Listening to Prestige 479: Guitar Pete Franklin

Pete Franklin, born in 1928, was a good deal younger than most of the blues artists recruited for Prestige's Bluesville subsidiary, but stylistically he had more in common with those older artists, and much of his career involved accompanying or collaborating with them: St. Louis Jimmy, Roosevelt Sykes, Tampa Red. Jazz Gillum, Sunnyland Slim.

Much of his career was involved in recording with them, and although he generally recorded in Chicago, and he could play the electric guitar if called upon, he mostly stayed with this older style of blues, rather than getting involved in the electric blues sound

being pioneered by Chess Records. And perhaps that's understandable: when he was growing up in Indianapolis, he mother took in boarders, and one of those boarders was Leroy Carr, arguably the greatest influence on that generation of blues musicians. Franklin, though he called himself Guitar Pete, was equally capable on the piano, where he played very much in the style of Carr. An important influence on his guitar playing was Carr's frequent collaborator Scrapper Blackwell.

The Bluesville session was his only full length recording session, and one of the very few released under his own name. It was recorded in his hometown of Indianapolis by Kenneth S. Goldstein and another folklorist, Art Rosenbaum, who had grown up in Indianapolis and, as a youngster, had almost accidentally made one of the gret discoveries of the blues revival. As he recalled it years later in an interview with Fred C. Fussell of Georgia Music Magazine:

 I rediscovered Scrapper Blackwell, but I honestly didn’t know who I had rediscovered – at least not until I was talking to a friend who was slightly older than me. I said, “Hey, I met this really great guitar player who said he made some records back in the old days. His name is Scrapper Blackwell.” Well, this guy, Ted Watts, just hit the ceiling! “You mean Scrapper’s living here?” he said. Scrapper hadn’t recorded for many years, and was not active as a musician anymore except for going around to play at house parties. But he still could play amazingly well, and he sang with a very poignant voice. 

Franklin was recorded alone, accompanying himself on both piano and guitar. Unusually for a rediscovered blues singer, he did not repeat any of the songs he had previously recorded, instead choosing mostly songs he liked off earlier recordings by others: "Doctor" Clayton, Curtis Jones, Tampa Red, and of course, Leroy Carr. He sang a couple of songs that had just been around forever, and one of his own composition, "Guitar Pete's Blues," the song he is now most remembered for. Guitar Pete Alexander isn't hugely remembered at all--not part of the generation of Leroy Carr and Tampa Red, never part of the newer sound of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam. But he was a solid bluesman, and another reason to be grateful for the arrangement struck between Kenny Goldstein and Bob Weinstock.

The album was called Guitar Pete's Blues, and it has been rereleased on CD by Concord as part of their Original Blues Classics series. It's worth a listen.