The Wildest Blues Guitar! 1958-1960

Another Dozen Hair-Raising, Speaker-Shaking Tracks

Otis Rush (photo by Jeff Titon, courtesy Wikipedia)

This is the fourth and final installment of my “Killer Blues Guitar” survey of extraordinary postwar solos. The sounds conjured on these tracks recorded between 1947 and 1964 showcase some of the wildest and wiliest electric guitar playing ever. Links to the first three parts are presented at this article’s end.

Hop Wilson, “Rockin’ in the Jungle”

Houston’s Harding “Hop” Wilson gained local renown for playing Elmore James-influenced slide blues on an eight-string, non-pedal steel guitar tuned to an open chord. He obtained his first steel guitar in 1939, and teamed up with drummer Ivory Lee Semien in the early 1950s. He cut six songs at his very first session, held in Lake Charles, Louisiana, on March 22, 1958, for the Goldband label.

The loping instrumental “Rockin’ in the Jungle” demonstrates his rare ability to dial-in distortion and play with such precision that some notes sound like they were finger-fretted on a standard guitar. “I never seen a man’s hands move as fast as his!” William Orten Carlton observed in Living Blues 26. “He had tremendous hand coordination and thus could play things on steel guitar that very few others could ever dream of.” Hop’s regular accompanists – drummer Semien and bassist “Ice Water” Jones – join him on this unissued side.

Wilson, a guarded man whose distrust of record companies and dislike of touring relegated him to being a local phenomenon, nevertheless cast a strong influence on Johnny Winter and Jimmie Vaughan.

Larry Davis, “I Tried”

Released as Duke 192, singer/bassist Larry Davis’ debut single, “I Tried” backed with “Texas Flood,” profoundly influenced Stevie Ray Vaughan, who mimicked Davis’ singing style and Fenton Robinson’s guitar parts and named his breakthrough album Texas Flood. A slow blues, “Texas Flood” featured Robinson’s elegant chord vamps and subdued solos. Robinson demonstrated an entirely different side of his playing on the hard-driving “I Tried,” splattering white-hot solos above the quintet’s hard-charging arrangement.

Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1936, Larry Davis spent his formative years in Little Rock, where he began on drums and bass and was enthralled by the music of B.B. King. By 1957 he was playing the chitlin circuit with Fenton Robinson, who hailed from Greenwood, Mississippi.

In May 1958, on Bobby “Blue” Bland’s recommendation, Don Robey summoned Davis to Houston to record for Duke. “So I carried Fenton with me,” Davis told Bob Eagle in Blues Unlimited 102, “and we both went together. Mr. Joe Scott was the writer and the arranger, and I used what guys Robey put in the studio with us, which wasn’t but two. Fenton played the guitar for me, I played bass, and James Booker, a great organist, he played piano. The drummer, I can’t recall. We made two titles – that was all.” Fenton Robinson, most likely playing the Stratocaster that Ike Turner had given him, also recorded four sides under his own name. After moving to Chicago in the early 1960s, Robinson expanded his style with jazz influences and developed a following at home and in Japan, where he was revered as “the Mellow Blues Genius.”

Curley Page/Sly Williams, “Boot Hill”

Where to start? On the labels of Dalton 107, “Curley Page and His Band” are listed as the performers of “Boot Hill” and “I Believe in a Woman,” and Cleo Page is credited as the composer. In discographies, though, the performances are credited to “Sly Williams, v with unk saxes; p; g; b; d.” Blues Records 1943-1970 adds, “There is an aural similarity to Clarence Samuels.”

Deepening the mystery of just who we’re hearing here, the guitar playing on the only other releases credited to Curley Page, a pair of instrumentals issued as Dalton 106, have none of the fire and fury of “Boot Hill.” After its Elmore James-inspired opening, the guitarist on this murdering blues goes orgiastic on the solo. Stevie Ray Vaughan, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of postwar blues, brought up “Boot Hill” during our interview about Jimi Hendrix: “It sounds like something Hendrix would do, except it was recorded in ’58. I’ve never heard anybody other than Hendrix get this intensity and play as wild as this guy. He uses a wang bar, and he uses it real radical in places. It’s like this guy’s teeth are sticking out of the record! It’s unbelievable. And every time I hear it, it seems impossible that Hendrix didn’t hear this guy.”

Albert Collins, “Collins’ Shuffle”

Spine-chilling titles like “Frosty” and “The Freeze” earned him the nickname “Iceman,” and his control of his trademark instrument brought him the title “Master of the Telecaster.” In Albert Collins’ hands, an old Fender could tickle his listeners, deliver a sucker punch, or approximate the sounds of a nagging wife, Gatling gun, or graveyard howl. On record after record, Collins’ stinging attack and unbridled energy were second to none.

And it all began here with Kangaroo 103/4, his first released record. Collins opens 1958’s “Collins Shuffle” with the distinctive bass string hammer-ons that reappear throughout the track. His trebly tone and string-snapping solos as he jabs through the skintight horns place him squarely in the Texas school of cool as practiced by T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown.

Like Brown, Collins preferred to play in the first position, using a capo to change keys. He tuned his guitar to an Fm triad (F, C, F, Ab, C, E, from low to high), maxed his volume, and rolled all of his treble controls up to 10. The better-known flipside on his first single featured “The Freeze.” Long after earning widespread acclaim, Collins remained true to his rural Texas upbringing, as evidenced by his telling guitarists to always keep a rattlesnake rattle inside their acoustic guitars, as Lightnin’ Hopkins had advised him to do.

 The “5” Royales, “The Slummer the Slum”

An R&B group from the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina, the “5” Royales rolled jump blues, gospel, doo-wop, and early rock and roll into a sound all their own. The group’s founding guitarist, Lowman “Pete” Pauling, wrote several of their best known songs. In concert, he took the concept of the low-slung guitar to its extreme, using an extra-long strap to dangle his instrument to his knees.

With its unusual phrasing and piercing tone, Pauling’s kinetic soloing instantly set 1958’s“The Slummer the Slum” apart from other harmony-vocal pop releases. Despite having sole composer credits for hits songs such as “Dedicated to the One I Love,” a Top-10 hit for the Shirelles and The Mamas & The Papas, and James Brown’s “Think,” the hard-drinking Pauling spent his final years working as a night watchman at a Manhattan church.

Phillip Walker, “Playing in the Park”

Phillip Walker was born in heart of Cajun country – Welsh, Louisiana – in 1937, which, as he explained in Living Blues 131, gave him “one ear in zydeco and one ear in Texas blues.” His family moved to Port Arthur, Texas, at the end of World War II. After playing rhythm guitar behind Lonesome Sundown, Walker spent two years recording and touring with Clifton Chenier’s zydeco band. When Chenier disbanded his lineup in 1956, Walker formed his first group, Little Phillip and Blue Eagles, in El Paso, Texas.

In September 1959, J.R. Fulbright of Elko Records drove Walker to Los Angeles to make his first records as a leader. “He operated out of his house,” Walker told Lee Hildebrand. “It wasn’t a studio. He had a couple of pretty good mikes, and he had, I guess, one of the best two-tracks you could buy. He would bring a band in there with those couple of mikes and two-track machine, and he would cut a record on you. He was against big record companies. That’s why he’d make his own records, press maybe a thousand or two thousand, and put ’em in the trunk of an old car. He would leave here and go all the way through the South, through the West, all the way to the East Coast, putting records on jukeboxes.”

Joining Walker at the Elko session were tenor saxophonist Willie Gresham, pianist Peter Brandbull, bassist Pauline “Lindy Lou” Adams, and drummer Bob Tinsley. Elko 002 featured two Walker originals: the vocal song “Hello My Darling” and rowdy instrumental “Playing in the Park.” Luckily, Walker’s trebly guitar jabs managed to punch through the terrible mix, which swamps the other musicians’ shouts and instruments in a wash of distortion.

Eddie Kirkland, “I Must Have Done Somebody Wrong”

Jamaican-born Eddie Kirkland moved to Alabama during his infancy. Following his court-marshal from the U.S. Army, he joined his mother in Detroit and became part of the Motor City’s burgeoning postwar blues scene. During the early and mid 1950s he often worked alongside John Lee Hooker, who, in turn, backed Kirkland on his first single as a leader, recorded for RPM in 1952. Kirkland made two records for King the following year and recorded unsuccessfully for Cobra in 1957. His next session, held in Detroit in 1959, produced Fortune 848: “I Need You Baby” b/w “I Must Have Done Somebody Wrong.”

The authorship of this latter song remains a mystery. On the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East, Duane Allman introduces “Done Somebody Wrong,” a song of karmic retribution, as “an old Elmore James song.” Sure enough, Elmore did record a version in 1960, with Fire Records assigning James the songwriting credit. However, the similarity between the James and Kirkland’s earlier version are unmistakable, and the Fortune release lists Eddie Kirkland as the composer.

But where Duane and Elmore used the song as a launchpad for slide solos, Kirkland dialed-in an angry, badass tone and finger-fretted his notes. Billed as Eddie Kirkland & His Houserockers, his band included Johnny Hooks on tenor sax, pianist Joe Dooms, drummer Jimmy Parner, and a bassist identified as “Head.”

Tarheel Slim, “Number 9 Train”

Today it’s regarded as a rockabilly classic, but Alden Bunn’s first recording as “Tarheel Slim,” 1959’s “Number 9 Train,” did not sell well upon its release. The North Carolina-raised Bunn, a fine guitarist in his own right, played alongside session ace Wild Jimmy Spruill as the band tore it up in a New York studio. The guitarists’ propulsive rhythms project the feel of a moving train, and the brilliantly played solos rave. While composing the song, label owner Bobby Robinson drew on his memories of the northbound Number 9 that passed by his boyhood home in South Carolina. “Number 9 Train” was originally issued with the slightly less-frantic “Wildcat Tamer” as Fury 1016.

Spruill, a prolific session guitarist who grew up on a North Carolina farm, declared in LB 115 that he’d had no musical influences: “I’m a self-made person. I do things the way I feel it. I had a guitar about three weeks, right? Then I started dreaming about it at night. Like I could see the front of it and something was showing me where to put my fingers and how to hit certain chords. Next day, I got up and started playing. That’s funny, you know, so it’s a gift.”

In same same LB issue, Bobby Robinson detailed Spruill’s approach during sessions: “He did more or less what he felt, which was kind of an odd thing, you know. He didn’t follow any trends. He never followed any trends. He’d come up with something that felt right for the moment, and that’s the way he recorded.”

Guitar Shorty, “Ways of a Man”

David William Kearney was still in his teens when he showcased his appealing singing voice and clean, echoey guitar on this torrid shuffle. Born in Houston in 1939, Kearney had spent his youth in Florida, where his uncle, Willie Quartermain, taught him guitar. Kearney made his recording debut in 1957, cutting a Cobra single that identified him as “Guitar Shorty.” As a member of Ray Charles’ touring band, Kearney saw Guitar Slim in person, which inspired him to adapt some attention-grabbing stage moves of his own.

“We was in Orlando when I saw Slim run out on the floor with his long cord,” Kearney revealed in LB 95, “and he would lay down on the floor and kick his heels. And I’m lookin’ at him and I say, ‘If he can do that, I can turn flips.’” He soon added somersaults, flips, and other physical stunts to his act. In 1959 Pull Records arranged Kearney’s second session, held in Los Angeles with saxophonist Bob Tate and others who remain unidentified. The date produced three finished singles, with “Ways of a Man” b/w “Hard Life” coming out as Pull 301.

Icky Renrut, “Prancin’”

Producer, talent scout, session musician, leader of the Kings of Rhythm – the amazing Ike Turner wore all of these hats during the 1950s and early 1960s. Born Izear Turner in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931, he made his first musical inroads on piano, backing Robert Nighthawk in Clarksdale, and playing on Jackie Brenston’s groundbreaking “Rocket 88.” Seeing a solidbody guitar hanging on the wall of a Memphis music store, he experienced love at first sight. “That’s the first time I saw a Fender guitar,” he remembered in LB. “So I bought it, and I just started playing.”

Turner learned rapidly, drawing immediate inspiration from Gatemouth Brown: “That’s the first thing I learned on guitar, [Brown’s] ‘Okie Dokie Stomp.’ So there’s probably a connection in their mentally.” Never having seen anyone play a Stratocaster before, Ike was unsure of how to use all of the guitar’s available technology: “I didn’t know that they put the whammy bar on there for tremolo, so that’s the reason I always used it the other way.”

The “other way” being his penchant for pounding on the whammy, as heard to good effect on “Prancin’,” recorded in St. Louis or East St. Louis in 1959 for the tiny Stevens label. Ike further energized the instrumental with staccato bursts, top-of-the-fingerboard bends, ultra-fast finger vibrato, and slinky chords. On all four of the released Stevens sides Turner was identified by the odd appellation “Icky Renrut,” the surname being “Turner” spelled backwards. The Stevens version of “Prancin’” was shelved. In 1961 Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm recut the instrumental as “Prancing,” with a horn section, for Sue Records. Here we present the 1959 original.

Otis Rush, “So Many Roads, So Many Trains”

When it comes to conveying sheer anguish, few performers can rival Otis Rush, with his plaintive voice, crying falsetto, and note-perfect guitar work. After cutting several of his most significant records for Cobra, Otis moved on to Chess Records in January 1960.

His first recording for his new label, the emotion-drenched “So Many Roads, So Many Trains,” featured Rush and Matt Murphy on guitars, Lafayette Leake on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, Bob Neely on tenor sax, and Odie Payne on drums. Otis claimed that “somebody gave me that song.” The label for Chess 1751 identified “Paul Marshall” as the song’s composer, likely a reference to Leonard Chess’ son, Marshall Paul Chess.

Due to the unusual way Rush played guitar, his fills and solos stood apart. A lefty, he played a flipped-over right-handed Fender Stratocaster without restringing the guitar, so his lowest strings were nearest to his toes. “A right-hand man try to push the little E up,” Otis explained, “where I ain’t got nothin’ to do but just pull it down. And it’s more easier to pull something down than to push it up.”

An intensely focused player, Rush typically combined his fretting hand’s index, middle, and ring fingers to create string bends and control his distinctive vibrato. Most of all, he instinctively understood the power of a few well-placed notes. “Well, I can play fast stuff,” he revealed, “but I try to take my time and make you feel what I’m doin’. Measure it out enough so they got time to hear what you’re doing. To me, that’s important.”

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Up Above My Head”

Like her contemporary Sister Wynona Carr, Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved easily between spiritual and secular music. The daughter of a traveling evangelist, in her early twenties Tharpe sang uplifting songs in Harlem’s famed Cotton Club and then perfected her earthy vocal style with the Cab Calloway and Lucky Millinder orchestras. She’s best known, though, for her rousing gospel music.

Taped for an early-1960s telecast of Gospel Time, “Up Above My Head” features Tharpe singing with the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Choir. This footage, which is available on youtube, shows her rocking-out on a white, early-1960s Gibson Les Paul SG Custom with a sideways vibrola. Wearing a large thumbpick, she begins her rip-roaring solo in the first position and then, throwing her whole body into it, climaxes with frenetic slides up the frets. No wonder Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan counted her among their favorite performers.

Thanks to Klaus Kilian, who originally compiled these recordings for a CD set that was never issued.

Related articles:

Killer Blues Guitar! A Dozen Electrifying Postwar Obscurities, 1947-1952

More Killer Blues Guitar! 15 Raucous Postwar Obscurities, 1953-1954

Still More Killer Blues Guitar! 1955-1957

Lightnin’ Hopkins: “I Was Born With the Blues”

Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown at Aladdin Records, 1947

Jimmy Rogers on Songwriting, Muddy Waters, and 1950s Chicago Blues

Elmore James: “Dust My Broom” on Trumpet Records

Muddy Waters: Baby Face Leroy’s Almighty “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”

Otis Rush at Cobra Records

Otis Rush: “This Is My Life Story”

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