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Blues

Tutwiler to Hastings Street

John Lee Hooker

John Lee Hooker is thought to have been born near Tutwiler, Mississippi, probably in 1912, though 1917 often gets quoted. His stepfather, the blues singer William Moore, got him started on guitar. In 1943 he took a job at Ford in Detroit and played the clubs on Hastings Street. In 1948 Modern Records released a demo he had cut for Bernie Besman, and from there he recorded for one label after another under a string of pseudonyms. Hooker 'n Heat, made with Canned Heat in 1970, was his first album to reach the Billboard charts. A 1989 album with Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt won him a Grammy. He died in his sleep at home in Los Altos, California, in 2001.

Fitzgerald, Georgia, one-man band

Abner Jay

Abner Jay was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, in 1921. His grandfather had been enslaved and played banjo, and he handed down a huge stock of old-time and folk songs. Jay was working medicine shows from the age of five, joined the Silas Green from New Orleans tent show in 1932 and from around 1935 performed as a one-man band, with harmonica, drum kit, bones and a banjo he claimed dated from 1748. From 1946 to 1956 he led the WMAZ Minstrels on Macon radio. He billed himself as the "last working Southern black minstrel" and pressed small runs of records on his own Brandie Records, named for his daughter. He died in Augusta in 1993. Compilations from 2003 onward brought his music back.

Chulahoma juke joint, Fat Possum

Junior Kimbrough

David Malone "Junior" Kimbrough Jr. was born in 1930 in Hudsonville, in the north Mississippi hill country near Holly Springs. He cut a session for Goldwax Records in Memphis in 1966, but it was judged too country and sat on the shelf until 2009. Footage shot in 1990 at his Chewalla Rib Shack turned up in the 1992 documentary Deep Blues. The same year his debut album came out on Fat Possum, produced by critic Robert Palmer and recorded at his juke joint in Chulahoma, and it got him national attention. He died in Holly Springs in 1998, aged 67. Fat Possum says he left 36 children. The label's 2005 tribute album featured Iggy & The Stooges and The Black Keys.

Bethnal Green, Blue Horizon, 1967

Peter Green

Peter Green was born Peter Allen Greenbaum in Bethnal Green, London, in 1946. In 1966 he took Eric Clapton's place in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and made his debut with them on A Hard Road. He left in 1967 to start Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood and Jeremy Spencer. Signed to Mike Vernon's Blue Horizon label, they released Fleetwood Mac in 1968, and it spent 37 weeks in the British charts. Mr. Wonderful and Then Play On came next, and a Green instrumental went to number one in Britain in 1969. After taking LSD near Munich, he played his last show with the band in May 1970. He was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, led the Splinter Group through nine albums between 1997 and 2004, and died in 2020, aged 73.

Marksville to Maxwell Street

Little Walter

Little Walter was born Marion Walter Jacobs in Marksville, Louisiana, usually dated to 1930. By about twelve he had left rural Louisiana and was busking his way through Southern cities. He got to Chicago in 1946, cut his first records for the Maxwell Street label Ora-Nelle in 1947 and joined Muddy Waters' band in 1948. Tired of being drowned out by electric guitars, he cupped a small microphone against his harmonica and drove the amplifiers past their limits. Recording for Checker from 1952, he had fourteen top-ten R&B hits by 1958, including the only harmonica instrumental to top that chart. The Best of Little Walter came out in 1958. He died in Chicago in 1968, aged 37, and went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008.

Avalon, rediscovered in 1963

Mississippi John Hurt

Mississippi John Hurt was born John Smith Hurt in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi, in 1893, and grew up in Avalon, where he taught himself guitar at nine. Fiddler Willie Narmour recommended him, and in 1928 he recorded 20 songs for Okeh in Memphis and New York City. The records sold modestly and he went back to sharecropping. Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music got people interested in 1952. In 1963 one of his old records, which named Avalon as his hometown, led Tom Hoskins to look for him there, and he found him. That year brought Folk Songs and Blues and the Newport Folk Festival, and Vanguard put out Today! in 1966. He died of a heart attack in Grenada, Mississippi, in November 1966.

Lyon, Mississippi, a preacher's blues

Son House

Edward James "Son" House Jr. was born in 1902 in Lyon, Mississippi. He was preaching by fifteen and wanted nothing to do with the blues until he heard bottleneck guitar at 25. He served about two years at Parchman Farm after a juke-joint shooting, then joined Charley Patton and Willie Brown, and in 1930 he recorded for Paramount in Grafton, Wisconsin. The records sold badly, but he became a formative influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Alan Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. In 1943 he moved to Rochester, New York, and quit music. He was found there in 1964, released Father of Folk Blues on Columbia in 1965 and died in Detroit in 1988, aged 86.

The Collection