The past month saw the passing of two bluesmen, 97-year-old Texan Big Walter Price on March 8, and Jerry McCain, the Gadsden, Alabama-based harmonica player, who died on March 28 at age 81. Neither Price nor McCain ever won much acclaim outside the South or gained much traction with the white blues market, but they made influential records and McCain was an outstanding harp player. Outside of an occasional appearance at European blues festivals, they played the “chitlin’ circuit,” and they both stuck with their own songs, which in McCain’s case especially, were admonishing, incisive and bittersweet.
Price, who was known as “The Thunderbird,” was a local legend around Houston, where he played piano, worked as a deejay, and operated a label he called Sunshine. In 1967, Blues Unlimited reported that he was running a “14 foot square, packed to the ceiling” record store that doubled as a personal shrine. In 1956, he recorded two regional hits, “Shirley Jean,” and “Pack Fair and Square” for Peacock Records. The former became a prototype of Gulf Coast swamp pop, while the latter, featuring a scorching tenor solo from Grady Gaines, was more typical of the high energy jump blues and rock’n’roll that Price recorded in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. “Pack Fair and Square” was covered by the J. Geils Band on its debut release in 1970.
In 1965, when the English blues journalist Mike Leadbitter was in Houston, he encountered Price and wrote that his music “has always stuck with current trends. “ In other words, it wasn’t sufficiently deep blues for the Brits. But a few months later, Price sent him “a tape of himself backed by a three-piece including the really fabulous Albert Collins on guitar. This was so good,” Leadbitter wrote, “that I asked Walter…to make available the great item he taped.” Leadbitter released Big Walter’s “My Tears” on a long out-of-print compilation entitled Nothing But the Blues, and as you’ll hear, it’s a devastating slow blues featuring 33-year-old Collins, who was then emerging on record with instrumentals like “Frosty” and his classic vocal blues, “Dyin’ Flu.” Despite its obscurity, “My Tears” has been hailed as Albert’s greatest recorded solo, though there’s lots of competition for that superlative. “My Tears” seems not to have been reissued on CD, but YouTube has it in all its glory complete with Price shouting, “Take it all the way to London!”