Zero G Sound: Chicago - The Blues - Today! Vol. .

Notes from the original issue of "Chicago/The Blues/Today Vol. 3": Johnny Shines and Walter Horton sit round a board in Johnny`s apartment drinking a short from a fifth of Teacher`s, and after the television set in the adjacent way is closed off the mouth goes backward to their early days in the blues. "Robert Johnson?" Shines laughs and shakes his head. "I ran with Robert for two days when I was first starting to sing.

He was just a class or so older than I was and I was 17 at that time. When? It must have been in 1933-in Helena, Arkansas." Walter interrupts, "You couldn`t run with Robert for long; he wouldn`t persist in one place." Johnny shrugs, "He did run off after we got here to Chicago. We were staying someplace-I don`t recall where it was-and he got up in the middle of the night and left. Just care that! I didn`t see him for 5 months." Walter has another drink. "He was that sort of fellow. If anybody said to him `let`s go` it didn`t matter to him where it was they were going, he`d just read off and go. It didn`t matter, either, what sentence of day or night it was." Johnny Young leans against the bar where his band works on 47th Street, his broad, worried face perspiring from the final set. "I grew up in Vicksburg so I heard all them guys. Even Charley Patton. Of form he didn`t do to see me, I was too young. He fall to see other people, but I was there anyway. The mandolin? I was playing that support in Vicksburg, but I did hear Charlie McCoy play, too. He was a mandolin player living over in Jackson that made some records about that time." The poor, hard city living in the Chicago slums has changed the Mississippi, the Alabama and Tennessee blues styles, but the ties between the old country music and the new city blues are even close. For the men in their twenties and thirties, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Jimmy Cotton, Buddy Guy, it`s less personal-it`s something that they`ve heard other people talk about-but for the men in their late forties and early fifties, Johnny Shines, Walter Horton, Johnny Young, it`s a direct, still living involvement. You sit at a crowded table trying to hear to Johnny Young over the disturbance of the people around you and the language of the blues could be from Tennessee in the 1930`s. "I asked sweet mama, let me be your kid." He could have heard it on a Sleepy John Estes record, but it`s as much like the former things he sings as it is like Estes. Johnny stands on the low bandstand, his tie knotted in direct and his coat still buttoned, despite the hot, stale air of the club. "I`m stealin` back to my same old used to be." In the early 1950`s Johnny Shines came into a recording studio and did a man called "Ramblin`" that came nearer to the emotionalism and the musical style of Robert Johnson than anything else he has done before or since. He took a minute to remember, then nodded, "`Ramblin`` was really picked out of the sky. We got thither to the studio and we didn`t have enough time and we didn`t have arrangements for anything; so I just started telling the foremost matter that came into my mind." Without arrangements or much time Johnny went back to the first blues style that he`d known, and now he even sometimes puts the guitar in an old Mississippi open tuning and begins to talk with some of Robert`s inflection and phrasing, the title as rude to Johnny as it was to Robert. The open tuning and the bottleneck go back even earlier for him. "I had an elder brother, Willie Reed, who played, and I tried to take from him, but I couldn`t work all the chords that he could." Johnny grew up in Frazier, Tennessee, just north of Memphis. There`s a shopping center there now, but the remainder of the township has become a suburb of Memphis. ".Then one day I ran into Howlin` Wolf, who was young himself a that time, and I saw how he was acting with the open tuning and the slide. I said to myself, `If it`s that light I can do it too.` Wolf went away and left his guitar there and when he came back I was performing the like matter that he had but played." A new man at 51, Johnny`s voice is one of the strongest and most exciting sounds in the Chicago blues today, and his music is a complex intermingling of the land and the city-the Delta melodic lines and the Chicago bass guitar and backbeat drumming-the South Side harmonic structure and the Delta verses, "Mister Boweevil, you done ate up all my cotton and corn."