A Selfless Perspective on Blues History
Jimmy Rogers looks like he enjoyed himself on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 1994. By then, the great bluesman was 70, and nearly 25 years into the second act of a career that he’d abandoned in the sixties for the sake of a dependable livelihood self-employed behind the wheel of a cab and the counter of a clothing store. He re-emerged around 1970, toured Europe, wrote some new tunes, and revived several of the classics he’d recorded for Chess Records in the fifties. He was a major figure in the golden age of Chicago Blues, and an inductee in the Blues Hall of Fame. But in 1994, it was still unusual for any blues artist besides B.B. King to get a slot on TV.
Rogers made the most of it, singing his mid-fifties hit, “Walking By Myself,” then joining Conan for a few minutes of conversation. You know O’Brien wanted him to talk about all the rock stars who were in his debt. Rogers’s Atlantic album, Blues, Blues, Blues, features Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Taj Mahal, Eric Clapton, Steven Stills, Robert Plant, and Jimmy Page, and Richards singled him out for praise in his autobiography, Life. “I was heavily into Muddy Waters’s guitarist Jimmy Rogers, and the guys who played behind Little Walter, the Myers brothers,” the Rolling Stones guitarist wrote. “Talk about an ancient form of weaving.” Instead Rogers, bless him, talked about his heroes. As a result, this is most likely the only time that such seminal figures as Robert Jr. Lockwood, Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Minnie, and Tampa Red were mentioned on network television. Robert Johnson’s in there, too, along with Jimmy’s old blues brothers, Muddy Waters and Little Walter.
Rogers scored a handful of r&b hits in the fifties including “That’s All Right,” “Ludella,” “Sloppy Drunk,” “Chicago Bound,” and “Money, Marbles, and Chalk.” But his place in blues history is forever secure through his charter membership in the combo that Waters put together in the late-forties. Muddy’s four-piece group, known on the street as the Headhunters for their fierce competitive drive, is credited with electrifying the blues and establishing the sound that became a prototype for rock. But again, to Rogers’s credit, he tells O’Brien that it was really Lockwood and Williamson (like many of his peers, Rogers calls him “Williams”), not Muddy and himself, who were responsible for amplifying the blues as early as “1940, ’41.” Show business rarely witnesses such selfless acts of credit reassignment, especially before an audience that wouldn’t have known the difference. (Read an earlier blog I wrote on Williamson and Lockwood here. It includes rare, color footage of the pair performing in Helena, Arkansas in 1942 and ’52.)
As Rogers relates to O’Brien, the region around Memphis was a hotbed of blues in the late thirties and forties, and locales west of the Mississippi, including Helena, and East Monroe, Louisiana, were even more hospitable than Beale Street to good times, gambling, and ’round-the-clock music-making. It was in Helena where Williamson and Lockwood began a midday radio show on KFFA that galvanized blues people throughout the area. Rogers, who was an excellent source for Robert Palmer’s sweeping historical narrative, Deep Blues, recalled, “I would rush home every day around twelve to hear Sonny Boy’s show. I’d be diggin’ every inch of his sounds.” Palmer, a Little Rock native and New York Times music critic who died in 1997, summarized the region’s primary role in the modernizing of rural Delta blues. “To a considerable extent,” he wrote, “the Helena style and the music that’s now universally recognized as Chicago blues were one and the same.” Rogers apparently concurred.
Rogers first recorded “Walking By Myself” on October 29, 1956 with an all-star lineup including Big Walter, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Otis Spann, Willie Dixon, and Fred Below. Horton’s harmonica playing– his solo, the lines he weaves around Rogers’s singing, and his follow-ups to Rogers’s stop-time breaks– have given “Walking By Myself” a separate status as a classic of amplified blues harp. Pete Welding’s original liner note essay described Horton’s playing with the novel term, “high compression harp.” The YouTube file of the song includes a famous photo taken in 1954. From left to right, that’s Muddy Waters, guitar; Jerome Green, maracas; Otis Spann, piano; Henry “Pot” Strong, harmonica; Elgin Evans, drums; and Jimmy Rogers, guitar.
When I began listening to blues in the late sixties, Chess Records was just then reissuing album-length collections of singles that Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Elmore James, John Brim, Albert King, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, and other legends had made in the previous decade. Muddy and Little Walter were billed in small print on the cover of Chicago Bound, the Chess Vintage Series LP on Rogers. The sides it contained were impressive for several reasons, including Rogers’s smooth, clearly enunciated singing; the astonishing harp playing of both Little Walter Jacobs and Big Walter Horton; the band’s deft combination of supple swing and emotional intensity; and Rogers’s lyrics, which contained some of the most memorable lines of blues verse.
“I didn’t need no steam heat by my bed/The gal I loved she kept me cherry red.” (Chicago Bound)
“I ain’t never loved but four women in my life/That’s my mother, my sister, my sweetheart, and my wife.” (Goin’ Away Baby)
“You’re the one who really gave me a buzz/I didn’t think I’d last much longer, but that shows you just how wrong I was.” (You’re the One)
“You told me baby, your love for me was strong/When I woke up this morning, half of this big world was gone.” (That’s All Right)
“I’ve got a little woman, she’s got money, marbles, and chalk/She bought me a fine Cadillac, man, That’s why I don’t have to walk.” (Money, Marbles, and Chalk)
Rogers was born James A. Lane in Ruleville, Mississippi, on June 3, 1924. He died on December 19, 1997. He adopted his step-father’s surname, which he maintained as a performer and recording artist, but his music is published under his birth name, and his son, James A. Lane. Jr., is the fine guitarist heard soloing with his father on the Late Show appearance. Rogers is the subject of richly comprehensive biography by Wayne Everett Goins, with an introduction by Kim Wilson, the acclaimed harp player and vocalist for The Fabulous Thunderbirds. It’s named for another Rogers tune, Blues All Day Long, and published by the University of Illinois Press. Wilson produced Rogers’s finest late career album for Antone’s Records in 1995. From Ludella, here’s the Rogers original, “You’re Sweet.”