Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen - Lost In The Ozone (1971)

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”Lost In The Ozone” ?  Cult !

I remember very well when I bought this vinyl LP (at the time) in a Paris record shop a few months after it US release. I was barely twenty and had been immediately attracted by the name of the band and the fancy cover à la Freak Brothers (a famous counter-cultural comics). I ran home to play this strange object and was immediately blown up ! I still have this vinyl today, and listening to it again on CD I must say that fifty years after its release, this cult album sounds like it was recorded last week !

Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen was founded in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a renowned university town, by pianist George Frayne aka Commander Cody, and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1969. Around Cody were Billy C. Farlow (lead vocals and harmonica), Bill Kirchen (lead guitar and trombone), John Tichy (rhythm guitar), Andy Stein (fiddle and sax), Steve 'West Virginia Creeper' Davis (pedal steel guitar), 'Buffalo' Bruce Barlow (bass) and Lance Dickerson (drums), a joyful bunch of solid instrumentalists.

Doc Watson - Memories (1975/1993)

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The mountain folk master

Imagine clouds of mist hanging around the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, the autumnal russet color of the trees, and a little town called Deep Gap nested below a mountain pass. There lived a blind mid-19th century looking man whose face evokes Abraham Lincoln. He played guitar and banjo like nobody else, and sung old country-folk and bluegrass songs. The photograph of this man adorns the front cover of the album “Memories”. The man’s name is Doc Watson (1923-2012).

Country, bluegrass, folk, ragtime, blues… why bother to put a name on the kind of songs he plays as long as he plays them because they’re just a pure pleasure for the ears, the mind and the soul. His banjo and guitar picking mastery is amazing, and his voice is warm as a wood fire in an old cabin’s fireplace.

John Lee Hooker -1948-1998 King Of The Boogie (5-CD Box Set, 2017)

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The Boogie Man

Most of beginners learning to play blues guitar have started by trying to play a John Lee Hooker boogie thinking it was easy. I did it myself in my early teens when I got my first cheap guitar. Apparently simple, but easy ? Not really ! This apparent simplicity probably explains why JLH has become a symbol of blues itself. Ask any ordinary person not really into blues to give you the name of one blues musician he or she knows, there's 80% chance he/she will answer : JLH.

For blues fans, the problem is different : JLH discography is such a jungle that, unless you're a specialized musicologist, it's almost impossible to find your way between his numerous original early recordings (many of them recorded under different pseudonyms), his albums and the myriad of compilations of his work ! This is precisely the interest of this 5-CD 100-song box set which covers 50 years of JLH's endless boogie since his recording debuts in Detroit in 1948.

Big Mike Griffin - Sittin' Here With Nothing (1995)

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Big Bike Griffin's big blues

It starts with the gutsy funky "Somebody's Been Talkin'", a Little Milton number revisited with heavy bass & drums, groovy horn riffs, pulsing organ and flashes of burning guitar. It continues in the same vein with "Satisfied", another Little Milton song. The third track, Percy Strother's "Love Is Growing Cold", is a slow blues where Griffin's scorching guitar lightnings are entwined with exciting organ parts by Clayton Ivey. The same blood runs through the entire album : rhythm and blues with as much funky rhythm and soulful blues, and a bit of jazzy groove.

Chris Smither - Live As I'll Ever Be (2000)

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The folk-blues troubadour

Chris Smither is one of the talented spiritual children of the great prewar pioneers of acoustic country blues like Blind Willie McTell, Lightnin' Hopkins, Fred McDowell, Son House or Mississippi John Hurt on one hand, and of their great folk music counterparts like Doc Watson or Woody Guthrie on the other. Smither, who took part in the late period of the folk-blues revival on the New York and New England scene, made the junction between both genres. At 77, he is now one of the veterans of a long line of folk-blues revivalists like John Hammond Jr., Roy Book Binder, Steve James, Doug MacLeod or Jorma Kaukonen, which was later continued by younger artists like Toby Walker, Richard Ray Farrell, the late Kelly Joe Phelps, Fiona Boyes, Nathan James, Tom Feldman, Mike Munson...

Jimmy Johnson - Every Day Of Your Life (2019)

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Preaching the blues

I discovered Jimmy Johnson one day in the mid-1990s in a blues and jazz second-hand CD shop in the Latin Quarter of Paris. My eye got attracted by the cover where Johnson is holding a big axe (I smiled at the symbol : axe is a slang word for guitar) and by the album's title, "Johnson's Whacks", so I bought it, just knowing it was electric blues but ignoring it was one of the best recordings of this Johnson. A perfect introduction. From then on, I always liked him. I later got some of his previous and following albums and was never disappointed even if like many of his fellow bluesmen, he had his downs too. This 2019 album is certainly not gonna make me change my mind.

Kokomo Arnold - The Story Of The Blues, Blues Archives Vol.11 (recorded 1936-38, released 2004)

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The bootlegger's bottleneck

James "Kokomo" Arnold is a relatively overlooked prewar bluesman although he was an outstanding figure of the Chicago blues scene in the 1930s and had a durable influence on some of his more famous contemporary blues musicians, the most emblematic one being Robert Johnson who turned his "Old Original Kokomo Blues" into "Sweet Home Chicago", and "Milk Cow Blues" into "Milkcow's Calf Blues". The phrase "dust my broom", which Johnson used as a song title, was also introduced by Arnold in his song "Sagefield Woman Blues".

Arnold was a very innovative user of the bottleneck, probably the fastest one ever to record, developing some unique rhythmic patterns of his own. His influence was notable on slide guitar players, particularly on Elmore James. The reason why he fell back into a relative anonymity after his brief but successful ten-year career is due to his growing disinterest for music !

Johnny Nicholas - Broke Again (1988, rel. 2007)

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The lonesome rocking cowboy

He is from Rhode Island, lived in Ann Arbor (Michigan), San Francisco, Chicago before settling down in Texas, where he opened a roadside restaurant with his wife in 1981 (the Hill Top Café near Fredericksburg, about a hundred km west of Austin). He has founded bands with Duke Robillard and Ronnie Earl, been a member of Asleep at the Wheel from 1978 to 1981, made several albums with Big Walter Horton, toured and/or recorded with an impressive list of famous bluesmen : One String Sam, Eddie Taylor, Billy Boy Arnold, Houston Stackhouse, Boogie Woogie Red, Robert Pete Williams, Robert Lockwood Jr., Johnny Shines, Snooky Pryor, Roosevelt Sykes… He writes his own material. His cowboy look is a mix of Calvin Russell and Tom Waits. His name is unknown to most people. He is Johnny Nicholas and his album "Broke Again" is really a kick.

Billy Boy Arnold - "Blowin' The Blues Away" (1977, rel.1997) / Boogie 'n' Shuffle (2001)

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Billy Boy's blues dream

Once upon a time in Chicago there was a young boy named Billy who wanted to play harmonica just like his idol John Lee "Sonny Boy"  Williamson that he had heard on records. So, after discovering John Lee lived in his own neighborhood and where, he found the courage to knock on his door. Williamson welcomed the boy in and gave him a harmonica lesson. The boy came back twice for more lessons but unfortunately this mentoring was cut short when Williamson was brutally murdered one night in the street in June 1948.

The boy was Billy Boy Arnold, a pure Chicagoan born in the Windy city in 1935. Four years later, in 1952 at only seventeen, he recorded his first 78-rpm single, "Hello Stranger"/"I Ain't Got No Money", for the obscure Cool label with the Bob Carter's Orchestra. Meantime, Arnold was playing on street-corners with a guitarist friend named Ellas McDaniel.

Earl King - New Orleans Blues aka Street Parade (1972/2005)

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The Earl of New Orleans

Earl Silas Johnson aka Earl King was a legend on the rhythm'n'blues scene of his hometown of New Orleans and far beyond. Few musicians are offered a flamboyant jazz funeral parade in the streets like the one the Crescent city organized when he died in 2003.

Here is what I wrote about him in November 2021 : «His discography counts at least three or four times more compilations, collections and other "Best of" than "real" original albums. Why ? Because Earl King put out a good number of singles, and above all, because he certainly had more fun playing live than being locked in a recording studio, be it with excellent musicians.