Booker “Bukka” White: The Early Years

An Exploration of His Best Prewar Sessions

Booker White 1960s publicity photo.

Like Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Lee Hooker, and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Booker “Bukka” White excelled at creating intensely personal blues—“sky songs,” he called them. “I just reach up and pull them out of the sky. They just come to me.”

During the years before World War II, White emerged as an extraordinary lyricist and one of the most hard-driving blues guitarists on record. Even on his earliest releases, cut in the 1930s, he demonstrated a wide knowledge of guitar tunings, playing positions, and slide guitar techniques. His 1940 session produced what many consider the final great pre-war country blues recordings.

As Peter Guralnik wrote in Feel Like Going Home, “White, inspired by Charley Patton, put together one of the most moving, personal, and autobiographical documents in the history of the blues when he recorded for Vocalion in 1940, shortly after his release from prison. The delicate bottleneck, the haunting, almost impressionistic lyrics are among the highest achievements of the blues.”

B.B. King, who at the start of his career roomed with White in Memphis, echoed this sentiment in his autobiography Blues All Around Me: “I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, simple stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast times and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said I am what I am.”