Description
Release Date: 1990
Label: Original Blues Classics
Track List
1. Haunted House
2. Memories of You
3. Blues for Chris
4. I Found a Dream
5. St. Louis Blues
6. I’ll Get Along Somehow
7. Savoy Blues
8. Back Water Blues
9. Elmer’s Blues
10. Jelly Roll Baker
Personnel
- Lonnie Johnson – electric guitar, vocals
- Elmer Snowden – guitar
- Wendell Marshall – bass
Notes
This beautiful album was engineered by Rudy Van Gelder in his Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home studio in 1960 where so much jazz history was made. It features guitar innovators Lonnie Johnson and Elmer Snowden together for the first time–despite a friendship going back to the 1920s when both appeared on some of the earliest jazz and blues 78s. Johnson, the father of single-note six-string soloing, is in marvelous voice on this selection of blues, ballads, and jazz, crooning the double-entendre “Jelly Roll Baker” and the heartache-laden “Back Water Blues” (a Bessie Smith tune he first cut in 1927) with a marksman’s sense of pitch and chilling nuance. Snowden serves mostly as accompanist. But these men play so closely that they seem to be sharing every breath. –Ted Drozdowski
