watcha listenin to, crispy? i'm in a blues phase; been downloading i'm afraid. so let me feature four guys who inhabited the man-and-his-electric-guitar persona which has been so central to blues and rock. really, for many artists, their whole recorded output is a dialogue with a guitar, even a particular guitar: each speaks in turn, expressing the song through call-and-response or contrasting phrases. you sing a measure, play a measure, sing a measure. the guitar is lover, choir, etc.
it would be hard to argue against b.b. king and lucille as the best exemplars of this style, which also encompasses hendrix and stevie ray vaughn. i'm picking out four who i think are specifically are among the very best singers that blues ever produced: lowell fulson, magic sam, otis rush, and freddie king. they all worked in a vein we might call 'shouter', though in somewhat different settings.
lowell fulson worked on the west coast, often with what might be termed a 'jump' band, with a small horn section, doing driving rhythm and blues. i do particularly like the horn charts, and lowell's singing is always intense; often distorting in the mic, as all these guys.
download: the complete chess masters.
magic sam and otis rush were pure mississippi-to-chicago pipeline, rocking the west side through the 60s. sam has a very distinctive guitar style: juicy in a basically non-technical sort of way. but what a very fine blues singer.
download: west side blues and black magic.
otis has just had an amazing career: what a very fine and coherent guitar player, and what a fine blues shouter.
i love the later album ain't enough comin' in, which might be a bit hard to find. there is an endless supply of consistently excellent material; another highlight is mourning in the morning, made with the memphis house band including a young duane allman.
of all the texas guitar heroes, i will take freddie king, not necessarily as a guitar player every single time out, but as an amazing blues singer. (though his instrumentals san-ho-zay and hideaway are classics.)
[that should be 'tore down'.] someone needs to put together a good big freddie package: i can recommend boogie on down: the essential collection and burglar.
one message is: by the time you get to 1960, regional styles are not that pronounced; with some variations as much explained by time as place, these guys all play the same style; no doubt they were all listening to each other's recordings...
