The great Sonny Boy Williamson, in the UK on the American Folk Blues Festival tour in the early 1960s:
Worth it just for the sight of Sonny Boy ambling up to the stage with bowler hat, brief case, and rolled umbrella - the perfect English gentleman.
Sonny Boy took a liking to the European fans, and while there had a custom-made, two-tone suit tailored personally for him, along with a bowler hat, matching umbrella, and an attaché case for his harmonicas.... One of his final recordings from England, in 1964, featured him singing "I'm Trying to Make London My Home", with Hubert Sumlin providing the guitar.
That track appears at the start of this video, which seems to have collected just about every live appearance of the man. Plus, at the end, starting around 1:19:08, Robbie Robertson's extraordinary reminiscence of meeting Sonny Boy in Helena, Arkansas, shortly before his 1965 death. Which underlines quite why London must have seemed such an attractive proposition - even though he didn't rate the musicians.
Sonny Boy previously, Nine Below Zero.
One of the stories I'd heard was that he was notorious in Chicago for being a bullsh!t artist. So he disappeared from his usual haunts for about six months for the European tour, and when he got back everyone asked him where he'd been. He told them, and nobody would believe him!
Posted by: Martin Adamson | March 30, 2018 at 11:46 AM