Listening to Prestige 523: Tampa Red

LISTEN TO ONE: How Long

 When Samuel Charters sought out Tampa Red in Chicago in the late 1950s, he found a singer whose commercial viability had dried up under shifting musical tastes, but who, unlike some of the others Charters found, had not given up on the idea of a recording career, and was itching for the chance to get back in the studio/ In the liner notes to this album, Charters reports that when he first spoke to Tampa (he got the nickname "Tampa" when he arrived in Chicago from Florida; "Red" came later): 

As he talked about the situation, sitting in his small room on Chicago's south side, he said again and again that he could still play the blues and get new songs together if he had a chance to record.

Sadly, for all his enthusiasm, Tampa would not record again after this, his second Bluesville album. although he lived another 20 years.

Neither Bluesville album represented his own choice for recording options. He was presented as a solo act, with just acoustic guitar (and kazoo!), but he had always preferred to work with a partner or even a group, going back as far as his widely popular recordings in the 1920s with "Georgia Tom." particularly "It's Tight Like That." Georgia Tom would become Thomas A, Dorsey, composer of some of America's  most beloved gospel songs. His most frequent partner, Big Maceo Meriwether, had died in 1953, and most of his old bandmates had died or left the business. If this had been ten years later, Tampa would have had no trouble finding young blues enthusiasts, most of them white, dying to play with an authentic blues legend, Even a couple of years later, young Chicagoans like Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop and Nick Gravenites were falling in love with the blues and forming a new generation of blues bands. But Tampa went into the studio with no amplified guitar and no fellow musicians.

Into which studio? That's a little unclear. The back cover of the first Bluesville album, at least one pressing of it, says "recorded in Chicago," and the usually reliable jazzdisco.org also gives Chicago as the site of the recording. But the back cover also says "recorded by Rudy Van Gelder," and Rudy wasn't known for taking road trips. The second Bluesville album also lists Van Gelder as the recording engineer. Stefan Wirz, the German blues discographer whose website is remarkably complete, has

Chicago listed as the recording site for both albums--and for both albums, has crossed out Chicago and written in Englewood Cliffs. That's a little odd--why not cut Chicago completely, rather than just crossing it out? Tampa Red's is one of the few pages on Wirz's site that's still marked "Under Construction," so maybe he's still researching this issue. Conceivably, whoever typed up the copy for the back cover could have put Van Gelder's name down by force of habit.

For now, we'll go with the preponderance of evidence and assign the recording site to Englewood Cliffs. If Esmond Edwards were still producing for Bluesville, he might have brought in some musicians to work with Tampa, but Kenneth Goldstein was more of the new breed of folklorist.

Charters quotes Tampa Red as saying:

My theory of a song is that it should have some kind of meaning to it. If it doesn't a man goes to two or three different meanings before he knows what the song is about.

Of course, in his younger hokum days, double entendre songs were exactly what he was about. But he'd mostly outgrown that by this time  (he does give us a little of the old hokum in "Jelly Whippin' Blues"), and he gives us the blues, straight, no chaser. It's too bad he never got to record again. 

The Bluesville album is entitled Don't Jive Me.