Bumble Bee Slim / Amos Easton

[MomsMobley]

Moving away from imagined "heros" of white boy blues (Robert Johnson etc) and into bluesmen who were oft recorded and popular among black folks of the 1930s... Amos / Bumble Bee not the king of anything, nor the "best" either, if Leroy Carr got there first, there's a great deal to be said for Bumble Bee the performer & his very consistent discography with tons of great sideman from Scrapper Blackwell, Tampa Red, Charlie McCoy etc etc on up / down. That Bumble Bee was never properly anthologized by Columbia, RCA / Bluebird or Yazoo etc has kept his brilliance-- and its reflection of, resonance within contemporary black culture-- at unfortunate remove.

Chicago 4 April 1935

Chicago 22 June 1937... whoa!

 

 

Edited November 28, 2015 by MomsMobley

[JSngry]

He was a pioneer of W#est Coast Jazz!

[mikeweil]

Fresh Sound has reissued the contents of this LP as bonus tracks to two reissues of Les McCann and Curtis Amy, respectively, as it was their bands playing with Bumble Bee Slim:

[clifford_thornton]

huh.

[MomsMobley]

Thanks for mentioning West Coast Bumble Bee / Amos-- was going to get to that but since we're here, what professional blues musician recorded longer more or-- in the 1950s certainly less-- continuously? Amos' first session c. October 1931 for Paramount... I love Lonnie Johnson, Victoria Spivey etc and though their own stories remarkable... I should clarify too Bumble Bee / Amos had individual tracks anthologized on Yazoo etc but without a career-spanning compilation to summarize his range & ability...

 

 

 

[robertoart]

What is the resonance with contemporary Black American Culture?

[MomsMobley]

12 minutes ago, robertoart said:

What is the resonance with contemporary Black American Culture?

I meant then contemporary black culture, i.e. these records made by, marketed (see Chicago Defender ads e) and sold almost exclusively to black people- sold very important in # of ways because you had to sell some to keep making more. Of course this mediated by white record companies, and often (mostly?) white owned retailers... A&R majority white with some notable exceptions...

If you mean contemporary as of NOW then Bumble Bee Slim / Amos Easton has the same resonance of nearly all his peers, which ain't much but I'd ask Ishamel Reed or Robin D.G. Kelley +++ what they think first. (We can and should review the careers of all the "Blues Queens" whose brilliance has been misleadingly compressed to just Bessie.)

the astonishing Tampa Red-- whom Bumble Bee records with-- & is course virtuoso where Amos is proficient / genial / sly another example. And Tampa almost made it straight through...  1929 --> 1951 Damn!

 

 

 

[robertoart]

9 minutes ago, MomsMobley said:

I meant then contemporary black culture, i.e. these records made by, marketed (see Chicago Defender ads e) and sold almost exclusively to black people- sold very important in # of ways because you had to sell some to keep making more. Of course this mediated by white record companies, and often (mostly?) white owned retailers... A&R majority white with some notable exceptions...

If you mean contemporary as of NOW then Bumble Bee Slim / Amos Easton has the same resonance of nearly all his peers, which ain't much but I'd ask Ishamel Reed or Robin D.G. Kelley +++ what they think first. (We can and should review the careers of all the "Blues Queens" whose brilliance has been misleadingly compressed to just Bessie.)

the astonishing Tampa Red-- whom Bumble Bee records with-- & is course virtuoso where Amos is proficient / genial / sly another example. And Tampa almost made it straight through...  1929 --> 1951 Damn!

 

 

 

OK gotcha. Very interesting then.

[Dan Gould]

I searched high and low before finding that PJ record, and it was well worth it. But it brings to mind a comment that I wish I could reference exactly but it boiled down to a statement that the jazzers on that record very much looked down their noses at Bumble Bee during the session.  So, not to change the subject but reading about that, it made me wonder how common that kind of attitude was, that jazz guys thought of people like Bumble Bee as too 'simple' or whatever.

[MomsMobley]

 

DG, the question of 'respect' is very interesting one; I should some c. 1930s & 1940s black newspaper (Chicago Defender) record ads to show what blues, jazz and spiritual company Bumble Bee sides were sold in-- in Chicago, in Newark, in Philadelphia etc...

For now, here's this, (white) blues collectors dismissal of much of Bumble Bee's output--

http://www.goldminemag.com/article/bumble-bee-slims-later-work-belies-his-true-blues-chops

though of course they're hardly alone; white JAZZ collectors, who were generally their first, largely dismissed blues altogether or simply had no way of knowing and lacked the desire to find out... which was OK, it kept rare blues 78 prices reasonable for longer period of time.

[Big Beat Steve]

A random note about jazz musicians looking down on (down-home) bluesmen: The "Before Motown" book about jazz and R&B in Detroit has statements by black jazz and R&B musicians from the early 50s that clearly put down John Lee Hooker, stating "he couldn't play shit".