and let B.B. and the band caress your soul. Rock along to You Upset Me Baby and Woke Up This Morning, and soak in the blues feeling of Worry Worry and You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now.

You’ll see what is the very best of modern blues.