Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
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Happy Hour Harmonica Podcast
Paul Butterfield retrospective, with Tom Ellis
Tom Ellis joins me on episode 62 for something a little bit different as we do a retrospective of the legendary Paul Butterfield, with Tom our resident expert.
Born in 1942 in Chicago, Butterfield frequented many of the South Side blues clubs located there and even had the audacity to hire Howling Wolf’s rhythm section before going on to record his seminal album ‘The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’. His high energy form of blues launched him on the scene and he quickly followed this with the genre busting East West album, with the band evolving further in the following albums by incorporating horns.
Butter moved to Woodstock and formed Better Days. He also appeared in some notable sideman roles, including The Last Waltz concert with The Band.
Butterfield has left us a tremendous body of work. He helped bring blues to the mainstream and created his own sound on harmonica that is as influential as any of the classic harmonica players.
Links:
Tom’s Blues Access magazine articles on Butterfield:
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_25/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_27/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_29/butter.html
http://www.bluesaccess.com/No_31/butter.html
East West Live album review:
https://www.bluespower.com/447rev.htm
Horn From The Heart documentary:
https://www.hornfromtheheart.com/
Homespun instructional material:
https://www.homespun.com/instructors/paul-butterfield/
Videos:
Album with John Mayall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR040iW52_c
Performing at Woodstock in 1969:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h62W2ARtwU8
Mystery Train with The Band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-fmqOU8_Uo
Playing with Muddy Waters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Sj5tpn-no
Performing with BB King, Eric Clapton, Steve Ray Vaughan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-i-tIXxtlY
2015 Hall of Fame Induction, with Jason Ricci:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMxFvBVTWmM
Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com
Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB
Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ
Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
and Blows Me Away Productions: http://www.blowsmeaway.co
Tom Ellis joins me on episode 62 for something a little bit different as we do a retrospective of the legendary Paul Butterfield with Tom, our resident expert. Born in 1942 in Chicago, Butterfield frequented many of the Southside Blues Clubs located there and even had the audacity to hire Howling Wolf's Ribbon Section before going on to record his seminal album, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. His high-energy form of blues launched him on the scene and he quickly followed this with a genre-busting East-West album with the band evolving further in the following albums by incorporating horns. Butter moved to Woodstock and formed Better Days. He also appeared in some noticeable Sideman roles, including the Last Waltz concert with the band. Butterfield has left us a tremendous body of work. He helps bring blues to the mainstream and created his own sound and harmonica that is as influential as any of the classic harmonica players. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello, Tom Ellis, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:So today we're doing something a little bit different. We're doing a Paul Butterfield retrospective. So obviously, Paul, sadly, is no longer with us. So you're here as our resident Paul Butterfield expert to talk us through Paul's life and his career. So maybe you can start off by telling us, you know, your sort of background with Paul Butterfield.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'll give you the kind of a short history. I grew up in a beach town in northeast Florida. And when I was 15 years old, the local radio station. It was a small little 5,000 watt station. They hired a disc jockey who came from New York. His name was Jay Thomas. And Jay actually became a TV actor and a very famous radio personality in Southern California later. But Jay was hired to do a show from three to eight every day. And Jay brought nothing but albums and was doing album-oriented rock in 1965, which exposed me and my friends to a whole host of musics that we would never have heard on traditional AM radio at that time. And one of the things that Jay, one of the groups he loved a lot was The Doors. He played a lot of Doors. About two years later, I was working with a group of people, one of whom had been living in San Francisco. She brought a copy of early issues of Rolling Stone magazine, in which there was an interview with Paul Butterfield, who I had never heard of. And in that interview, he made some fairly negative comments about The Doors' opinion that The Doors were not a Well, I was a big Doors fan, so I immediately thought, who is this Paul Butterfield? And that is kind of what set me on my search. I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine at that point in time so I could enjoy all of the music news that I would never have received in Florida. I went out and bought the first Paul Butterfield album at a record store that eventually hired me. And I worked there for a couple of years and learned a lot more about blues and music in general, having access to their catalog. But that's what started me with Paul Butterfield. Butterfield. I got the first album and I knew nothing about the blues, nothing about the Chicago tradition at all, but was blown away by it. One of my closest friends was a jazz guitar player and we had listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of guitar players, a lot of jazz guitar players. He, of course, was wiped out by Michael Bloomfield. So Butterfield became this thing that bonded the two of us and a couple of other folks that were big music fans like me.
SPEAKER_00:With your long association with Paul Butterfield, you've actually done quite a lot of writing about him, haven't you? You wrote some excellent articles for the blues access magazine which are four of which are available online i'll put links onto those people who want to go and delve deeper into the details of paul's career they're fantastic articles well recommend reading them you did a seminar about paul busfield at the spa convention um you wrote the liner notes for the paul busfield box set and electra
SPEAKER_02:yes but not only the box set but also the the reissue of the live recording where we basically put out twice the music that had appeared in the first recording there was a whole additional cds worth of material that that had never been released. And we put that out.
SPEAKER_00:And you also interviewed the man himself.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I did. The first time I saw Butterfield, the first Miami pop festival was in the late 60s. Me and my jazz guitar player friend and another friend who was a drummer, we all went to the pop festival specifically to see the Butterfield Blues Band. This was a point in his career that we were unaware of. We had not heard the Pig Boy Crab Shaw recording yet. And the band that he had in Miami was in fact that original Pig Boy Crab Shaw Band with Mark Nathalan, Philip Wilson, Sanborn was there. We were just blown away, just completely blown away by Butterfield. And that night, in those days, they had a lot of camping out went on at these festivals. As you know, if you've watched the Woodstock films, we went into the campground because we had been told that there were a lot of musicians who were performing who were wandering around in the campground playing. And in fact, so Butterfield was. He was with Gene Dinwiddie. The two of them were walking around and kind of jumping in and jamming with people and And it was funny because Dinwiddie was playing mandolin, which he played, you know, on In My Own Dream. And then Butterfield was playing flute. So I kind of got to sit up close and personal with Butterfield in a different kind of setting. But I did interview him later. Yes, when I lived in Houston, I wrote for a music magazine there. He came to town, and this was the period right after Ronnie Barron had left the Better Days Band. Jeff Mulder was still in the band. Amos Garrett was still in the band. The original group was there. And they had hired Goldie McJohn, who had become famous as the keyboard player for Steppenwolf and then later for Crosby, Stills, and Nash. So But I got to interview Paul after that gig, and to say I was intimidated is a significant understatement. But he was very outgoing, very easy to talk to, obviously somebody who was extremely proud of the music that he had released.
SPEAKER_00:So what was he like as a person? I read some things that he, certainly when he was younger, he was quite a tough guy, but had he mellowed out a little bit by the time you met him?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, I think that tough guy reputation, I think that was something that all of the band leaders in Chicago probably had. They carried around a lot of cash after gigs. It was kind of a dangerous area, certainly where Butterfield grew up. He was right on the edge of the University of Chicago campus, but where he grew up, it was pretty tough. He was very, very open in talking about his music. It was kind of bizarre our interview because we talked for about 15 minutes and I'm writing notes and asking him questions and I got to a certain point where I wanted to know what had happened with Buzzy Featon who you may remember was his guitar player at Woodstock and then on the Keep On Moving album Buzzy had left the band or actually had been kicked out of the band I think because he had some substance abuse problems and when I mentioned Buzzy Butterfield kind of ended the interview he said you know I really don't want to talk about that that wasn't a good situation and I So we had kind of an odd ending. He was a very nice guy, very, very nice person. I sense none of that, you know, bully tough guy stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, good to hear. I'm sure he was. He was born in 1942. And you mentioned there that you heard him playing flute at the festival there. So I think that was his first instrument. He learned classical flute as a youngster, didn't he?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he did. And I think one of the important things about Butterfield that most people overlook is the fact that because of his classical training, he learned how to read music and he understood how to play. music theory to a certain extent. If you look at the traditionally famous blues players, very few of them had any relationship either with classical music or with reading or writing music in terms of sheet music. And I think that that is an aspect of his character and his background that opened him up to the kind of musics that led to East-West and then provided him with a secure position in fronting a band that was full of fantastic horn players, just fantastic players. The big band, the last iteration of the big band had stellar musicians, all of whom on paper were much greater musicians than Butterfield was, but he could hold his own with those guys. Sanborn told me once that the leader of that band from an arranging standpoint was Dinwiddie, of course, because Dinwiddie had come straight out of bebop and he was very, very seasoned. Paul did read music. He didn't read music well, but he did read music and he understood what these arrangements were like when he looked at them on paper.
SPEAKER_00:Did he get to a good level playing flute? Do you know what sort of age he played that tool?
SPEAKER_02:I guess the best way to answer that question is to say he studied with the first chair flautist of the Chicago Symphony. And I doubt the first chair flautist of the Chicago Symphony just takes all comers. I actually, doing my research for Butterfield, I wanted to know more about what learning the flute was about. And I spent some time with the first chair flautist of the Dallas Symphony. And the basic stuff he explained to me that he would require his students to know indicated to me that you have to be somewhat schooled and educated to get to that level of instruction. So So yeah, I think he did. I think he fully understood the flute. He sounded great, you know, when we heard him in the campground that night.
SPEAKER_00:He's not recorded playing flutes in any of his albums, is he?
SPEAKER_02:I think he's the flute player on Love March. I'm almost positive he is. Because they didn't have a flautist in the band. You know, they had baritone, tenor, alto. They had a trumpet. They had everything, but they didn't have a... And none of those guys were flute players.
SPEAKER_00:And so his father was a lawyer, right? So he came
SPEAKER_02:from a reasonably wealthy family then? jazz fan, played jazz all the time. And when Paul was younger, he had to be around that. He had to be exposed to all of that. He was around jazz all the time. I got to spend quite a bit of time with Peter in doing my research, who was a wonderful person. And he made it clear to me that it was his opinion that that had had a huge impact on Paul, being around all of that jazz. There weren't blues records to the extent that there are today in the early 60s, late 50s and early 60s. And jazz, of course, was a hugely popular idiom here in the United States.
SPEAKER_00:You mentioned that, obviously, he grew up in Chicago, the blues town. I think he, from the south side in Hyde Park here, where lots of the blues clubs were.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, lots of the blues clubs. I think at one point in time in the early 60s, there were something like 100 blues clubs in Chicago, and they were all over. There's actually some really interesting information about late 50s, early 60s Chicago club environment in the new Billy Boy Arnold book that Kim Field helped Billy Boy write. There were clubs everywhere. And then that's just on the South Side. And then there was a whole other group of clubs on the West Side. What Butterfield did was he grew up enmeshed in the South Side traditions, which was the Muddy and the Wolf. And West Side was more guitar-oriented. I don't think there's many harp players that were famous that came from the West Side. Otis Rush was from the West Side. What he did was he enmeshed himself in that South Side thing, which was being around Muddy and all those guys all the time, and was, from what everyone told me, completely unafraid to go down into those neighborhoods, you know, any time of the day or night, wandering out of the club at 3 a.m., he was unafraid. I mean, he and Charlie Musselwhite were really warriors in the fact that they would go down into that environment to hear the music. Fully ingrained in the Southside tradition there for a couple of years.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and he sat in, what, with Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters as well during that time, did he?
SPEAKER_02:I would imagine that Butterfield sat in with more people than we would ever know. I'm sure you've read the quotes from Elvin Bishop when where elvin said you know he started playing harmonica and you know and he was a beginner and a year later he was he was an expert he was a master
SPEAKER_00:yeah
SPEAKER_02:that kind of growth has to come from somewhere it doesn't come from sitting in your bedroom it comes from getting out playing and being exposed to the music
SPEAKER_00:so yeah i think you know he sat in the clubs and you know certainly said that money waters was his mentor and obviously recorded a couple of albums with him which we'll get on to later but yeah so he formed that early relationship with money then did he
SPEAKER_02:yeah he did of course you know the most notorious thing that butterfield did was he hired sammy lay and Jerome Arnold away from Howlin' Wolf as his rhythm section but besides that's a pretty ballsy thing to do you know I think it's an indication of how much respect he had garnered and had earned in the south side in the clubs that he could approach guys like that who were you know well seasoned and in demand and convince them to come you know with this young upstart white boy with another white boy guitar player
SPEAKER_00:and I think that's a you know really critical thing that Butterfield did is he brought blues to a mainstream white audience yeah and he also had an interracial band, as you say, because he had the rhythm section from Howling Wolf's band.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I think that, you know, the beginning of that was certainly the playing at Big John's, which was a club on the north side. And the north side was a wealthier part of Chicago. There were a lot of music clubs around. John Hurt, who became Albert Grossman's partner, owned a club there. They had a white audience that was interested in drinking, partying and dancing. And when Butterfield hit the scene there, it became a scene. I think they were booked every weekend. He would support booking Muddy or someone else on the weeknights. So he was already working to spread the blues. And he and Bloomfield probably were the leaders of that, especially in the Fillmore days. But when he got to the north side, things really exploded. And then the college kids came to the clubs on the north side. They got interested. Then he started playing some colleges. And from there, it just blew up. And then you got to Monterey and New York. And he really became... really famous, actually, I think, within music circles at that point in time. But he certainly became a star in a loud, highly propulsive music.
SPEAKER_00:So before that, before he became well known, he started out I think playing with, is it Nick Gravenites in the duo before he then went on to form the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they would play these socials, house parties, socials, whatever. Elvin Bishop was involved in that scene as well. I think that that trio of Nick Gravenites and Elvin and Paul Butterfield, they kind of got together and did a lot of playing at a lot of events, mostly just parties is what it was. It was private parties.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so they Then he got the band together, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as you mentioned, Howling Wolf's Rhythm Section, Elvin, Nick. They were formed, I think, in 1963, and then they released the first album, which I'm sure many people listening to this heard many times, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band album. It was released in 1965 after a couple of false starts trying to record them,
SPEAKER_02:yeah? Yeah, there's actually an earlier iteration. There's the Lost Paul Butterfield Electro Sessions.
UNKNOWN:.
SPEAKER_02:That was kind of the band without Bloomfield. The producer, Paul Rothschild, really lobbied Butterfield very heavily to bring Bloomfield into the band. And of course, that changed the dynamic and the entire trajectory of both of their careers at that point when that first album came out, because it had such a huge impact.
SPEAKER_00:Right, yeah. So Bloomfield was on that 1965 album, yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, he is.
SPEAKER_00:He decided to play with Butterfield instead of Bob Dylan, didn't he?
SPEAKER_02:He did. And, you know, I think you can tell a lot about that band from from that famous quote that appears on the back of that album cover, which is, we suggest you play this record at the highest volume possible. These guys were very much in your face, very confident in what they did. When Newport happened and Bloomfield pulled a portion of the Butterfield band up on the stage to back him in his electric music performance that created so much controversy, I don't think that Dylan probably could have offered them the kind of playing environment that they had in Just
SPEAKER_00:to highlight that, just bringing that out. So this is the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, where Paul Butterfield's band backed Bob Dylan in his first electric performance, which is, of course, a very famous incident where all the folkies were unhappy that he wasn't playing acoustic. But Butterfield wasn't playing in that band, was he? It was just the band,
SPEAKER_02:yeah? friend of Dylan's, you know, from living in Woodstock and being managed by Albert Grossman.
SPEAKER_00:So that appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, was that before the album was released? That helped to gain some more recognition, did it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it did. It's funny, you had a whole group of people at Newport who would later all become part of that same music scene in Woodstock, including, you know, Jeff and Maria Mulder and Eric Von Schmidt. I mean, all these people saw Butterfield play at Newport, you know, in that first performance, which I think was a an afternoon performance, and it literally blew everybody away. I mean, you talk to them even today and they'll say, we just never had heard anybody play music that way. Certainly not blues that way. It just engendered this, you know, enthusiasm and reputation and people started talking about him and it just blew up from there.
SPEAKER_00:And you mentioned the original Lost Electro Sessions, which, you know, there's some great songs on that. It's a double album, as you say, isn't it? Some really good songs.
UNKNOWN:And...
SPEAKER_00:but maybe a little bit raw but certainly the um that was released later i think in in the in the 90s yeah but um the first album again the uh the paul butterfield blues band album which has got born in chicago of course probably one of his most iconic songs so uh what about that album
SPEAKER_02:In preparation for this, I listened to that whole album again the other day. And what struck me was the variety of the music. The tribute to Little Walter and Muddy. You sense the honoring of those people that taught him so much and that he respected so much. You sense that throughout that whole album. But when you listen to a song like Thank You, Mr. Poobah... Which is a very interesting instrumental workout. Unlike anything I've ever heard, even today, I've never heard anything that quite reminds me of Thank You for Mr. Puba. I mean, these guys were at a level of sophistication or targeting a level of sophistication that was far beyond a version of My Babe or a Muddy Tomb. They were going after something else. Luckily for them, they hit a time when the listening audience, had big ears and people were searching out new music to hear. They were aggressively looking for something new and it fit right in with that desire to find the new.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And you've already mentioned East West, which came next year in 1966, which is definitely a departure from standard blues. East West being the typical of that kind of inspired by Indian music slash kind of jazz. So that East West song was quite a departure, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_02:It is. And again, I hate to keep using the word sophistication, but you have to be a sophisticated musician to play across those changes the way they do. Certainly, that song could never have been played with Sammy Lay on drums. Sammy's always been a great drummer, but you needed a jazz drummer to have the right feel for that. Billy Davenport opened that door. If you listen to Work's song, I can see Sammy playing that very easily, but even Work's song, that's not a traditional blues song either.
UNKNOWN:... Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:It's a different set of changes, and certainly the way they solo over the changes of both of those tunes, as impressive as it is on work song, you can ramp that up a couple of degrees for East-West, because the playing of everybody, you really hear Elvin. Elvin has now come out as a guitar player and really has established his personality as a guitar player. Bloomfield, of course, is kind of an outer space, but very much grounded. And then Butterfield, what Butterfield plays, it's just butter. Butterfield. And the thing that strikes me about Butterfield is his playing style was his and his alone. You know, Levon Helms said to me when I was writing the articles and we were writing about a performance where Muddy Waters came up to Woodstock to play, he said to me, Muddy Waters' idea of fun was not getting together with a bunch of white boys to play the blues. You had to be more than that. You had to bring more to the music. You had to be more than unique to get on the stage with Muddy Waters. I mean, Muddy Waters, you know, when Butterfield was a kid and when he was coming up. And even through the first album, Buddy Waters, he could call up Little Walter. He could call up a whole range of players. They all live right there in Chicago. He didn't need to have some white boy who was not that good on the harmonica playing on stage with him. So Butterfield brought something different. And if you listen to Butterfield's playing throughout his entire career, there is no one else that sounds like that. The way he approaches the instrument, the way he puts together phrases and and puts together notes, the way he plays background. It's not Little Walter. It's not James Cotton. It's Butterfield. And if you're looking for Butterfield to try and find the parts of Butterfield's playing where he obviously sounds like Little Walter or Cotton or Big Walter, you're not going to find that. That's not him. His personality is very, very distinct as a harmonica player.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I read so many times, you know, researching for this about people saying he just put everything into every performance, even in his later years when he was dwindling, he still put everything into it.
SPEAKER_02:He did. You know, when I saw him at the Miami Pop Festival, those guys laid it all on the line. There was nothing left after that performance. They were sweaty, they were worn out, but they played their hearts out. I was shocked. Watching Butterfield was just, it was inspiring to watch him play.
SPEAKER_00:Going back to East West, apparently the live versions of that would sometimes run on to almost an hour yeah and it became this big epic epic song every time they performed it
SPEAKER_02:yeah in fact I got to spend a little time with Martin Afflin when I was doing my writing and at his place up in north of San Francisco and He actually, you know, he released the live East West performances on his label, which are fantastic and are really much different in many ways from what you got on the Elektra albums. But he has, you know, hours and hours of additional tape of varying quality from East West. I listened to some of it. Well, we stayed up from midnight till 5 a.m. doing nothing but listening to versions of East West. And I was never bored.
UNKNOWN:Oh, my God.
SPEAKER_00:So in 66, he did a recording with John Mayles' Blues Breakers.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he went to England. The band went to England. The entire band went. There's a very interesting history of that trip to England in David Dan's Michael Bloomfield biography. If you're into Bloomfield, I would highly, highly suggest you read. They went. It was not a great tour. The weather was bad. They had all kinds of equipment issues. It didn't come off the way they wanted it to, but he did do that recording with John Mayles.
UNKNOWN:I love Cry for you Cry for you
SPEAKER_03:i've
SPEAKER_02:seen recently some bootlegs of a peter green fleetwood mac performance where he is also playing and i don't know if that was recorded at that same time or not
SPEAKER_00:and then in 67 you already mentioned the resurrection of pig boy crabshaw album this was a bit more of an r&b album yeah so what about the inspiration for this one and where's the name pig boy crabshaw come from i always wondered
SPEAKER_02:big boy crabshaw was a moniker that alvin bishop came up with for himself uh You know, Elvin's always been the guy that wore the overalls on stage and kind of portrayed himself as a Oklahoma country boy, which he was. He happened to just be brilliant. from an education standpoint. Superstar guy. But that was his deal. So it was kind of his coming out, not only as part of the new band, but also stepping far away from the Michael Bloomfield-led sound of the first band. Elvin told me was that when Butterfield put that band together, everybody wanted to have a band with horns. The template for the Butterfield band was Junior Parker, because Junior had a full horn section. B.B. King had a horn section. That was kind of the thing. that was really, really interesting to Butterfield in his next phase was to have a horn band. And I think when you listen to Pig Boy Crab Shot, you listen to the arrangements, especially on a song like Driving Wheel, which is a Junior Parker tune, you're not going to find them straying too far from the original arrangements or the original approach. The band obviously had not, it wasn't seasoned yet. It takes a while to season a band. By the time they got to Woodstock, which was not too long after that, and Elvin, of course, had left, that was a different band. Actually, the In My Own Dream Band was a very different band when I listened to it from the Pigboy Cramshaw. Much, much more. The charts are much more complex. The arrangements in the charts. The song selection is much different. The reading of a song, like the way they do Just To Be With You.
SPEAKER_00:That's one of my absolute favorites of his. Of any harmonica song, it's fantastic.
UNKNOWN:......
SPEAKER_02:You can listen to Muddy do that all day long, and it's as great as it is. The way Butterfield does it is just as great from a different perspective.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so in My Own Dream, as you mentioned, there's an album released in 68, so he's releasing an album a year. He's busy, but this is still the Paul Butterfield blues band. He just added horns to it, yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Right, exactly. Horns and changed the structure. The biggest change that probably happened with Pig Boy Crab Shaw was, besides the horns, the obvious thing, was the change in the rhythm section. because he had Bugsy Ma, who you referenced R&B. That was a good observation because Bugsy Ma had come out of Wilson Pickett's band, had been the bass player for Wilson Pickett. So he was an R&B guy, pretty hardcore. And then he had Philip Wilson, who, you know, Philip Wilson was a free jazz guy. I mean, he had been playing in New York and Chicago with Mulhall Richard Abrams and a lot of those kind of people who were playing completely free. And so he brought that rhythm section That odd combination of those two guys brought a very, very different sound to Butterfield from Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, or Billy Ballantyne.
SPEAKER_00:And then a slight departure for Butterfield, he did an album with Muddy Waters called Father and Sons. You know, I think Muddy Waters, I've read, was really pleased with the album. He felt it was his best since his kind of heyday in the 50s playing with Little Walter and co. Yeah, so he was well pleased with it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you're right. You know, that weekend of the recording, the live recording, as well as the studio recordings That was a weekend of honoring Muddy Waters in the city of Chicago. So, you know, you had people who were very big Muddy Waters fans who were attending those shows that show up on the Fathers and Sons on the live cuts from Fathers and Sons. I can see why Muddy was pleased. I mean, when I listen to Fathers and Sons, even today, it has not aged. It is still a spectacular blues album. I don't really know. If there are a lot of albums that were made by leading blues guys like the Howlin' Wolf London Sessions or any of those, I don't know if any of those albums even come close to Fathers and Sons. Fathers and Sons is just many rungs up the ladder from those other kind of tribute albums or albums where guys got to play with their heroes. If you listen to a song on that album, the same thing.
SPEAKER_03:That same thing That's
SPEAKER_02:about as deep a blues as Muddy Waters gets. The way Duck Dunn and Butterfield in particular, the way they approach their instruments in that album, man, it's as heavy as the original Muddy's tune. Maybe heavier than the original Muddy tune, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00:In the same year, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played at Woodstock, which is a very famous concert. And his caption is, there's a motion picture made of it. And originally they didn't make the motion picture, but then it was added later on, wasn't it? So that was a big deal playing in that Woodstock festival.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that was a really, really big deal. One of the unfortunate things about Woodstock was that Albert Grossman, the very famous Svengali manager who managed Janis Joplin and a bunch of bands, he was reticent to have his groups recorded without getting paid. Everybody that played at Woodstock, nobody got paid for the recordings that appeared in the movie. So a lot of the good Butterfield stuff didn't come out. It's almost all out now. I know there's a bootleg LP that can be found on eBay that I think is the entire set. But the band had changed a little bit then. Bugsy Maw had left, Elvin had left. Buzzy Featon was on guitar. He was, I think, 19 years old. Incredible player. Then you had the very huge ad of Rod Hicks on bass. Rod Hicks played a fretless bass. He played with Aretha Franklin forever. And he was a very, very well-taught bass player. Really had a rhythm section that was incredibly strong. And Buzzy was so full of energy. You can almost sense when you watch the Woodstock stuff, whether you see all the recording of just what appeared in the original film, you can sense the energy level Buzzy Featon had when he got And the horn section had fleshed out some too. They'd gotten a different trumpet player, a guy named Stephen Deo, and they'd added a baritone bass player. So they had a much thicker sound out of the horn section. And it was at that point in time, I think, with Butterfield where he really, you know, there was an interview with him where he said something to the effect of, you know, I don't want to play all the solos. I've got some guys in this band that can really play. And as the band continued on after Woodstock, it became more and more of a, almost more of a jazz band. Yeah, and I think, you know, there wasn't then quite
SPEAKER_00:as much harmonica in the recordings, was there? But it's something, as you say, that he wanted to do, yeah, with the sound overall.
SPEAKER_02:One of the things that I've always felt very strongly about Butterfield was that he was very much a creature of his bands. He was driven by the quality of the musicians around him. He never had anybody in his band who wasn't a stellar player, who didn't go on to do something else. I mean, the whole horn section, when the big band ceased to be, the whole horn section, Stevie Wonder hired them all. He had players who were highly respected. He had to hold his own with these guys.
SPEAKER_00:You know, Butterfield was particularly strong in the live recording.
SPEAKER_02:That kind of brings me back to my comment about, you know, Butterfield played Butterfield. You listen to some of those songs, and you listen to some of the solos Butter does, where he just bar after bar after bar, ideas just flowing just one after another after another, after another, all interesting, all tied together, all different and unique. The sound of one song completely different from the sound of another song. Who is not a straight jazz player like Toots or who could play at that level with that level of musicians and be improvising and that creative.
UNKNOWN:So
SPEAKER_00:Right. Everybody
SPEAKER_02:was living in Woodstock. or they lived in New York City. So there was this interesting confluence of all these different musical styles in Woodstock, and people were playing constantly. They weren't just gigging at the Golden Bear Club. They weren't just gigging there. There were afternoon get-togethers where everybody would play. Very creative music environment. The band, of course, was up there as well. And Better Days came together, I think, because of that jamming that went on among all these different musicians. It was made up of a group of really, really stellar musicians.
SPEAKER_00:But did he go back to being a bit more rootsy in the first couple of albums with Better Days?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I think a lot of that's because of the people he was playing with. I mean, Jeff Mulder was definitely a folky. Ronnie Barron brought a lot more of that up-tempo, kind of like R&B kind of a feel. Amos Garrett was a guitar player who was also a great arranger, understood music very well, and was very unique. So again, it was an all-star ensemble. And a lot of those guys also were being managed by Albert Grossman. So it was kind of an in-the-family kind of a thing.
SPEAKER_00:And then he did another album with Muddy Waters in 75, the Woodstock album. I didn't know this until I read it. It was the last album released by Chess, and it won a Grammy, that album, as well.
SPEAKER_02:It did. On some of the songs, the band sounds a little timid behind Muddy, I think maybe a little intimidated, and on other of the songs, you know, they sound great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, probably not quite as strong as Falling Suns, but still a very good album from Muddy, I think, that one. And then in 1976, he appeared again on another very famous recording of The Last Waltz with the band and very famously played Mystery Train.
SPEAKER_02:I was watching a short little video clip with Robbie Robertson introducing him. He says something like, how about a little Paul Butterfield? And the crowd just goes nuts. Butterfield definitely had a stature. Even at that point, his bands had kind of gone away. He still had that stature. And his playing on Mystery Train is just fabulous.
UNKNOWN:Music
SPEAKER_00:Then getting late in 76, he released his first solo album, as he called it. So this was what, he didn't have the Butterfield Blues band, he wasn't playing with Better Days, it was what he called it, his solo album, and put it in your ear.
SPEAKER_02:When I listen to the second Better Days album, It All Comes Back, it's apparent to me that they probably went in the studio a little early. Those songs, they needed to be performed more. It sounds a little forced to me. And I think that the live album, the Put It In Your Ear album, is another example of why a musician who has had an opportunity to live in a song and perform that song can present it fully fleshed out. In that first Put It In Your Ear album, you had Henry Glover, the spectacular producer. You couldn't get a better producer than that with a huge reputation. The songs obviously were written and performed relatively quickly. There's some great harmonica playing on it. It doesn't sound like a Butterfield band. It doesn't have that cohesiveness that you came to expect. from everything that was put on recording by the Butterfield Blues Band.
SPEAKER_00:And I think it's fair to say that his last few albums didn't have the power of his early ones yet. So he had North-South in 81. Again, some good songs on there. Bread and Butterfield's a good one. But yeah, then he did Alive at the Lone Star with
SPEAKER_02:Rick Danko.
SPEAKER_00:And then his last album was the legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again. This was an attempt at a comeback just a couple of years before he died. Do
SPEAKER_02:you know the story behind the financing on that album? No,
SPEAKER_00:no, go
SPEAKER_02:for it. It's interesting. There were a group of guys. I don't know whether they were stockbrokers or what. They made a lot of money and they'd all gone to college together. And when they were in college, the number one thing they listened to all the time was the Butterfield Blues Band. They found out that Paul Butterfield was out there, didn't have a recording contract, you know, just kind of floating around. And they actually put together the money to put that album out. They were just huge fans of his, and it's just not a very good album. At that point in time in Butterfield's career, the substance abuse issues had really started to cause him some problems. And I think he felt without a band, he was kind of cut adrift. Albert Grossman died in that time frame. He'd been his business guy, got divorced. Of course, he had his problems with pancreatitis, which created all kinds of drug-related issues with him in his later years. Those albums, they're not representative of the Butterfield that I want want to listen
SPEAKER_00:to no but again in those later years though he did he did do some good stuff and he did a little bit more kind of session work of sitting in with people didn't he played in 1987 and a bb king and friends concert which was great you know a lot of stellar names on that such as bb king obviously eric clapton and of course we mentioned mystery train played with bonnie ray and maybe a little bit earlier than that
SPEAKER_02:you're right he did some great stuff in fact i saw him at a small club here called poor david's but that first set he played was stunning he went out for a break and I think he ingested some things that you know diminished his creativity because his second set was sad it was really sad to see what had happened in a 30 minute gap while he took a break you know but the first set when he was on boy he laid it out it was really something
SPEAKER_00:you know you mentioned there obviously he had his health problems with this stomach problem that he had and that really caused him a lot of problems didn't he he had to have a lot of operations and he started using heroin before then was that maybe partially as a result of the pain he was in, but maybe partially from the kind of us being the star that he was, you know, he was drawn into that, you know, and alcohol as well. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I think the pancreatitis led to that. You know, one of the things that I was told when I was doing my research was by guys in the early bands, he had no tolerance for hard drugs, none. It was always ironic to me that at the end, all of these people who loved him and who cared about him, you know, they tried interventions, they tried all kinds of different things and they just could not get him to kick, you know, his heroin problem.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, and this is ultimately, he died of an overdose, sadly, in 1987, yeah?
SPEAKER_02:Yes. He was living, I think, in Los Angeles at the time. In his later years, talking to his brother, I really got the feeling that things had really gone awry for Paul. ran around with a pretty hardcore drug crowd. It's almost a rock and roll cliche. A very sad ending to someone who had been what he had been.
SPEAKER_00:How was his death received in the musical community?
SPEAKER_02:I heard it on NPR, on National Public Radio. I'll never forget where I was. I was in my car and I was listening to NPR and they said, today Paul Butterfield, they played a little bit of Born in Chicago. I think a lot of people were kind of shocked. It elevated an interest in him again, which is kind of what led to me doing a lot of the writing that I ended up doing. But you have to remember that at that point in time, 10 years, maybe 15 years after the heyday. And so Butterfield, you know, music styles had changed. The blues was basically dead. Butterfield could still draw a crowd, couldn't sell any albums because people didn't know who he was, couldn't hold a recording contract because he couldn't sell any albums. It was a rough time for him. The music world was stunned, totally stunned.
SPEAKER_00:I've got to mention that there's a fantastic documentary, if people haven't seen it, about him called Horn From The Heart. Lots of interviews with, you know, many of the musicians were in his bands and people he played with and many of the names you've mentioned here on that documentary. So do you know who put that together?
SPEAKER_02:I can't think of the name of the guy that put that together, but that was very much a labor of love in the works for many, many years. I mean, I think the first time I talked with the guy that did that, gosh, I want to say it was 10 years before it came out. His timing was great because not long after that, within a year or two after that, a lot of the people that played with Butterfield just passed away. I think it is a good introductory to Butterfield, his history, especially the early days.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Definitely worth a watch, yeah. So a few more things he did. First of all, let's talk about his singing. We talked about, obviously, as a harmonica player, but certainly in the Butterfield Blues Band, he was the singer, and then later on he shared the singing. But, you know, I think singing was a real strong point of his, although he wasn't necessarily known for being a singer as much as being a
SPEAKER_03:harmonica
SPEAKER_00:player.
SPEAKER_01:I thought I'd be your king, baby You would be my queen, yeah, yeah
SPEAKER_02:I think you're absolutely right. I think Butterfield was a great harp player. I also think he was a great singer. I was not very close to, but knew Bill Clark, William Clark, pretty well. And the last time I saw Bill, I was sitting backstage with Bill and we were talking and he said, you know, you did all that writing on Butterfield. And I said, yeah. He said, you know, when I was going, starting out, I didn't have any respect for that guy. You know, he said, but now the more I listened to it, the more I realized not only what a great harp player he was, but what a great singer he was and what a great band leader he was to hold that caliber of musicians to in a band and keep them all incentivized to stay. Coming from Bill Clark, I thought that was a very astute observation.
SPEAKER_00:He did a little bit of film work. I know he did a film called Steelyard Blues, which was his last recordings with Mike Bloomfield, interestingly, and Jane Fonda was in this film. So that was, I don't know if he had many other film soundtracks, but certainly that one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he did a Christmas tune on an album out of Woodstock. He did some stuff. I've seen Steelyard Blues. It's not a very good movie, in my opinion, but the music The music is really good. I don't know if Butterfield actually appears in that movie in the background somewhere or not. Steelyard Blues has a couple of great Butterfield tunes. The one I think I referred to you was Swing With It, which starts out the recording, and there's some guitar noodling going on, and then all of a sudden Butterfield comes in and takes the song over. The presence of his harmonica is just amazing.
SPEAKER_03:Swing with it.
UNKNOWN:Swing with it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and there's one other album I'd like to mention, and that is the Levon Helm RCO All Stars.
UNKNOWN:All Stars
SPEAKER_00:Something else he did, he did something called the Blues Harmonica Masterclass with the homespun owner, Happy Trom. It's a really nice recording because you kind of get to hear him talking about his approach to harmonica. I've read that it's been described as a zen-like approach to harmonica instruction.
SPEAKER_01:...around with the rhythms at the same time as you're learning those different licks. So I'm going to play a little rhythm just to leave you with maybe you can get some idea.
UNKNOWN:...
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and you know, one of the things that's great about that is there's so much of his acoustic playing on it, which is something he is woefully underestimated for. His acoustic playing was really, really great, really different. A lot of it on the Better Days stuff is great. Some of my favorite playing he does.
SPEAKER_00:It is, and you're right to point out his acoustic playing there because, you know, we've talked about his power and the emotion he gets out of his harmonica, certainly when he's amplified, but, you know, he does play a lot of acoustic on it as well.
SPEAKER_01:Don't try to
SPEAKER_03:love
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, his brother Peter told me this story, great story. He said that Paul was playing in, I guess they were playing in Chicago, and the brothers hadn't seen each other for a long time. And Peter was unable to go to the gig, and Paul came over afterwards. And Peter, his wife's name is Pam, Peter and Pam's daughter was a baby and was crying, and they could not get her to stop crying. And so Paul walks in the bedroom and pulls out, you know, harmonica, and for about 30 minutes plays her what Peter described as this incredible incredibly beautiful piece of music. It was almost symphonic because it just kind of had sections that it built to calm her down. Obviously, all acoustic. He was a great acoustic player.
SPEAKER_00:And then he was honored as he deserved, first of all, in 2006, inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. And then in 2015, inducted much more prestigiously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
SPEAKER_02:Correct. I was at both of those. Yeah, both of those induction ceremonies. The induction at the Blues Hall of Fame, which was held in Los Angeles, it brought out an incredible array of musicians. I mean, everybody from Billy Gibbons to John Fogerty to obviously the members of the band. Bonnie Raitt was there. I mean, a lot of people came out. It was a big deal. when Butterfield was inducted into that. And of course, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a little shout out to my friend Bill Bentley, who is a very, very well-known person in the music world here in the United States. Bill lobbied for years with some other people too to get Butterfield considered for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And of course, he was successful. So good work for Bill.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And Jason Ritchie played at that concert, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, didn't he?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, he did.
UNKNOWN:Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:So these inductions for both, these were for Butterfield himself or was it for the band or both?
SPEAKER_02:You know, the induction ceremony was really for the first iteration of the band. meaning the Bloomfield, Bishop, Mafflin, Sammy Lay, Jerome Arnold version of the band. The Butterfield Blues Band obviously includes two or maybe three very different ensembles, but in terms of who was invited to speak at the induction ceremony, it was the core remaining members of the band who spoke. I think Bloomfield's niece was there, and then Butterfield's first wife was there with her sons. But yeah, first version.
SPEAKER_00:Did he play any chromatic? I've got a record one of his albums, If I Never Sing My Song. Is that him playing chromatic on there? Is that somebody else?
SPEAKER_02:I think he does play a little chromatic. You know, that's a funny story for me, because when I first found out about Butterfield, there was an early PR photo of Butterfield that appeared somewhere that I saw, and he's playing the chromatic. I remember when I first started to play harmonica, I wanted to play like Paul Butterfield. That was my goal. So I went out and bought a chromatic because that was what he was playing. And of course, I had no idea how to play chromatic, no idea how the notes laid out. And it didn't function at all, you know, playing a C chromatic.
SPEAKER_00:Was this a photo shoot of him?
SPEAKER_02:It was.
SPEAKER_00:Because often they use chromatics because they're bigger and you can see them in photographs, right? So they didn't necessarily play them that much. But yeah, they just look better in the photographs.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm sure. Well, it's the same thing with, you know, there's a famous Dylan picture with him holding a chromatic. It's like, come on, Bob, you don't play chromatic in a rack.
SPEAKER_00:We'll get on to talking about the gear that Butterfield used. So you've touched on earlier on that you used to have a harmonica microphone business called Tom's Mics. Tell us about that.
SPEAKER_02:I did. It's still limping along. I'm not as engaged in it as I used to be, but I did, yes, for a long time. And I sold harmonica microphones to, that's how I got to know Bill Clark and Charlie Musselwhite and all of these guys, Jerry Portnoy, all of these guys that I, you know, consider to be my friends. I got to know them through that business. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to get to get up close and personal with a lot of heroes.
SPEAKER_00:Great. And so you sold mics to all those guys, did you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I did. Either sold or gave them mics. I mean, one of the things that we did was we, harmonica microphones, you know, have typically been thought of as a JT-30 or a Green Bullet or, you know, some version of those two. And one of the things that I was interested in, because of the microphone that Butterfield played or the two that he played, I was really interested in in exploring you know other great mics for harp players that provided maybe a different bit of color or a different bit of tone or performed very differently based on you know whether you were a hard blower or a soft blower how much nuance you could hear out of certain microphones as opposed to others and so i tried to expose a lot of my my harmonica playing professional friends and amateurs too to all of these different types of microphones
SPEAKER_00:yeah so of course butterfield famously played what the shura 545 and then the sort of gun shaped one that Is that his main mic?
SPEAKER_02:Yes and no. His first mic was an Electro-Voice mic. But in the mid-60s, when the Shure company, of course, was based in Chicago, at that point in time in the mid-60s, Shure was sponsoring bands. And they would provide all the microphones for a band. And they were sponsoring the Butterfield Blues Band. At that time, the 545 had not come out. Well, it was not called a 545. It was called a PE54. The PE was for professional entertainer. And one of the people that had played that microphone was Little Walter. It was a microphone he used a lot at the end of his career. And so everybody who played harp wanted to get one. And of course, Butterfield ended up getting one as well. And in fact, if you go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and you look in his kit that, you know, where he kept his harmonicas and his microphones and all that stuff, his kit was donated by his wife, Catherine, to the Rock and Roll. You can see the PE-54 in there, 545. It was a high impedance microphone.
SPEAKER_00:And so, you know, you mentioned Obviously, most people play a kind of bullet mic, a kind of crystal or a green bullet type mic. So what do you think that Shure dynamic mic brought, which was different in sound to those more traditional mics?
SPEAKER_02:Well, a huge sound. It's just a whole different animal. First of all, it's a dynamic mic as opposed to a crystal mic. The consistency, the lifespan of it is much greater. What Butterfield did that I thought was really cool that no one had done was he paired it with a super. And there weren't hard players out there playing through supers. Now, one of the reasons he did that...
SPEAKER_00:Sorry, this was a super reverb Fender amp,
SPEAKER_02:yeah. Right, yeah. I mean, the first time when I saw him in Miami, I was just blown away because he had two supers and Elvin had two supers. I mean, two supers, that's a lot of volume. That's a lot of air movement. Of course, they're playing outdoors, you know, and that kind of thing. So a lot of sounds go in the way naturally. But no one had done that. And that 545 really matched up very, very well with the Super. Matched up well with anything, but an amplifier with the power of a super was not something that was in the harmonica player's repertoire. You know, today, Rod Piazza and Dennis Groening, those guys, they have those big amps with 610s in them. And, you know, I mean, they're designed specifically to match with the output levels of a microphone. This was different back then. They were messing around. And that combination was... was really, really brutal. And the 545, also one of the things that was great about it, and I think you kind of see this on the cover of the live album, you could play it very acoustically because it was omnidirectional. So you had two in one. You can't really play a bullet microphone acoustically. It doesn't work. You have to be too close to the microphone to get the full sound. very, very functional microphone across a lot of different uses.
SPEAKER_00:I think the 545 is very similar, isn't it, to the SM57?
SPEAKER_02:It is similar. Probably the biggest difference is that there was a change in microphone, really in amplification technology. The original amplification that harmonica players used was all based on the high impedance system. A high impedance signal coming out of the microphone going down to the amplifier, it's called an unbalanced signal. So what happens is if you have a piece of cable, let's say that you're standing 20 feet from your amp, it's fine. But if you go 50 feet from your amp, the signal deteriorates as it makes its way down to the amplifier. So they came up with what was called low impedance. And low impedance, you can have a cable of any length. And when they made everything low impedance, they had to change the sound element a little bit in the 57. So it doesn't have quite that big, thick sound that the So you mentioned
SPEAKER_00:he played the Super Reverb. Is there any other particular amps he used?
SPEAKER_02:He certainly had at Newport. It appears he's playing through an Ampeg. It's hard to define, you know, in a situation like that, was that a house amp or was that his amp? I haven't seen enough pictures to know, but he's definitely playing through an Ampeg. And I think Bloomfield's playing through one too. In the live Fillmore recordings that you referenced earlier, I think Bloomfield's playing through one too. earlier, there's a picture in those recordings. And unless I'm mistaken, he's playing through a super. Almost positive he's playing through a super. So, you know, back then, people weren't as sophisticated about amplifiers as they are now. You know, you probably have heard the stories that Little Walter would show up with a microphone and his harmonicas and play through whatever they happened to have. He just didn't carry stuff around. People were exploring a little bit, but I think he stayed with a super longer than anything else. That's what he was also playing when I saw him play with Better Days. He was playing And
SPEAKER_00:harmonica-wise, he played the Marine Band, the Hornet Marine Band, right? But that's about all there was back then. He also played it upside down, didn't he? He did. He played
SPEAKER_02:upside down. A lot of people have said, he's not a tongue blocker. He can't play blues unless he's a tongue blocker. Well, come on, just listen. I think Butterfield was a guy, and I think you hear a lot of the use of the tongue a lot on the Fathers and Sons album. He used what he felt comfortable with. He could do it all. But he did play backwards or upside down. Interesting thing I learned in kind of researching the flute playing, and that is that one of the things you have to be very, very adept at as a flute player is the use of air. And so, you know, he came prepared to play a wind instrument. He didn't just kind of pick it up and not have any experience of playing a wind instrument. He knew how to do it. The fact that he was pursing his lips to play flute, you know, that's probably why he played more as a pursed lip player. But he had a technique of hitting three notes at once and kind of sucking up on the middle note that sounded very much like a tongue slap in a lot of ways. And you hear him use that a lot to really thicken up sound. Jerry Portnoy has the most beautiful vibrato I've ever heard. But Butterfield is a close second. His of vibrato, he could turn it on and off. And by turning it on and off, he could effectively change the entire emotional feel of a sequence of notes.
SPEAKER_00:So final question then, what do you think his legacy is to harmonica players and music in general?
SPEAKER_02:A couple of things. First of all, without Paul Butterfield, I don't know if the blues would have ever escaped Chicago. It certainly would have never become a huge popular style of music that it became in the middle to late 60s. I think his legacy beyond that is that Butterfield, more so than any other player, put the harmonica in a number of very interesting, very disparate environments. The big band, the playing over jazz changes in the big band is completely unique and different from playing over jazz. over the Eastern music changes in East-West, which is very different from him playing last night, very different from what he does on a lot of the Better Days stuff. And then you move on to the RCO All-Stars where you've got him putting the harmonica again in a very different environment from where people expect to hear that instrument. It provided a setting where the harmonica could now be added and put in different environments. And that's a huge accomplishment that I think Butterfield needs to be recognized for. So
SPEAKER_00:thanks so much for joining me today, Tom Ellison, sharing all your knowledge about Mr. Paul Butterfield.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been an honor, and I hope that anyone who listens to this will take up my suggestion, and I know it's your suggestion, to go out and listen to Paul Butterfield as much as they can.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast, and be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com. or on Facebook or Instagram at Zeidel Harmonicas. Thanks so much to Tom Ellis for bringing his expertise about Paul Butterfield. Remember to check out the podcast website, harmonicahappyhour.com, where you can give a donation to the podcast if you are so inclined. And now we'll take up Tom's advice and listen to some more Paul Butterfield with Song for Lee.
UNKNOWN:Song for Lee Thank you.