Tad Richards' odyssey through the catalog of Prestige Records:an unofficial and idiosyncratic history of jazz in the 50s and 60s. With occasional digressions.
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.
Bluesville has called upon Memphis Slim before, for a jazzier 1959 session under Willie Dixon's name, featuring Harold Ashby on tenor sax; then two sessions in 1960, one a piano-bass-drums trio and the other piano and harmonica. There was only one more simplification that could be made, and this session makes it--Slim alone with his piano.
But not quite that simple. On four tracks, he switches over to organ, two instrumental and two with vocals. Slim's rolling piano style is a huge part of his appeal, and the organ stuff is very different, but it offers pleasures of its own.
The instrumental organ tracks are his own compositions, "Celeste's Boogie" ("Cella's Boogie" on the session log) and "Mr. Freddie's Boogie." The vocals are the traditional "Soon One Morning" and "Goin' Down Slow," originally a hit for St. Louis Jimmy Odem in 1941 (and reprised by him for Bluesville in 1960). The two boogies are the more successful experiments.
"Steady Rollin' Blues" and "Three Women Blues" are both Memphis Slim compositions, and each with a debt to previous blues--as has been noted before, a good blues lyric is likely to turn up in a number of songs. Robert Johnson sang about being a steady rolling man, but the real nod here is to Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's 1946 "So Glad You're Mine," covered a decade later by Elvis Presley. Slim borrows from the chorus - "I'm so glad I'm living, and I'm so glad you're mine." "Three Women Blues" tackles the familiar theme of the guy who's only loved three women. Jimmie Rodgers did it a little more sentimentally than some. His three women are his mother, his sister, and his darling wife. Slim's persona has a tougher time: "My mother, and my sister, and the gal who wrecked my life." He borrows more strikingly from from Alberta Hunter, by way of Bessie Smith, who made "Downhearted Blues" one of her best-known songs. Slim sings it: "You know I've got the world in a jug, I hold the stopper right here in my hand / But I'm gonna hold you baby, until you come under my command."
There are lots of songs about big-legged women (a blues euphemism for big butt). Slim has chosen to credit Jimmy (Mr. Blues) Williams's version, though by the time he gets through with it, it is Slim's own. He goes to two legends of the blues for his other two selections: Leroy Carr for "Mean Mistreatin' Mama" and B. B. King for "Rock Me Baby," and he more than does justice to these two masters. "ROck Me Baby" is credited to King and Joe Josea, but it's King all the way. "Joe Josea" was the pseudonym that West Coast indie label impresario Joseph Bihari used when he wanted to claim writing and publishing credit for a song one of his artists had written and recorded for his label.
I've made "Mr. Freddie Boogie" my "Listen to One" to show a different side of Memphis Slim, although his piano blues are really his best work.
Ken Goldstein produced the session. It was engineered by Mel Kaiser, whose specialty was engineering blues and folk recording sessions, but is oddly best known, for those who know about such things, for his Folkways album of science fiction sound effects. The Bluesville release was called The Blues of Memphis Slim: Steady Rolling Blues.
Prestige Bluesville released two Memphis Slim albums in 1961, each of them culled partly from an earlier session (April 26, 1960) and partly from this one. Although Slim had, throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, fronted a rhythm and blues ensemble with a couple of saxophones, and one might have thought that side of him would have appealed to Bob Weinstock's jazz-oriented sensibilities, Prestige--like Folkways, which recorded him at about the same time--decided to emphasize his folk blues persona. The April session put him together with Lafayette Thomas, a rhythm and blues guitarist from the West Coast who was taking a folk blues sabbatical in New York, and jazz bassist Wendell Marshall. For this November session, Marshall is dropped, and Thomas is replaced by Buster Brown, here called Buster "Harpie" Brown, on harmonica.
Both sessions, though, belong to Memphis Slim's inventive boogie-woogie and blues piano playing, and his distinctive vocals.
One of the interesting things about different blues singers, as they expanded their audience from their neighbors in the delta to white folks from the north, is their different levels of intelligibility. Sometimes you didn't even have to be from the north. Early blues scholars and musicologists puzzled over some of Charley Patton's lyrics. Some they had to guess at, some they couldn't get at all. When Patton's friend and blues partner Son House was rediscovered in Rochester, New York, the scholars beat a path to his door, played some of the old records, and asked, "What's Charley saying here? And here? And here?"
House just laughed. "Nobody could ever understand what Charley was saying. You could be standing on the bandstand right next to him and you wouldn't understand."
Muddy Waters is supposed to have told Mick Jagger that too much attention to diction took away from the emotional power of the song, and it's an interesting idea, although Mick--and Elvis before him--were smart enough to know that you can't imitate the unintelligibility of a Delta blues singer, although Elvis himself was from pretty close to the Delta.
And Muddy may have something. People who don't speak a word of Italian can still be moved to tears by grand opera. On the other extreme from Charley Patton, whose music is emotionally searing, you have Josh White, whose diction is supper-club perfect, as opposed to coffee-house casual, and doesn't deliver that much of an emotional punch. Of course, diction is only part of that story. You can understand all the words to both Josh White's and Billie Holiday's version of "Strange Fruit," but only one of them will tear your guts out.
Robert Pete Williams is closer to the Patton end of the spectrum, and if you really wanted to get every word he was saying, you'd have to listen awfully closely, which of course is why you don't. You can get the drift of "Parole Renied Again," and feel the lonesome desperation a prisoner's hopes dashed, without understanding every word.
Muddy Waters' first recordings for the Library of Congress, when he was still in the Delta. By the time he started recording for Chess, even though it was still "race records," he'd spent some time in the North and while he wasn't thinking in terms of communicating with white audiences, his Delta accent has still thinned out some. Chuck Berry came to Chess a few years later. He was from St. Louis, and had grown up listening to Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, and to the very different accents of the white country and western singers he heard and admired on the radio. The brilliance and wit of his lyrics, the incisiveness of his character development and social commentary, demanded that the words be understood.
Memphis Slim was originally from Memphis, but he made Chicago his home for many years, and, as with Muddy Waters, the North had its effect on his diction, although it's still very much his own, and he's certainly not sacrificing anything on the altar of making sure he's understood, although when the lyric is clever, as in "Beer Drinking Woman." the words come across clearly. By the time he was reinventing himself as a purveyor of folk blues for Bluesville and Folkways, he knew his audience would be the white leftists for whom Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie McGhee had reinvented themselves, creating a new audience and a new blues style. More power to them. They played their music, and got paid for it. And Memphis Slim was one of the greats.
How much he's adapted himself to a new audience can be heard in his Dragnet intro to an original blues he's been singing for a long time, "Beer Drinking Woman" (it's also on one of his Folkways albums with Willie Dixon).
His version of "My Baby Left Me" is very different from Arthur Crudup's (the one covered by Elvis)., but they have an opening verse in common. There are variations, but the basic structure is the same -- his baby has left him without saying a word, so he doesn't know if it was something he did or something that she heard.
"When Your Dough Roller Is Gone" sounds as though it's going to be another clever one, "dough roller" working as both allusion to sexual and breadwinning prowess, but it turns out to be a pretty straightforward blues about a lost lover. So is "Darling, I Miss You So," for all that the title sounds more like something Perry Como would sing. There's a comedy routine about what blues lyrics can and can't be about. It includes names that would never fit into a blues, like Sierra, Sequioa, Auburn or Rainbow. "Darling" comes close to making that list, but frankly, Memphis Slim could sing a blues about a woman named Sequoia, or even Muffy, and make it work.
And as good as his singing is, his piano playing seals the deal. If there are limitations on the possibilities of blues or boogie-woogie piano styles, you couldn't prove it by Slim. He includes some instrumental numbers in this session, and each of them is a treat.
Slim is the engine that drives this whole session, and Buster Brown doesn't have that much to so. But when he is featured, as in "IC Blues" or "Motherless Child," he more than holds up his end.
These tracks were meshed with the earlier session and put out on two Bluesville albums, Just Blues and No Strain, both released on Bluesville during 1961.
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
Bob Weinstock has tried, not always successfully, to give a showcase to talented but unheralded blues artists (Al Smith), and he's jumpstarted careers of performers who had slipped into obscurity (Lonnie Johnson). With Memphis Slim, it's a little different, Slim, who started to find success when he moved to Chicago in the late1930s, had sustained a recording career right through the 1950s, as a jump blues player and bandleader, and then reinvented himself as a folk blues artist, having recorded several successful albums for Folkways Records, including one with Pete Seeger.
Don't forget, in 1960 the blues revival had not yet happened, and there actually was not a huge demand for a label named Bluesville. Columbia's release of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers would be released in 1961, and would start a trickle of interest that would grow exponentially as the British Invasion rockers embraced American blues and brought them back home.
The late 1950s were the fields of honor for a complex series of culture wars that made the War on Christmas look like a beach party with Frankie and Annette. In literature, the battle was between tbe academics and the beats--the raw and the cooked, in Robert Lowell's phrase. And in music, the center of all the battles was rock and roll. If you were over 35, rock and roll was an offense to Western civilization, especially if you were over 35 and white and a believer in racial purity. If you were a jazz fan, rock and roll wasn't subtle or sophisticated enough. If you were an ethnic folkie, it wasn't pure enough.
So where did that leave the blues?
It seems hard to believe, as central as the blues are now perceived in the American cultural wheel, but in this era the blues were lumped into the philistine camp. Muddy Waters--philistine then, revered icon now--sang about how the blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll, but back then the cultural guardians stood at the door, banishing both mama and baby as orphans of the storm.
The old guard basically rejected the blues because they weren't white enough. Their idea of the blues was Frank Sinatra singing about how, along with cigarettes lit one after another, you could get your first lesson in learning the blues. Or Dinah Shore singing about how the Southland gave birth to the blues. Nat "King" Cole was white enough until he crossed the unwritten lines. His 15-minute network TV show was canceled when no sponsor would touch it. Sammy Davis Jr. celebrated the new racial tolerance and the death of the old Stepin Fetchit stereotypes by essentially playing Stepin Fetchit to Frank
Sinatra.
The jazz snobs rejected the blues because it wasn't sophisticated enough, but certainly not on racial grounds. Oh, no? Are we so sure about that? Modern jazz had been created, developed, brought to its peak of artistry by black musicians. But there were whites involved in that development, too, and rhythm and blues was so black. If there were any white artists playing rhythm and blues in this era, I can't name them. When Esquire magazine included black critics in its annual jazz poll and suddenly more black artists were winning, Stan Kenton became the first white racist to yell "reverse discrimination." There was no Stan Kenton in rhythm and blues--except Johnny Otis, and he identified as black. There was no Stan Getz in rhythm and blues.
Actually, there was. Elvis Presley was the Stan Getz of rhythm and blues. But no one was going to accept that idea then, and I'm willing to bet that almost mo one who reads this will accept it now. This is not meant to be a knock on Getz. We all know that he and Desmond and Evans are great jazz musicians by anyone's standards. As were Teddy Kotick and Stan Levey and George Wallington and many others. But if there hadn't been white faces on at least some of the bandstands, the audience for modern jazz would have been a lot smaller. And if the Down Beat readership of the 1940s and early 1950s had been blacker, wouldn't Roy Milton and Paul Gayten and Joe Liggins and Big Jay McNeely have been showing up on some of those polls?
Clint Eastwood, in Bird, echoes this. Eastwood is a true jazz lover and a great champion of jazz, and I am perhaps the only person in the jazz community who actually liked Bird, for reasons irrelevant to this discussion. But Eastwood is a bit of an old school jazz snob too, and he does have Parker react incredulously and scornfully when he hears an old rival playing at the Apollo: "What is he doing playing rhythm and blues?" I have to believe that was Bird, and not Bird.
Folkies made the divide easier. If it wasn't played on acoustic instruments, it wasn't folk, and by the 1940s most blues musicians had gone electric. The exceptions there were a small group, mostly centered around New York and mostly recorded on Folkways, including Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Lead Belly.
Lead Belly was the first, and one of Folkways' biggest stars, if such a term can be applied to a populist egalitarian folkie business like Folkways. Lead Belly is an unusual figure, because he's such an important figure in the history of the blues, and yet he's not really a part of the history of the blues at all. The blues as we know them, which means recorded blues, began in 1920 with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," which sparked the blues craze that lasted through the 1920s, until the depression meant that record companies had to cut back on their output, and the black performers got cut back first.
Lead Belly spent the 1920s in prison, so the decade in which his fellow songsters reinvented themselves as bluesmen passed him by. He was discovered by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who were traveling the South looking for authentic Negro folk singers. Since the blues had achieved such a high level of popularity, the Lomaxes regarded it with the disdain an aficionado of classic rhythm and blues would feel for disco. Lead Belly, who knew a thousand songs (and could make up a thousand more) represented the music of an earlier generation--the pure folk music, in the minds of the Lomaxes.
When he got to New York, they found that he had no audience in the black community, He bombed at the Apollo. He represented a time and a culture that contemporary African Americans wanted to forget. So his audience was white leftists--the Folkways crowd. And there was a problem singing the blues to this crowd, because the blues is a music of hard-headed realism. This is the way life is, and don't expect it to be anything else. This was at odds with the philosophy of the white leftists, which was give us bread and give us roses--take it easy, but take it. So Lead Belly did what any good entertainer who wants to eat should do, and gave the people what they wanted. He started writing an singing songs about being from the home of the brave and the land of the free, and not wanting to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie. Others saw that market and decided to get in on it. Big Bill Broonzy, a jazz guitarist from Chicago, reinvented himself as an ethnic folk bluesman (he had the roots credentials for it) and sang a plea to get together and break up the old Jim Crow.
The explosion of popularity of electric blues, and the invention of folk rock,was to change the face of folk music in the mid-1960s, and all but the purest of the purists had to revise their definitions. Muddy Waters gave the nod, or perhaps the finger, to the folk establishment when his 1966 LP was called The Real Folk Blues.
Which brings us to Memphis Slim, who managed not only to make a living through all those years, but to defy categorization. He was a piano player, which put him in a different category from the guitar and harmonica players who congregated in Washington Square Park on Sundays, and who were most identified with the folkie sound, but he recorded for Folkways, as a solo act and with Willie Dixon, the achitect of the Chess Records rhythm and blues sound of Chicago. He put together a jump blues band callled Memphis Slim and the House Rockers which recorded for various R&B labels: He was recording for VeeJay and Folkways at the same time. And after 1962, when he moved full time to Paris, he became a staple of European jazz festivals, including the one at Montreux in Switzerland. His song, "Nobody Loves Me," which a reworking of an earlier blues,"Every Day I Have The Blues," with the original title given back to it, became a hit for Count Basie and Joe Williams, then Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and is now considered a jazz standard.
For his first Prestige session, he formed a trio made up of electric guitarist Lafayette Thomas, whose mostly rhythm and blues background included a steady gig for several years with Jimmy McCracklin, and Prestige regular Wendell Marshall. All the songs are Slim originals, with songwriting credits given to Peter Chatman, which was not Slim's real name either, but his father's. He was actually John Len Chatman, but he used "Peter" for all his songwriting and publishing. Co-writer credit goes to Marshall on "Teasin' the Blues," which has some very nice piano-bass duet parts, and to Thomas on "Nice Stuff," which has a walking guitar solo reminiscent of Jimmy McCracklin.
This session and a later one for Prestige were both distributed across two albums, Just Blues and No Strain. Either would be an excellent introduction to Memphis Slim both as piano player and singer, or to anyone's blues library. Both were released on Bluesville. "Darling I Love You" is marked in the session notes as "Rejected," but Slim must have liked the number, because he did it again in his November session, where Thomas' guitar was replaced by a harmonica, and that one became the first cut on No Strain.
Willie Dixon occupies a special place in the history of the blues. He is really the blues' first professional songwriter.
The early blues singers had no need for a songsmith. They were telling their own stories, and they were singing them essentially to audiences who lived like them, thought like them, felt like them, experienced life like them. Their
songs were so self-directed as to be almost solipsistic, and there are a lot of paradoxes involved with this, the deepest and most potent one being that this near-solipsistic music has become so universal, perhaps the most potent way of expressing pure emotion that any art form has ever devised.
The relationship between the blues singers and their audience was intimate. They might play dances for the white overseers, but essentially they were singing to their own people, or to the dusty intimacy of the street corner. As the blues and jazz merged, and singers became part of an ensemble and moved onto the stages of theaters or speakeasies, the songs were still personal, but a separation between performer and audience was an inevitable result. The blues singer was now a professional entertainer, and while audiences might still react viscerally to the emotional intensity of the songs, they viewed the emotional and biographical particulars as interested outsiders.
Starting in the 1930s, the blues began to move northward. When John and Alan Lomax brought Lead Belly to New York, they tried to introduce a traditional folk blues singer to a black audience that had little interest. They were listening to Jimmie Lunceford and Cab Calloway and Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. So Lead Belly found himself performing for an audience primarily composed of white leftists, and now the audience was really the other. The subtext of the blues had always been hard realism. Life is hard, and it's going to win, You can't change it, and you can't beat it. The best you can do is celebrate small victories: women, getting drunk, killing someone, grabbing a train and riding. That's why racism was not a dominant theme in the early blues. It was just another fact of existence. But the subtext, indeed the manifesto of the white leftists was hope. We can change the world.
So the blues adapted to its audience. Leadbelly challenged racists as bourgeois men living in a bourgeois town. Big Bill Broonzy told his audiences that we could all get together and break up the old Jim Crow.
In the Midwest, in Chicago and Detroit, the new blues singers were still singing to black audiences, but that was different, too. The audiences weren't farmers and sharecropper's from the singer's home region. They were factory workers and shopowners, and they were from all over the South. The division between entertainer and audience was wider.
And this is the world that Willie Dixon, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, entered. He had grown up with the blues, but when Leonard and Phil Chess, European immigrant merchants who had started a record label aimed at the colored market, hired him to supervise their recording sessions, he had moved some distance away from the blues. He was performing with a cocktail jazz trio modeled after Nat "King" Cole.
And he became the first great professional songwriter of the blues, blazing a trail that would be followed by Chuck Berry, by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, by Curtis Mayfield. With Chess, Dixon wrote songs that were, rather than deeply personal expressions of self, carefully and powerfully crafted personae for others, most famously Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf: the good-hearted sensualist and the sexual predator. The natural born lover, the son of a gun who can make pretty women jump and shout. And the back door man, the one around whom you had better watch your happy home, who eats more chicken than any other man has ever seen. Or Koko Taylor, the sensual banshee who can play that wang dang doodle all night long.
With Willie Dixon, Bob Weinstock and Bluesville were really making a commitment to the blues, a commitment that they would keep: Bluesville was unquestionably a blues label. It was a commitment that was sort of slow in developing. Weinstock had recorded Al Smith in September. The Willie Dixon session came in December, but it would be held in the can for a while. It would become Bluesville's third release, following a Sonny Terry-Brownie McGhee session of the following August.
The session seems to have been organized on the fly--the liner notes say it was recorded in two hours at Rudy Van Gelder's studio, when Willie and Slim were between flights, on their way back to Chicago. How Weinstock and Esmond Edwards heard they were in town is anyone's guess, but they threw together a very decent session, and this became Willie Dixon's debut album, although he had put out a handful of 45s for the Chess subsidiary, Checker. Memphis Slim had been fairly widely recorded on 45 by a number of independent labels, often leading a jump blues band, and often with Dixon on bass.
Blues and especially rhythm and blues, which was considered the first cousin to rock and roll and therefore declasse, was slow to be recorded on LP. The audience for long playing records was seen to be the more sophisticated audience for classical music, jazz and original cast recordings of Broadway shows. Moses Asch of Folkways Records put folk music on LP, including some blues, but outside of Lead Belly most of his blues was on compilation discs designed to appeal to folklorists. Labels like Caedmon specialized in spoken word recordings, particularly the widely appealing poetry and mellifluous reading voice of Dylan Thomas. But the independent labels that specialized in rhythm and blues, rock and roll and country didn't release LPs, and the majors weren't really interested until 1956, when RCA Victor bought Elvis Presley's contract from Sun. So it's not really surprising that artists like Dixon and especially the popular Memphis Slim were late to the LP table, nor that they were first recorded on LP by a jazz label from New York,
Drummer Gus Johnson and tenorman Harold Ashby were both Midwesterners who worked out of Chicago a lot, so they may have been touring with Dixon and Slim. Johnson had gottten his start with Jay McShann. He would be back to New York over the next few years to play on some other Prestige sessions. Ashby was a protege of Ben Webster's. Webster would recommend him to Duke Ellington, and he worked off and on with Ellington for many years. Finally, starting in the late 1960s, he would become a mainstay of the Ellington orchestra.
Wally Richardson was probably a local pickup. He was new to the scene, having just made his recording debut on an Atlantic album with LaVern Baker, but he had an interesting career ahead of him. He became an in-demand studio guitarist for Prestige and numerous other labels, and it was on Prestige that he had his moment in the sun in the late 1960s, with what has been described as a psychedelic jazz funk album, Soul Guru.
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The whole group is heard to particularly good account on the instrumental "Go Easy." The best known song to have come out of the session was certainly "Built for Comfort,: which became a hit for Howlin' Wolf and has been a staple for blues singers ever since.
The name of the album was Willie's Blues. Bluesville released one single -- not "Built for Comfort," but "Nervous" b/w "Sittin' and Cryin the Bluse."
Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1954-1956 is here! You can order your signed copy or copies through the link above.
Tad Richards will strike a nerve with all of us who were privileged to have lived thru the beginnings of bebop, and with those who have since fallen under the spell of this American phenomenon…a one-of-a-kind reference book, that will surely take its place in the history of this music.
--Dave Grusin
An important reference book of all the Prestige recordings during the time period. Furthermore, Each song chosen is a brilliant representation of the artist which leaves the listener free to explore further. The stories behind the making of each track are incredibly informative and give a glimpse deeper into the artists at work.
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.
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." 
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