|
Little Sonny: Blues With A Feeling (1972) |
E-mail |
|
Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festivals
|
|
Saturday, 31 December 2005 07:17 |
Blues With A Feeling
Little Sonny
Recorded 'Live' at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972
Schoolkids Records
By John Sinclair
The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was a remarkable undertaking in 1972. Produced by a community-based non-profit organization staffed by long-haired music business professionals and left-wing cultural revolutionaries like this writer, it brought together a strange concatenation of modern blues giants, leading avant-garde jazz musicians, and an audience of 12,000 hippies and college students for a three-day extravaganza of Black music, sunshine and fun in a field next to Huron High School.
Following on the Ann Arbor Blues Festivals of 1969 and 1970, a pair of artistic and critical successes which unhappily lost a considerable sum of money for the student group at the University of Michigan that had sponsored them, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival reached out beyond the traditionally small knot of identifiable blues devotees to tap the curiosity of rock & roll lovers who were--in 1972 -till open to new musical experiences and anything else that could stretch their cultural horizons.
Funded by means of a chance meeting with a young man who wished to make socially righteous use of a small inheritance, the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival offered this writer--as its co-producer, creative director and music programmer--the opportunity to create a musical blend previously unrealized in the USA, and this welcome opening was pursued with zeal and considerable glee.
The opening night presentation on September 8, 1972, offered 45-minute sets by the Seigel-Schwall Blues Band, Detroit's Contemporary Jazz Quintet (CJQ), Jr. Walker & The All-Stars, Sun Ra & His Arkestra, and Howlin' Wolf.
The next afternoon featured the Music of Chicago, with performances by Muddy Waters, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Hound Dog Taylor & the Houserockers, and Mighty Joe Young with Lucille Spann and Koko Taylor, including a surprise appearance by the Bard of Vicksburg, Mr. Willie Dixon.
Sunday afternoon brought to the stage Freddy King, Archie Shepp, Sippie Wallace with Bonnie Raitt, Luther Allison (who proved to be the Festival's true star), and Ann Arbor's Mojo Boogie Band.
Sunday night climaxed the Festival with Miles Davis, Otis Rush (with Jimmy Dawkins), Leo Smith & Marion Brown, Lightnin' Slim, Boogie Woogie Red, and unannounced guests Robert Jr. Lockwood and Johnny Shines.
The Saturday night show was intended as the ultimate piece de resistance: the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop, the great Bobby 'Blue' Bland, Dr. John's "Nite-Tripper" revue, and Detroit's own Little Sonny, soon to be acclaimed by his promoters at Stax Records as the "New King of the Blues Harmonica."
It turned out to be impossible to feature Charles Mingus--an unavoidable figure in this writer's pantheon of available musical greats--until the following year due to his prolonged illness, and he was replaced by the Pharaoh Sanders Quintet. Bobby Bland and Dr. John met every expectation, and Little Sonny opened the show with a well-paced set of originals and blues classics that showed off his vocal and harmonica mastery.
At the time Little Sonny, long one of this writer's favorite modern bluesmen, was enjoying the small surge of popular success that had followed the release of his first Enterprise LP, Black & Blue, produced by Al Bell and Zorn Productions for the Stax Records subsidiary.
It seemed exactly the right time to present Sonny to the largest audience he had faced to date, and the response his performance elicited was heart-warming indeed.
Little Sonny has his own memories of the occasion, as he recalls for Tom Gelardi in the audio memoir included at the end of this disc:
"Hello ladies and gentlemen, I am Little Sonny. I was in Memphis doing a tour of promotion. I was promoting the album Black & Blue. We went into New York, Texas, New Orleans and went into Memphis and St. Louis, Missouri.
"After I was out there for about two weeks promoting, I came back home and picked up my sons and then we went back on the road again.
"I was called by Mrs. Rodgers her booking agency was Rodgers & Rodgers. She called me at the hotel that morning and asked me to do the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. I told her to get the contracts together and I accepted.
"We came and we got our automobiles and we drove up to Ann Arbor to do the show. We got in and we was there in the range of about two hours or more before we got a chance to go on stage. We did not have a sound check we went on without a sound check, and actually we was the opening act of that particular show.
"We opened up and started the first number and the crowd just dived in with me and everybody started having a good time. Everybody seemed like they were glad to see us because this was the first time that we played the Ann Arbor Festival. The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival was one of the largest festivals I ever played."
* * * * *
Aaron "Little Sonny" Willis enjoys a healthy entry in Sheldon Harris's 1979 Blues Who's Who, set off by a handsome photo of the harmonica star taken by Doug Fulton at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival 1972 (cf. pp. 578-580 in the DaCapo Press paperback edition), and immediately following the entry for his idol and namesake, Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller).
According to Harris and other sources, Little Sonny was born in Greensboro, Alabama, on October 6, 1932, and raised on his father's farm. A sandlot baseball player as a youth, Sonny began his musical career working with local gospel groups until his family moved to Detroit in 1954.
An enterprising young man with the booming Motor City entertainment scene at his feet, Little Sonny soon acquired an early Polaroid Land camera and began taking pictures of patrons and players at places like the Club Plantation. He got to know several leading musical figures in the clubs and demonstrated for them his blossoming talent on the "Mississippi saxophone."
Before long Sonny was on the stand with his elders, working with Washboard Willie & His Super Suds of Rhythm at the Good Time Bar in 1955 and making a name for himself in blues circles. But let's let Sonny tell the story himself:
"I started playing the harmonica when I was a kid. My mother bought me a five-cents harmonica. I was playing harmonica all the time, but I didn't know that you could make money playing the harmonica this way.
"When I seen Sonny Boy Williamson, that give me a chance to say, 'Hey, I can make a living doing what this man was doing,' because he was playing the harmonica. And not only was he playing the harmonica when someone request a song, he would put his hand out after they request a song and they was putting dollar bills in his hand before he played the song.
"So that kind of riled me up. I say, 'This guy can do that, and so can I.' So then I went back home, and you talk about practice see, that's when I really got into the harmonica, and I say, 'Hey, I'm gonna work, and I'm gonna make this harmonica work for me the way its working for him.'
"And that's what I started doing start practicing everyday. I would drive along with the automobile, playing the harmonica while I'm driving, holding up the harmonica, playing it, and I practiced it.
"Then I was buying his records, I was buying Jimmy Reed records, and I was buying Little Walter records because these was the three blues singers, harmonica players, that I was really interested in.
"Sonny Boy Williamson was one of the first harmonica players that I had a chance to sit and watch play. I used to go to clubs every weekend to watch him play, because he would come in town and perform, and he might stay three or four weeks.
"I was going to the club that he was playing at I think it was Joe's Bar it was down on Lafayette. I was going down to see him just about every weekend, and I watched him and he was amazing to me. I used to watch the man perform, and I decided I had to play harmonica myself for a long time as a youngster, but when I seen Sonny Boy, this is what really turned me on.
"And at this particular time I was also doing photography. I had a Polaroid camera, the black & white one that developed your film in about three minutes, so actually I was taking pictures at that time.
"So I was shooting pctures of Sonny Boy as well. That's how I come by the picture of Sonny Boy. I used to sit and watch him play all night. And later on Sonny Boy became a friend of mine as well, because he came to the club where I was playing and sit in with my band.
"So we came to be friends, in either '56 or '57 it was when that Land camera first come out, but I was taking photograpy pictures. Going around with my polaroid camera I was moving into a lot of areas.
"I had a chance to move into Washboard Willie, Baby Boy Warren, Eddie Burns and speaking of Eddie Burns, Eddie Burns was one of the guys that really gave me an opportunity.
"He was like one of the first guys who give me the opportunity to sit in with his band to play, because at that particular time I didn't know but one song to play when it would come to blues, and that was Bo Diddley, 'I'm A Man' Muddy Waters cut it also, but it was Bo Diddley, 'I'm A Man.'
"I would be around there doing photography work. Eddie Burns would want to come off the stage and go where he wanted to go he would say, 'Come on up here you want to do one?' And I would walk up on stage and play 'I'm A Man,' and the crowd used to go wild.
"The crowd liked what I was doing, so at that particular time I didn't know but one song I say, 'Hey, I got to start learning some more songs.' So I started learning some more songs. "I would hang around where Eddie Burns were quite a bit, because he was the type of guy who would say, 'Hey, man, you can come up and play.'
"My first job was offered to me by the club owner where Washboard Willie was working, and that was called the Good Time Bar. What happened in 1955 I started off my first gig with Washboard Willie. The man offered me $10.00 a night to play, and I felt that was some big money.
"At that particular time I was working three nights a week making thirty bucks, and I was also working at a used car lot during the daytime, and I worked at clubs during the night taking photography pictures in between the shows to make up the difference so I could provide for my four kids and my wife.
"So, in other words, this is how I began my career. My career really began through watching Sonny Boy, Washboard Wille, Eddie Burns, Baby Boy Warren, Calvin Frazier, all of these guys. Calvin Frazier was playing with Washboard Willie at that time he was a great guitar player, one of the greatest.
"So, with all of these guys, I had a chance to associate with these particular blues artists who were some of the most popular blues artists in Detroit. My band started off with a young man named Jim Doo his name is James Crawford and Charles Slit, we called him Chuck, he was the keyboard man when I first started out. And another guy we started out with that's still around named Mr. Bo, he was the guitar player.
"My original group that I started out with, all of them today is still living, and we still keep in touch and talk to each other."
* * * * *
Following this auspicious debut, Little Sonny worked at the Bank Bar during 1956-57, moved to the Congo Lounge for 1957-59, hit the Club Caribe in 1960, worked around for a while, and then settled in for two long engagements: at the Apex Club from 1963 to 1967 and then the Calumet Bar on 4th Street from 1967 until it closed in the mid-'70s.
Sonny began making records in 1958, recording for Duke Records ("I Gotta Find My Baby"/"Hear My Woman Calling" Duke 186) and for Joe Von Battle ("Love Shock"/"I'll Love You Baby" JVB 5001), who leased the side to Excello Records (issued as #2209) for national distribution. He acquired a two-track tape recorder and made some recordings to be released on his own Speedway label in the early 60s.
Two of these sides, "The Creeper" and "Latin Soul," were leased to Detroit's Revilot Records and issued as Revilot 209 in 1966; they can be heard, through the courtesy of Little Sonny, as bonus cuts on this CD, along with a third self-produced tune from this period titled "Stretchin' Out."
Things began to pick up for Sonny in the early '70s when he hooked up with Zorn Productions and cut his first LP, Black & Blue, for Enterprise Records, a Stax subsidiary directed by Al Bell. Four Aaron Willis originals, four written for him by Bettye Crutcher and Bobby Manuel, Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do," Z.Z. Hill's "I Found Love," and a hip harmonica version of the spiritual "Wade in the Water" made up this album, which featured the Bar-Kays horn section and plenty of intense harp work by Little Sonny.
Black & Blue was given a fairly high-powered promotional push by Stax and made a little dent in the blues marketplace, but this minority share of the record market had unhappily shrunk to its smallest size since the end of the Depression, and the modern blues revival among young white listeners had not yet taken hold. Thus the success long hoped to follow upon a national recording contract was not to materialize.
Stax followed with another tasty LP, New King of the Blues Harmonica (Enterprise EN-1005), which ushered in Sonny's long association with keyboardist/producer Rudy Robinson and his band, but it too failed to gain the wide audience that was obviously targeted by the record company. An appearance at WATTSTAX, the massive Los Angeles concert produced, recorded and filmed by Stax in 1972, similarly met with indifference in the marketplace, and soon Stax itself fell into a tailspin from which it never recovered, leaving Little Sonny high and dry once again.
New Orleans
September 19, 1994
(c) 1994, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
3.1.690 |
|
Share Link: 
