Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
The day after backing Roosevelt Sykes, King Curtis and his group were back in the studio with another blues piano man, Sunnyland Slim.
It was a contrast in styles Both were from the Delta area--Sykes from Elmar, Arkansas, and Slim (Albert Luandrew) from Vance, Mississippi. They were they same age--54 at the time these recordings were made. Both called Chicago home, and were part of that Chicago blues scene, Slim even more than Sykes. He played, over the years, in the bands of Muddy Waters (Muddy was his guitar player for his first recording session), Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, and Robert Jr. Lockwood, whereas Sykes eschewed the electric blues sound,
decamping from Chicago to New Orleans in the early 1950s, as that style gained the ascendancy on the South Side.
But Sykes, who first came north in 1929 to record for Okeh Records in New York, adopted a more urban style. Slim's journey to Chicago led through Memphis in the 1920s, where he worked with Ma Rainey among others, and while his piano style reflected the modernity of his associations, his voice stayed in the Delta, with that rich rawness we associate with the Delta blues singers.
This makes for a different kind of collaboration with Curtis and his urban jazz/rhythm and blues musicians. On two cuts, "I'm Prison Bound" (by Brownie McGhee) and "Harlem Can't Be Heaven," Curtis sits out, leaving the field to Slim and Robert Banks, whose organ brings the arrangement up to 1960, while at the same time carrying that Delta feeling. By contrast, on "Shake It," a Big Joe Turner composition but a standard part of Slim's repertoire, he brings a lot more Chicago into his vocal, and Curtis provides a foot-stomping solo.
This admixture of styles makes for a fascinating album, where you never quite know what mixture you're going to get net. "Decoration Day" starts out with a moody blue intro from Curtis, and then Slim enters with his Delta voice and a real down home twelve-bar blues that nonetheless fits with what Curtis had started. Curtis returns with another sax solo, followed by Banks pulling out all the stops (or the equivalent on an electric organ). In other words, this is a session that gives the participants a chance to explore every possible way of playing together.
Of particular interest, the Leroy Carr classic "How Long Blues." just because it's such a great tune and it's interesting to hear anyone play it. And the two instrumental numbers, "Slim's Shout" (co-composer credit, Ozzie Cadena) and "Sunnyland Special," both of which feature just some great blowing. Chicagoan Slim pays an affectionate tribute to the Big Apple with "Harlem Can't Be Heaven."
Robert Banks should have had more of a prominent career than he did.
This is a great album.
A curiosity: Most of Slim's originals are credited to Sunnyland Slim, but one ("Sunnyland Special") is under his birth name, Albert Luandrew. And even odder. on "Every Time I Get to Drinking," co-composer credit is given to Luandrew and Slim.
Two Bluesville 45s came from the session: "Baby How Long" / "It's You Baby" and "I'm Prison Bound" / "Slim's Shout." Slim's Shout was also the name of the Bluesville album. "Every Time I Get to Drinking" and "Tired of You Clowning" were left off the LP, but added to the CD reissue.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
This is Roosevelt Sykes' second album for Prestige. The first used a rhythm and blues lineup of tenor sax and rhythm section such as Sykes had used on his biggest hit, "The Honeydripper." That seemed to work well, so they've returned for it with this outing, but this time the Chicago session men from the first outing are replaced by King Curtis and a crew of some of New York's finest musicians from the rhythm and blues side of the jazz spectrum. Curtis regular Robert Banks, who joined the King or an Al Smith session on Prestige, is here on the organ, and Belton Evans, previously used by Prestige on a Swingville session with Al Casey, plays drums. The bassist is bebop veteran Leonard Gaskin, who
appeared on one of Prestige's first recording sessions with J. J. Johnson and Kenny Dorham, and more recently joined Curtis and Banks to back up Al Smith.
He's still in good form here, playing and singing the blues with a flair for double entendre, a powerful voice and a steady rolling piano that sets the tone.
What's really new here comes on the fourth cut of the day (and the third on the album), "Yes Lawd." It's the only song not written by Sykes--it was supplied by Ozzie Cadena, who would in a couple of years become a producer and head of Artists and Repertoire for Prestige. I've remarked before that the main practical difference between jazz and rhythm and blues in the 1950s was that jazz became an LP art form, while rhythm and blues was still essentially a singles art form. Jazz recordings opened up to take advantage of the greater length of the LP record, and so it is here with "Yes, Lawd." Every other track on the album is short -- "Miss Ida B.," at 4:57, is the only one that pushes the limits of the 45 RPM
single. "Yes, Lawd," is over 9 minutes, and allows for extended solos by Banks and Curtis, and one by Sykes as well.
Esmond Edwards produced. The album came out on Bluesville, and was titled The Honeydripper, although Sykes's signature song was not on it. A Bluesville 45 had "Miss Ida B." as the A side, "Satellite Baby" as the flip side.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon. The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT. – Terry Gibbs
On the YouTube page for "Soul Street," the person who uses the nom de tube NAFTALI2 says:
Those who heard Jimmy Forrest in person said the most dreaded position on stage is being another tenor player along side of him.
NAFTALI2 may be a little biased in favor of Forrest:
In this cut, standing with jazz stalwarts, not amateurs by any means, guys who are more critically acclaimed, guys who got more studio time, guys you've heard of--from Jimmy's first flourish, you can sense they just want to go home. He continues his solo showing his harmonic complexity, incredible sense of rhythm and groove, the ability to move effortlessly from the beautiful to the honking blues, and the ability to build his solo.
That's going a little overboard. Nelson and Curtis contribute wonderfully to this session too, but he's not wrong about Forrest, an unjustly overlooked jazzman. I've checked a few internet lists of greatest jazz saxophonists, and he doesn't make any of them (well, he makes the Ranker.com list now, because I added him). And this is a real oversight.
Forrest is probably best known for "Night Train," one of the best-known rhythm and blues instrumentals. Forrest takes composer credit for the tune, developed from a Duke Ellington riff, and all in all he probably deserves it. He made the first recording of "Night Train," and it's been recorded over 120 times since, mostly but not always as an instrumental, including a 1982 version by Forrest with Shirley Scott.
Forrest's first appearance on Prestige was a 1952 session recorded live in a nightclub in his native St, Louis, with Miles Davis sitting in on trumpet. I wrote about it:
A few online reviews of this session tend to give it short shrift -- recording quality not all that great, playing competent but uninspired.
They couldn't be more wrong...this session, recorded live in a St. Louis nightclub, is the real thing. This is jazz in 1952, a piece of living history, jazz as it was, and played by working musicians in small clubs in the Midwest, music that came out of the legacy of the territorial bands of the 20s and 30s, the nighttime wail of America that John Clellon Holmes captured so vividly in The Horn, still the greatest jazz novel.
This is mostly an Oliver Nelson album, and I'll get on to him, but NAFTALI2's praise of Forrest's contribution to "Soul Street" is not misplaced. His solo is lyrical and raunchy, inventive and deeply satisfying.
NAFTALI2 finishes his encomium to Forrest with these words:
For years there were alto players in St. Louis who were disciples of Nelson, all the while never having heard Jimmy Forrest, who lived just around the corner. Upon hearing Forrest for the first time, they always asked why they hadn't heard of him before, shaking their heads in awe.
Forrest wrote "Soul Battle," and it was left off the original release of the album, only added as a bonus track for the CD release, perhaps another nail in the coffin of Forrest's legacy.
Nelson wrote all the rest of the tunes on the album except for Juan Tizol's "Perdido." He was rightly becoming recognized as a rising star and a brilliant composer. As I said in my notes to his previous Prestige session, it's amazing that his compositions really haven't broken through to become jazz standards. There are some terrific ones here.
"Blues at the Five Spot" opens with an evocative interplay between Gene Casey and George Duvivier, then introduces a repeated riff that morphs into some blues figures that are just right for three saxophone players who each have a feeling for the blues.
Nelson stays with the blues, and stays in New York, moving from the legendary downtown jazz club to the radio, with "Blues for M. F. (Mort Fega). Fega was one of New York's early champions of jazz on the radio, with a show that ran opposite the better-known Symphony Sid Torin on radio station WEVD. Nelson's tribute is a real atmospheric blues, with plenty of room, at nearly ten minutes, for soloists to explore all its possibilities.
"Anacruses" are the series of unstressed notes that come before the first complete measure of a composition, which makes an interesting title for this composition, because there aren't any. After a complex but driving drum roll by Roy Haynes, Nelson and cohorts hit the ground running in this very different take on the blues, powerful and aggressive.
"In Passing" begins as an almost nostalgic blues, and then becomes very modern--a striking and powerful transition.
Esmond Edwards produced the session. Except for "Soul Street," the tunes comprised the Prestige album Soul Battle, credited to the three tenormen. "Soul Street" appeared as the title track on a New Jazz album, a 1964 release joining numbers from different sessions.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.
"The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT." – Terry Gibbs
The Davis/Griffin pairing, two intense, hard-blowing, hard-bop tenor saxophonists, is legendary among jazz aficionados, but it was surprisingly short-lived. This, their first pairing, was also their only studio album for Prestige, although an extended live recording was released on four different albums over the next several years, so the recorded output of their partnership lasted a good deal longer than the partnership, or than Griffin's tenure on this side of the Atlantic. They also recorded a few albums together for the Riverside subsidiary Jazzland, and Griffin on his own for Riverside, before the diminutive "Little Giant" of the tenor decamped for Europe. where years later they would reunite for one more session.
Johnny Griffin had made plenty of music before he got together with Mr. Jaws, starting as a student at that cradle of jazz, Chicago's DuSable High School, where at age 15, in 1943, he was already playing in T-Bone Walker's band. Immediately after graduation, in 1945, he joined Lionel Hampton's band, which became a proving ground for many future beboppers.
Still primarily working out of Chicago, he made his first recording as leader in 1956, for the Chess subidiary Argo, after which he came to New York as a Blue Note artist, and his first Blue Note session became the first album to actually be released under his own name.
There were recordings for Riverside, and some memorable sessions with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and with Thelonious Monk, including one album with a group co-led by the two jazz giants, before Bob Weinstock and Esmond Edwards got him together with Davis.
This is a full-throttle session, starting with "Pull My Coat," a tune written by Richard Evans. Since there are several composers named Richard Evans, it took some digging to find the right one, but the digging was worth it, as it uncovered another fascinating jazz story of a young Chicagoan and contemporary of Griffin's, who also made his recording debut (and only album as leader) for Argo.
Let's digress a little and find out more about Evans, who grew up in Chicago in the 1940s, going to
...the Regal Theater. Later, I found out it was part of what they called the chitlin circuit. I remember being about nine years old and going there. You could watch two movies, and then watch Count Basie live, Duke Ellington live, and Fats Waller live. And we loved Fats Waller because at the end of the show, he’d take the curtain, wrap it around his belly, and shake it. [laughs] Cab Calloway was there too. I tell you this because, for some reason, we knew we were getting something special and that we were privileged to see these people live.
And if you turned on the radio, you had Al Benson, a Black disc jockey who’d play Black music. And when the Black programming was done, you’d hear Polish programming and their music. And I never turned the radio off. I listened to all kinds of stuff. I knew polkas, how they went, and how they sounded. Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw, so I absorbed a lot of Polish tunes and their distinct style. My stepfather was [actually] a farmer and began working the steel mill when the war started. When he’d make us breakfast, he’d listen to country music, so that’s how I heard country. So I had listened to jazz, the blues, Polish music, and country, and Minnie Pearl even.
As a kid, I didn’t know I was gonna grow up to be a musician. It just worked out that I came across diverse stuff when I was young. Plus, later I found out I could listen to a song once and arrange it without reading the sheet music.
Evans knew he wanted to be an artist, but he hadn't connected with music until his older brother, in a letter from Guam, told him he should be a musician, and since he idolized his older brother, he started playing the bass, because
...it was a quiet instrument. People could see me play it but could not really hear it, so they wouldn’t know that I wasn’t a real musician.
But when his brother got out of the service and went to work in the steel mill, he saved up his money
and bought young Richard a bass, and then the boy knew that he couldn't let his hero down. He had to become a real musician. He went on to become a musician (with Sun Ra), composer and producer--for Cadet, which was Argo with a new name, and for whom he produced Marlena Shaw (he wrote her biggest hit, "Woman of the Ghetto"), Donny Hathaway, and Woody Herman, in spite of Leonard Chess's misgivings:
Leonard Chess called me and said, “You signed that old fade Woody?” I told Leonard that I could still get a hit out of him. So we went to a hotel ballroom in North Chicago and rehearsed some songs. We only had four tracks: one track for reeds, one for rhythm, one for solos, and one for brass. We cut that whole album, Light My Fire, in two and a half hours. It turned out to become a Grammy-nominated album.
Another life in the jazz business. There eight million stories in the Naked City, three million stories in the Windy City, and Lord knows how many in the disapora of jazz, and they're all good. This has been one of them.
Does "Pull My Coat" reflect Evans's early Polish influence? Maybe only the title -- "The Pull My
Coat Polka?" -- sounds like a hit for Jimmy Sturr, doesn't it? Certainly not the way Griffin and Davis play it. It's bebop you can dance to, driving and wailing and riff-driven and lyrical at the same time.
The rest of their set list is wonderfully eclectic. They go to Fletcher Henderson for the little-heard "What's Happening?", which includes a romping and stomping piano solo from Norman Simmons, and Simmons himself contributes the next number, "Abundance," which is a vehicle for a dialogue between the contrasting sounds of the two boss tenors.
"63rd Street Theme" is a Griffin original, down and dirty, with lots of room for great blowing, and you could dance to it. "Hey Jim" is solidly from the bebop era, by Babs Gonzalez and James Moody,.
And "If I Had You"is a chestnut from the 1920s by Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly, composers of the drunkard's anthem "Show Me the Way to Go Home," and the romantic ballad "Try a Little Tenderness," co-written with Tin Pan Alley veteran Ted Shapiro. It was the last tune of the day for them, the only ballad, and the one song from the entire set that can be called a standard, with admirers in virtually every genre. Every genre? Well, in 1955 alone, it was covered by jazz singer Barbara Carroll, pop singer Margaret Whiting, avant-gardist Lennie Tristano, and country singer Rusty Draper. We've heard it recently on a Prestige session by Etta Jones. Davis and Griffin give it that classic bebop treatment of starting sweet and opening up to some wild and creative blowing, before cycling back to the head again.
The players in the rhythm section are all making their Prestige debuts. Pianist Norman Simmons was Johnny Griffin's homeboy from Chicago, and like Griffin, had made his debut as a leader for Argo in 1956. He would become probably best known as an accompanist to some of jazz's finest singers, including Betty Carter, Anita O'Day, Etta Jones and Dakota Staton, with long and fruitful collaborations with both Carmen MacRae and Joe Williams. He was also in demand as an arranger, working with Johnny Griffin's big band and others--most famously, arranging Ramsey Lewis's hit record "Wade in the Water."
Victo Sproles was also part of that Chicago gang. He and Simmons started out together, playing with Red Rodney and Ira Sullivan on an album called Modern Music from Chicago. He was part of Griffin's big band, and teamed up with Simmons behind Joe Williams.
Ben Riley played on all the Davis/Griffin sessions for Prestige and Riverside/Jazzland, and a lot more--over 300 albums to his credit. In an obituary, Michael J. West, for WBGO's web page, described his style:
His drumming was noted for understatement, and for a slightly skewed rhythmic conception that could keep the listener off balance. If these seem contradictory, it was perhaps Riley’s greatest gift that he reconciled them.
On this album, particularly on "Abundance," you can hear him doing exactly that.
Esmond Edwards produced the session, which was released on Prestige as Battle Royal. "Pull My Coat" also came out as a two-side 45 RPM disc, edited down for the jukeboxes and the dancers to feature the two saxophones--Norman Simmons's piano solo is cut.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three vokunes available from Amazon.
The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
How does one get a recording contract? Or how did one, back in the day? John Wright was playing a gig in his native Chicago. There was a Sunday jam session at a club near the hotel where most of the touring big bands stayed, and players from the Hampton or Ellington band, or whatever band was passing through Chicago, would come and jam. After one of these sessions,
a fellow walked in and said, “I’m from New York, I’m a hiring man for one of the companies in New York, and I’ve got a spot for you. Would you like to come to New
York and record?” Well, I’ve heard of Prestige Records and Riverside, Coral, and Blue Note, those were the most prestigious jazz records back in the day. Quite naturally, I said yes. So, he gave me a plane ticket and $500. In August 1960, I went to New York City and that’s where I got to record five albums on Prestige Records.
Why not? Wright brought his regular trio with him, and he brought a breath of Chicago with him--not the breath that was hog butcher to the world, but the one that came out of the jazz clubs on the South Side. As Wright ran it down in a later interview, the album
...was talking about the streets of Chicago; South Side Soul; Sin Corner (Sin Corner was about every corner); Amen Corner (Amen Corner was the churches); 63th and Cottage Grove; 35th Street Blues, 47th Street (47th street was a red-light district) and LaSalle Street was the financial district. The blocks on State Street, Wentworth, and Cottage Grove, were always storefront churches. It was about two or three storefront churches in every block.
One might expect such a thematic album to be entirely self=composed, but such is not the case.
Wright takes composing credit for the red light district and "63rd and Cottage Grove." bandmate Wendell Roberts contributes the "35th Street Blues" and the "Amen Corner." The financial district after hours and the sin corner were the product of another composer, and an understandable pairing, since who knows what goes on in the financial district of a large metropolis after hours, especially in those days, when the big brokerage offices were macho central? The composer was Armand "Jump" Jackson, a jazz and rhythm and blues drummer and all-around entrepreneur and impresario. "South Side Soul," which became the album's title, Wright's signature song, and part of his name--from then on he was John "South Side Soul" Wright, appears not to have been written by a Chicagoan at all. Composer credit goes to producer Esmond Edwards, and since Edwards did not make a regular habit of slapping his name on other people's compositions, it seems likely that the credit was deserved.
By the end of the 1950s, Chicago had started to make a significant name for itself as the home of the electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but Wright was making South Side soul of a different sort, the kind of piano trio jazz that Chess Records songwriter-producer Willie Dixon started out in, and that Ahmad Jamal was making in the more upscale part of the city.
But if Wright wasn't making quite the kind of hard-edged blues that Chess artists like Otis Spann were making, his South Side sound was funkier and bluesier than the uptown jazz of Jamal. The blues penetrate every note he plays, and it makes for some very good listening.
Wendell Roberts and Walter McCants are South Siders who remained part of the Chicago scene without making broader waves in the jazz world, but they know about the blues and provide sympathetic support to Wright. McCant's son Nolan has made a name for himself as a photographer.
"Sin Corner" and "Amen Corner" were released as a 45 RPM single.
I've talked about the blues revival starting in earnest after the 1962 release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers in 1962, and of course by "blues revival" I mean the new expanded audience, mostly white, that started putting on blues festivals, that sought out old Delta musicians like Son House, that followed the British rockers to sweet home Chicago and the musicians who had been creating a new electric blues. But there were some young white folks who had fallen in love with the blues earlier, people like Happy Traum who sought out and studied with Brownie McGhee, and other young New Yorkers who came up to Harlem to learn from the blind preacher and street singer, Blind Gary Davis, also known as the Reverend Gary Davis (which he was), or the Harlem Street Singer (which he also was.)
Just a few of those: Bob Dylan, Stefan Grossman, David Bromberg, Dave Van Ronk, Rory Block, Larry Campbell, and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir (the Dead would record "Samson and Delilah" and "Death Don't Have No Mercy." So Davis's influence and his sound were far-reaching, far beyond those who actually heard him in performance or on record.
His influence went deeper than that. Originally from the Piedmont region, he taught Blind Boy Fuller, who in turn mentored Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He was a remarkably gifted musician. Some credit part of his virtuosity to a broken wrist that was set at an odd angle, making it possible for him to reach in and make difficult chords.
He had made a few records in the 1930s for ARC, the "race" records subsidiary of Columbia, not very successfully. He could never get used to the recording studio, and saw no need to finish a song just because the red "recording" light went out. He was a more accomplished musician than Blind Boy Fuller and the other blues musicians who had been signed, but he was paid less, because of his lack of studio experience and skills, and that rankled him. He was also, by that time, singing religious music (he became an ordained minister in 1937) and clashed with ARC's producers over that--they wanted blues.
He would not record again until 1954, when he made an album for Stinson, a New York-based label. Stinson may have been the perfect archetype of the adoption of blues and rural folk music by urban leftists: it was founded by Communists for the purpose of issuing recordings from the Soviet Union. It even pressed its records on red vinyl.
He next recorded one album for Riverside in 1956, then nothing until his series of Folkways albums in 1960-61. He recorded through the mid-1960s, and went on preaching and performing until shortly before his death in 1972.
The session--all spirituals, although as Davis became more and more embraced by the new blues audience, he did start to expand his repertoire to include some secular music--was produced by folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, and released by Bluesville as Harlem Street Singer. The Jazzdisco website lists the session as having taken place in New York City. Wikipedia puts in the Van Gelder studio, but it seems more likely that it was not. About half the songs recorded that day were never released. Later rereleases on Prestige and the short-lived Prestige Folkore were titled Pure Religion.
You may start listening to this album thinking of the poignancy of two young lives. Lem Winchester would be dead a few months after this session. Oliver Nelson was at the beginning of a career that would last into the next decade and include many recordings, but he would die of a heart attack at age 45.
But however you started listening to it, you would very quickly be in the thrall of the music. Nelson and Winchester are both brilliant soloists, and so is the underrated Richard Wyands. But the real show-stopper here is Nelson as composer.
Nelson began to be recognized as a composer for his Impulse! album, Blues and the Poetic Truth, and he went on to have considerable commercial success composing and arranging music for movies and TV, and he composed several symphonic works. But his greatness as a composer didn't start with Blues and the Poetic Truth. Listen to any of his originals on this album: "Nocturne," "Early Morning," or particularly "Bob's Blues."
It surprised me to discover, as highly regarded as Nelson is in jazz circles, how few recordings of the tunes from Blues and the Poetic Truth have been made by others. It absolutely shocked me to discover that none of his other compositions have even been recorded. I defy any jazz musician reading this blog to listen to "Bob's Blues" and say that he or she wouldn't like to make their own interpretation of it.
The album is called Nocturne. Esmond Edwards produced. It was released on Moodsville after Winchester's death, as we see in this four-star review from the April 24, 1961 issue of Billboard:
One of the newer jazz names is spotlighted in this moody compilation of torch ballads. Oliver Nelson plays both tenor and alto on the date with a genuine regard for the ballad form. He is caught, along with the late vibes player Lem Winchester, on seven feelingful tracks playing some beautiful melodic material.
The Billboard reviewer goes on to single out "In a Sentimental Mood" (Duke Ellington),"Time After Time" (Jule Styne) and "Man with a Horn" (Jenney, Lake, deLange) for mention, but none of Nelson's originals, so recognition of his composing skills was a little slow in coming. Granted, these are all first-rate tunes, but so are Nelson's.
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. Available from Amazon.
Brownie McGhee had recorded for Prestige once before, in 1951, predating the Bluesville label by nearly a decade, during an earlier and shorter-lived flirtation with folk blues by Bob Weinstock. I've pointed out that Weinstock's Bluesville anticipated the full-out blues craze that would come later in the 1960s, generally credited with dating from the 1961 Columbia release on LP of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, which gathered together some of the recordings Johnson had made in the 1930s.
Terry and McGhee were contemporaries of Johnson's, but from a different region. Johnson was from the Mississippi Delta, as were the blues singers like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson who migrated to the Midwest, mostly Chicago. Terry and McGhee were from the East Coast, the Piedmont plateau, which runs more or less parallel to the Appalachian mountain range across several southern states, and which gave its name to the Piedmont style of blues.
The most important progenitor of the Piedmont blues style was Blind Boy Fuller, both McGhee and Terry worked with him, Terry as his harmonica-playing sidekick, McGhee leading him and absorbing his guitar style. All three of them had become full time musicians, playing on the street or for local dances, because physical disabilities left them with no other career choices. Fuller and Terry were both blind; McGhee's legs were crippled by polio.
Fuller was, among other things, a master of the double entendre dirty blues, the composer of such classics as "Keep on Truckin', Mama" and "What's that Smells Like Fish?" Like Robert Johnson, he had been sought out by John Hammond to appear in his 1938 "From Spirituals to Swing" concert at Carnegie Hall (presumably to do cleaner material), and like Johnson, he didn't make it. In both cases, in true blues fashion, there was a woman involved. Johnson was dead, poisoned by a jealous husband; Fuller was in prison for shooting his wife in the leg. Terry took his place, and stayed in New York.
The two of them began their guitar-harmonica partnership in New York in the early 1940s. Later in the decade, they drifted apart. McGhee tried his hand at rhythm and blues, following the lead of his brother, Stick McGhee, who had a substantial R&B hit with "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee." Terry found himself on Broadway, in the cast of the musical Finian's Rainbow, about an Irish family (and leprechaun) in the segregated South.
In the 1950s, they resumed their professional partnership, which was to last over the next several decades. Like Lead Belly before them, they learned quickly that the audience for folk blues in New York was white leftists, and they adapted their style to that audience. Terry frequently collaborated with Woody Guthrie. They developed a repertoire of old songs adapted to their style, and songs of their own composing, that--unlike the electric blues that Southern transplants to Chicago and Detroit were developing--remained acoustic and fit in well with the folk music scene that was developing around Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and their ilk.
Terry wrote a song about Lead Belly -- "Me and Huddie Ledbetter, Huddie Ledbetter was my friend," which McGee adapted to "Me and old Sonny, Sonny Terry was my friend," but from many accounts, that was not strictly true. They did not get along. But unlike the rock groups that came
along in the late 20th century, that let personality and ego clashes break them up just when they were reaching their pinnacle of success, Terry and McGhee kept a successful business relationship going, and McGhee kept singing about how old Sonny was his best friend.
Their sessions for Bluesville mostly featured the same songs, and the same arrangements, that they recorded for Folkways and Stinson and whatever other folk-oriented labels wanted to pick them up. Roy Haynes joins them on a few tracks, but essentially they resisted the Prestige Bluesville treatment. And that's mostly good. I love the Bluesville albums that put traditional bluesmen together with jazz musicians from the Prestige orbit, but McGhee and Terry had a formula that worked, and went on entertaining people for a great many years, so why mess with it?
These sessions were released on a series of Bluesville albums: Down Home Blues (also on Prestige Folklore, a short-lived Prestige venture that did mostly re-releases in 1963-64), Blues And Folk, Blues All Round My Head, Blues In My Soul. There were some 45 RPM releases: "Let Me Be Your Little Dog" / "Stranger Here," "Too Nicey Mama" / "Pawn Shop," and "Beggin' And Cryin'" / "Freight Train."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 3, 1957-58 now includes, in its Kindle edition, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. Available from Amazon.
decamping from Chicago to New Orleans in the early 1950s, as that style gained the ascendancy on the South Side.
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