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"His high-pitched inflections and relaxed phrasing is irresistible." (All About Jazz - October 2008)
"Blues by nature is the story of pain,suffering, and occasionally a triumph, so is therefore by nature, emotional. John Estes took it too another level in regard to that emotion." (This review)
This is album review number One Hundred and Ninety Four in the series of retro-reviews of both vinyl and CD albums from my collection.
The series is called Cream of The Crate and each review represents an album that I believe represents significant musical value, either because of its rarity, because it represents the best of a style or styles of a music or because there is something unique about the music, the group or the particular production. The first fifty reviews were based on vinyl albums from my collection, with the following fifty on CD albums from my collection. Links to all these reviews can be found at the bottom of the page.
A good part of my collection is blues based, and over the one hundred and ninety two past retro-reviews, a significant proportion has been blues based reviews. It's easy to understand why when we recognise that blues music, be in city blues as exemplified by the Chicago blues music, or the Delta blues, being the blues of the rural blues artist or the variety of electric blues that grew out of these styles, gave us a plethora a fine artists. It is one of these rural artists that I look at this week.
The artist is Sleepy John Estes and the CD album is titled - Jailhouse Blues. It was released on the Past Perfect Silver Line label. a German label, with the identifying code of 220365-203. The album was originally released in 2002 and has no vinyl LP equivalent. The album consists of 26 tracks equally distributed over two sides.
Track Listing:
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Sleepy John Estes was really born in quite a different era. Born John Adam Estes on January 25th 1899 in Ripley, Tennessee, he was born into a period where Afro-Americans were born into slavery and total poverty. While poverty was the companion of many bluesmen and women throughout the first part of the 20th century, for a black man born into the 19th century, albeit the later part, it was the absolute pits.
As if attempting to deal with the absolute situation of slavery and dire poverty, whilst still a young child Estes was accidentally blinded in one eye, and by the time he reached fifty years of age he had gone totally blind.
From a very young age the young Estes took solace in the songs he heard the men and women around him sing and he taught himself to play guitar, and in fact throughout his esteemed career, it can be said that he was never an outstanding guitarist. What he did do quite magnificently was to turn his experiences and portray the conditions of his very poor and very hard life, into a true and authentic "blues-art".
He was prone to self pity, which I think is quite understandable, and in some of his songs he would refer to himself as "poor John"! In many ways his songs are a record of life during this terrible period. He would record songs with the lyrics telling the story of the segregated South, where again, he focussed on the poverty and the constant battle with uneasy racial tensions.
The home of Sleepy John Estes
Now in regard to his name "Sleepy" John, when you read biographies on John Estes you read things like, some say his poor eyesight gave him the appearance that led his friends to nickname him "Sleepy;" others say it was just his penchant for falling asleep on the bandstand during his gigs. Neither of these explanations are correct. He was nicknames "Sleepy" because he actually would pass out briefly every now and again, and in fact gave rise to his supposed ability to sleep standing up. In fact Estes had a chronic blood pressure disorder, and it was that, that caused his brief passing out - his "sleeping"!
His style of singing has been called "crying", a term in fact given to his style by non other than Big Bill Broonzy. It is largely because Sleepy John Estes puts an incredible emotional quality into his music. Blues by nature is the story of pain,suffering, and occasionally a triumph, so is therefore by nature, emotional. John Estes took it too another level in regard to that emotion.
One of the most critical moments in Estes career was in the early 1920's, when he teamed up with harp (harmonica) player Hammie Nixon, and to a lesser degree with mandolin player, Yank Rachell.
Sleepy John with Hammie Nixon
As a trio they set forth on the 'House Party Circuit in and around Brownsville Tennessee. It was during this period that he began to sharpen his skills and put his thoughts down as songs. It is a fact that except for a short period in the 1930's when Estes played and worked in Chicago, his whole career involved laying in and around Brownsville right up until his death.
One of Sleepy John's first recordings was in 1929 when he was accompanied by Jab Jones on piano and James "Yank' Rachell on mandolin. That recording was on the Victor label. In terms of his playing and recording, Estes preferred to play with friends as opposed to other known bluesmen, which was not to say that some of his friends he played with weren't great musicians in their own right. If his friends weren't available, then he went for local musicians.
With Yank Rachel
It actually took until the 1960's, when the white bands started picking up on the blues, and the white audiences started to seek out the original songs and artists, that along with other blues artists Estes actually began to make some money. But even so it was only a moderate income and it was soon spent and all his later years were spent in the same poverty and insecurity that he experienced in the early part of his life.
As far as this album goes, it covers music recorded between August 2, 1937 and September 24, 1941. I have to thank the album producers for actually putting the tracks in chronological order. This is an on-going bug-bear of mine. With any form of compilation it seems to be to make perfect sense to place them chronically, so that we, the listener, can hear the development of the music and track and changes in style.
We start with the albums calling card, track 1 - Floating Bridge. Recorded in New York on August 2nd in 1937, along with Estes on vocals and guitar is, Hammie Nixon on harp and either Charlie Pickett or Son Bonds on guitar. The records of that session as somewhat confusing. Incidentally Charlie Pickett was Estes cousin.
Eric Clapton recorded his version of this track on his 1981 album, Another Ticket and Greg Allman recorded it as his first track on his 2011 album, Low Country Blues.
The track describes Estes' near drowning near Hickory, Kentucky. He was either thrown or fell from the bridge in question and was swept under the water for some minutes before being rescued by fellow musician Hammie Nixon. The song recounts the incident in a few spare lines that are striking for their economy and visual power, and when Estes is placed in a bed to recover following his rescue, he sings that he "couldn't hear nothing but muddy water run through my head."
Given a new lease on life, Estes begins to wonder if he should change his ways ("quit playing a bum") and find an honorable profession. Whether this ever happens or not is not attended to in the song, which ends with people screaming and crying back on the bridge. Deceptively simple, Floating Bridge deftly draws the turning point in a man's life without revealing the outcome, and it is sung in a very intimate style that seems to be then mainstay of Estes writing and delivery method. What is so good about this original version of Floating Bridge is that it totally demonstrates Estes' reedy voice over one of a few easy shuffle progressions that he favored.