Remembering Eddie Bo (expanded)

This is numba three of my July re-run requests. The request was from my home-boy pmac and he will be happy to know that the request resulted in my reworking my Edwin Bocage files and expanding this post to 56 tracks of music from this unique and pioneering funk master. There are now two collections of Eddie' s music here. The first set were all released in Eddie's name but you will see that on the second set the songs aren't always in his name; he recorded under numerous alias' and also produced and played with many other artists. His signature sound, however, is always in clear evidence on all of these tracks. Neither of these sets completely corresponds to these covers, there is much more here than that and many tracks have been replaced with better copies than those used on the released discs!

original post: On March 18th New Orleans lost another of our treasures as R & B pioneer, Funk originator and New Orleans piano giant Mr. Eddie Bo passed away. Eddie was a sweet man whom I had the good fortune to get to know when his girl friend and then infant daughter used to be my neighbors. Eddie was always good-natured and friendly and would stop to chat when I was on the porch. I last saw him on the Fairgrounds for Jazz Fest and he made a point of stopping to say hello and impressing the hell out of my friends; always a gentleman was Eddie.

The following is quoted with permission from the very hip site 'Funky 16 Corners'.

"Eddie Bo (Edwin Bocage to his mama) is one of the most important – and least known – of the great funksters of the 60’s and 70’s. His recording career, stretching from the mid-50’s on started out in New Orleans R&B like ‘Twinkle Toes’ and ‘Check Mr. Popeye’ and moved on, in the mid-60’s to some of the grooviest soul and funk made in New Orleans, or anywhere else for that matter. While he made plenty of his own records – among them the mighty and legendary ‘Hook & Sling Pts 1&2" which was a minor national hit in 1969 – he was also a major producer, arranger and collaborator on scores of other records. His importance to the New Orleans scene can not be overestimated. The fact that he wasn’t better known nationally is a crime, and probably due in large part to the fact that most of his records were made for small independent labels like Scram, Seven B, and Bo Sound. Some of his best stuff did see national distribution but with the exception of ‘Hook & Sling" and "Check Your Bucket" not many got anywhere near the charts outside of the Big Easy. To put it in perspective, where James Brown is the Charlie Parker of funk, , Eddie Bo is the music’s Thelonious Monk, working with a strange, sometimes unfamiliar palette of sounds and rhythms, which reveal their beauty and complexity a little more with every listen. Much of this palette is common to New Orleans funk and soul: the drums of the Wild Indian tribes and the "second line", the soulful piano of players like Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey Piano Smith, Fats Domino and Bo himself, and the spice of the wild and unique mix of cultures that has been in New Orleans for hundreds of years. It doesn’t hurt that Bo had drummers like James Black and Smokey Johnson creating the beats on his records." (from Funky 16 Corners with permission, thank you Laurence)