Fred Below

We can't...

It wouldn't do us any justice to, as much as I wanna play like Fred Below or, uh, you know, uh, Francis Clay or some of these great blues drummers.

Earl Phillips, who played with Jimmy Reed, probably my favorite stuff ever.

I wanna play it with the right feel and I w- but I don't wanna copy them, and-

[laughs]

Look up Mercy Baby.

He played with a guy named Frankie Lee Sims, and he's probably the most [laughs] influential guy on records that I ever listened to besides all the Chicago guys, Fred Below and all those guys, S.P. Leary.

Um, but he was fantastic and he, he doubled up on ba ba bam, ba boom, ba bam, ba bam, ba bam, ba boom.

He will be a legend forever.

And I mean, nobody got, got that spirit of, uh, Fred Below and the s- and the Chicago, the Chess-

Yeah

... sound like Richard Ennis, and, and what he brought to that West Coast thing, and just knowing that he had been a part of that Hollywood Fats band and so many things, and was such a just down-to-earth guy.

There's a whole art to it.

In Chicago, a drummer named Fred Below, playing behind Little Walter and Muddy Waters and the rest, basically perfected the modern blues shuffle and gave the Chicago sound its swing and its drive.

The shuffle can be light and jazzy or heavy and pounding, and there's a famous tricky version called the halftime shuffle.

With drummers like Bernard Purdy as its master, that's so slippery and funky that players spend years trying to get it right.