According to the liner notes that accompany this CD, the new title is in reference to the two distinct eras of Blues that are being married together for this recording. Sleepy John hailed originally from the Deep South, where his father was a sharecropper who picked cotton. He also played a little guitar and he passed that on to his son. When John lost an eye to an accident at a young age, his usefulness as a farm hand was reduced. So he began to learn guitar and by nineteen he was playing professionally throughout the South.
The majority of John's recordings were made before and during the early years of World War Two for the Decca label. John was an integral piece in the development of the Memphis sound around that time, with folk like B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Bobby Bland. This Memphis scene played a big role in the development of what became the Chicago Sound. But John himself never made it up to Chicago in any serious way until the 1960s.
Like so many other older Blues players, he was given a second career through the folk revival in the States and the huge interest in traditional Blues music in Europe. In 1964, he was part of the American Folk Blues Festival that toured Europe annually in the early sixties, and began jamming with some of the more modern musicians for the first time. Delmark Records producer Robert Koester caught one of those jams and promised John a recording session to make an album of that type of music.
The band assembled for that recording was some of the best of the best at the time in Chicago: Carey Bell on harmonica (and bass for two tracks), Sunnyland Slim on piano, Jimmy Dawkins on lead guitar, veteran Chess session man Odie Payne Jr. on drums, and Earl Hooker and Joe Harper splitting the rest of the bass duties. With John's old-style singing voice added to that mixture of hot players, the contrasting styles made for some powerfully emotional music.
If nothing else, this disc shows there is no problem when the old meets the new and everybody wants the same thing: to make some great music.
Article comments