This is New England Public Radio's Janz Beat. I'm Tom Rini with a podcast edition upon Janz's blog, which you can find at n E P R dot net. This edition of Janz Beat is about the blues man T-bone Walker. I found a packable footage of T-bone Walker on YouTube a few weeks ago and have been on the search for more ever since.
What drew me in was T-bone's performance of Don't Throw Your Love on Me So Strong. It was filmed in 1962 for a West German TV special, Janz Heard and Seen, where T-bone was accompanied by pianist Memphis Slim Basis Willie Dixon and drummer Jump Jackson. They were all part of that year's American Folk Blues Festival tour in Europe. The 1962 pack had also included Helen Humes, John Lee Hooker, Shaky Jake and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.
In describing the tour's impact, Don Snowden, co-author Willie Dixon's autobiography, I Am the Blues, says the Blues Legends arrived just in time for a generational shift that brought an entire new audience to the blues. Europe and England quickly became a more hospitable home for blues artists than America. Helen Oakley dances 1987 biography of Walker, Stormy Monday, the T-bone Walker's story, draws primarily on extensive interviews she conducted with the guitarist before his death in 1975. Of his first tour of Europe, the Linden, Texas native said, going abroad was an education for me.
I dig the way those people live. They consider you an artist and treat you that way. That's why a lot of the fellows stay over there. For the first time, us guys could hold our heads high.
Maybe there's no place like home, but in the US, when you feel less than a man, something is really wrong. ["The Love of Lisa Strong"] Don't throw your love on Lisa Strong. Don't throw your love on Lisa Strong. You'll know your love is like a passage.
You can turn it off. He bones 1965 tour of Europe included shows and a television appearance in London. His highly animated performance for the BBC of Hey Baby harkened back a few decades to a time when he was both the leading innovator of electric blues guitar and a showman renowned for pulling out all the stops, doing splits, playing guitar behind his back, and dazzling audiences with driving instrumentals and devastating slow blues. Recalling his European tours, however, he noted that audiences were impatient with anything but pure music.
We couldn't believe the kind of audiences we had. People there to listen. You've got to be a showman back here. Over there, first time I did the splits, fans booed.
That was hard to credit, but was all right with me. They can't be here the music. Here's T-Bone singing Hey Baby, accompanied by a well-rehearsed orchestra that boasts an organist and saxophone soloist. All time, Mississippi.
Walker was back in Europe the following year with jazz at the Philharmonic, the name given to the all-star groups that the famed jazz empressario Norman Grant's began presenting in the mid-40s. This hard-driving arrangement of going to Chicago features T-Bone with a band that includes Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, James Moody, Zoot Sims, Teddy Wilson, Bob Crancho, and Louis Belsen. T-Bone was a longtime favorite and the go-to blues man for grants, who featured the guitarist on some of the jazz series at the jam sessions he presented in Los Angeles in the 40s. This performance was broadcast by the BBC from Royal Festival Hall in London in November, 1966.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I wonder, why don't you write B? Sometimes I wonder, why don't you write B? You're a bop and a bad-gonna baby, didn't answer B. She left home with a mouth and a baby's all my mind.
T-Bone Walker's roots and blues and swing ran deep and wide. As a youth in Dallas, he functioned as a lead boy for the legendary blind lemon Jefferson, who was a family friend of his parents and of his stepfather, Marco Washington, who played guitar with a Dallas string band. In 1929, the 19-year-old Aaron Tebow Walker recorded as Oak Cliff T-Bone for Columbia Records in a duet with pianist Douglas Renelle. Note that from the outset, T-Bone displayed the precise enunciation that added to his appeal and influences in Erbine blues man.
I love my bing-bing-bing. Baby, baby, I've done my bing-bing-bing. The more I do for you, baby, the less you care for me. Tell me, baby, what more can you tell me do?
Tell me, baby. T-Bone moved to Los Angeles in 1935. He quickly established himself on the city's thriving central avenue scene and earned a spot with band leader Les Hite, whose orchestrat famously backed Louis Armstrong and Fat Swatter during their residency in LA at Sebastian's new cotton club, the most prestigious of the city's black nightclubs. As the most prominent African-American band leader in Southern California in the 30s and 40s, Les Hite's band drew to its ranks Lionel Hampton, Lawrence Brown and Dizzy Gillespie.
T-Bone was featured as a vocalist with Hite at a time when Frank Paisley held the guitar chair in the band. On this classic side with T-Bone, it's Paisley who plays the tasty steel guitar. She's on me, too. Yes, I love my baby.
She's on me, too. I'm your train, my way of living. Move across the deep blue. T-Bone's combo was occasionally built with the net king Cole Trio at LA's Subber Clubs, and he sometimes spelled the Trio's guitarist Oscar Moore, who was a notorious no-show for gigs.
As a blues man inspired by Charlie Christian's pioneering single-string style, T-Bone had a fondness for jazz and throughout his career shared the bandstand with many jazz rates. As he told Helen Dance, I was in on some of Norman Grant's earliest jam sessions, and in 1943 was featured alongside Billy Holiday, Nat Cole, Woody Herman, and a lot of other names. Not withstanding his earlier association with jazz musicians, when T-Bone joined Grant's as jazz at the Philharmonic Tour in 1966, he said there was a little outcry in London because people were saying they didn't want R&B, but Norman paid it no mind. And Grant's himself recalled, as far as the musicians were concerned, T-Bone was a perfect fit.
In this excerpt from a BBC broadcast, Clark Terry deploys the mouthpiece of his trumpet to produce a harmonica like Wawa Sound. At the concert, Norman Grant's introduced T-Bone with a defense of the blues as what he called the root of all jazz. Why will you must be crazy? You don't know what you want to do.
You must be crazy. You don't know what you want to do. Catch back with you, be going baby. After all I've done to you.
A YouTube search also yielded rare, wobbly footage of T-Bone in 1971 at the outset of a period in which he worked with a backup group led by the guitarist and singer Paul Pina. In a local legend, Pina was a Cape Verdean who grew up in Hyannis on Cape Cod and lived in Worcester for several years in the 60s and early 70s. I wrote about him a few years ago in a blog about Bonnie Rayte. Pina appeared on her first album, recorded a classic of his own for capital records in 1972, and he composed Jet Air Liner, which became a mega hit for Steve Miller.
One wonders if Miller met Pina through T-Bone. Miller's father was a doctor who treated Walker. At beginning at age 11, young Steve Miller became the beneficiary of guitar lessons and a career path from T-Bone himself. Forty years after this performance of Walker's classic, Collette Stormy Monday was filmed at the jazz workshop in Boston.
Paul Pina was the subject of the documentary Genghis Blues about his odyssey into the culture of Tuvann throat singing. At the jazz workshop, he was seated behind T-Bone playing tasty fills and sporting a billowy afro. Midway through the performance, Pina assumes the lead while T-Bone goes to the piano. Pina was that good set of friend of T-Bones in Stormy Monday, where Helen Dance writes, the only member of the group who struck T-Bone as outstanding was the blind guitarist Paul Pina, who was the kind of challenge needed to inspire T-Bone.
Walker himself said, if I don't have a guy like that alongside, I might as well give up. When Pina moved to the west coast to pursue his own solo career, I was lost. I saw a lot of great music at the jazz workshop between 1971 and its closing in 75. Jazz Rage Charles Mingus, Yusef Lateef, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Roland Kirk, Gary Burton, and Chick Correa, as well as Muddy Waters.
And I was always impressed by the intimate space and feeling of connection and engendered between performer and patron. But for all the amazing sights and sounds that took place at Fred Taylor's low ceiling, one flight down complex on Boylston Street in Boston, which housed both the jazz workshop and Paul's Mall, I think this is the only footage or tape I've ever heard from either venue. The chorus done me Monday, Tuesday, and Justice, Bill. Call this done me Monday, Monday, Monday, Tuesday, and Justice, Bill, when's his voice?
Oh, this is a song, yeah. I saw a T-Bone Walker only once. It was in 1972 when he spent a week at Joe's Place in Cambridge and was still working with Paul Pina. At the time, I knew of him mostly as a legendary pioneer of amplified guitar and a major influence on B.B.
King. But it was unfamiliar with the brilliant material he had recorded in the 40s and 50s, and not sure if it was then readily available. What little I'd heard of him on record came from American folk blues-fest sampler, Undecca, that I happened upon in the backroom of a barbershop. The album, like his fairly lackluster set at Joe's Place, was little match with a gripping tightly arranged blues of the players I was accustomed to seeing back then.
B.B., Albert, and Freddie King, Muddy Waters, the Butterfield Blues Band, Charlie Malsa White, and James Cotton. Of course, I'd love to be able to see the same show by T-Bone today, certain that I'd appreciate it from a more mature and patient perspective. But the closest I'll come to that is the jazz workshop footage, as well as his recorded legacy, the colossal trove of blues he recorded for black and white and imperial in the 40s and 50s, and his Atlantic record's album, T-Bone Blues. T-Bone Blues was compiled from 1955 and 56 sessions that he made in Chicago and Los Angeles.
The former featured Chicago Bluesman Junior Wells and Jimmy Rogers, and included T-Bone's original, Why Not, a little known tune that proved to be the prototype for Walkin' By Myself, the blues classic that was recorded the following year by Jimmy Rogers. Why Not, why Not, darling, I don't understand. Why Not, let me be your make a man. Why Not, why Not, leave it, you know you turn me wrong.
Why Not, let me love you all I know. I love you, baby, you know that too. Give me all my love, one more. And I do.
Why Not, why Not, darling, I don't know. Why Not, let me be your daddy. Since his death in 1975, T-Bone Walker has remained one of the most revered and respected figures among Bluesmen, and few players who pick up a guitar fail to acknowledge T-Bone as the primary source of electric blues guitar style in modern blues. But few have exceeded B.B.
King in the continual acknowledgement that he paid to T-Bone. In his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, B.B. said, when I heard Aaron T-Bone Walker, I flat out lost my mind. Thought Jesus himself had returned to earth playing electric guitar.
T-Bone's blues filled my insides with joy and good feeling. I became his disciple and remained so today. My greatest debt is to T-Bone. He showed me the way.
His sound cut me like a sword. Musically, he was everything I wanted to be. A modern Bluesman whose blues were as blue as the bluest country blues with attitude as slick as those big cities I yearned to see. After singling out T-Bone for the quality of his singing, his songwriting, his stage presence, and his attire, B.B.
concludes his narrative with a humbling self-assessment of his singular stature among Bluesmen. As my markets kept expanding, I might have gotten cocky or prideful. I didn't and for good reason. I knew I was there carrying the blues message around the globe only as a result of timing and happenstance.
T-Bone Walker should have been the worldwide symbol of the blues. T-Bone was the sure enough guru. I was just his disciple, but T-Bone was born too soon. No wonder then that the King of the Blues took such pleasure and played so hard on September 16, 1967, his 42nd birthday, when he welcomed T-Bone as his special guest for this performance at the Monterey Jan's Festival.
Thank you so much. Today is my birthday. And this is one of the greatest gifts I think that I could ever have. Being able to work here with you and to have this wonderful gentleman back here.
That's the T-Bone Walker. Come on, do this number with me. How about it? To see all of the film clips referred to here, look for my blog on T-Bone Walker on the jazz on the mode page at innetr.net.
There you'll also find additional podcasts produced by New England Public Radio. Thanks to Katie Bright for Production Assistance for jazz beat on Tom Rini.