Sonny Boy Williamson II retrospective with Giles Robson and Jim Basnight

Giles Robson and Jim Basnight join me on episode 136 for a retrospective on Alex ‘Rice’ Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson II). 

Information on Sonny Boy’s early life is sketchy. Sonny Boy was likely born in 1912 and had a hard upbringing working on a plantation before becoming a travelling musician. Arriving in Helena, Arkansas, he found fame performing on the King Biscuit Time radio show before making his first recordings with Trumpet Records at age 38 in 1951. Sonny Boy made his classic cuts for Checker Records (a subsidiary of Chess) in 1955. 

He then toured Europe in 1963/64, becoming a celebratory in England and having a huge impact on the British Blues Boom.

Returning to Helena, where he died in 1965, Sonny boy is one of the true giants not only of the harmonica but also the blues, with his charismatic vocals, songwriting and enigmatic charm.

Links:

Giles Robson: https://gilesrobson.com

Jim Basnight: https://www.jimbasnightmusic.com/

Extract from Bill Donohue biography: https://www.furious.com/perfect/sonnyboy.html

Chris Strachwitz remembers Sonny Boy: https://arhoolie.org/chris-strachwitz-remembers-sonny-boy-williamson/

Bob Corritore photo gallery of Sonny Boy: https://bobcorritore.com/photos/sonny-boy-williamson-ii/

Sonny Boy discography: https://sonnyboywilliamson2.blogspot.com/2013/08/sonny-boy-williamsons-chronological.html

Macie J Blues blogspot on Sonny Boy: https://sonnyboywilliamson-maciejblues.blogspot.com/

Videos:

Possibly the late Chris Strachwitz recordings of Sonny Boy: ‘Last Sessions’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLco7ZmxqUs&t=10s

Concert from the Jazz House, Wiesbaden, Germany, November, 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGGR5l4zOzw&t=1s

‘Solo Harp’ album, from German photographer Stefanie Wiesand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6RkAlhX7fg

Robbie Robertson recalls meeting Sonny Boy shortly before he died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90-O6c20PLk

The grave of Sonny Boy, with comments from Giles Robson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-XQwpBTGRI

Bye Bye Bird in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZArN9y5qZc

Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

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
--------------------------------
Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

Chapters

• 1:57 Giles Robson returns to the podcast from his first appearance way back on episode 3 and has been busy as ever
• 2:38 Giles released a duo album with John Primer in 2024: Ten Chicago Blues Classics, where John plays rhythm guitar
• 4:12 When Neil first saw Giles perform he played the Sonny Boy song: My One Room Cabin
• 4:52 The influence Sonny Boy has had on Giles’ career and comparisons with Little Walter
• 5:10 Sonny Boy prompted Giles to play purely acoustic harmonica
• 6:42 Sonny Boy was highly admired during his time and the positive write-up he received in the UK press at the time
• 7:31 Sonny Boy dominated the European American Folk Blues tours
• 7:39 Sonny Boy was received virtually no press coverage about him in the US
• 9:09 Jim asks Giles aout a comparison between Walter Horton and Sonny Boy, and Big Walter may have taught Sonny Boy some harmonica
• 10:53 Jim Basinger is a singer, guitar player and bandleader, who doesn’t play harmonica
• 11:48 Jim is writing a biography on Sonny Boy, who Jim sees as a complete artist, not just a harmonica player
• 12:56 It will be a comprehensive 500 page biography on Sonny Boy
• 13:53 The biography is likely to be released either late 2025 or in 2026
• 14:27 Jim is also looking at making a documentary film on Sonny Boy after the book is published
• 15:14 There has previously been a biography released on Sonny Boy, by William (Bill) E Donoghue: Fessor Mojo's Don't Start Me To Talkin’
• 15:33 The Bill Donoghue biography is reasonably short. Jim was involved with this and Jim’s book will be more in-depth
• 16:15 Bill Donoghue had wanted to produce a documentary film on Sonny Boy
• 16:56 Lillian McMurry, of Trumpet Records, had a headstone placed on Sonny Boy’s grave in 1980, which probably doesn’t show an accurate year of birth
• 17:08 Gravestone correctly shows Sonny Boy died in 1965
• 17:59 Sonny Boy was the youngest of 21 children, likely born in late 1912 or early 1913
• 18:58 Brother was the one who named Sonny Boy ‘Rice’ due to Sonny Boy’s love of rice
• 19:55 Sonny Boy probably lived until the age of 52
• 20:06 Sonny Boy’s real name was Alex Miller (not Aleck, as written on his gravestone)
• 20:17 Born in Glendora, Mississippi
• 20:25 Sonny Boy ‘mis-represented’ facts about his life to the journalists who interviewed him and there isn’t reliable documentation showing the truth
• 21:16 Family later moved to Money, Mississippi where Sonny Boy worked on a plantation until age 17, where conditions were very tough and 12 out of 18 people didn’t make it past age 18
• 22:50 Sonny Boy looked older than he was due to his rough life and lifestyle, including alcohol abuse
• 23:59 Didn’t have a strong concept of time or dates
• 24:27 Jim tells of how Sonny Boy’s early life made him an habitual liar as he had to evade the law and other sources of trouble
• 24:55 Started the life as a wandering musician after leaving the plantation at age 17, which made him an outlaw at that time in the US
• 27:27 Travelled up to Memphis where met other musicians, including Howling Wolf, marrying his sister
• 27:59 Sonny Boy has various recorded marriages and likely a child
• 28:27 Travelled from town to town, centred around the town of Greenwood
• 30:08 Teamed-up with Robert Lockwood, which led to Sonny Boy working on the King Biscuit Time radio show
• 30:47 Sonny Boy reportedly stabbed a white man who was “trying to kill him” and he had to flee the Greenwood area
• 32:44 Moved around until arriving at Helena, Arkansas, where the radio station KFFA was located, which ran the King Biscuit Time show
• 34:27 Sonny Boy was on the King Biscuit Time show for about two years, and Pinetop Perkins played with him on that
• 35:01 Sonny Boy played amplified harmonica on the King Biscuit Time show, and so was one of the earliest to play amplified harp
• 35:50 Only recordings of Sonny Boy playing through a mic are his recordings on Chess records
• 36:23 Sonny Boy probably recorded his amplified tracks with Chess using a Shure Slim X mic, which Giles doesn’t rate as a good harp mic
• 36:41 Difference with Sonny Boy and Little Walter playing amplified is that Little Walter ‘played the amp’ whereas Sonny Boy just used the mic for amplification
• 37:40 The early photo of Sonny boy holding a mic is from 1939 when he had a radio show in Illinois
• 38:10 Jim thinks the Storyville recordings capture the best sound of Sonny Boy
• 39:44 There are no known recordings of his playing of the King Biscuit Time radio show
• 40:27 Sonny Boy falsely claimed to have recorded a Jimmy McCracklin in 1927 during the Wiesbaden concert in Germany
• 41:06 On whether Sonny Boy ‘stole’ the name Sonny Boy Williamson from John Lee Williamson
• 41:35 Giles talks about how the world was different and the circles Sonny Boy moved in weren’t always the most honest
• 42:39 Jim emphasises the point that the alleged Sonny Boy stabbing had a profound effect upon Sonny Boy wanting to remain anonymous
• 43:30 Sonny Boy reputedly knew John Lee Williamson from a young age
• 43:53 John Lee Williamson released records first so was known through those and Rice Miller used the name Sonny Boy Williamson to market himself
• 44:55 Memphis Slim told a story where another performer used his name, and also someone who used Little Walter’s name
• 45:36 Sonny Boy also used various other names to perform under
• 46:21 John Lee Williamson visited the KFFA radio station after he found out his name was being used and was given a radio show on there himself for a short time
• 47:43 Made his first recordings in 1951 on the Trumpet label, when he was 38 years old
• 48:28 First recording Sonny Boy made with Trumpet was destroyed in a fire but some of the original records were distributed and Jim has been searching for them to no avail
• 49:01 Elmore James played on the first (lost) version of Eyesight To The Blind
• 49:48 Other famous artists on Trumpet included Elmore James, with whom Sonny Boy recorded Dust My Broom
• 50:37 The Sonny Boy Trumpet records sold quite well and the record label treated black artists fairly
• 51:05 The owner of Trumpet records, Lillian McMurry, sold Sonny Boy’s contract to Chess records
• 51:34 Giles likes that the Trumpet recordings and talks of how Sonny Boy was able to adapt himself to different audiences and scenarios
• 53:22 Really leads the band on Trumpet records releases, whereas with Chess recordings he fits in perfectly with the accomplished city musicians
• 53:59 Started recording with Checker Records (subsidiary of Chess) in 1955
• 54:19 Sonny Boy was a big star from his Trumpet recordings, with hits including Nine Below Zero, Mighty Long Time and Dust My Broom
• 55:03 Recorded several hits with the superstar band on the Chess Recordings, including Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Muddy Waters
• 55:30 The expansion of Black radio coincided with the success of Chess Records
• 56:16 Adapted the song Good Evening Everybody, the theme tune to King Biscuit Time, on the first Chess recording session
• 56:49 Don’t Start Me Talkin’ on the first Chess recording session is a very well constructed song
• 57:16 Sonny Boy as a genius songwriter and he was able to read and write (not typical for people with his upbringing)
• 58:42 Sonny Boy was very smart and determined to learn how to read, and the need to hide this due to the racism in society at that time
• 1:00:39 Due to his success Sonny Boy had to act in ways where he would draw attention away from himself
• 1:00:55 Sonny Boy’s music was heard by some white audiences, including Elvis
• 1:03:43 Went over to Europe in 1963 and 1964 and had a huge influence on the British Blues boom
• 1:04:31 Sonny Boy created a new style to play to the European audiences, who listened in silence like they did to highbrow music such as opera, classical and jazz music
• 1:06:16 Memphis Slim really capitalised on the European blues scene and put on a classical pianist poise, while playing blues music, but Sonny Boy managed to overshadow him in the European American Folk Blues Festivals
• 1:07:56 The recordings with the Yardbirds and Animals weren’t good, mainly because those bands were so young at that time
• 1:08:30 The recording with the Chris Barber band was the only one of note with a British band during his stay there
• 1:09:19 Despite the famous quote of: "those British boys want to play the blues real bad, and they do”, Sonny Boy still appreciated his time in England
• 1:09:40 Jim backs-up the comment from Giles on how adaptable Sonny Boy was, with an ability to play in virtually any setting
• 1:10:43 Sonny Boy made some recordings in the home of German photographer Stephanie Wiesand which show off his ability to play solo
• 1:11:59 Wrote a lot of lyrics, but some were in collaboration with others, such as Elmore James, and who wrote them all is unclear
• 1:12:45 Favourite Sonny Boy songs from the panel: Jim selects Help Me, which he played without overdubs
• 1:13:43 Jim’s second choice is So Sad To Be Lonesome
• 1:14:45 Neil’s favourites are You Killing Me and Don’t Lose Your Eye
• 1:15:17 Giles favourites are Nine Below Zero and She’s My Baby
• 1:16:52 The Sky Is Crying song on the Storyville label
• 1:18:32 His characteristic style of bowler hat, case and umbrella
• 1:18:51 The black blues musicians were given a level of respect in Europe that they didn’t receive in their homeland
• 1:19:19 Sonny Boy was on British TV a lot in the 1960s
• 1:19:34 Dressed with the bowler hat from way before visited England
• 1:20:12 Well known for playing the Hohner 364 diatonic with the extra low octave and played with a harp in his mouth
• 1:20:32 Giles demonstrates Bye Bye Bird and the fact that it’s a riff and not just a rhythm
• 1:21:11 The extended range diatonic was Sonny Boy’s USP, and Hohner made some for him in different keys
• 1:21:26 The difference in the harmonica techniques of Sonny Boy and Little Walter included Sonny Boy being rhythmical and Little Walter more melodic
• 1:22:14 Giles demonstrates a riff from Don’t Start Me Talking
• 1:22:43 Giles thinks Sonny Boy still sounds fresh today, whereas Little Walter has a 1950s sound
• 1:23:20 How Sonny Boy influenced The Beatles to use the harmonica on their recordings via the harmonica playing of Delbert McClinton
• 1:25:04 Sonny Boy played with lots of big acts in his time in England, including Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker and The Moody Blues
• 1:25:42 Van Morrison’s third most performed live songs is Help Me
• 1:26:02 After successful time in England he returned to the US after his visa had expired, but he also knew he was approaching the end of his life
• 1:27:00 Initially went back to Chicago and then to Helena and then travelled to Alabama where he possibly took part in the civil rights movement there
• 1:28:08 Returned to Helena to say his goodbyes
• 1:28:15 Played his last gig at a house party in Greenwood
• 1:29:16 Robbie Robertson from the band met Sonny Boy a few weeks before he died and recounts the story on a video available on YouTube and who this might have impacted Bob Dylan’s harmonica playing if Sonny Boy had joined The Band
• 1:31:11 Cause of death was put down as heart attack, but that isn’t confirmed
• 1:31:32 Lillian McMurry had headstone placed on his grave in 1980
• 1:31:40 There was some celebration of his life after he passed away
• 1:32:55 Sonny Boy is buried in Tutwiler, Mississippi, at the Whitfield Baptist Church Cemetery
• 1:33:22 When Jim visited the gravestone had been knocked over and was broken and Jim had it put back in place
• 1:33:50 Sonny Boy was well loved
• 1:34:04 His wife Maddy stuck with Sonny Boy despite his shortcomings
• 1:34:26 Was elected to the Blues Hall of Fame in the first year of balloting in 1980

Transcript

SPEAKER_04: 0:00

Giles Robson and Jim Bassnight join me on episode 136 for a retrospective on Alex Rice Miller, otherwise known as Sonny Boy Williamson II. Information on Sonny Boy's early life is sketchy. Sonny Boy was likely born in 1912 and had a hard upbringing, working on a plantation before becoming a travelling musician. Arriving in Helena, Arkansas, he found fame performing on the King Biscuit Time radio show before making his first recordings with trumpet records at age 38 in 1951. Sonny Boy made his classic cuts for Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess, in 1955. He then toured Europe in 1963-64 and becoming a celebrity in England and having a huge impact on the British blues boom. returning to Helena, where he died in 1965. Sonny Boy is one of the true giants, not only of the harmonica, but also the blues, with his charismatic vocals, songwriting, and enigmatic charm. 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.

SPEAKER_03: 1:14

Seidel Harmonicas Bye. Hello

SPEAKER_04: 1:38

Giles Robson and Jim Bassnight and welcome to the podcast. Hey Neil.

SPEAKER_05: 1:43

Hey Neil, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04: 1:45

Thanks for joining both and we're here today to do a retrospective to talk about the great Sonny Boy Williamson II and whether he is the second or not we'll what his real name is we'll get on shortly but first of all we'll introduce you guys so Giles you were back on the podcast very early on in on the third episode so great to have you back my pleasure you've been very busy since that time haven't you doing lots of great stuff

SPEAKER_01: 2:07

as usual I just keep pushing it you know because I love the music so much and really what keeps me pushing it is the audiences because they they really love the blues you know so it just keeps me going I've had a really great time you know really had some profound moments as well so I'm very grateful for everything that's happened to me since that podcast episode

SPEAKER_04: 2:27

well you do an amazing job I'm forever seeing all the wonderful things you do and you do such a great job promoting not only yourself but also some other great blues musicians so yeah fantastic and you released an album with John Primer in 2024 10 Chicago Blues Classics on which there's a Sonny Boy song let me explain

SPEAKER_02: 2:45

way back in my heart I want to explain to you baby just how much you treat me wrong

UNKNOWN: 2:53

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 3:03

That's been your most recent album, is it? Yeah, well, I wasn't going to record that album, but actually they really wanted to do it. We really just wanted to record what we've been doing on stage, you know, because people had been, the critics and audience members had been commenting on the sort of telepathy between John's guitar and my harmonica playing, which is an amazing thing to have happened, this sort of musical union that we've forged since about 2022. So we sat down with an old school ribbon mic, so it's just a single mic recording and recorded it in in less than three hours you know it's really turned out great and has been well received across the world and i'm singing on it because john's got such a busy release schedule with loads of different projects i mean i think he's got another he's had an album grown in mississippi that came out in april he's got another album coming out in the autumn so we wanted to do something that was a bit different with me singing and then shauna light on his rhythm guitar playing which is absolutely incredible and It really gets to the heart of how blues expresses meaning and feeling. So that's been a very happy experience, you know.

SPEAKER_04: 4:11

Yeah, no, fantastic stuff. And so when I first saw you perform, Giles, some years ago now, you performed the song One Room Cabin, which is, of course, a Sonny Boy song.

SPEAKER_03: 4:21

The room was so small I couldn't even put up no cooking stove

UNKNOWN: 4:33

Thank you.

SPEAKER_03: 4:34

Little

SPEAKER_04: 4:39

Rooney

SPEAKER_01: 5:04

as a player, Sonny Boy as a complete artist I think I'd probably listen to Sonny Boy more and also he prompted my move I now play purely acoustic on everything rather than through a mic and an amp and I think that he prompted that move because of the way that Sonny Boy's records were always popular on chess and I think one of the reasons is that the harmonica played acoustically with a band sits nicely with a full band sound I think the amplified harp can sometimes be rather overpowering and also it's quite a huge sound in comparison to the vocals and so really when we're in the lockdown i was listening a lot to him and and also a lot to his acoustic recordings in in europe which are just outstanding I made the move to playing acoustically and in a duo format as well so I could get all of those subtle dynamics and all of that rhythm and the phrasing into what I was doing and so he's been a massive influence on me and really he's an addictive listener you never get bored of his records yeah so I can't really stress how important he's been to me you know

SPEAKER_04: 6:25

I'll second that as I you know I obviously listen to Sonny Boy lots I've got lots of his songs in my collection but doing the research for this episode and just listening to all Sonny Boy's songs again it's like almost every every one of them is a gem. They're all fantastic, aren't they? We'll get into that clearly, but they're all such great songs, almost every one of them.

SPEAKER_01: 6:42

And also, it's not just retrospectively. He was highly appreciated in his time. I mean, I got into collecting classic jazz magazines, the music sort. I got a decade's worth of jazz monthly and jazz journal off eBay, you know, from the UK. And the critics right away, even more so than Little Walter, the critics in these magazines picked up on all of these qualities, you know, the consistency, the artistry. I mean, he got described by the Sunday Times magazine, which was like a cultural linchpin in 60s Britain. They described his performance as perfect artistry. And this was a magazine that would be doing articles on Picasso and Henry Moore and Miro. So he was right up there in the critical consensus as a major league artist. And he dominated the American Folk Blues Festival with pretty heavy competition.

SPEAKER_05: 7:36

Can I add something to that? You guys making a great point about Sonny Boyz in England and Europe, how he was received. In the United States, he wasn't talked about at all. There was not one single preview, record review feature done by any American journal of note in his lifetime. The only thing that ever happened to him was Jet Magazine, which was an African-American focused magazine, and Ebony Magazine had little teeny mentions about the American Folk Blues Festival saying that these guys are making it big over in Europe, and it's more about the political factor of why no one cares about him here. And then in Cashbox and Billboard and places like that, they'd have like, yeah, this is another good song that'll make you money on your jukebox. Nothing about him as an artist, his lyrics, his songs, his live performances. And the only person in American Journal of any sort was a mimeographed magazine put up by a guy named Dr. Demento. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of him, but he was a radio fixture for many years in the United States playing kind of oddball weird novelty records and old records and stuff. And he did a feature on his discography during his lifetime. This was in like 62 of his discography in this little mimeograph magazine that he did when he was in college in Portland, Oregon. And that was just like a little mimeograph thing. It wasn't the New York Times or anything like that. So nobody in the entire United States followed him in any way or covered anything about him in his lifetime. And also another thing I wanted to add too, you mentioned great harmonica players, I have a question for Giles. I want to put a shout out for Walter Horton, Big Walter, and what do you think about his style?

SPEAKER_01: 9:17

Well, I think he's amazing as well, you know. I remember him boasting in an interview that he taught Sonny Boy. Yeah. He taught Sonny Boy his style. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I find that I just think with Sonny Boy, there is as much technique as Walter Horton, but there's a lot more artistry in terms of use of space for praising everything, you know, and that's why his records are so Moorish. So I think that Horton's incredible. MUSIC PLAYS horton as a standalone harmonica player yeah is is probably better and as an instrumentalist but sunny boy the way he slots the harp into the singing it's like a complete package with the vocals and the personality i think is a is is just more listenable you know

SPEAKER_04: 10:19

i'll second that exactly when i was picking out my clips which i always do before the episodes i just couldn't separate the vocals sunny boy they're so linked together and he sort of moves you know the harmonica just that really reflects you know kind of mirrors his voice and so you Yeah the whole package. Sing it to that other

SPEAKER_05: 11:01

one

SPEAKER_02: 11:19

Take a goodbye note and bring it to that other world Going

SPEAKER_05: 11:32

back to this, thank you very much for including me. I'm just excited to be here and talk about Sonny Boy.

SPEAKER_04: 11:38

No, it's great to have you on. And it's okay, we'll let you on the Happy Hour Harmonica podcast, even though you don't play harmonica, Jim, because I'm sure you're going to have lots to add. So thanks for joining. So you've been working on a biography of Sonny Boy for, I believe, over 10 years now, yeah?

SPEAKER_05: 11:53

Yes, I have, and it's been kind of a long time. Long story why it's taken so long, but I won't tell that. I will say one thing that Giles touched on too, is that Sonny Boy was a complete... artist, not just a harmonica player. And that's why I think I'm valid to this conversation because I'm an artist and I'm a journalist and a writer. I talk about Sonny Boy in the book, not just as a harmonica player. It would be better if I was a harmonica player because I'd understand more about his playing. But I talk about him as an artist and also as an innovator and also as a trailblazer of African-American culture, as well as, you know, a trailblazer of American music. Yeah, fantastic.

SPEAKER_04: 12:34

What about your book then? Is it coming out soon? Can people look forward to reading it? It'd be great to get a hold of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 12:41

Basically, I'm working with a very good literary agent that's very well respected, and I can't really talk about it much more than that, but I'm in a good position to be able to get the kind of publishing deal that I need to get, because it's a very unique kind of a book. It's not just like a little... 50,000, 70,000 word type of a music book. It's a 500 page manuscript alone, as well as photos, as well as a very detailed chronology, as well as a very detailed discography, and an index, etc. So basically, it's a very big reference book that really represents Sonny Boy, but the giant that he is when it comes to those specific things fields of study, be it African American history, American music history, and rock and roll history, and of course the specialized area of blues music history, it covers a lot of important information for people that study those fields, a lot of new information. So it goes into a lot of detail on these various chapters in his life which coincide with very important points in history.

SPEAKER_04: 13:52

Sounds great. So can you give us an idea about when it might be out, next year, this year?

SPEAKER_05: 13:57

I think it's really Let's say that it will hopefully be out this year, but I think it could very well be out by next year. It's like anything else. When you put this much invested in something, it just matters that the right deal comes along. It's not so much could I put it out? I could put it out right now if I wanted to. I need to have the right people involved with it. And so that's what's taking a little bit more time. But compared to the amount of work I put into it, the amount of time that that's going to be is not long.

SPEAKER_04: 14:24

yeah no well fantastic we'll look forward to seeing that so i believe before i don't know before or at the same time you were also looking at making a you know a film documentary on sunny boy as well yeah

SPEAKER_05: 14:35

and i'm glad you brought that up i have all the means to do that and i'm looking after i get finished with publishing the book i will start that project but my intention is to find someone who's already done a number of films to partner with i don't want to have to learn how to do a film along with although i directed uh over 100 filmed interviews in HD. I don't want to have to be the one to do the film. I co-wrote a little screenplay that I wouldn't be able to really use, you know, but I could rewrite another one for potentially a dramatic adaptation of the story. But I would like to partner with a filmmaker. So that's what I'll be looking for, somebody to partner with to do that.

SPEAKER_04: 15:14

So there has been a book released about Sonny Boy by William E. Donahue. Yes. Professor Mojo's Don't Start Me Talking. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a hold of the book before this. So I I've read little extracts available on the internet but I think that was a reasonably short book wasn't it and you know he did a good job but yeah I think hopefully yours is going to be more in depth.

SPEAKER_05: 15:33

Yeah Bill Donahue and I are very close friends unfortunately he passed away in early 2017 and that's one reason why this has taken so long because we were partners in doing this research and then after that was over there was a little bit of a disagreement about how to proceed with it with his estate so basically I had to kind of start over with that but Bill and I were very close friends and I'm very close friends with his ex-wife today, Susan. And basically, that book was more or less just sort of a little kind of an amusement book. It really wasn't anywhere near a real reference book on Sonny Boy, and I think he would be one to admit that. It was sort of a toe tester to see if he could just kind of get out there something and then attract more people. What he really wanted to do was to do a documentary film. Bill published a number of successful books on finance and had a career as a speaker on on television on financial news shows and things like that he was more of a finance guy and he had an interest in the blues but he didn't know a lot about music so that's kind of where he brought me in and and so we were a good team there to get some of these things going but his health was very poor unfortunately and that's what kind of led to me doing probably most of the work on the first draft that we did a draft of a book and uh it was almost done and then he passed away

SPEAKER_04: 16:51

so it certainly sounds like you've done your research so let's go on to some anybody now so there's a gravestone uh which is put together by the person who who i think was involved with trumpet records which we shall talk about shortly so the gravestone let's talk about first about what year he was born and what year he died so what year he died is certain it was in uh it was in 1965 that he died but the year he was born is a bit more strategy on the gravestone it says 1908 but i think that isn't isn't certain by any means right

SPEAKER_05: 17:19

this is where i'm going to be the one to talk to about this because i've done a lot of research on this. Jim O'Neill also has done quite a bit, as has Dr. David Evans from the University of Memphis. But in fact, both of them helped me with a lot of this stuff. So I'll give you the best I can as far as factually how old he was and what his age was. It's a little bit of a tidbit that will be in the book, but it'll be more fleshed out in the book.

SPEAKER_04: 17:44

just on that point I mean obviously it's great that the book's coming out obviously we can only cover so much here so we all look forward to jumping into the real detail when your book comes out and I appreciate that you know we're just skimming the surface here right

SPEAKER_05: 17:55

I'm going to do the best I can to give you a quick analysis of how old he was according to family and accounts from people that were very close to family he was the youngest of 21 children some of them were children that were born from a previous relationship that his mother had with a man named Ford and some of them may have been possibly children of the children, because they were church people, decided to present to the public as being her child, children of the young girls that were, you know, teenage era. So, that's a possibility that has been claimed. The long and short of it is that he was the youngest. The next youngest of the children was a man named Boyakin Miller. And Boyakin lived to be quite older. His stories were well documented about his life with Sonny Boy in family get-togethers, never anything by any journalist or anything, any interview or any transcript. Family get-to reunions, he talked all about his experiences. And he actually was the one who named Sonny Boy Rice because Sonny Boy liked rice when he was an infant. He was the youngest, and his age was such that it was documented in the census, and he was a few years older than Sonny Boy. I think three years, two and a half, three years older than Sonny Boy. And he was... X age. We don't know the date because all we know specifically is that he was a couple years older than Sonny Boy. The census says that he was three years older than Sonny Boy and Sonny Boy was seven in 1920 census. Now Sonny was not alive in the 1910 census of the Miller family. Boykin was. Boykin was an infant at that time. So Sonny Boy was probably born in about 1912 or 13, probably late 12. A lot of people think it's early 13 yeah

SPEAKER_04: 19:51

so that would mean that he lived to be 53 years old

SPEAKER_05: 19:55

if he's born in 1912 he died in 65 it was late 12 at absolutely would have been late 12 so he would have been 52 yeah

SPEAKER_04: 20:04

yeah so pretty young yeah

SPEAKER_05: 20:06

and his real name is Alex A-L-E-X got it not not Alec

SPEAKER_04: 20:11

not Alec with a C-K yeah so his name is Alex Rice Miller Rice being his sort of nickname yeah yeah and he was born in Glendora Mississippi Which is just south

SPEAKER_05: 20:22

of Clocksdale, is that right? 12 of the 21 children in his family didn't make it to the age of 18. Nobody had a birth certificate. The marriage certificates that they had were very often not really legal because they would get married and then they'd meet somebody else and they'd get married again without a divorce decree. Basically, there was no paperwork supporting any of this stuff for these folks. So, we can honestly say he probably was born in Glendora, but the word that I've heard from all the family is that they moved to what's now called Money, Mississippi, which is a very, very small town north of Greenwood in the Greenwood area when he was about one years old. And he was there on the Pleasant View Plantation from age one until age 17 when his father made him leave.

SPEAKER_04: 21:39

Yeah. So, I mean, that's important, right? So he grew up on a plantation in a farming community. That was his young life, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 21:46

Yeah. In a cotton plantation where you had to work from what they called cane to cante, which is when the sun comes up till when the sun goes down. And you basically made no money. And at the end of the year, they'd give you a bonus for Christmas based on just however they were feeling about you, whether they wanted to keep you around or not. And like I said, 12 out of 18 kids didn't make it to the age of 18. so the conditions they lived in were severe to say the least

SPEAKER_04: 22:14

and you mentioned there that he you know he was kind of secretive about his life or at least he told different stories about his life and that's kind of reflected in some of his lyrics like keep it to yourself for example

SPEAKER_03: 22:25

don't tell your mother don't tell your father don't tell your sister don't mention it to your brother please darling keep all the business to yourself music Don't you tell nobody and don't mention to nobody.

SPEAKER_04: 22:45

He certainly had that mystique about himself and what he sang about. I think it's really

SPEAKER_01: 22:51

interesting when you look at his birth date because if he was born in 1913, that would make him two years older than Memphis Slim, who was born in 1915, although there is a draft card that would suggest that Slim was actually born in 1910. And then I think Muddy originally it was 1916 but now they think it's 1913 i think but i mean that that in itself is interesting because when you see him at the in the american folk blues festival shows i mean he looks at least a decade older but both in his posture the the way his i mean he's got very old man wrists you know he's sort of got rheumatism or arthritis in in the wrists and and that that in itself is fascinating and and i know there's been a lot of conjecture about about he looked so old because he'd lived such a rough and a rough life and a you know dependent on alcohol and so on

SPEAKER_05: 23:47

not to mention the late nights and and the and the traveling and probably lack of good nutrition and probably just lack of sleep a whole variety of things his lifestyle was was pretty rough

SPEAKER_01: 23:59

we've also got to remember as well i mean i don't think he had any concepts of time or dates because he would introduce songs in the american folk blues festival i was listening to fattening frogs for snakes a solo performance that he said he first recorded in 1947 which obviously he didn't because he didn't start recording until the 50s but I don't think he had any concepts of time or the only consistent thing was his music you know throughout his whole life that was his sort of island

SPEAKER_05: 24:27

he was a habitual liar and I think he did so for a very important reason and I want to expand on that He was the age that I said he was based on first hand from family

SPEAKER_00: 24:38

including

SPEAKER_05: 24:38

people that really knew his sisters and people like that.

UNKNOWN: 24:42

So basically it all adds up that he was born in late 1912 or early 1913 and he was basically around 52 years old when he passed away and I think that the way he looked was because of drinking.

SPEAKER_04: 24:55

So we obviously talked about him, you said he left the plantation at age 17 and then he sort of took up the life as a wandering musician is what I've read Jim. So what do we know about that time when he started playing do we know what got him started playing the harmonica and singing and you know what was he doing in those early days when he started playing

SPEAKER_05: 25:11

what you need to know is it isn't like the wandering musician today or in the 1970s when my dad told me that i had to leave the house when i was 18 he was an outlaw because what happened in mississippi and in the deep south in general at that time was that being a blues man was essentially an outlaw per thing to do there was laws in the in the law books in the arkansas law books and it's in my book there was a law that said pipers and fiddlers Giles will like this they didn't even have the dignity to call them harmonica players and guitar players but pipers and fiddlers were not allowed to make a living if there was work that the authorities needed to do and the joke about that is I talked to a number of people in the south is that all the authorities were white and all the white people were authorities so what basically happened was if he was found to be working as a harmonica a player at that age traveling and living on his own and not attached to some sort of farm or some sort of servo position with a company owned by a white man or very unlikely but possibly a white woman he would be subject to legal problems they would legally put you if they wanted to and it probably would want most of those kind of young men they would put them in what's called county farms just for being alone they called it vagrancy they'd get them for jaywalking they'd get them for for all kinds of things. They'd ask you, how much money do you got? Well, I got 50 bucks. Well, in this county, you have to have 60. They put you in hard labor, in chains, in the hot sun, and you would die within six months to a year when those conditions, and until you got a family member or somebody to get a white person to come hire you, and then you'd be indebted to that white person, and that's the facts. And maybe this is unpleasant stuff for your show. I don't know if you want to get into this kind of discussion, but...

SPEAKER_04: 27:03

This is the roots of the blues, right? This is the real blues, yeah?

SPEAKER_05: 27:06

This is what happened. And so basically, he lived the life of an outlaw from 17 on. That's why his father was so mad at him that kicked him out of the house. Of course, they all loved him. He was the baby of the family, and he was really talented. But they wanted him to be in the church and be a preacher or something like that with that talent. And he just said, no, I'm a blues player. So he went out and did it.

SPEAKER_04: 27:27

He sort of wandered around, went up to Memphis and then to Arkansas. And on the way, he's sort of known to have met various people. Like, for example, he certainly knew Howlin' Wolf, right? And he married his sister.¶¶

SPEAKER_03: 27:39

¶¶

UNKNOWN: 27:57

Oh, man.

SPEAKER_05: 27:59

Well, we found other marriages that he had. Dr. David Evans found a marriage that he had in 1932. And also, there was another marriage that potentially could have happened. He had a child, too. He did a lot of things in that time. And it's all very well detailed in my book, to the best that can be detailed, based on interviews and firsthand accounting of family members. But the long and short of it is what he did was he left the house in this little shack in this plantation. And he just went from town to town. Using a different name everywhere he went, he became known as Rice, but he also went other places and used other names, but mostly was centered around the Greenwood area and pretty well known as Rice from 1930 until 1938. And in that time frame, he played around and posed basically as a farmhand for or as long as he could, you know, around places, and he'd play and he'd work. And once they figured out he wasn't one of the farmhands, he would go somewhere else and run away. And he'd usually be dependent on somebody there to kind of put him up, usually maybe possibly a female, possibly a male friend, to give him a place to stay while he was working in the area. And he'd go from town to town in that area in those different delta towns around within reasonable distance of Greenwood. And then in 1938, he ran into some trouble. He was so talented that he became popular with some of the white people, and he was just well-known. And so he started getting some favoritism over some of the other musicians who possibly could be treated the way I described earlier. And basically, he got in with some folks that would have him come and play on gambling boats and things like that. Honey Boy Edwards was another guy that was in that category, and of course, Robert Johnson. And these guys would travel, and of course, Robert Lockwood Jr., he became involved with him and started traveling with him. pretty early on so the key thing is he would travel with these folks uh these other guys they're all guys and they would play on street corners in towns and then at night they'd play at juke joints and things like that and sometimes they'd play for some white people that would get paid more money but it was somewhat more dangerous to do that

SPEAKER_04: 30:08

so you mentioned robert lockwood there and so he met with robert lockwood and then he which led to him playing on famously on the king biscuit time radio show that's correct in arkansas yeah so so this was kind of his well well sort of his big break in a way because he became known then and he was advertising on this radio show i think playing what 15 minutes a day advertising flour and cornmeal so this was kind of his big break yeah

SPEAKER_03: 30:41

What

SPEAKER_05: 30:47

happened here is that in 1938, this is shortly after Robert Johnson died, and we don't know if it was related to Robert Johnson's death or had anything to do with it. He had a squabble with some quote-unquote bad white men. Apparently, late night after the event, a musical event, they did something to him, and he claimed to his family they tried to kill him, so he took out a knife and defended himself against them and stabbed one of them in order to get away now in that area that would not be considered self-defense that would be something where they would they would if they would have he would have told the sheriff they would have created a search party and gone after him and it would have been a big big event to search high and low until they found him and then they would have probably lynched him they probably wouldn't even have put him on trial but the bottom line is is that these bad white men were obviously bad enough to where they They didn't go to the police. They went only to look for him in places that they knew about him. His sister, who was most friendly with him, and the two daughters that were there at the time were threatened to be killed. And everyone was so scared that they never repeated this story until about 2015 is when I finally got the full story from one of the daughters who was 86 at the time. They were so afraid because these bad white men were also people in the community that have descendants now. and did all these years. What basically happened is that he ran away from the Greenwood area and he never used the name Rice again. When Eric Clapton asked him, aren't you Rice Miller? He pulled out a pen knife or put out a little pocket knife and scared Eric Clapton and said, you ever say that again? And Giorgio Gamelski had to kind of get between him and try to brush things up. He just never let anybody promote the idea that his name was Rice Miller because he had actually run away from being Rice Miller. Very much like Jean Valjean and Les Miserables actually if you want to get dramatic about it so basically he just ran away from that identity and he went from town to town again but much further afield first he went up to southern Illinois to get away from this whole thing for a while to see what was going and then when he felt the heat was off he moved back and centered himself in Helena which had a large black community that he could kind of blend into like a lot of musicians did and so at that point he became centered in Helena and eventually after traveling around with Robert Lockwood, becoming more famous in a lot of ways, and well-known as this great harmonica player, as this great entertainer. He was able to make a deal with these people who had this brand new radio station, and they needed to sell, advertise, they needed to sell, have content, and The Signal broadcast to an area that was about 70% African-American, and so he convinced them that just, they would be able to sell this flower if he put the blues on the radio, and the community was very much against it. community leaders and such but the bottom line is the guy who he convinced convinced them that this would only be temporary because World War II was going on and this will be just temporary because we need to do this because of the war and when the war's over we're going to move it back to all white and they bought it and of course by that time four years later he had already gotten a bunch of other radio stations to go with this format with other sponsors and by 1948 the first all black radio station was established in Memphis in no small part because of all the groundwork that he laid.

SPEAKER_03: 34:15

so i

SPEAKER_04: 34:27

think this king biscuit time radio show ran for 10 years but he wasn't on it for that long was he didn't do we know how long he was

SPEAKER_05: 34:33

he was on it for a couple of years lockwood left first and they gave him his own show with mother's best flower and he did more of a kind of a big big band style blues kind of like what bb keen became famous doing and then basically Basically, Sonny Boy continued with other guitar players, more notably Joe Willie Wilkins.

SPEAKER_04: 34:51

And, of course, Pinetop Perkins also played with him on this.

SPEAKER_05: 34:53

Pinetop joined the band, yeah. Pinetop replaced Robert Dudlow-Taylor, who played on a lot of stuff, too, and was a great piano player, yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 35:01

So, obviously, you mentioned earlier on, Giles, correctly, that Sonny Boy played acoustic harmonica, and that's inspired you to take up more acoustic harmonica. But I think he's noted for having played electric harmonica on the King Biscuit time show, so he's possibly one of the first if not the first electric harmonica played on this show is this right?

SPEAKER_01: 35:20

Well yeah there are a couple very early publicity shot of Sonny Boy in a bowler hat funnily enough that he went on to wear a bowler hat in the UK but a 30s publicity shot of Sonny Boy with an amp and a mic on a mic stand and there's also a shot of him at a political rally again playing through a mic and also the video footage of him with the King Biscuit entertainers being driven across to various gigs across the Mississippi again he's got a mic so yeah he's probably one of the first people to use it but the only evidence that we have of his what he sounded like through a mic is on chess records tracks like 99 born blind which is obviously better known as eyesight to the blind cross your heart and so on to my mind they're not great sounding records I think he sounded better acoustically and I think that he played through a Shure Slim X mic which is one of the worst sounding harmonica microphones you'd ever want to play I've got one here I got one actually just as I managed to pick one up in perfect condition just as a sort of a souvenir because Sonny Boy played through one and Walter Horton and James Cotton but it's one of the worst sound and the difference I think between Sonny Boy and Little Walter is that Little Walter really you know he really created an art of playing through the amplifier it's like he's not only playing the harp he's playing the amplifier as well. Whereas Sonny Boy, it was mainly just for amplification in clubs. He said in a very early, in an interview with Blues Unlimited in the UK, that he basically used it for amplification in clubs, you know. So I think all of those guys, Snooki Pryor, Sonny Boy, obviously needed amplification to be heard. But I think really the most artistically successful amplified blues harmonica player was Little Walter.

SPEAKER_05: 37:29

He did. Little Walter really led that. But what I'll say about Alex Miller and Sonny boy, was that basically what he did, he had a microphone and he did it earlier than Walter, obviously. That picture is in 1939. That's from Harrisburg, Illinois, where he had a radio show, believe it or not, for a very short time and did a few of other things, a harmonica contest. That's when he ran away from the knife fight that I told you about. So he kind of made his home there for about one year. So at any rate, what I think about that is that he did do a lot less than Walter did as far as perfecting the use of harmonica with a microphone, but his playing was so fantastic that when somebody figured out how to record him like they did at Storyville, that's the best anybody ever did of recording him as far as knowing how to dial in his organic sound. It was incredible.

SPEAKER_03: 38:34

Had

SPEAKER_05: 38:46

he lived to work with more great engineers that knew a little bit more about miking and such, he probably would have made a lot better amplified harmonica.

SPEAKER_01: 38:55

But it's very interesting because I think the success of Sonny Boy and the success of his records are the fact that he very quickly moved away from amplified yeah and it suits his conspiratorial vocals you know the yeah the the deeply nuanced vocals the acoustic harmonica is a much more intimate beast and even with the the big chicago blue you know with the two guitars the piano the bass and the drums behind him he still created an intimate relationship with the listener by playing acoustic harp and the way that that melds in with his his vocals you know which which are less a more conspiratorial and conversational than say much Muddy

SPEAKER_03: 39:34

Wolves.

SPEAKER_04: 39:44

Get on to the show, but we know he was first recorded in 1951. Are there any recordings from the King Biscuit Time radio show, or is there anything from that period of his playing?

SPEAKER_05: 39:55

There may be, but I don't know of any, nor does Jim O'Neill, nor does anybody else. The only recording that anybody's ever heard was the one that was done right before his death by Chris Strockwitz that was released on some of those various records he did when he reissued the trumpet record stuff

SPEAKER_03: 40:11

on his label. Darling, please keep our business to yourself

SPEAKER_01: 40:27

What's very interesting, he did a... which appears to be a complete lie and sort of shows up his sort of habitual lying. There's a bootleg recording of him at the 1963 American Folk Blues Festival when he recorded in the Jazz House in Weisbaden in Germany.

SPEAKER_05: 40:44

Great

SPEAKER_01: 40:45

tape. Yeah, and he says, here's a song of mine called I Don't Care No More. I recorded it in 1927 or something on the Bullet label. And then he says, you might know the version by Jimmy McCracklin, but it's actually my version... did it first and there's no evidence no evidence to support the fact that it's a

SPEAKER_05: 41:03

jimmy mccracklin song sorry sonny boy

SPEAKER_04: 41:06

yeah so so so on that topic let's now talk about the the sonny boy name so as i think most most on monica players know there's sonny boy one and sonny boy two and uh clearly john lee williamson is known as sonny boy one and sonny boy uh two we're talking about here probably he probably did take john lee williamson's sonny boy name i think because johnny williamson was quite famous that time in chicago so my impression was that he because he was a long way away from there he just sort of used his name to help his own fame is that what you uh you understand giles

SPEAKER_01: 41:35

yeah i mean i've read a lot about i've heard a lot about i think what we've got to understand is that this was he was where he was moving in a world of complete chaos you know when you look back a lot of the time people don't know the difference between say jazz and blues and they see classic black and white photographs of of say count basie or duke ellington dressed up in a suit and then they see a classic photo of Sonny Boy dressed up in a suit and you know they don't realise the different milliers that these artists worked in you know Sonny Boy was working you know with these very small record labels a lot of them were not properly run you know a lot of them were crooks and so Jim will probably come in with more accurate information but I wouldn't be surprised that it was given to him by the DJ or whether he used it down in the south knowing that Sonny Boy John Lee Williamson was up in Chicago and might not ever find him I mean He was living in these sort of little crooked radio stations and record labels. So I imagine it was maybe a bit of him, maybe a bit of the DJ's idea, but Jim will probably come in with more accurate information.

SPEAKER_05: 42:42

Let me just start by saying I hope people understand that what I said about the knife fight and him changing his identity was a major, major thing. A number of much less famous musicians that could have been more famous were killed in the Delta because of things like that that happened to him with that knife fight one good example is Hound Dog Taylor claims that the Klan was after him and he escaped to Chicago so this was a traumatic thing in his life and at that point he really lied about everything for a reason not just because he liked to lie and it probably helped him to lie in some situations but the bottom line is he really was vague about who he was for a reason so I don't think he was necessarily that as bad of a person as some people say but getting back to the story about john lee williamson john lee williamson and he by legend had met when they were 12 and 14 years old by the age that i believe sunny boy is and they had played in harmonica little contest when they were very very young so they went way back according to some people i don't know if that's factual but they knew who they each other were and john lee of course had already had a recording career by 1941 for, I believe, four years. So his name had been on jukeboxes, which is where most people heard records. Very few people owned records or record players. And so He was the blues harmonica, the player that people knew. There was no internet. There was no television. And so what happened was he started using the name Sonny Boy Williamson because that was some way for him to market himself. And he'd play Sonny Boy Williamson songs. And if that was to his advantage to make money, he was a hustler. He would go from town to town living in the shadows, basically illegally, marginally legally. And he'd do whatever he could to make a buck. And Giles know what that's about. He's a musician. I just wanted

SPEAKER_04: 44:40

to point out, jazz never breaks the law, Jim. Put

SPEAKER_05: 44:44

it this way, if he's a musician and he came up as a professional musician, at one point he worked in bars or on street corners or something like that, and he knew to adapt to his surroundings to make the better money.

SPEAKER_01: 44:55

This was commonplace. There's a great audio interview with Memphis Slim on YouTube. He talks about actually meeting a guy that used his name and the house rocker's name and having a good laugh with him years later. Yeah. And this interview is interesting as well with Memphis Slim because he seconds a story that someone was using Little Walter's name.

SPEAKER_05: 45:14

That's

SPEAKER_01: 45:14

right. And Memphis Slim alludes to the fact that Walter did some pretty bad things to this guy. Obviously, in Cadillac Records, Walter shot the impersonator. So that actually happened. Memphis Slim alludes to it in this interview in about 1976, I think.

SPEAKER_05: 45:28

And that may be where that thing in the movie comes from. But I will say that Mary and Little Walter's daughter was not too happy about that. But nonetheless, what happened was that he used Sonny Boy Williamson, he also used a lot of other names. He used Harmonica Blow and Slim. He used Little Boy Blue. He used WM. He used all kinds of names. When it came to King Biscuit, what happened was he was in Helena and he talked to the guy and it's unclear whether it was the guy who ran the flower company that sponsored the show or him that suggested using Sunny Boy Williamson, but it was suggested to use Sunny Boy Williamson for the name because it was a name that people knew. And at that time, there hadn't been a civil judgment by a black person against a white person in Arkansas in like 80 years, I think, or whatever it was, and since Reconstruction. So what was John Lee Williamson going to do? Sue? No. After he found out, after this show was such a big success, he found out about it, and he came down to Helena and said, well, are you using my name? And everybody, are you doing that for her? And he goes, no, we're calling, he's Sonny Boy Williams, not Sonny Boy Williamson. And if you want a show, we'll give you a show. So he went down, he's from Chicago, and he did a Sonny Boy Williamson show. They gave him a 15-minute show, and he got a sponsor, and he did it for a while. And according to Robert Lockwood, he wasn't as good as Miller, and it didn't last long, and he had other things he wanted to do, and he just said, heck, what am I going to do? I'm glad the guy's making money. What the heck? And actually, he rationalized it further by saying, this guy's helping me sell records because he doesn't have any records out, and he didn't put another Eden Brecken until three years after John Lee was murdered or how he passed away in 48.

SPEAKER_00: 47:24

Hey, everybody. You're listening to Neil Warren's Harmonica Happy Hour Podcast, sponsored by Tom Halcheck and Blue Moon Harmonicas out of Clearwater, Florida, the best in custom harmonicas, custom harmonica parts, and more. Check them out, www.bluemoonharmonicas.com.

SPEAKER_04: 47:43

His first recordings were in 1951 on the trumpet label. And this is with Lillian McMurray of Jackson, Mississippi, who recorded him. So what happened there? and getting finally recorded what age was he here then Jim in 51 do we think

SPEAKER_05: 47:59

He was 38 years old.

SPEAKER_04: 48:00

So reasonably, you know, mature in years, considering the life he'd had playing harmonic for a long time. It took him quite a while to get recorded, yeah?

SPEAKER_05: 48:08

If you look at the pictures that Lillian had taken for him, though, he's believably 38. He's a believably 38-year-old guy that drinks a lot and parties a lot, yeah. It's a little bit more of a believable story about his age when you see the pictures from 1951 than when you see the pictures from 1965. But anyway, he started with her. They did a recording. recording of eyesight to the blind and unfortunately the master was burned in a fire in in the pressing plant and so it was lost but they before they what that happened they made a run of those records and they sent most of them out to radio stations uh and they sold the rest of them they didn't even go through any distributors to some they just sold the rest of them right in the record mart which was her furniture store that they had a record section the record mart was called their record section and they sold them right there in jackson on ferris street so we've been searching high and low to try to find one of those, and nobody has, to my knowledge, has found one of those first versions of Eyesight to the Blind, which Elmore James plays guitar on. Now, the next version that they re-recorded it, because of that unfortunate situation, there was no guitar player. I

SPEAKER_03: 49:19

remember one Friday morning, we were lying down across the bed. Man in the next room was dying, stopped down and held up his head and said, Lord, ain't she pretty? And All right, all right.

SPEAKER_05: 49:48

Trumpet Records was a pretty cool label. They did a lot of stuff. They did a lot of good stuff. Willie Love was an artist that's really worthy of mention. It's lesser known for fans out there. He wasn't a harmonica player, but he was a great blues man. He played piano with a lot of Miller's radio shows, and he actually had a radio show that Miller helped him get in Greenville that was sort of a spinoff of Sonny Boy's success. One of the other big artists on trumpet was probably the most famous one was Elmore James his version of Dust My Broom.

SPEAKER_04: 50:36

How did these records sell with Trumpet?

SPEAKER_05: 50:38

The Trumpet Records was a pretty successful indie label at the time. The label owner was fair to the black artists. She treated them the same as the white artists and paid them the same and was more generous to them than the chess guys. And they were afraid that that would be a threat long term. Some people would contest that she was perfect in her way she dealt with people, but I think it's probably true. Sonny Boy had a tremendous affinity for her it seemed like liked her a lot more than he liked the chess brothers but she sold his contract to them because there was a distributor who was really the big game in town at that time and really without his distribution company what we know as rock and roll and r&b and blues might not have happened the way it did there was a guy that had a distribution company that rose from a jukebox company that he established as a very young age his name was buster williams

SPEAKER_01: 51:34

I think what's very interesting about the trumpet recordings, which are magnificent, by the way, and if you're a Sonny Boy fan and haven't heard them, you need to go out and get the King Biscuits or just stream the King Biscuit time compilation recordings on our Hooli records. But what's very interesting and what is fascinating about Sonny Boy's career is his adaptability to different audiences and scenarios. His harmonica playing is noticeably different on the trumpet recordings than it is on chess, than it is on the american folk blues festival tours and the the playing is on trumpet it is almost geared towards a more southern audience

SPEAKER_03: 52:28

It's

SPEAKER_01: 52:30

got a lot more vibrato, a lot more hand wah-wahs, and his vocals as well are a lot more boisterous and you can hear a lot of the church in them. And then suddenly he makes the switch to chess and you have the first session with Don't Start Me Talking and All My Love in Vain and You're Killing Me, all those tracks.

UNKNOWN: 52:54

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_01: 53:04

And it suddenly becomes big city cool. You're suddenly... It's very constrained. It's a different beast altogether. And he's just adapted to a big city audience just like he then adapted to the big silent sort of classical and jazz audiences in the opera houses and concert halls. And it's incredible. And the other thing is that the band on the trumpet, he's really leading the whole thing. The band on the trumpet label almost implodes several times behind him. They're keeping up with him. And then he just... goes to chess and just sits on top of the whole band and melds into it perfectly as he's fully aware of the drums of what all the other instruments are doing giving them space so he just completely manages to adapt from the sort of ramshackle country band on trumpet to this big city you know sort of band of virtuosos in Chicago without you know that missing a beat and that and it's pretty incredible

SPEAKER_04: 53:59

so on that so as you we've touched on there in 1955 we recorded for chess I think check a record as a subsidiary of. You know, what happened then to his career? You know, he played on trumpet, as you said there, Jim, maybe it was a smaller scale label. Did he then become a big star? You know, where did his career go after he made these classic recordings on the chess record?

SPEAKER_05: 54:18

Well, he was a pretty big star on trumpet. He had a couple of national hits. Eyeside to the Blind was a pretty good hit for him on there, although it was done by others. And then, of course, the biggest hit he had was Nine Below Zero with Mighty Long Time. That was his biggest record on trumpet. But that was a pretty big hit.

SPEAKER_03: 54:34

And my teeth and tongue began to fight.

SPEAKER_05: 54:52

And then he played on Dust My Broom with Elmer James, which was the biggest hit of all. So, you know, there was some success on trumpet. But, yeah, I think Giles really nailed it. Basically, the band at Chess was, you know, Willie Dixon leading it. And then, of course, Otis Spann, some of the greatest musicians to ever play the blues. Muddy Waters, you know, just a bunch of great guitar players. And, of course, Robert Lockwood, just a bunch of great musicians that he played with and great drummers. So, yeah, he recorded a chord for Chess and then it came... took off he had more hits he had more exposure because Chess was a little bit better at distributing getting it out to the jukeboxes and also by that point quote unquote black radio had expanded somewhat so American Roots Radio started with Grand Ole Opry in 1927 you know 17 years later was King Biscuit that was the first time that blues was played on a radio show that's of any real note and the first time that electric guitars were used playing blues and kit drums playing blues on broadcast And also the first time that a sponsor aimed their marketing product through a broadcast media musical show at African-American consumers. So it was a real, everything was brand new. And the same is true of Chess Records, and the same is true of Black Radio, the same is true of a lot of things. So it was, things had been progressing strongly. And so I think part of the success of Checker, as opposed to the trumpet, was just the timeline.

SPEAKER_01: 56:16

It's interesting, that first session, because all the Sonny Boy stuff on Chess is incredible. But you can tell on that first session, first session a because he you know um he adapted the song good evening everybody the the the theme tune to the king biscuit time he adapted it and he said i'm up here in the studio in chicago trying to knock these blues around i mean he was obviously excited about being there

SPEAKER_03: 56:38

i'm in a studio over in chicago

SPEAKER_01: 56:47

trying to knock these blues around And it's probably his most disciplined session. Don't Stop Me From Talking is like a micro novel. It's full of detail. It's a properly written song. It's got verses of various different lengths, which are fully rehearsed. Because it's the one, you know, one verse is longer than the other. And it's the one thing that always throws out accompanists. It's not a straight ahead 12 bar. So that first, he went there focused and honed and ready for that first. And the evidence is in the music.

SPEAKER_04: 57:16

And that's an important part, just picking up on the lyrics. he wrote these songs, right, and the lyrics are a massive part of, you know, his charisma, his voice, his harmonica playing, but the lyrics are, he wrote them all, yeah? Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 57:26

Yeah, and apparently he was prepared, he had stuff. The one thing about Sonny Boy was he could read and write, and there are various examples of his letters that he wrote to fans in the UK, he wrote a letter to Victoria Spivey. He kept a pen and paper very prominent in his pocket, which I think was to advertise the fact that he could sell his writing skills to people that couldn't read and write So he was a literate guy. I mean, in this Jazz House recording that was done in Weisbaden, the first song was a song called Unrain Me Baby. He used the word unrain me. So just, you know, let me go out and have some fun. And he uses this, you know, this very literate word, unrain me. I mean, where else have you heard that? So he was a literate guy. And I think he was a, you know, he's a deeply artistic guy, you know, and a naturally creative guy. The poetic imagery in his songs has really helped them last and stay talked about and really have a real lyrical worth in the sort of canon of 20th century song

SPEAKER_03: 58:27

long time to find out my mistake it sure did man but i'll bet you my bottom dollar i'm not finding no more frog for snakes

SPEAKER_04: 58:41

So to pick up on that, and maybe Jim, you can help us with that. So obviously you've talked about the rough life he had as a child. He worked on a plantation. Do we know where he learned how to read and to develop his songwriting skills?

SPEAKER_05: 58:52

Basically, it was not encouraged at all for any of these young men to learn to read, or women. When they were six, seven years old, they were supposed to start helping out in the field. They had to go out and get water for the adults. And a lot of times that was very dangerous because they had to get it out of a river where there was snakes, there was crocodiles, there was snapping turtles There was, of course, a lot of disease and mosquitoes and all that stuff. So that's why 12 of 21 of them died. So basically, there wasn't school. So if you learned to read, you were determined to learn how to read. And these guys were geniuses. You can look at a guy like Sonny Boy and you think, oh, this is kind of some goofy, drunk, gambling womanizer. He's not smart. No, he was very smart. And so was people like, for instance, a guy like Hubert Sumlin. I talked to this guy who was a childhood friend of his that he used to... his father owned the plantation that Hubert Sumlin grew up on near West Memphis. And when he was a kid, he used to let him in the house and they'd smoke cigarettes and they'd play. And when his father wasn't around because he wouldn't let a black boy in the house. But the bottom line was, he said that Hubert Sumlin, if he would have been white, would have been the smartest kid in his school. Now, Hubert Sumlin doesn't come off as a smart kid, but he was. He was a brilliant, brilliant person. So these guys had to pretend they were stupid. We have to understand the culture If they were too smart, they were a target in their

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:15

society. Sonny Boy was an energetic, creative guy. And you can see by the way he walks, he's got to keep his head down because, I mean, he was exuberant. And so, you know, he had to, he was literally figuratively downtrodden. It's really important to understand that when dealing with blues and blues people. And that's the key to the music as well. And that's why it's always been slightly misunderstood, because there's a lot, especially with Sonny Boy, there's a lot of this ironic, wry... tone to the music there's a lot of irony there a lot going on beneath the surface that can't be outwardly said and that is very important to understand and it's fascinating but also incredibly depressing because basically say blues is a triumph of the worst that humanity can throw at a people and blues is a triumph out of that

SPEAKER_05: 1:01:36

Absolutely

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:36

This old life I just can't stand to live it no more Baby, you gotta help me get myself straightened up right now If

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:56

you don't, I am going to have to go.

SPEAKER_05: 1:02:22

that listen to him Elvis heard the blues the first time according to his childhood guitar friend when they were 13 and 14 years old on Sonny Boy and Howlin' Wolf shows on KWEM in West Memphis and they attempted to play those songs much like they attempted to play the songs they heard on the Grand Ole Opry and the Gospel Hour so when Elvis auditioned for his record deal with Sun Records he played two songs first of all he tried to play songs as a country guy and they didn't like that he played a couple of gospel songs they didn't like that And then he played a couple songs that were the blues. Listen to this blues. I know some blues. He and his friend Ronald Smith learned. And then he played God's Alright Mama and My Baby Left Me. Two Arthur Big Boy Crud Up songs that Arthur was the guitar player in Sonny Boy's band on that show. And so Sonny Boy would let him do a song on the show. He'd always let guests do songs. And so that's where Elvis learned about that song. And then he got the Arthur Crud Up record, which had been out, unlike a lot of Sonny Boy's stuff at that point had not been released but Arthur did have records and so he learned that song. Some people listen to this music but by and large it wasn't covered by the media and it wasn't considered anything that white people knew about but some people did but it was very unique. Underground.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:39

Kind of underground all the cool people in the know used to listen to it. So he came over to Europe in 63-64 and this had a huge impact certainly in England where he became a kind of minor celebrity and it is a big influence on the on the English blues boom which of course then went back to the US and influenced you know you know blues becoming popular in the US as well right so it had a massive impact it

SPEAKER_05: 1:04:03

was a huge influence huge influence on the British blues

SPEAKER_04: 1:04:06

absolutely I mean you know we know Led Zeppelin were massively influenced you know Jimmy Page played with Sonny Boy we got you know the Who we got the Yard Boys got the Animals so he went over there so do we know in 1963 you know what happened I think it's quite well documented. There's lots of interviews. I think you talked about earlier on, Giles, with... There's quite a lot of interviews took place in England, yeah? So that's quite a well-documented time, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:31

It's well-documented, and it's fascinating for two reasons. In terms of the recording output, it's fascinating to hear Sonny Boy create yet another brand-new style at this low volume. There's another recording of this 1964 line-up, minus Sonny Boy, at the Jazz House in Weisbaden, and at the beginning... now this is just a a loud club you know the audience are really talking and you can hear sunnyland slim saying oh this is just like home and and he's sort of relaxing but sunny boy managed to really really create incredible performances to completely dead silent audiences and a lot of the artists had real trouble doing that but but they're incredible recordings and i actually from youtube and every source downloaded i mean there's almost 100 songs that he recorded in europe you know just within a year you

SPEAKER_03: 1:05:41

don't have to talk

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:43

And they're magnificent. And he wowed sophisticated audiences and sophisticated journalists that were more used to seeing opera and classical music and what jazz had to offer. And it was a major triumph. And absolutely, considering where he came from.

SPEAKER_04: 1:06:00

Yeah, and just to note, that concert you mentioned there a few times, there's a link to that and I'll put that on the podcast page so people can listen to that. What you're saying there, Jazz, is it almost, blues then almost became that kind of, you know, highbrow art music of jazz, right? And and he was playing to that sort of audience from what he was used

SPEAKER_01: 1:06:17

to. Yeah, but what's very interesting is that the one guy that truly capitalised on this and really, for the rest of his career, was Memphis Slim. Now, Memphis Slim... he was one of the one along with Willie Dixon he managed to get this thing together along with the German promoters he managed to put this thing together and Memphis Slim was from a completely different background he was born in the city he was born in Memphis he had a very strong father figure because a lot of these a lot of these artists would were really cursed by the fact that they they didn't have strong father figures in their lives they were raised by their mothers and and it was a real handicap you know standing up for yourself in the world you know but Memphis Slim had a real strong father figure who ran a couple of clubs and he created a sort of he became like a classical pianist he put on this classical pianist sort of poise but he was completely even with all his finesse and his dignity and his worldliness was completely overshadowed by Sonny Boy who managed to pull off the same trick who managed to create these great fine art performances if you will that kept the feeling of his music and the irony and the wryness and the groove whereas Memphis Slim if you I mean you never hear when you read reviews or people raving about the American Folk Blues Festivals really it should have been Memphis Slim who was centre stage and he was sort of centre stage in all the publicity but Sonny Boy completely overshadowed him and again it's a testament to Sonny Boy's adaptability that he could overshadow someone like Slim but still keep the essence of his art but then the flip side of that was the in my opinion the terrible recordings with the the yard but you know these incredibly young musicians and sh and it shows you how how much they had to learn and maybe never even learned about rhythm and nuance and phrasing and so on The only successful recording with a British band is a very little-known one with Chris Barber on his Lost and Found series of recordings. The sound quality is very bad, but the performance, because Sonny Boy's playing with a jazz band, and again, Sonny Boy modelled his harp playing, and it's a beautiful, beautiful melding of skills between Chris Barber and Sonny Boy.

UNKNOWN: 1:08:54

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:02

But the other stuff just shows you how far advanced Sonny Boy was in his playing and how much the UK guys... Because, I mean, these were 18 or 19-year-olds, you know, suddenly playing this very mature and defined music.

SPEAKER_04: 1:09:14

And one of those... one of those players with yours was Eric Clapton who obviously went on to a very successful career but so there's a famous quote where Sonny Boy says those British boys want to play the blues real bad and they do right but I think he was still very grateful for the publicity right and I took it it brought him some money as well right Jimmy he probably loved the celebrity when he was over here

SPEAKER_05: 1:09:34

yeah I think that's true I think I think Giles hit on something I'd like to hammer down a little bit more Sonny Boy from the time he was 17 lived on the road with a harmonica a bottle of booze and a weapon and change of clothes and he could either be like just he could blend in with the poor population or he could wear a suit and look spiffy he always carried weapons because he was uh he lived a very in a very difficult situations and had to defend himself in different things so basically he learned to adapt to whatever was going on he would play wherever he could get the best action if it was if he'd show up and he had a gig but the band was horrible he fired the band and do the whole show himself and tap out the rhythm on his feet and play the bass on his harmonica while he's playing the high end of the harmonica. If it was a jazz band that was there, he'd play with them. If it was a real raw electric blues band, he'd play with them. If it was a folk thing, he'd play with them. He could play with anybody. He'd play with a piano player, he'd play with a guitar player, he'd play with a sax player, he'd play with anybody. So he learned to adapt early on, and he just kept that going. And that's why when he got to Europe, he was so experienced that he could do what Giles is explaining.

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:42

And there's a fascinating recording recorded in the photo stephanie someone i can't remember her surname but it's the photographer

SPEAKER_05: 1:10:50

visant

SPEAKER_01: 1:10:51

visant yeah there's a fascinating solo recording the the the photograph of him is actually on the front of the the of the recording set is actually on the front of the yard birds album but he just sat in front of a tape player and did five tracks unaccompanied and it's absolutely incredible the precision he does a version of work with me and it's just just grooving you know

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:21

Work with me. Let me work with you. Oh, darling, work with me. Let me work with you. And

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:40

that harks back to the fact that he'd be walking around the Mississippi just having to play solo. And that's where I think he gets his very incredible rhythmical acuity from, is from the fact that he had to be the whole band. Being a harmonica player, he had to be the whole band. And that's where he learned how to be so rhythmical.

SPEAKER_05: 1:11:59

Right, and I wanted to add something that was said earlier about whether he wrote songs. He wrote the lyrics to a lot of his songs, but some of the songs he wrote were probably co-writes. Like, for instance, One Way Out was most likely a co-write with Elmore James, but it's sometimes credited to this, that, and the other. Some other guy, producer, tried to write his name into it and all that. I think other things like that with Willie Dixon, it's hard to know just what was his or not. But I think that what happened there is that he was a writer that just produce a bunch of great songs. And I think the main thing that needs to, for your listeners, I think we need to maybe focus in on some of the best, if you haven't heard Sonny Boy, some of the best songs to listen to. I think one of the all-time best showcases of his talent, and it goes right to your point, Giles, is Help Me.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:46

You know if you don't help me, darling I'll find myself somebody else

SPEAKER_05: 1:13:07

When he's playing on Help Me, there's no overdubs. This isn't anything with pro tools or something. He's getting up there, he's singing... and playing on the same microphone. He's playing the harmonica and singing in between those vocal phrases, and he's playing a variety of harmonica styles. He's getting away from the mic, he's getting close to the mic. To me, it's a masterpiece of music.

SPEAKER_04: 1:13:32

That's incredible, yeah. So you mentioned, Jim, obviously one of your favorite recordings is Help Me by Sonny Boy, so I was going to ask the question to pick out maybe two of your favorite Sonny Boy songs. So if you've got another one as well, Jim, after Help Me.

SPEAKER_05: 1:13:45

I think Giles hit it off with The Don't Start Me Talking is a fantastic one. But I'd have to say my second favorite one is kind of an obscure one that's so sad to be lonesome.

SPEAKER_01: 1:13:55

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:13:56

So strong. It's unbelievably strong. The emotion and the feeling and the sentimentality of it is just piercing.

SPEAKER_03: 1:14:04

It makes you feel so good When your baby comes back home I'm having fun.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:24

But I can't pick two because it's like any other fantastic artist. I would say you'd have to really have a top 20 to really have something where you can actually say you've got all the somewhat better songs. But there's easily probably 50 great Sonny Boy records. Yeah,

SPEAKER_04: 1:14:40

and as I said earlier on, listening through his collection again, they're all great. So two of my favorites is You Killing Me. That's incredible, yeah. Which is in first position, interestingly. That's a fantastic song. So, so emotional. and then also don't lose your eye and it's got a fantastic intro on this version of don't lose your eye so what about you giles

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:17

I just recently did a podcast with Royal Colleges of Music talking about blues and the musicality behind it. And the one song that I talked about was Nine Below Zero, the chess recorder.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:31

MUSIC PLAYS

SPEAKER_01: 1:15:49

The groove in it is just, it's like an impossibly slow groove. Because they were saying, you know, blues can be seen by some people as depressing. And I said, well, you have the lyrics that might be depressing on their own, but then the irony of the rhythm and the music. And that's a classic example of where if you just read out the lyrics, it's quite depressing. But then when you counter it with the execution of the lyrics next to that rhythm. So I think Nine Below Zero and I like, you You know, one that isn't often discussed, She's My Baby. It's got the most technically incredible harmonica solo on

SPEAKER_02: 1:16:25

it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:44

So probably those two. There are loads more. I don't know from the American Folk Blues Festival. I mean, just incredible amount of stuff, man. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_05: 1:16:52

I mentioned Storyville earlier, but one of the greatest moments in his recording career is his version of The Sky Is Crying on that Storyville stuff. Oh, it's just touching. Really incredible.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:03

Oh, yeah. Oh, man, yeah. When I went to college when I was 18 years old in London, there was a guy called Frank Nazareth who lived down the next street, and he did odd job work for my landlady and introduced me. And he used to be a roadie. He still performed, you know, he performed himself in a band around the area, but he used to be a roadie for the American Blues Festival for Jim Simpson in the 70s. So he, you know, toured around with Eddie Taylor and Lightning Slim and all of those guys. I'd never heard of the Storyville stuff. And he played me that, the album, and I got shivers down my spine. That sky is crying. Just from the vocal introduction and the softness of the way the harp comes in. And as a harmonica player myself, It's really important to emphasise his adaptability was incredible, because a lot of the blues musicians weren't that adaptable or sensitive. And for him to go into that studio and suddenly become so soft and detailed, I mean, it's almost impossible to conceive how he did that. But he did, and it's beautiful. It's just this sort of melding into each situation is really impressive.

SPEAKER_03: 1:18:14

so

SPEAKER_04: 1:18:27

when he was in england and you mentioned the bowler hat that he wore earlier on jazz but he sort of liked the sort of british business suits and he wore the the bowler hat and the cane and the umbrella and and this and the case and yep

SPEAKER_01: 1:18:39

it's kind of like memphis slim with the white streak The white streak in the hair was a great... You know, they were all trying to outdo each other and have their own gimmicks. And Memphis Slim had the white streak in the hair. You know, and they were being treated like men. Memphis Slim sang this song on the Spivvy label. He said, Alabama I really hate. If I went fishing, I'd use Alabama for my bait. And then he says, I'm going to move to Paris and sit under the Eiffel Tower. That's where a man has equal as much power. So these guys could suddenly dress like aristocrats. They could walk tall. and not be persecuted for it, you know, and be celebrated for their culture, for the skin of their color, and for their music, you know. I mean, you imagine Sonny Boy in 60s Britain. I mean, he was on TV an awful lot. He would have been driven around London and recognized and going to all these clubs, and he could dress like an aristocrat or a successful businessman.

SPEAKER_05: 1:19:34

The way he dressed, he dressed prior to, way long before that, with the bowler hat and the look. He was doing that look all the way back to that photo that you remember from 1939 in Southern Illinois. So he was actually just pulling from stuff that he already knew about. He had suits, that kind of suits made in Chicago prior to the one he had made in Savile Row. He already had that look, but he understood probably, I guess it's a good guess, he understood that people would get a kick out of that look because of the fact that that's the way distinguished gentlemen wore clothes there.

SPEAKER_04: 1:20:09

So a couple of things which he was well known playing harmonicas first of all he played a low harmonica and he played the honer 364 which was the extended range low octave one yeah so you know Bye Bye Bird was one of his songs that he's associated with so he had that low harp and then he also would do the trick where he put the harp in the mouth and played with no hands so these are both very characteristic of him yeah

SPEAKER_01: 1:20:32

well it just so happens I have one of those here because I was going to talk about Bye Bye Bird that track is an incredible track because when you hear cover versions of it like John Mayle who did, I think it was Room to Move or Another Man Done Gone. What you've got to understand about that track is that it was very well composed. It was composed with a central riff. So it wasn't just sort of... It's actually a riff. It's a... You know, it's an actual riff. It wasn't a written thing. little walter had the chromatic that was his sort of claim to fame sunny boy with these extended range harmonicas and i think from what i remember reading hona actually may made some for him you know with different keys when he was in europe you know

SPEAKER_05: 1:21:26

and that played into him being a full package because he had to impersonate the low end of the of the scale because he's doing the bass he's doing the high end he's tapping out the rhythm so having that full range helped what he did but more as far as walter walter always had a band so it was all it was And Walter, what he did so brilliantly was expand upon the technology of using the amplification.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:48

The major difference between Walter and Sonny Boy was Sonny Boy was more of a rhythmical player, and Walter extended the melodic aspect of the harmonica and the blues. That's right. So Walter was very melodic, and Sonny Boy had just as much technique. I mean, he had the same range as Walter, but played it rhythmically. So when I'm teaching harmonica, one of my favourite little riffs, and it's a tiny, subtle riff in Don't Start Me To Talking, but on the final... The final solo goes something like this And then this bit That little riff there You can hear how he's throwing the notes around and really swinging with it, you know. And it's these little subtle details and his rhythmical approach that I think makes him still fresh today because the melody on Walter's tracks kind of sounds, it sounds very 50s and very of the time. But Sonny Boy's never really aged that much, you know. And that rhythmical approach really still sounds as fresh today as it did back then.

SPEAKER_03: 1:23:07

Wow. Huh? Bruce

SPEAKER_05: 1:23:21

Chanel was an artist that had a big hit in 1962 with Hey Baby, and he came over to England and toured, and the Beatles opened for him. The Beatles at that point had been just starting to be a recording, right before they became a recording act. They were just about ready to start becoming a recording act. So Bruce Chanel had a harmonica player named Delbert McClinton, who's a famous musician now, and Delbert McClinton's early bands in Texas had opened for Sunny Boy a lot and he got to know Sunny Boy quite a bit. Sunny Boy actually explained to him using the harmonica with the vibrato and explained to him how he did that. Now Dilbert McClinton was playing harmonica in Bruce Chanel's band on that song Hey Baby. And John Lennon asked him, how do you do that? And he showed him, he said, this is what Sonny Boy showed me how to do.

SPEAKER_01: 1:24:21

As

SPEAKER_05: 1:24:22

a result of that... the Beatles started using a lot more harmonica in their music and that was a real signature of the early Beatles sound was harmonica. We might be able to surmise that they wouldn't have used harmonica had they not been so fascinated by the fact that John Lennon was excited about learning how to use it and that vibrato. Now I'm sure you can pick apart the Beatles harmonica playing and say that it's nothing like Sonny Boy but nonetheless that's maybe one little note as to why maybe Sonny Boy had more more than a small influence on British rock.

SPEAKER_04: 1:24:57

I haven't heard that before, Jim. That's a fascinating one. If Sonny Boy influenced the Beatles to start playing the harmonica, that's fantastic. That's amazing, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:25:04

And the other thing is, too, that he played with so many people, and I have literally an A's list of every British young teenager that wanted to be a blues guy that loved R&B. I mean, Rod Stewart, he played with the Five Dimensions, which Rod Stewart was the frontman. He played with the Hoochie Coochie Men, which Rod Stewart was the frontman. He played with the Mule Skinners, which are members of the Faces. He played with Joe Cocker's early band. He played with Moody Blues. He played with Alex Harvey's soul band. He played with, I mean, just about everybody in rock in Britain that was really interested in the blues. Van Morrison, he didn't play with him, but Van followed him around and was heavily influenced by him, kind of followed him like a puppy dog. And then one of Van Morrison's, his third most performed songs in his musical concert career is Help Me.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:48

Wow.

SPEAKER_05: 1:25:49

The guy that runs the fan club confirmed that for me. So basically, he was a huge Huge, huge influence on British rock and, as you mentioned, The Who and Tommy and all that stuff with Eyesight to the Blind. So that's another factor here.

SPEAKER_04: 1:26:02

so then he you know after this great time he had in Europe and obviously in England the impact that he had there Jim as you just mentioned he did decide to go back to the US so it's interesting as to why he did that considering his success but he went back to Helena yeah and I think did he then go back to maybe doing a bit more recording on the King Biscuit time briefly didn't he so he went back and you know it wasn't long after that sadly he died in his sleep on May 25th 1965 so what do we know about that time when he when he went back to the U.S.?

SPEAKER_05: 1:26:33

What happened was his visa was expired, but he himself knew he was going. He was having problems with internal bleeding. He was spitting a lot of blood up in spittoons and such as that. And George Ogimelski and Brian Auger and a lot of other people who had gotten to know him a lot from hanging around him thought he wasn't long for the world. And so basically he left Great Britain and probably knew he wasn't going to be coming back, even though he said he'd like to. He went back to Chicago and And then he hung around Chicago, kind of made the rounds. He took a train down south and back down to Helena. He went down there, but then he started going to some other places. This is something that you'll see more about in my book. It's kind of very new information about what he did near the time of his death. He went over to Alabama, which at the time was where they were, the Freedom Ride and where the March to Montgomery was going on. And the civil rights things were going on that led to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He went over there and he centered himself in Tuscaloosa, which was very close to what was going on there. We don't know what the reason was, but we do know that you've probably seen the thing he did in Sweden where he starts talking about Kennedy and stuff. I think he had a conscience about what was going on there and how he wanted to be part of it. And so I think he was over there doing that. And I had a couple of eyewitnesses that said that he was involved with playing in Tuscaloosa at that time, that they thought that he may have gone over over to the march and been a part of that but we don't know for a fact after that that little episode he went back to Helena and he got Houston Stackhouse primarily but a few others to sort of help him go and say goodbye to people basically because he sort of knew he was going I think and he went to see his that some of his friends the people he'd come up with the people that helped him along the way and he played a few gigs at some old places he had he'd grown you know up in and he went back to Greenwood where he was he had avoided for many years he avoided Greenwood for 10 years and when he went back he was always very careful and he was a completely different person looked different and dressed different and no one knew he was Alex Miller but he also was kind of careful when he went back there according to his family just came into town and just hung out with them and didn't go out and fraternize much so he went back to Greenwood and played his last gig actually in Greenwood at a house party and then he went back to his residence and hung out there a couple days and went out one night and and borrowed some money, paid back the money he owed somebody by pawning some ring or something like that. And then he went home to his bed and died and didn't make the show the next morning and was discovered by Pet Curtis.

SPEAKER_04: 1:29:16

And so there's a fantastic video of Robbie Robertson, who was the guitarist with Bob Dylan and in the band. He talks about this time when he met Sonny Boy in Helena, I think it was, just a few weeks before he died and leave on helm. And they were talking about they might record with him so there's possibility he might have gone on to play with the band or something and it didn't happen so I put a link onto that it's really sort of 10 minutes really fascinating sort of look into the last couple of weeks of his life there

SPEAKER_05: 1:29:43

I talked to a guy that was at that thing. I interviewed him, and he told me all about it. And then, of course, it's been told by Robbie Robertson and others in the band what happened, Levon Helm and such. And what happened was they were looking for him, and they knew about him, because Levon was so tremendously influenced by King Biscuit. Pat Curtis was one of his big influences as a child, because he grew up right there. And so, basically, he wanted to get Sonny Boy and introduce Sonny Boy to his his friends from Canada so they found him and they asked him and they wanted to jam and so they jammed at this hotel room I guess for two and a half days and then Sonny Boy took him to a like a restaurant cafe kind of a that served soul food and what not and they went there and then they had this big you know scene with the cops and they had to leave but the intention was that they wanted to hook up with him and have him join their band or back him up or whatever and I often wonder had he become a member of their band what he would have what kind of effect it would have had on Bob Dylan's career because they went right to being Bob Dylan's back-to-back. I can't imagine Bob Dylan playing harmonica the way he did if Sonny

SPEAKER_04: 1:30:54

Boy was there. A whole different Bob Dylan harmonica, that would be great, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:30:57

And I can't imagine the British audiences complaining about Bob Dylan going electric if Sonny Boy was there. I don't think they would have had the balls to do that. Sonny Boy, he would have set them straight.

UNKNOWN: 1:31:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:10

So do we know what the cause of his death was? I think it was put down to heart attack, wasn't

SPEAKER_05: 1:31:15

it? Yeah, it's, I mean, again, with these death notices, you know, I mean, the guy that did the death notice for Robert Johnson said that he was a banjo player. So, I mean, the bottom line is we don't know what his real, there wasn't a proper autopsy done. So we don't know what he died from.

SPEAKER_04: 1:31:32

So Lillian McMurray, who was the proprietor of Trumpet Records, she had a headstone placed on his grave in 1980.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:40

What is interesting is that he did have a casket. There's a photo of him in his open casket. So there was some money there to pay for the funeral and so on.

SPEAKER_05: 1:31:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:31:50

So he was obviously looked after. He

SPEAKER_05: 1:31:52

was well-liked. The people in the community and the people, the black people in the community, I should say more specifically, the church people had known him growing up. And some of the more, you know, successful preachers who looked favorably on him and provided for him, I think. The Undertaker, the black Undertaker that did his casket was also a very close friend of him and Robert Lockwood. I talked to their son who knew him growing up. He'd come over with Robert Lockwood all the time and stuff when they were growing kids and for dinner and stuff. And I just think they were just benevolent to him and had created this funeral probably out of whole cloth, you know. And the photographer that took that picture was his brother The guy that I interviewed's brother, the son of the undertaker. And unfortunately, because he's a church guy and has a sort of a negative attitude, according to this guy I interviewed about the blues, he just didn't keep the pictures. But he had a lot more pictures than what currently exists of that funeral.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:49

Wow. Well, it's amazing. And then, as you say, Neil, Lillian McMurray paid for the headstone, which is there now. It's an amazing grave site. You know, you go there and you think of everything that he did in Europe. And there's this modest grave looking out across the open fields of the Delta. And it's quite moving to go there and see the love as well, because it's always covered with harmonicas and bottles of whiskey and so on. When I went down there, poured some whiskey on there, left a harmonica. I mean, it's a shrine and it's a monument to his, the love from around the world.

SPEAKER_05: 1:33:22

I showed up there, unfortunately, and somebody had knocked it over and broke And so I don't know if it was who it was in the community or if it was racially motivated or if it was just some idiotic hoodlums. But the bottom line was I got it put back up there and with the help of the sheriff and some local political people. So that was cool. But, yeah, the key thing is what happened was is that– is that he was well-loved by a lot of people, despite the fact that he was so notoriously nasty to a lot of people. Most people, if you bring up his name, they laugh because he was crazy and obnoxious, but lovable. And actually, Maddie deserves a medal for staying with him as long as she did. And that's one of the problems with the research that Bill Donahue did. He was able to interview her while she was alive, and I would have asked more pointed questions as to why he stayed with the guy. but she stiked with him and as it turns out it worked out okay because he started making quite a bit of money after he died.

SPEAKER_04: 1:34:26

So Sonny Boy was elected into the Blues Hall of Fame in the first year of balloting in 1980 which showed that he was a true giant of the blues as well as of course without doubt a true giant of the harmonica and definitely in my mind you know one of the absolute greats you know up there with Little Walter we mentioned Big Walter you know and you know absolutely one of the greatest yeah and his lyrics his charisma all the things we've said about him so I I don't think I could have chosen two better informed guests than you guys on Sonny Boy. You know, thanks so much for your contribution. Fantastic. And Jim, look forward to your book tremendously and digging into all that detail. Let us know for sure when it's out and I'll give it a shout on here and, you know, put the link onto the podcast when it is out. So thanks so much for joining, Jim, and all the hard work you've done. And Giles, the love that you have for Sonny Boy and I'm sure lots of people listening do too.

SPEAKER_05: 1:35:13

And I look forward to Giles coming out to Seattle and Portland and the Northwest United States sometime. He's only... He always comes to the United States. He just goes to Mississippi, and that's it, you know?

SPEAKER_01: 1:35:25

I hope so. I hope so. There'll be more trips next year. But, Jim, I'm really looking forward to the book, and I'm excited about the social contacts that you're explaining as well because I think that's incredibly important to understand the art. And you're such a great spokesman for the book and for Sonny Boy, so I'm really excited to read that.

SPEAKER_05: 1:35:42

Well, you know, I love this stuff, as I know you guys do, and I just appreciate you including me in this conversation.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:49

Thanks. Thanks so much for joining, guys. Cheers, Neil. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05: 1:35:52

Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Giles. I really appreciate it out here.

SPEAKER_04: 1:35:56

Once again, thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast. Be sure to check out their great range of harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas. Many thanks to Giles and Jim for joining me today. Both really knowledgeable about Sonny Boy. I can't wait to read Jim's biography when it's out. Also thanks to Bob Corritore and Kim Field for helping me with getting this episode together. Be sure to check out Bob's comprehensive photo gallery on Sonny Boy. The link to that is on the podcast page. Sonny Boy is truly a legend and influential to so many harmonica players. It's been wonderful revisiting his catalogue of songs, which has taken me back to my early days learning the harmonica. As usual, most of the clips of the songs used in this episode are on the Spotify playlist. The link to that is on the podcast page. I'll sign out now with the master playing his signature tune from the American Folk Blues Festival. This is Bye

SPEAKER_03: 1:36:59

Bye Bird. Bye. I'm gone.