Key to the Highway
2017-05-31 Howlin’ Wolf
Elmore James
Jimmy Reed
James Cotton
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Today’s show will be the first of three 2017 Blues
Marathon kickoff shows where we will be offering an advance chance to order
your James Cotton tee shirts. Cotton for
a tee shirt. Is that right? A marathon with fiber!Today will mark the first fifth Wednesday show I will be sharing with my friend and alternating host, Gil de Leon. Gil has been the head of the Blues department for many years now and he has once again put together a fine lineup for in-studio live music. The full marathon lineup is included after today’s playlist. I don’t know exactly what Gil intends to play so I cannot include his contributions in the playlist but he will be featuring our tee shirt cover boy James Cotton.
So, early on in my time at KKUP I had started changing from vinyl to CD because of the ease of programming but I was just spending too much money. I decided to go all out one time in order to curtail the expenditures and ordered six box sets of almost all the output by some of the most “must have” Bluesmen in history, including Little Walter (4 discs), John Lee Hooker (6, but not nearly all of his output), Muddy Waters (9), and three by artists we’ll hear today, Howlin’ Wolf (8), Elmore James (4) and Jimmy Reed (6). These are all Charly boxes and I paid $15 per disc, so the 37 discs cost me about $600 including tax. Still, that only put a brief hold on my musical investing.
For today’s show I went with the earliest of each artist’s recordings, so for two of them I went with material previous to the collections. For Howlin’ Wolf, born Chester Burnett, the box covered all of his Chess recordings (with two albums omitted) between 1951 and 1969, but at the beginning of these sessions he was not signed to Chess Records. Before his teaming with Tina, Ike Turner was a young musician and talent scout in the Memphis area who brought musicians to Sam Phillips studio long before his Sun Records became famous for Rock-a-billy and Elvis releases. Turner would often use the Phillips studio for many of his musicians and from there get them to outside labels. For Wolf, these would be Modern and Chess Records, a situation neither company appreciated and complications ensued leading to an ultimate agreement that Chess would sign Howlin’ Wolf and Modern would get Roscoe Gordon. I think we know who got the best of that deal. If not, just listen to today’s opening set.
These early sessions, some sent to Modern and some sent to Chess, are documented on the CD Howling (sic) Wolf Rides Again (and likely several others since its 1991 release) and from this we hear some of the rawest and rockin’est of the Wolf’s material. I grew up on the Wolf’s Chess albums, but United / Superior came out with two or three vinyl LPs around 1970 with much of this material which was new to me, but without any documentation it didn’t receive as much of my attention until released in this one compilation.
This disc doesn’t have much documentation, but I feel safe in saying Wolf provides the vocal and harmonica while being backed up by guitarist Willie Johnson and drummer Willie Steele. When there is a pianist, it is likely Ike Turner. Shortly after these 1951 and 1952 recordings, harmonicist James Cotton joined the band, allowing Wolf to concentrate on fronting the group with his vocals and showmanship. My records show that Cotton was in the studio with Wolf on only two sessions, those of April 17th and October 7th, 1952. There seems to me no better way to begin delving into Wolf’s musical history than here.
Similar to Wolf’s box, the Charly Elmore James set is extremely comprehensive as it covers a few different labels, but Proper Records came out with a single disc which covers his very earliest recordings, although there are duplications of the first six Charly tunes. The opening number is probably his most copied, Dust My Broom, on which he had the services of Sonny Boy Williamson II on harmonica sharing with Elmore’s bottleneck guitar. I must have set the two booklets aside to put together a future write-up and now cannot locate them with their excellent documentation, so I must rely on my memory. Until this recording, Elmore was not interested in recording in his own name, possibly even to the point that he might have not even known the tune was being recorded. Or perhaps he thought it would be credited to Sonny Boy, I can’t recall.
Through the greater portion of his recordings, Elmore had one of Chicago’s finest backing groups featuring Odie Payne Jr. on drums, his cousin Homesick James Williamson on bass (who would later have a long career of his own as a singing guitarist much in the style of Elmore) and sax man J.T. Brown. Elmore would often return to the riff from Dust My Broom on several of his recordings and he even re-recorded the tune for a different label, under the not so subtle name-change of Dust My Blues, which concludes our set.
Hey, I actually used the Charly Jimmy Reed box, The Vee Jay Years, for this final set, although I suspect Gil and I will be doing a lot of marathon hyping and most likely will not complete it. Of the nine songs that made it to this disc, we took three from his very first session (June 6th 1953, which featured John Brim on guitar) and two from the second date, December 29/30th. When I think of the harmonica and guitar playing singer, I also think of his lead guitarist Eddie Taylor. Eddie accompanied Jimmy beginning on his second session all the way through the 50s, with one exception, and occasionally again in the 60s. That exception included I Don’t Go for That and I Ain’t Got You, the latter becoming a Bay Area band anthem after both the Animals and the Yardbirds included a version in their repertoire. Significant backup crew on that July 18th 1955 session were pianist Henry Gray in his only known session with Reed, although later a longtime member of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, and the first appearance of drummer Earl Phillips, who would not miss another Reed session until 1962.
Jimmy three times had hits that reached as high as #3, including Ain’t That Loving You Baby, and had 21 sides make the R&B top twenty or the Pop 100 between March 1925 and April 1963. An excellent career that we will follow in more depth in the future.
I was wanting to do an essay about James Cotton for this show but never got around to it. I have had construction workers causing a lot of noise around my apartment complex since November and, since I have been a night worker / day sleeper since the 80s, you should be able to imagine how this sleep disruption has cumulatively affected my concentration and therefore my writing. Because of this and the fact that I am concerned about the effect it could take on my driving ability to and from the station, I have made arrangements to take a leave from my next four scheduled shows, coming back just in time to do a Chuck Berry presentation prior to the Oldies marathon.
enjoy
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Since it is still relatively new, I thought I’d
mention that KKUP is now streaming on the internet and, while it is still in a
developing stage, we have been putting out the word. I’m not all of that good with high-tech
stuff, but it seems pretty easy to access.
If you go to our website at KKUP.org you will see on the home page a
strip of options immediately above the pictures of the musicians the next to
the last option being LISTEN ONLINE. By
clicking this, it brings up a choice of desktop or mobile. I can only speak for the desktop but after
maybe a minute I was receiving a crystal clear feed. As already mentioned, this is still a work in
progress and we are currently limited to a finite number of listeners at any
one time. I mention this so you will be
aware to turn off the application when you are not actually listening. (I put the player in my favorites bar for the
easiest of access.) Now we can reach our
listeners in Los Gatos and Palo Alto, even my family in Canada. Let your friends elsewhere know they can now
listen to your favorite station, and while they have the home page open they
can check out our schedule.
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House Rockin’ BoogieCrying at Daybreak
Keep What You Got
Dog Me Around
Moaning at Midnight
Riding in the Moonlight
My Baby Stole Off
Worried About My Baby
Driving the Highway
Howlin’ Wolf 28mins
Dust My Broom
Rock My Baby RightBaby What’s Wrong
I Held My Baby Last Night
Early in the Morning
Hawaiian Boogie, part 2
Mean and Evil (The Way You Treat Me)
Can’t Stop Lovin’
Strange Kinda Feeling
Dust My Blues
Elmore James 27mins
High and Lonesome
Jimmy’s BoogieYou Don’t Have to Go
Roll and Rhumba
I Ain’t Got You
Boogie in the Dark
I Don’t Go for That
Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby
You Got Me Dizzy
Jimmy Reed 24mins
Marathon schedule
FRIDAY June 2nd 2017
noon-3pm Gil will host live music: 12:30pm Virgil Thrasher and Rick Stevens
1:30pm Preacher Boy
3-6pm "Blue Suede Dave" Stafford will continue with live music:
3:30pm Little Johnny Lawton
4:30pm: Rob Vye and Illya Portnov
6-9pm Mike the Fly
9-midnight Kingman
SATURDAY June 3rd 2017
midnight-3am Eric Hayslett3-6am Nightbird Susie
6-9am Tomas Montoya
9-noon Blue Radish (AKA The Foggy-Eyed Radish)
noon-3pm Mark Owens
3-6pm Radio Re
6-8pm Jim Dandy and friends
8-10pm Rhythm Doctor and friends
10-midnight Johnnie Cozmik and the Honeybee
SUNDAY June 4th 2017
midnight-6am Bobby
G 6-8am Nightbird Susie
8-10am Paul Jacobs
10-Noon Lars
Noon-2pm Jim & Gratia
2pm until live sessions Jammin' Jim Farris
3pm-midnight
will be live performances in the station
3pm:
Scooby Valdez and the Infuego Band4pm: Hipshake
5pm: Pam Hawkins and the Back to Lyf Band
6pm: Amy Lou and the Wild Ones
7pm: Gil de Leon’s Benton Street Band
8pm: Patrick Ryan and Chris James
9pm: International Harmonica Blowout
10pm: John Clifton
11pm: J.C. Smith Band
