Listen to Prestige 520: Memphis Slim

LISTEN TO ONE: Churnin' Man Blues

 One tends to think of Memphis Slim as blues pioneer, and he was only four years younger than Robert Johnson, but actually he was second generation blues within his own family. His father, Peter Chatman, led a band that featured pianist Roosevelt Sykes, young John Chatman's earliest piano mentor. 

Chatman moved to Chicago in 1939, began playing with Jazz Gillum, Big Bill Broonzy and others, and by the mid 1940s was leading his own rhythm and blues/jump blues band with some success, particularly the record he called "Nobody Loves Me," but has become better known as "Every Day (I Have the Blues)." Versions of this song had been around for a while, but Slim's reworking of it became the standard version, and he is generally given composer credit. That is to say, "Peter Chatman" is given composer credit, because Slim usually used his father's name as his songwriting pseudonym.

As the rhythm and blues market dried up. and the folk music/folk blues market began to open up, Slim followed the path of his jazz mentor Big Bill Broonzy and became a folk musician, playing solo or with bassist Willie Dixon. And a European tour convinced him that this was the way to go. Not long after the release of this record, he decamped for Paris, which remained his expatriate home until his death in 1988. In 1986, he was made a Commander in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of France.

This album is called All Kinds of Blues, and we do get a bunch of varieties, all of them well known to fans of Memphis Slim. There's the patter intro, over a slow boogie or piano blues feature. In "Blues is Troubles." we get that, and we also get that Slim is talking and singing to an audience of European or white folk festival fans--he wouldn't need to explain to home folks what the blues are. And Slim is generous in his inclusion here: "That's what I like about the blues. No discrimination. Everybody have the blues."  It was, of course, discrimination that drove Slim and so many other African American musicians to an expatriate life in Europe.

Slim was no stranger to the dirty blues, and we get them here in "If You See Kay" (no explanation necessary) and "Grinder Blues." We get the patter song and the dirty blues together in "Churnin' Blues." One of the enjoyable things about double entendre songs is that anything can be used as a metaphor for sex. Here it's farm work. Churnin' is a familiar metaphor--Wynonie Harris uses it in "Keep on Churnin' till the Butter Comes." In this song, Slim shows that he's not only skilled with the double entendre, he also knows his way around actual churning on the farm - "I put my dasher in, and then I turn it around and around." And challenges to fellow artists didn't start with the rappers. In this song, Slim tells us that Willie Dixon, Big Maceo and Muddy Waters are all in awe of his churning ability.

It was Big Bill Broonzy who encouraged Slim to stop imitating Roosevelt Sykes and find his own style, and he certainly did that. He became one of the foremost piano blues and boogie-woogie stylists, and he shows it here with three instrumentals, "Three-in-one Boogie, "The Blacks," and "Frankie and Johnny Boogie." 

"Letter Home" is more sentimental than most blues, and it has a psychological subtlety more commonly associated with modern performer/writers like Chuck Berry.

All Kinds of Blues was Slim's fourth and last for Prestige Bluesville. "Churnin' Blues" and "If You See Kay" were also included on Bluesville's Bawdy Blues compilations.