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Sunday, June 3, 2012

Sunday Morning Blues - Roosevelt Sykes, Son House, Sunnyland Slim, Johnny Shines

Even more continued adventures into The ABC Of The Blues - volumes 41 and 42 now... getting into the home stretch.

Roosevelt Sykes
Sykes was born in Alabama in 1906, at fifteen he left home and went traveling as a musician. In the mid 1930s he ended up in Chicago. Until then he was a pretty standard blues musician, creating a number of standards in the blues scene. In Chicago he switched from the classic 12-bar to an 8-bar blues, a more pop sounding boogie-woogie. Though the forties he was a minor hit, producing a number of records without attaining huge fame. By the 1950s he, like many blues musicians, found that the blues didn't make money anymore, not even a small amount. Moving south to New Orleans as the electric blues and Rock'N'Roll took over, he continued playing. In the 60s he had a short revival as did most blues musicians from the effort to document the old blues from the past half century. He died in New Orleans of a heart attack in 1983.

The opening track in his set is his standard, which became a general blues standard, 44 Blues. After that it's a number of clean recordings of both some hits and some tracks from deeper in his collection of blues both straight 12-bar and a more pop sounding jumping 8-bar boogie. A good mix of his overall career.

Son House
Son House is as much legend as he is bluesman. An influence on Robert Johnson (it was Son who reportedly started the rumor Johnson had sold his soul), Muddy Waters, and many others. For all that Son House was never a big name in the popular scene. He had a few failed recordings in the 1930s, and then fell into obscurity for the next thirty years. The blues revival of the 1960s brought him out of obscurity and he finally go the success in recordings he missed earlier. He toured until his death in 1988.

This is deep folk and country blues, some of it gospel given Son's occupation as a Baptist preacher for some time. Some of the recordings are nice and clean, possibly from later dates, but some have the heavy hiss common with taking older recordings off of surviving 78s. Like many others from early on in the history of the blues in this collection, it's just Son and his guitar for most of the tracks.

Sunnyland Slim
Albert Laundrew, going by Sunnyland Slim, was one of the few blues musicians who career never really took a break. Recording from the mid 20s, he had moved to Chicago in the early 1940s and started to recording in earnest. Even with the decline in the blues in the 50s Sunnyland was a musician who never fell far enough out to stop playing. An accomplished pianist and a singer with a loud projecting voice, he kept making records and touring, right up to his death in 1988.

There's a fairly wide variety of classic blues layered in here. His long recording history through several evolutions of the blues gives his playing here a wide retrospective to look back through. He didn't stick to one style, and it shows with the way he moves from pure folk to electric, rhythm and blues, and even a little boogie.

Johnny Shines
Shines has a complicated recording history, he began playing in the late 20s or early 30s, and managed to record some in 1935. Those records weren't release. Later he moved to Chicago and became part of the blues scene there, where again he recorded but the records weren't released. A few years later he recorded again, by then it was 1952 and blues records were in sharp decline, his records were a commercial failure and Johnny left music. He came back during the revival in 1965 and finally recorded for Vanguard what would be his first hit. In 1980 he had as stroke that stopped his playing, until 1988 when he was able to start up again and toured for the next four years until his death.

 For someone with such a stop and start recording career, Johnny was pretty consistent with his blues playing. A classic country-folk blues guitar style and vocals. All very smooth, and low down and bluesy. As one might expect, but still, he was in a lot of places at a lot of times and didn't pick up much influence from the 'popular' styles being put out. Very good and it's too bad he never got the sales to make himself a bigger name in the popular eye.

Next Week - Big Mama Thornton, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, and Eddie Taylor come up in Volumes 43 and 44.

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