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Robert Petway was an African-American blues singer and guitarist.

Very little is known about Robert Petway. His birthplace is speculated to have been at or near J.F. Sligh Farm near Yazoo City, Mississippi, birthplace of his close friend and fellow bluesman Tommy McClennan. His birthdate is guessed at 1908, and the date and even the occurrance of his death is unknown. There is only one known picture of Petway, a publicicty photo from 1941. He only recorded a dozen songs, but his influences, by some accounts, include John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Jimi Hendrix

Like many bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta, Petway traveled around as a musician, playing at parties, roadhouses, and other venues available. Petway and McClennan often traveled and performed together. After McClennan had been in Chicago for a few years, Petway travelled north to join him and cut records.
One of Petways most influential songs is “Catfish Blues”, which he recorded in 1941. Muddy Waters used the lyrics and style of “Catfish Blues” for his first single “Rollin’ Stone”, the song from which the rock group The Rolling Stones chose their band name. There is debate on whether Petway deserves any credit for the Muddy Waters song, mostly stemming from the fact that blues musicians often borrow lines and verses from each other and often use common symbols and phrases that can’t be traced back to one source. There is even some speculation that Tommy McClennan wrote the version that Petway recorded. Max Haymes has written a well-researched article, Catfish Blues (Origins of a Blues) on the topic. When Honeyboy Edwards, a follower of Petway, was asked if Petway wrote the song, he replied, “He just made that song up and used to play it at them old country dances. He just made it up and kept it in his head.”

Fird Eaglin, Jr., also known as Snooks Eaglin or “Blind Snooks” Eaglin, is a blues and R&B guitarist and singer, born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1936.

Eaglin lost his sight not long after his first birthday after being stricken with glaucoma, and spent several years in the hospital with other ailments. Around the age of five Eaglin was given a guitar, with which he taught himself to play by listening to and playing with the radio. Being a mischievous young man, he was given the nickname “Snooks” after a character on the radio named Baby Snooks.

After a few years Eaglin dropped out of high school to play with the Flamingoes, a local band started by Allen Toussaint. He stayed with this band for several years, until its dissolution in the mid 50s.

Eaglin often took to playing in the street when he didn’t have enough studio or touring work; there he was found by Harry Oster, a folklorist from Louisiana State University. Oster made recording of Eaglin which later became records on Folkways, Folklyric, and Prestige labels.

His vocal style is reminiscent of Ray Charles; indeed, in the 50s, when he was in his late teens, he would sometimes bill himself as “Little” Ray Charles. He is generally regarded as a consistent and superb bluesman, perhaps best shown on the record That’s All Right (Heritage, 1961). He is equally capable on rollicking songs like the title track, and downtempo, lowdown blues melodies like The Walkin’ Blues.

Over the years, his ability to perfectly understand and make any song his own has earned him the nickname the “human jukebox.”

Eaglin later went on to record fine funk and soul flavored records in the 70s and 80s, cutting tracks with (usual New Orleans-based) musicians such as Ellis Marsalis, Smokey Johnson, and George Porter, Jr.

Eaglin’s most recent record came out in 2003, a live performance entitled Soul Train from Nawlins (P-vine Japan).

John Mayall, OBE (born 29 November 1933, in Macclesfield, Cheshire) is a pioneering English blues singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He was the founder of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers and has been influential in the careers of many instrumentalists, including Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green, John McVie, Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor, Don Harris, Harvey Mandel, Larry Taylor, Aynsley Dunbar, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Andy Fraser, Johnny Almond, Walter Trout, Coco Montoya and Jon Mark.

Mayall is the son of Murray Mayall, a guitarist and jazz music enthusiast. From an early age, he was drawn to the sounds of American blues players such as Leadbelly, Albert Ammons, Pinetop Smith, and Eddie Lang, and taught himself to play the piano, guitars, and harmonica.

Mayall attended art college and then had three years of national service with the British Army in Korea. In 1956, he started playing blues with semi-professional bands named “The Powerhouse Four” and, later, “The Blues Syndicate”. Under the influence of Alexis Korner, he moved to London and formed “John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers”.

The band was always something of a training ground for blues musicians, and went through several changes of personnel, before the arrival of Eric Clapton, with whom they achieved their first commercial success. After Clapton left to form Cream, the Bluesbreakers took on a succession of other notable musicians, including Peter Green, John McVie, Kal David, and Mick Taylor. Eric Clapton is quoted as saying, “John Mayall has actually run an incredibly great school for musicians.”

In the early 1970s, Mayall achieved commercial success in the United States and moved to Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles. There, he was influential in the developing careers of musicians such as Blue Mitchell, Red Holloway, Larry Taylor, and Harvey Mandel.

Mayall has continued to play and tour, ever since, including reforming the Bluesbreakers in 1982.

In 2005, he was awarded an OBE in the Honours List.

A little blues number I recorded in May 2005. You can view the video direct from YouTube:

Or download a better quality version (20.8MB .wmv file) from:

http://www.newton-art.com/bluesman/media/louise.wmv

John Adam Estes (25 January 1904 - 5 June 1977), commonly known as Sleepy John Estes or Sleepy John, was a U.S. blues guitarist and vocalist born in Ripley, Tennessee.

In 1915, Estes’s father, a sharecropper who also played some guitar, moved the family to Brownsville, Tennessee. Not long after, Estes was hit in the right eye by a stone, and his sight was never good after that. After working as a field hand in his teens, he began to perform professionally by 1919, mostly at local parties and picnics, often in the company of Hammie Nixon, a harmonica player, and James “Yank” Rachell, a guitarist and mandolin player. He would continue to work with both musicians, off and on, for more than fifty years.

Estes made his debut as a recording artist for in Memphis in 1929, at a session organized by Ralph Peer for Victor Records. He later recorded for the Decca and Bluebird labels, with his last pre-war recording session taking place in 1941. He made a brief return to recording at Sun Studio in Memphis in 1952, recording “Runnin’ Around” and “Rats in My Kitchen,” but otherwise was largely out of the public eye for two decades.

Though only modestly skilled as a guitarist (he was frequently teamed with more capable musicians, like Rachell, Nixon, and the piano player Jab Jones), Estes was a fine singer, with a distinctive “crying” vocal style. He sounded so much like an old man, even on his early records, that blues revivalists reportedly delayed looking for him because they assumed he would have to be long dead, and because fellow musician Big Bill Broonzy had written that Estes had died. By the time he was tracked down, by Bob Koester and Samuel Charters in 1962, he had become completely blind and was living in abject poverty. He resumed touring and recording, though his later records are generally considered less interesting than his pre-war output.

Many of Estes’s original songs were based on events in his own life or on people he knew from his home town, such as the local lawyer (”Lawyer Clark Blues”), local auto mechanic (”Vassie Williams’ Blues”), or an amorously inclined teenage girl (”Little Laura Blues”). He also dispensed advice on agricultural matters (”Working Man Blues”) and chronicled his own attempt to reach a recording studio for a session by hopping a freight train (”Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)”). His lyrics combined keen observation with an ability to turn an effective phrase, and he was less reliant than many of his contemporaries on borrowed verses and boilerplate swagger.

Some accounts attribute his nickname of Sleepy to a blood pressure disorder and/or narcolepsy. Others, such as Bob Koester, claim he simply had a “tendency to withdraw from his surroundings into drowsiness whenever life was too cruel or too boring to warrant full attention.”

Estes died on June 5, 1977 and is buried at Durhamville Baptist Church in Durhamville, Tennessee.

Charlie Patton (May 1, 1891 - April 28, 1934) is best known as an American Delta blues musician. He is considered by many to be the “Father of Delta Blues” and therefore one of the oldest known figures of American popular music. He is credited with creating an enduring body of American music and personally inspiring just about every Delta blues man (Robert Palmer, 1995). Palmer considers him among the most important musicians that America produced in the twentieth century. Many sources, including some musical releases and even his gravestone, misspell his name “Charley” even though the musician himself spelled his name “Charlie.”

Charlie Patton was one of the first mainstream stars of the Delta blues genre. Patton, who was born in Hinds County, Mississippi near Edwards, lived most of his life in Sunflower County, in the Mississippi Delta. He was born in 1891, but there is still some debate about this. In 1900, however, his family moved 100 miles north to the legendary 10,000 Acre Dockery Plantation sawmill and cotton farm near Ruleville, Mississippi. It was here that both John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf fell under the Patton spell. It was also here that Robert Johnson played his first guitar.

At Dockery, Charlie fell under the spell of Henry Sloan who had an unusual new style of playing music which we would recognize today as very early blues. Charlie followed Henry Sloan around and by the time he was about 19 in 1910 he was an accomplished performer and composer, having already composed his theme song “Pony Blues”.

He was extremely popular across the U.S. South, and (in contrast to the itinerant wandering of most blues musicians of his time) was invited to perform at plantations and taverns. Long before Jimi Hendrix he was the entertainer’s entertainer with dazzling showmanship, often playing guitar on his knees and behind his head, as well as behind his back. Although Patton was a small man at about 5 foot 5 and 135 pounds, the sound of his whiskey- and cigarette-scarred voice was rumored to have carried for over 500 yards without amplification. This gritty voice was a major influence in the singing style of one of his students, Howlin’ Wolf.

It is of minor debate which race Charlie Patton was. Though he was most likely African-American like most of his contemporaries in the blues field, because of his light complexion there have been rumors that he was Mexican, full-blood Cherokee (Howlin’ Wolf himself endorsed this theory) and many others.

Patton settled in Holly Ridge, Mississippi with his common-law wife and recording partner Bertha Lee in 1933.

Patton died on the Heathman-Dedham plantation near Indianola from heart disease on April 28, 1934 and is buried in Holly Ridge (both towns are located in Sunflower County).

Bob Dylan dedicates his song “High Water,” on his album Love and Theft to Charlie Patton.

There exists only one photo of Charlie Patton. The photo and its copyrights are owned by collector John Tefteller. Purchasing price was fifty thousand dollars.

A small blues collection played, sung and recorded by Steven J. Newton. (From hereon referred to as me, myself and I)

Anjie:
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Black, Brown & White:
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Candy Man:
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Cocaine Lil:
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Don’t Forget My Name:
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Hard Pill To Swallow:
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Hold Me:
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Hurt The One You Love:
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Kill The Blues:
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Love In Vain:
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No Way To Get Along:
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Sit Right Down (And Write A Letter):
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Smokestack Lightnin’:
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Spider & The Fly:
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Sportin’ Life Blues:
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Sweet Chariot:
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We’ll Meet Again:
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