LISTEN TO ONE: That's All Right
This is listed on the jazzdisco site as being a 1961 recording in New Orleans, with no further recording details. It was issued by Bluesville in 1962, but definitely recorded earlier--mostly in 1959 and 1960 by folklorist Harry Oster, and certainly in New Orleans, Eaglin's home town. In 1960 he had signed with Imperial, but the Oster recordings were leased to various labels, and Bluesville was probably the most substantial of them, with the best distribution network, so this vinyl release was an important part of the Snooks Eaglin story.
The Snooks Eaglin story, as told by writers of the time, is an interesting window onto the landscape of music writing, and especially writing about the blues, at mid-20th century, before the blues explosion of the
1960s. Folklorists like Samuel Charters and Kenny Goldstein were rediscovering for white America the blues as an art form, and the folk music revival had swept up acoustic blues in its net.
Electric blues and rhythm and blues were still regarded with suspicion, especially as purists, both of the jazz and folk persuasion, recoiled from rock and roll.
Ray Charles was a litmus test of sorts. Joe Goldberg, in his book, Jazz Masters of the Fifties, recalls how jazz DJ Symphony Sid would blow off callers who asked for Ray with "We don't play rock and roll." Big Bill Broonzy, the jazz guitarist turned folk blues singer, was noted for his hospitality to all sorts of music ("Is rock and roll folk music?" "I ain't never heard no horses singin' it"), but even he, in his memoir Big Bill Blues, draws a line: "Ray Charles is a mess. He's got the blues and gospel all mixed up" (quoting from memory).
Snooks Eaglin, who at one time called himself "Little Ray Charles," was something of a conundrum to the folklorists who were the early champions of the blues. Modeling themselves on John and Alan Lomax, early folklorists like Charters and Oster traveled the back roads, seeking out singers and instrumentalists who sang and played songs handed down in their families or churches or communities. Harry Smith was the exception. His Anthology of American Folk Music, released by Folkways in 1952, was entirely composed of commercial 78 RPM records that Smith had collected over the years, though the performers who sang and played on those recordings were mostly singing songs that had been handed down to them. Jimmie Rodgers, known as the father of country music, was another exception. When he went to audition for Ralph Peer and the Victor Talking Machine Company, he played popular sentimental tunes, and was told that they weren't interested in that, they wanted authentic folk music. Rodgers didn't know any authentic folk songs, so that night he and his sister-in-law wrote a bunch of songs that were as authentic as any that have ever been sung or recorded.
Eaglin was younger. He was born in 1937, the year after Robert Johnson made his recordings. As a New Orleans teenager in 1952, he played electric guitar in a rhythm and blues band called the Flamingoes (along with 14-year-old Alan Toussaint). And he learned his songs (he claimed to know over 2500) from the radio, from rhythm and blues and country and, yes, rock and roll. From Ray Charles and Elvis Presley ("That's All Right Mama," which he did for the Oster session, was written and originally recorded by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, but made most famous in Elvis's Sun Records version). And yet, singing on the streets of New Orleans, playing an acoustic guitar, he was unquestionably an authentic blues voice, at a time when authenticity was often questioned and closely scrutinized.
Kenneth Goldstein, in his liner notes to Folkways' 1959 release of some of Oster's sessions with Eaglin, attempted to come to grips with this new phenomenon:
All too little research has been done in the area of studying the effects of commercial and standardized music upon tradition...Listening to Snooks' recordings one is immediately aware that, though learned from radio and recordings, his material has undergone a process of change not unlike material in actual oral circulation. Learning a song from having heard it once or twice on radio, or from recordings, is little different from having learned it orally from another singer.
So, is it really authentic folk music? You bet. No horses did any singing or playing on this record. Instead, Eaglin was joined by a couple of real folks. Harry Oster, in the liner notes to New Orleans Washboard Blues on his own Folk-Lyric label (later re-released on Arhoolie Records) describes them:
Percy (Brother) Randolph, a French Quarter junkman who pushes around a primitive wooden cart, and Lucius Bridges, and auto mechanic.
The blues were not native to Great Britain, and British awareness of them developed a little differently. Lonnie Donegan, who changed his first name from Tony after hearing Lonnie Johnson play a concert at London's Royal Festival Hall, adapted the songs of Lead Belly and Josh White to his own skiffle beat. But the real blues awakening in Britain came with Muddy Waters' 1959 British tour. So it's not surprising that when music critic Tony Standish brought out a Snooks Eaglin record, which overlapped the Bluesville release, on his tiny (sales in the three figures were a real breakthrough for him) but influential Heritage label, his view of authentic blues included the Chess Records stars who were still scorned as rock-and-rollers by the folk blues purists (that would change in the 1960s), although--perhaps surprisingly, but maybe not if your idea of blues purity starts with Muddy Waters--he drew the line at Ray Charles:
Anyone who relied on solely on today's jazz press for his information could hardly be blamed for thinking the folk blues of the American Negro was a dying art...the blues as a continuing folk art is treated superficially if at all...an average, slipshod singer like Ray Charles is hailed as the epitome of down-homeness; contemporary blues singers such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Little Willie John are dismissed as worthless rock 'n rollers
But we live in a postmodern world where the battles of authenticity and purity are long since forgotten. Harry Oster's Snooks Eaglin recordings were picked up by Folkways and Bluesville. Harry Oster, in his liner notes to the Bluesville release, describes his approach vividly:
Although Snooks Eaglin's sources are diverse, spanning country blues, pop standards, rhythm and blues and rock-and-roll--in fact every type of music that circulates in a city Negro environment, he transforms them all into something characteristically his own; the voice is an extraordinary blend of hoarseness and velvet subtlety, roughness and wistfulness; the guitar technique is always brilliant, marked by short, fast, intricate swingy runs
Oster could not completely shake his folkie purist's distrust of rhythm and blues. In his liner notes to the Bluesville album, he wrote of "Don't You Lie to Me":
Although Snooks is here following the general pattern of rhythm-and-blues...he turns dross into gold through the dazzling brilliance of his guitar playing.
Eaglin made rhythm and blues records for Imperial, one of the two West Coast labels (Specialty was the other) that specialized in New Orleans rhythm and blues from 1960 to 1962, as Snooks Eaglin and as Ford Eaglin (an alteration of his given name Fird). In my youthful rhythm and blues collecting days (no mean feat for a small-town upstate boy) I had a Ford Eaglin 45 on Imperial. Then he seems to have faded into a temporary oblivion. Tony Standish, in the liner notes to Heritage album in 1963, lamented that Eaglin had disappeared and no one, including his father. seemed to where he was.
He can't have gone too far, because he was pretty much of a New Orleans fixture, and Standish in the same notes reported that some thought they had seen him playing rhythm and blues in a bar. In any event, he did turn up again, and enjoyed a long and fruitful career. He died in 2009.
The Bluesville album is entitled That's All Right.
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