Bluesmen

This page is dedicated to my favorite bluesmen. There are so many to choose from and I am not putting them in any real order as I tend to go back and forth about who is my favorite. These are the players who have inspired me and really made me love the blues. They put the blues into my soul.

Cream
I have always liked the blues without really knowing they were the blues. They just seem to speak to me. I can remember hearing Cream as a kid and knowing that these guys knew something I didn't. That made me want more of something I didn't even know I was missing.

from left Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, and Eric Clapton

Cream was made up of three great musicians. Ginger Baker on drums, Jack Bruce on bass and vocals and the great Eric Clapton on guitar and vocals.

This trio had come from other successful bands to form a new kind of band. The first supergroup. Their music was a combination of blues, rock, and psychedelic rock.

My favorite song of theirs is Crossroads. The version I like was recorded March 10, 1968 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.



Stevie Ray Vaughan
I was fully drawn into the blues by this Texas bluesman. He made it stick. The intensity he had made songs like Voodoo Chile really powerful. It was as if he knew deep down what the song meant with no uncertain terms and he was going to convey that come hell or high water.

It think it was around 1984 or 1985 that I found a Double Trouble cassette tape. I worked in a detail shop and we found stuff in repo cars all the time. It had Voodoo Chile on it. That was the beginning for me. I stopped listening to anything else but the blues for a long time after.

What I found really great about Stevie was that his guitar hero was his brother Jimmie Vaughan. Jimmie was the one time guitarist of the Fabulous T-Birds. Who I liked but only a couple of hits.

I would have to say Voodoo Chile by SRV is still my favorite tune. I am always sad that Stevie's life ended at such a young age. He was a great player!





Jimi Hendrix

Being from Seattle doesn't make you a Jimi Hendrix fan. I was a Jimi fan from an early age. Really as far back as I can remember. My Mother would say "it is acid rock" when I asked her what kind of music it was that Jimi was playing.

I was barely 8 when Jimi died and I don't really remember it. I do remember being in Renton 10 years later and seeing graffiti on the road near my home that said "It's been 10 years Jimi" and thought that was really sad that he was gone. By the time I was 18 I was aware of who Jimi Hendrix was and partially aware of his musical contribution. Music has had a profound effect on me. We were very poor when I was a kid and having a musical icon from my hometown made me feel a little better.

Jimi Hendrix. Born November 27, 1942, in Seattle, Washington, Jimi was the first of 5 children. He acquired his first guitar at age 15. Hendrix got into trouble with the law twice for riding in stolen cars. He was given a choice between spending two years in prison or joining the Army. Hendrix chose the latter and enlisted on May 31, 1961.

Jimi's first studio recording was in March 1964, when the Isley Brothers recorded the two-part single "Testify".

Linda Keith, the girlfriend of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, befriended Hendrix and recommended him to Stones' manager. She then referred Hendrix to Chas Chandler, who was ending his tenure as bassist in The Animals and looking for talent to manage and produce. Chandler liked the song "Hey Joe" and was convinced that Jimi could pull it off. He took Jimi to the UK.

The first Jimi Hendrix Experience album, Are You Experienced, was released in the United Kingdom on May 12, 1967. That was the start of a very illustrious and short career.

I can remember as a teenager seeing graffiti in Seattle Wa that said "It's been 10 years Jimi". I thought "it is cool to live in Seattle". I was a Jimi fan then and remain so today.

The brightest stars burn out first.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix


Hubert Sumlin

“He’s the one that shaped that Howlin’ Wolf sound,” said septuagenarian Chicago blues guitarist Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater. “On tunes like ‘Shake for Me’ and ‘Smokestack Lightning’ — that was the Howlin’ Wolf sound, and Hubert’s guitar made it.”

Hubert Sumlin passed last Sunday, December 4th 2011. 

Little wonder Clapton and Keith Richards volunteered to play sidemen for Sumlin on his Grammy-nominated album “About Them Shoes” (2005). In so doing, the guitar gods paid homage to a less-celebrated deity who had pointed the way for them.

Born in the Mississippi Delta — in Greenwood, Miss. — and raised in Hughes, Ark., the self-taught guitarist collaborated with future harmonica star James Cotton before either was known to the world. 

By the early 1950s, Wolf brought Sumlin to Chicago and mentored him before the listening public, transforming a somewhat shy, soft-spoken young man into a ferocious presence — once Sumlin strapped on his guitar.

The two men made staggering music together, but they sometimes battled with equal intensity off the bandstand.

Showing up after a gig had ended in Little Rock, Ark., in the 1950s, Sumlin nonchalantly piled into the car heading to the next date. It didn’t take long before Wolf interrupted the journey, dragged Sumlin out of the vehicle and shoved him down a hill, costing the musician two front teeth.

“He was a big man, and he scared me half to death!” Sumlin said in a Chicago Tribune interview earlier this year.

A few days later, Sumlin turned up unannounced at Silvio’s, a landmark Chicago blues club where the Wolf often howled, and cocked his fist.

“I hit him!” Sumlin recalled in the Tribune interview. “I knocked his teeth out too. And afterward, he laughed. ... I hated I did it. I apologized. But you know what the guy did? We went back to work.”

This kind of intramural violence was not uncommon in an earlier, more rough-and-tumble blues era, and that feral energy made its way onto recordings, assuring both Wolf and Sumlin a measure of musical immortality.

After the 1976 death of Wolf (who was born Chester Arthur Burnett), Sumlin eventually came into his own as bandleader and emerging vocalist, issuing critically acclaimed recordings that were more muted than those of his old boss.

In recent years, Sumlin — who had left Chicago and lost his wife, Willie B. “Bea” Reed Sumlin, in 1999 — was still a periodic attraction on Chicago stages. He appeared alongside Robert Cray and Jimmie Vaughan in 2007 at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, at Toyota Park in Bridgeview; performed at a “Blues at the Crossroads” concert in February at Symphony Center; and headlined frequently at the Chicago Blues Festival but canceled his participation in a Robert Johnson centennial tribute at this summer’s fest (as did the since-deceased nonagenarian David “Honeyboy” Edwards), due to illness.