T-Bone Walker

So give us some perspective on Mr. Berry.

Well, I mean, he... was a middle-class black kid in the suburbs of St. Louis who grew up idolizing T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan.

and had this idea of doing songs with narrative.

Although most of the work when he first started playing guitar that was available was blues work.

Nobody did the template for rock and roll.

That's just not possible.

Who are the major suspects, though, preceding Barry? Who do you see Barry taking from? I mean, you mentioned Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker.

But clearly, you know, there's a before and after with Chuck Berry in terms of how this music evolved.

I think the louder you listen to it, the more you'll understand why this song made the list.

It's kind of in the school, you know, in Texas, we're a T-Bone Walker state.

And T-Bone Walker, you know, had a very clean electric blues style.

This is more in the school of Muddy Waters, Electric Mud, Buddy Guy's latest stuff, and definitely the early Black Keys, who were basically a straight-head blues band.

But if you have a 1960s American muscle car and a good sound system, turn this one up.

Maybe he couldn't have and he would have gone back to Mississippi.

Maybe he would have formed an electric band and rather than going for that audience, tried to sound like T-Bone Walker.

We don't know.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

Recognition has taken its time catching up with Sam Rivers.

The Readman composer-arranger has played the blues with Jimmy Witherspoon and T-Bone Walker, toured with Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, and Andrew Hill, led groups of his own, which ranged in size from trios to big bands, and he was playing professionally in Boston during the early 50s, and during the mid-60s, Blue Knot released his Fuchsia Swing song and Contours, and Finally, in 1975 his Impulse albums attracted the notice of the jazz public and attention began to be paid.

There's often a certain austerity to Rivers' music.

It isn't cold or forbidding, but it's more or less pure, uncontaminated by programmatic conceits and atmospheric or romantic illusions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

In 1964, Rivers was on the road with T-Bone Walker when he received a telegram from Tony Williams, who had moved to New York to work with Jackie McLean and later joined Miles Davis, telling him that Miles wanted him to join the quintet.

Sam stayed for six months touring the U.S. and Japan, where a live album was taped but not issued in the U.S. for about a decade.

and he mostly taught himself guitar first and later the harmonica school was never really his subject his father writing about him years later said with some dryness that he went to high school only when he had to and that the school was very glad when he quit he found another education just across town in east palo alto among the black neighborhoods and bars where the music he loved was simply part of the air he was spending more time there than at home one friend remembered and the people there took to him they loved that he played the blues garcia said later and he was not a white boy trying to be black he was just himself And here's the odd thing about that night.

A friend from East Palo Alto named Dave McQueen heard that the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker was going to play at a little roadhouse on the railroad tracks in San Mateo, called the Choo Choo Inn.

Young Ron heard about it too, and came to McQueen the way any teenager does when he wants something he cannot arrange alone.

mcqueen knew the owner and got the boy a table right up front t-bone walker stood and played right in front of him the whole night and at the end ron mckernan said to him see you in twenty years mr walker He talked about it for weeks.

You can decide.

Nobody else has managed to.

Mew, as you might remember, had recorded several songs featured on this podcast from Sir Douglas Quartet's She's About a Mover to Roy Head's Treat Her Right and Freddie Fender's Before the Next Teardrop Falls.

in addition to work he did with Bob Wills, Lightning, Johnny Winter, T-Bone Walker, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

On a darker note, he was arrested in connection to a child pornography ring and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Well, Clifton got back to R. Hooley Records in 1967 and recorded a new album, this time in Berkeley.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, and then I, of course, had a, as I, as I matured a little bit, had, you know, moved a little bit more into Freddie King and T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown and, you know, got a little deeper.

Uh, you know.

There you go.