Special Chicago Blues Unplugged : John Primer & Chicago Bob Nelson

► Get the albums at the usual place...

John Primer: Almost unplugged

Unusual to hear John Primer, a Chicago electric blues fixture, play acoustic (only the last four "bonus" tracks feature electric numbers with a local blues band). Ten unplugged songs which remind a reality often ignored : the Chicago electric style is directly derived from Delta country blues.

Precisely Primer was born in Mississippi just like the blues greats he played with in the 1970s-80s : Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim… Born in 1945, he moved up north to Chicago in 1963 at age 18. His childhood dream came true in 1980 when Waters formed a new band, the Legendary Blues Band, and called him to fill the second guitar and bandleader position.
more to read →

 

Chicago Bob Nelson: Totally unplugged

Chicago Bob Nelson ain't superstitious : he sings about going down to Louisiana to get himself a mojo hand, but he doesn't mind having 13 songs on his album ! More seriously, Louisiana born Robert Lee Nelson was mentored by Slim Harpo and Lazy Lester, two friends of his father, during his teens. He moved to Chicago in the early 1960s and performed with musicians like Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Earl Hooker and Muddy Waters who gave him his "Chicago Bob" nickname. 

In 1965 he went to Boston and teamed up with Luther "Snake Boy" Johnson until Johnson's death in 1976. In 1980, he joined Tinsley Ellis' band The Heartfixers, played with a Memphis band named The Shadows in the late 1980s, and later in John Lee Hooker’s Coast to Coast Blues Band for the last years of Hooker’s life. CBN died in 2013 after a little dozen albums under his name.