| ARTIST | SONG | ALBUM |
|---|---|---|
| Tampa Red & Georgia Tom | No Matter How She Done It | Tampa Red: Bottleneck Guitar |
| Tampa Red & Georgia Tom | It's Tight Like That | Tampa Red Vol. 1 1928-1929 |
| Tampa Red & Georgia Tom | Dead Cats On The Line | Tampa Red Vol. 5 1931-1934 |
| Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhe | Custard Pie Blues | The Folkways Years 1944-1963 |
| Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhe | Climbing On Top Of The Hill | The Bluesmen |
| Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhe | Stranger Blues | Key To The Highway |
| Butterbeans & Susie | Cold Storage Papa (Mama's A Little Too Warm For You) | Butterbeans & Susie Vol. 1 1924-1925 |
| Butterbeans & Susie | Papa Ain't No Santa Claus | Blues, Blues Christmas Vol. 1 |
| Butterbeans & Susie | Times Is Hard (So I'm Savin' for a Rainy Day) | Classic Blues & Vaudeville Singers Vol. 5 1922-1930 |
| Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey | Need More Blues #1 | Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey Vol. 1 1924-1927 |
| Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey | Whiskey and Gin Blues #1 | Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey Vol. 1 1924-1927 |
| Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey | Wash-Board Cut Out | Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey Vol. 2 1927 |
| Joe Evans & Arthur McClain | Two White Horses In A Line | American Primitive, Vol. II |
| Joe Evans & Arthur McClain | John Henry Blues | The Two Poor Boys (Joe Evans & Arthur McClain) 1927-1931 |
| Joe Evans & Arthur McClain | Shook It This Morning Blues | Down In Black Bottom |
| Rufus & Ben Quillian | Holy Roll | Hokum, Blues & Rags 1929-1930s |
| Rufus & Ben Quillian | Good Feeling Blues | Uptown Blues A Decade Of Guitar: Piano Duets |
| Geechie Wiley & Elvie Thomas | Pick Poor Robin Clean | I Can't Be Satisfied Vol. 1 |
| Geechie Wiley & Elvie Thomas | Over to My House | American Primitive, Vol. II |
| Geechie Wiley & Elvie Thomas | Eagle On A Half | I Can't Be Satisfied Vol. 1 |
| Alec Seward & Louis Hayes | Ups And Downs Blues | Carolina Blues |
| Alec Seward & Louis Hayes | Travelin' Boy's Blues | Carolina Blues |
| Alec Seward & Louis Hayes | Big Trouble Blues | Carolina Blues |
| Mississippi Sarah & Daddy Stovepipe | Burleskin' Blues | Blues From The Vocalion Vaults |
| Mississippi Sarah & Daddy Stovepipe | The Spasm | Good for What Ails You |
| Pink Anderson & Simmie Dooley | Every Day In The Week Blues | Mama Let Me Lay It On You |
| Pink Anderson & Simmie Dooley | Gonna Tip Out Tonight | Good for What Ails You |
| Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell | I Believe I'll Make a Change | Whiskey Is My Habit, Women Is All I Crave |
| Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell | Papa Wants to Knock a Jug | How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone |
| Leroy Carr & Scrapper Blackwell | Memphis Town | Sloppy Drunk |
| Memphis Minnie & Joe McCoy | Goin' Back to Texas | Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe Vol. 1 1929- 1930 |
| Memphis Minnie & Joe McCoy | I Called You This Morning | Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe Vol. 2 1929- 1930 |
| Memphis Minnie & Joe McCoy | What's The Matter With The Mill | Blues Images Vol. 2 |
Show Notes:
Tod
ay’s show spotlights some great blues partners that made commercial recordings between the 1920’s and 1950’s. Perhaps the most famous was the team of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee whch spanned the from the 1940’s through the 1970’s with countless recordings made together and individually. For sheer longevity the honor goes to Butterbeans and Susie who’s career spanned from the 1920’s through the 1960’s. During the heyday of commercial blues recordings few duos were as popular as Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell and Memphis Minnie & Joe McCoy. Other partnerships featured today include recordings by Bobby Leecan & Robert Cooksey, Joe Evans & Arthur McClain, Rufus & Ben Quillian, Geechie Wiley & Elvie Thomas, Alec Seward & Louis Hayes, Mississippi Sarah & Daddy Stovepipe and Pink Anderson & Simmie Dooley.
In the 1920’s, having already perfected his slide technique, Tampa Red moved to Chicago, and began his career as a musician, adopting the name “Tampa Red” from his childhood home and red hair. His big break was being hired to accompany Ma Rainey and he began recording in 1928. In 1928, through the intercession of J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, he teamed up with pianist Thomas Dorsey a. k. a. Georgia Tom and recorded the Paramount label hit “Tight Like That. “The success of “Tight Like That” initiated the blues genre known as hokum. Early recordings were mostly collaborations with Georgia Tom. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded almost 60 sides, sometimes as “The Hokum Boys” or, with Frankie Jaxon, as “Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band”. Tampa had actually met Georgia Tom around 1925 and Tom recalled those early years: “We played Memphis, I think Louisville, down to Nashville; we was down in Tennessee, or in Mississippi just across he line. We recorded in Memphis at the Peabody Hotel in 1929), and I left him down in Memphis and he got another week’s at the Palace Theater there. They liked him so well they hired him with just he and his guitar. …We played just anywhere. Party, theater, dance hall, juke joint. All black. See we wasn’t high-powered enough. Other fellows who were in the high music echelon got those jobs with the whites. The money was bigger up there.”
Sonny Terry first got on record backing Blind Boy Fuller in 1937 for a session for Vocalion. In 1938 when he was invited to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall at the fabled From Spirituals to Swing concert. He recorded for the Library of Congress that same year and cut his first commercial sides in 1940. Terry had met McGhee in 1939, and upon the death of Fuller, they joined forces, playing together on a 1941 McGhee date for OKeh and settling in New York as a duo in 1942. There they broke into the folk scene, working alongside Leadbelly, Josh White, and Woody Guthrie. They recorded and performed together until the mid-’70s.
Butterbeans and Susie were a comedy duo made up of Jodie Edwards and Susie Edwards. Edwards began his career in 1910 as a singer and dancer. The two met in 1916 when Hawthorne was in the chorus of the Smart Set show. They married on stage the next year. The two did not perform as a comic team until the early 1920s. Their act, a combination of marital quarrels, comic dances, and racy singing, proved popular on the TOBA tour. They later moved to vaudeville and appeared for a time with the blackface minstrel troupe the Rabbit’s Foot Company. They cut over sixty sides between 1924 and 1930.
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| Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Marquee Club, 1958 |
Bobby Leecan (guitarist and banjo) & Robert Cooksey (harmonica) first recorded in September 1926, cutting fives sides for Victor and recorded again in October and pair of sessions in November. They also backed singer Helen Baxter and Margaret Johnson during this period. In 1927 they recorded around twenty sides.
The Two Poor Boys were a duo, composed of Joe Evans and Arthur McLain. Evans and McLain were based in Tennessee. They recorded twenty sides between 1927 and 1931.
Rufus and Ben Quillian were born in Gainesville, northeast of Atlanta, on February 2, 1900, and June 23, 1907, respectively. Between 1929 and 1931 they recorded first for Paramount as the Blue Harmony Boys and later for Columbia under their own names.
Geeshie Wiley recorded six songs for Paramount Records, issued on three records in 1930 and 1931. In March 1930, Wiley traveled with singer and guitarist Elvie Thomas from Houston, Texas to Grafton, Wisconsin, to make recordings for Paramount Records. Wiley recorded “Last Kind Words Blues” and “Skinny Leg Blues”, singing and accompanying herself on guitar, with Thomas providing additional guitar accompaniment. Thomas also recorded two songs, “Motherless Child Blues” and “Over to My House,” with Wiley playing guitar and singing harmony. Some sources suggest that in March 1931 Wiley and Thomas returned to Grafton and recorded “Pick Poor Robin Clean” and “Eagles on a Half.”
Alec Seward, one of fourteen siblings, was born in Charles City County, Virginia and came up to New York in 1924.There Seward befriended Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. He and the blues musician Louis Hayes performed together, variously billed as the Blues Servant Boys, Guitar Slim and Jelly Belly, and the Back Porch Boys cutting sides in 1944 and 1947.
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| Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy |
Johnny Watson, alias Daddy Stovepipe was born in Mobile, Alabama, on April 12th 1867 and died in Chicago, November 1st 1963. By the 1920’s he was working as a one-man band on Maxwell Street in Chicago, where he acquired the name “Daddy Stovepipe” from the characteristic top hat he wore. A veteran of the turn of the century medicine shows, he was in his late fifties when he became one of the first blues harp players to appear on record in 1924. In 1927 he made more recordings, this time in Birmingham, Alabama for Gennett Records. He made more recordings back in Chicago in 1931 for the Vocalion label with his wife, “Mississippi Sarah”, a singer and jug player and made more recordings with her in 1935. He spent his last years as a regular performer on Chicago’s famous Maxwell Street, where he made his last recordings.
In 1916 in Spartanburg, South Carolina Pink Anderson met Simeon “Blind Simmie” Dooley, from whom he learned to be a blues singer, this after experience in string bands. Anderson and Dooley would play to medicine shows in Greenville, Spartanburg, and other neighboring communities. They recorded four tracks for Columbia Records in Atlanta in April, 1928, both playing guitar and singing.
Teamed with the exemplary guitarist Scrapper Blackwell in Indianapolis, Leroy Carr became one of the biggest blues stars of his day, composing and recording almost 200 sides during his short lifetime. arr met guitarist Scrapper Blackwell in Indianapolis in 1928 and the duo began performing together. Shortly afterward they were recording for Vocalion, releasing “How Long How Long Blues” before the year was finished. The song was an instant, surprise hit. For the next seven years, Carr and Blackwell would record a number of classic songs for Vocalion, including “Midnight Hour Blues,” “Blues Before Sunrise,” “Hurry Down Sunshine,” “When The Sun Goes Down,” and many others.
For nearly 30 years Memphis Minnie was, along with Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red, was one of the giants of the Chicago blues scene. Between 1929 and 1953 she recorded some 200 sides for a variety of labels. Her marriage and recording debut came in 1929, to and with Kansas Joe McCoy, when a Columbia Records talent scout heard them playing in a Beale Street barbershop in their distinctive ‘Memphis style.’ etween 1929 and 1934 Minnie and Joe cut around one hundred sides together.
