BN-LA-533-H2

T-Bone Walker - Classics Of Modern Blues

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

Los Angeles, CA, April 5, 1950
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Strollin' With Bones
The Hustle Is On
The Sun Went Down
You Don't Love Me
Evil Hearted Woman
Baby, You Broke My Heart

Los Angeles, CA, August 15 & 20, 1951
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Life Is Too Short
I Get So Weary
Tell Me What's The Reason
You Don't Understand
Alimony Blues
I'm About To Loose My Mind

Los Angeles, CA, January 5, 1952
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

I Got The Blues
Street Walking Woman
Cold Cold Feeling
Get These Blues Off Me
News For You Baby
I Got The Blues Again
Blues Is Woman
Through With Women

Los Angeles, CA, February, 1952
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Everytime
Blue Mood

Los Angeles, CA, March 10, 1952
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Love Is Just A Gamble
High Society
Party Girl

Los Angeles, CA, January, 1953
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Railroad Station Blues
Got No Use For You

Los Angeles, CA, October 21, 1953
Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Maxwell Davis, tenor sax; Jim Wynn, tenor, baritone sax; Willard McDaniel, piano; T-Bone Walker, guitar, vocals; Billy Hadnott, bass; Robert "Snake" Sims, drums; and others.

Bye Bye Baby

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
I Got The Blues	H. E. Owens	January 5 1952
Love Is Just A Gamble	E. Hale	March 10 1952
Strollin' With Bones	E. Davis, Jr.-V. Walker	April 5 1950
Life Is Too Short	E. Hale	August 15/20 1951
Street Walking Woman	E.J. White	January 5 1952
Railroad Station Blues	D. Bartholomew	January 1953
Cold Cold Feeling	J. Robinson	January 5 1952
Side Two
Everytime	J. M. Robinson	February 1952
Get These Blues Off Me	A. Walker	January 5 1952
The Hustle Is On	H. E. Owens	April 5 1950
I Get So Weary	J. Williams	August 15/20 1951
News For You Baby	V. L. Walker	January 5 1952
The Sun Went Down	B. Lewis	April 5 1950
High Society	E. White	March 10 1952
Side Three
You Don't Love Me	V. L. Walker	April 5 1950
Party Girl	E. White	March 10 1952
I Got The Blues Again	V. L. Walker	January 5 1952
Tell Me What's The Reason	F. Cadrez	August 15/20 1951
Blues Is A Woman	F. Cadrez	January 5 1952
You Don't Understand	V. L. Walker	August 15/20 1951
Through With Women	E.J. White	January 5 1952
Side Four
Evil Hearted Woman	B. Carter	April 5 1950
Alimony Blues	F. Simon	August 15/20 1951
I'm About To Lose My Mind	J. Williams	August 15/20 1951
Baby You Broke My Heart	A. Walker	April 5 1950
Got No Use For You	T. B. Walker	January 1953
Bye Bye Baby	A. Walker	October 21 1953
Blue Mood	J. M. Robinson	February 1952

Liner Notes

T-BONE WALKER

Everyone knows the music of T-Bone Walker. Even if he's never actually heard one of T-Bone's recordings or seen him in person, anyone who's enjoyed the music of B. B., Albert or Freddie King, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Albert Collins, Jimmy Page, Duane Allman, Mike Bloomfield, Earl Hooker, Doug Sahm, Johnny Winter, Jeff Beck or any of a host of other contemporary blues and blues-influenced players has heard T-Bone as well. The reason is simple: He is one of the deep, enduring wellsprings of the modern blues to which they and so many others have turned and continue to return for inspiration and renewal. T-Bone Walker is the fundamental source of the modern urban style of playing and singing blues and is widely regarded as having started it all back in the late 1930s when, almost alone, he forged the fleet, jazz-based guitar style that has since become the dominant approach for the instrument and, with it, the blues itself. In a very real sense the modern blues is largely his creation. The blues was different before he came onto the scene and it hasn't been the same since, and few men can lay claim to that kind of distinction: real talent is uncommon enough but genius is rarer still.

The history of black music in America has been one of continuing synthesis, an all but limitless, unending process of borrowing, absorption, dissemination, solidification and borrowing again, the process starting anew Each generation of musicians draws upon and reinterprets those elements of its predecessors' work it finds relevant to its own experience and expressive needs, rejecting some while retaining others, adding to that body of common musical practice those newer technical and expressive means it feels most tellingly sets off its time and place from earlier ones with their own characteristic forms and expressions. Every age has its own story to tell, and its own way of telling it. The only constant in all of this is the process of change itself, with each and every generation in effect choosing its own method of reinterpreting the past as a means of signifying the present.

The careers of few musicians illustrate so clearly the deep, rich vitality of this multiform process as did that of T-Bone Walker, the immensely gifted, innovative singer-guitarist whose death in March of 1975 deprived the blues of one of its greatest, most eloquent and influential voices. While rightly considered the true father of modern blues whose pioneering instrumental work in the 1930s and early '40s almost singlehandedly reshaped blues guitar into the agile, hornlike, harmonically enriched form that has 'become so familiar through the work of every blues guitarist who has put pick to strings since his time, Walker's career as a blues performer was far more broadly comprehensive than just that — as if that alone weren't enough — encompassing virtually every major development in black folk and popular music of the 20th century.

From the country blues of his native Texas where, as "Oak Cliff T-Bone," he started his performing and recording career in the 1920s, through his years, and first successes, with a number of the important black orchestras of the Swing Era, to the electrified urban blues of the postwar years he did so much to create and refine, on to his recording success with rhythm-and-blues and, later, incipient soul music, T-Bone Walker participated in, and contributed to virtually every development black vernacular music has witnessed in the last half-century. A number of them he initiated as well. In length of service, adaptability and continuous creative activity perhaps only Coleman Hawkins or Duke Ellington have matched him; nor are such comparisons forced or undeserved, for his contributions to American music are demonstrably, significantly comparable to theirs, though manifestly of a different order. And among blues artists he is nonpareil; no one has contributed as much, as long or as variously to the blues as he has.

Walker's early years were not greatly different from those of many other blacks born in the Deep South in the early 1900s. He was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker (T-Bone is a corruption of his middle name) May 28, 1910, in Linden, Texas, and raised there and in Dallas, to which relatively cosmopolitan city his family moved when he was young. He was brought up in a musical household; his mother, stepfather and virtually all his uncles played guitar and various other string instruments, so it was perhaps inevitable that he should gravitate towards music. He took up guitar when he was 13 and in the next several years added to this proficiency on ukelele, banjo, violin, mandolin, "all the stringed instruments" and piano. He early participated in the family's musical activities, of which he recalled in later years: "They used to play for their own kicks, Like on Sundays everybody'd get together in the house and have a little drink, and they would tune up their instruments and play to themselves. People used to come and stand around and listen to them while we'd play. No money was involved. It was just one of those things, everybody was happy."

The knowledge and experience Walker gained from participation in these informal musical gatherings was extended through his listening, on record and in person, to other, more adept musicians. The teenage guitarist greatly admired, and studied assiduously the recordings of singer-pianist Leroy Carr and his guitarist partner Scrapper Blackwell. He was even more fortunate in being able to observe on the occasions of his periodic visits to Dallas one of the most fluent and inventive blues guitarists of the period, the widely admired Lonnie Johnson, whose quicksilver, harmonically daring music was much in advance of its time and which influenced virtually every blues guitarist who heard it, and there were many who did.

Further, Walker was to learn much from the superlative Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, another brilliant guitarist whose spellbindingly idiosyncratic playing and persuasively emotional singing electrified audiences and musicians alike and who, like Johnson, was one of the most widely imitated blues performers of the 1920s and '30s. For a time the youngster served as "lead boy" for the blind singer-guitarist. "Blind Lemon was a very good friend of my family," he told blues researchers Jim and Amy O'Neal. "Well, I was really crazy about him. My whole family was crazy about him. He'd come over every Sunday and sit with us and play his guitar, and they sang and they had a few drinks. You know, at that time they were drinking corn whiskey and home brew, things like that...I used to lead him around a lot. We'd go up and down Central Avenue. They had a railroad track there, and all the places were like clubs, beer Joints. you know. They wouldn't sell no whiskey no way. He had a cup on his guitar and everybody knew him, you know, and so he used to come through on Central Avenue singing and playing his guitar And I'd lead him and they'd put money in his cup."

While observing and learning from older or more accomplished musicians was the standard way an aspiring bluesman picked up the rudiments of the music, a practice that is still followed to this day. Walker was singular in that among his tutors were several of the most accomplished, forward-looking and sophisticated musicians of the 1920s blues scene. All four of his models evidenced a greater interest in, and awareness of broadened harmonic bases for blues than was usual for the time, and Walker was to retain and gradually to extend this interest over the next decade or so.

As his own skills sharpened. and his musicianship and self confidence increased, he began to widen his musical experiences. In the mid- and late-1920s he performed in medicine shows, carnivals and touring shows, including one featuring the great blues singer Ida Cox: he, and often his stepfather as well, "busted music" on street corners and drive-in softdrink stands and the like, he entertained on local and touring talent shows, and played for all manner of informal social affairs in Dallas and the surrounding countryside, at all-night dances and frolics, houseparties, picnics, barbecues, country dances and what-have-you, "I made enough money right there in Dallas to support me," he recalled proudly, noting that from the age of 16 or so he was for all practical purposes a full-fledged professional, equally adept on banjo, guitar or any of the stringed instruments, a thoroughly capable entertainer who could sing, play, dance or clown as the occasion demanded. It was a tough, hard, demanding regimen well calculated to temper the skills of those who survived it, If T-Bone was not a professional entertainer when he embarked on it. he was when he was finished with it.

Certainly he was sufficiently accomplished and well known, at least locally, for Columbia Records to record him when, in 1929, one of its location recording units was set up in Dallas for several days' recording of its resident musicians. Two Walker performances, Trinity River Blues and Wichita Falls Blues, were issued, though the release carried the name "Oak Cliff T-Bone," as Walker was then living in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Apparently the record did not sell sufficiently well for Columbia to follow it up with additional recording, a practice the firm followed in its regional recording activities of that period T-Bone was not to record again until a decade had passed.

Walker was far too busy pursuing his musical activities to give this much thought. "I played all over Dallas," he said of his late 1920s performing schedule. "When I was in school we had a school band, and then we changed the name of the band to Lawson Brooks. We had about 16 pieces. The majority of us all came out of school together. We began to work around Dallas. Around 100 miles or 200 miles from Dallas, like Abilene, Texas, and Amarillo and San Anton' and Waco, all in the district. And then we played Oklahoma City once or twice. Then I quit the band and gave the job to Charlie Christian."

Walker had met the young Christian in 1933, At that time, T-Bone recalled, Christian was playing his guitar and going to school. Whenever he'd go to school. We was really dropouts. Because we were making money, we wouldn't go to school. We'd go dance and pass the hat and make money. We had a little routine of dancing that we did. Charlie would play guitar awhile and I'd play bass, and then we'd change and he'd play bass and I'd play guitar. And then we'd go into our little dance. And his brother used to play piano with us, Edward Christian." At this time he and Christian were using acoustic guitars, T-Bone noted, as amplification of the instrument had not developed sufficiently to make its use practicable. It was when he moved from Dallas to Los Angeles in 1934, Walker stated, that he "gave Charlie my job with Lawson Brooks." Christian's membership in this Texas unit would thus predate his work with Alphonso Trent and Anna Mae Winborn and his return to Oklahoma City at age 18 when he formed his own group.

The history of the development of the electrically amplified guitar is confused at best, Eddie Durham, trombonist-guitarist with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra during the mid-1930s, generally is credited with being among the very first to utilize the amplified instrument on record. Durham has stated that the guitar heard on his 1935 recordings with the Lunceford band — I'll Take the South, Avalon, Charmaine and the celebrated Hittin' the Bottle, which he composed — and probably his 1937 Time Out, made while he was with the Count Basie Orchestra, was not an electric guitar but, rather, an acoustic resonator guitar. He further recalled that he did not record with a true electric version of the instrument until his mid-1938 Kansas City Five and Six recordings. It is his contention, or at least his recollection, that it was not until a year or so after this that the electrically amplified guitar became at all widely available, and certainly the weight of recorded evidence is on his side, for it is not until 1939 that one begins to hear what clearly can be discerned as electric guitar on record — Chnstian with Benny Goodman, Floyd Smith with Andy Kirk, Hurley Ramey with Earl Hines, Al Norris with Lunceford, T-Bone with Les Hite, and so on.

Walker, however, asserted on a number of occasions that despite his not having recorded with electric guitar until 1939 he had been using one as early as 1935, acquiring it shortly after his move to the West Coast: "I was out there four or five years on my own before they all started playing amplified." he observed, "I recorded my T-Bone Blues with Les Hite's band in 1939, but I'd been playing amplified guitar a long time before that. The band didn't like the sound of it in the rhythm section, so I played ordinary guitar there. I had a banjo and a guitar with me on the stand...Oh yes, I was before Charlie Christian on electric guitar He was about the next one to have it."

Prior to joining Hite's orchestra Walker had led his own small groups in various clubs in the Los Angeles area during the late 1930s, appearing most frequently at the Little Harlem Club there, during which time he had begun to develop the long-lined hornlike guitar style for which he was shortly to become noted. It was after joining Hite's Cotton Club Orchestra in 1939 that T-Bone began to draw attention to his strong, virile singing, his abilities as a blues composer of some consequence and, not least of all, his growing fluency and confidence on electric guitar, incorporating its greatly increased sound-sustaining capability into an integral part of his blues style. It was while with Hite that he made his first nationally successful recording, T-Bone Blues, and over the next few years he was to become one of the most popular of black recording artists, often having several of his records simultaneously in the rhythm-and-blues charts, Among his most notable record successes during the 1940s were Mean Old World, made while he was with the band of pianist Freddie Slack, and the song for which he is perhaps best known, the classic Call It Stormy Monday, which has gone on to become one of the most durable and frequently recorded "standards" of the modern blues.

It was in 1950, at the very height of his popularity, that T-Bone began recording for the Imperial label and over the next five years he recorded 56 sides for them, from which the present selection of 28 titles is drawn. There are among them any number of classic, influential recordings of the modern urban blues, and all of them are just chock full of what B.B. King has described as "the prettiest sound I think I ever heard in all my life," That is, the sound of T-Bone Walker whose music, B.B. said, is "what really started me to want to play the blues."

King's appreciation of T-Bone's music is as complete as it is unfeigned: "T-Bone Walker, for instance, has a touch that nobody has been able to duplicate...When I hear T-Bone play, his tone setting is like no one else's. He has a strange way of holding his guitar, slanting it away from him instead of having it lay flat against his stomach. It's almost like he were playing a steel guitar, but he curls his left arm underneath and reaches his finger up over the top.

"And he seems to kind of scrape his pick across the string — how he's able to hit specific strings I just don't know. And that touch he gets! I've tried my best to get that sound, especially in the late '40s and early '50s, I came pretty close, but never quite got it I can still hear T-Bone in my mind today, from that first record I heard, Stormy Monday, around '43 or '44. He was the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me so that I knew I just had to go out and get an electric guitar.

"T-Bone used to use a lot of horns, too—trumpet, alto, tenor and baritone (saxophones). They made a beautiful sound, like shouting in the sanctified churches, in just the right places. He had a good rhythm section, too. And to me T-Bone seemed to lay right in between there somewhere, That was the best sound I ever heard!

Now maybe these marvelous, perfectly realized recordings won't cause you to rush out and invest in an electric guitar and amplifier but hopefully, like B.B, King, you'll find them among the best sounds you've ever heard and will hear them resonating in your mind long after you've played them. I wouldn't be at all surprised: once having heard T-Bone it's hard to forget him. Which is all he ever wanted of life, to be remembered for and to have his music live on after him, And that it does.

PETE WELDING