Johnny Copeland - It's Me (Classic Texas Soul 1865-1972)

Hard to believe that I haven't yet gotten around to this guy; pretty strong stuff here.

"John Clyde "Johnny" Copeland (March 27, 1937 – July 3, 1997) was an American Texas blues guitarist and singer. In 1983 he was named Blues Entertainer of the Year by the Blues Foundation.

Copeland was born in Haynesville, Louisiana. Influenced by T-Bone Walker, he formed the Dukes of Rhythm in Houston, Texas, and made his recording debut in 1956, signing with Duke Records the following year. Although his early records met with little commercial success, he became a popular touring act over the next two decades.

His early recording career embraced blues, soul and rock and roll. He recorded singles for Mercury, Golden Eagle and All Boy, amongst others. His first single was "Rock 'n' Roll Lily", and he later cut successes such as "Down on Bending Knees" and "Please Let Me Know". For the most part, his singles featured Copeland as a vocalist more than a guitar player.

Driven by disco to rethink his future, he moved to New York in 1979, and played extensively in Eastern cities. In 1981, he was signed by Rounder Records, releasing albums including Copeland Special (1981) and Bringing It All Back Home (1985), and touring widely. Copeland appeared at the 1983 Long Beach Blues Festival and the 1988 San Francisco Blues Festival. He won a W. C. Handy Award in 1981 for the album Copeland Special[3] and a Grammy in 1987 for Best Traditional Blues Album, for the album Showdown!, recorded with Albert Collins and Robert Cray.

Copeland also played at the 1985 Montreux Jazz Festival, as a guest with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. Vaughan and Copeland performed the Bob Geddins song "Tin Pan Alley" together on Vaughan's compilation album Blues at Sunrise. He also played on the first edition of BRBF (Blues Peer Festival) later that year.

His later years were dogged by ill health due to a congenital heart defect. He died, aged 60, in Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York,  from complications of heart surgery for a heart transplanted six months earlier.

Copeland was a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey. His daughter, Shemekia Copeland, established a successful career as a singer. He was also survived by his wife, son and two daughters." wiki

Andrew 'Voice' Odum - Farther On Down The Road

The old ABC Bluesway imprint had some first class releases and this is certainly one of them. This comes from the period when Odum was teamed up with Earl Hooker in an everyday working band so the 'sympatico' here is outstanding. The band includes not only Earl, but Big Moose Walker, Jimmy Bond and Panama Francis! One serious bunch of heavyweights!

""Andrew ‘Big Voice’ Odom is a largely undiscovered gem of a Blues singer who plied his trade around the Chicago scene for many years, supplying his soulful vocal lines on many great performances by the èlite guitarists on the club circuit. His rich tone and superb timing might have made him a star, but he didn’t get a breakthrough as a solo artist.

Born in Denham Springs LA in 1936, Andrew Odom learned to sing in Church and in the mid-50s he moved to St. Louis where he began working with guitarist Albert King. Relocating to Chicago in 1960, he teamed up with his long-term partner Earl Hooker and, because Andrew’s voice had a strong resemblance to BB King and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland‘s, he was billed as BB Odem, and sometimes as ‘Big Voice’ Odem.
He cut his debut solo album ‘Farther on Down the Road’ for Bluesway in 1969, with Johnny ‘Big Moose’ Walker on piano, but it remained unissued for several years. Andrew was the front man for one of the hottest bands around the Chicago club scene in the late 60s, with Earl at the top of his game, and with Pinetop Perkins, Carey Bell and Freddie Roulette behind him. This is the team that played on the brilliant ‘Two Bugs and a Roach’ and ‘Don’t Have to Worry’ albums, but when Earl passed away in 1970, Andrew began fronting Jimmy Dawkins‘ band. He spent most of the next decade gigging and recording with Jimmy including European Blues Festivals, and featuring on the excellent Delmark album ‘All For Business’.

A regular face on the Chicago scene in the 80s, Andrew cut an album for the French Black and Blue label in 1982 with Lucky Peterson on keyboards, backed by Magic Slim and the Teardrops. Andrew often sat in at club gigs with Slim, Buddy Guy, Little Milton and many others who loved his rich voice and passionate delivery. The Canadian band, the Gold Tops with guitarist Steve Katz, invited Andrew to join them, and their 1992 album ‘Goin’ to California’ was one of Andrew’s finest recordings. Sadly, it was released posthumously, as Andrew died from a heart attack while driving between Chicago gigs, just days after his 55th birthday." Allaboutbluesmusic.com

Thanks to the original uploader for this gem!

Speckled Red

"Speckled Red (October 23, 1892 - January 2, 1973) was born Rufus Perryman in Monroe, Louisiana. He was an American blues and boogie-woogie piano player and singer, most noted for his recordings of "The Dirty Dozens", with exchanges of insults and vulgar remarks that have long been a part of African American folklore. Although the lyrics were sung rather than spoken, with its elaborate word play and earthy subject matter, "The Dirty Dozens" is considered in some respects an ancestor to rap music.

Speckled Red was the older brother of Piano Red, their nicknames derived from both men being albinos. The brothers were separated by almost a generation and never recorded together. Speckled Red and Piano Red both played in a raucous good time barrelhouse boogie-woogie style, although the elder Speckled Red played slow blues more often. Both recorded versions of "The Right String (But the Wrong Yo-Yo)", Speckled Red first in 1930, and the younger scored a big hit with the song 20-years later.

The family moved for brief periods during his early-to-mid teenage years to Detroit, Michigan, then Atlanta, Georgia after his father violated Jim Crow laws, before settling in Hampton, Georgia, where his birth was eventually registered some time later. The family itself, consisting of Perryman and 7 brothers and sisters, had little musical background, though Speckled Red was a self-taught piano player (influenced primarily by his idol Fishtail, along with Charlie Spand, James Hemingway and William Ezell, and inspired at his earliest point by Paul Seminole in a movie theatre) and also learned the organ at his local church.

By his mid-teens he was already playing house parties and juke joints, and moved back to Detroit in his mid-20s to play anywhere he could, including nightclubs and brothels, and was noticed by a Brunswick Records talent scout just before he left for Memphis, Tennessee, where he was located by Jim Jackson. It was here where he cut his first recording sessions, resulting in two classics for Brunswick in "Wilkins Street Stomp" and the hit “The Dirty Dozens”. The following year, 1930, he recorded again, this time in Chicago, Illinois, resulting in most notably “The Dirty Dozens No. 2,” which was not nearly as successful and the pianist was without a contract or label and again playing making the rounds at Memphis venues and St. Louis bars.

His 1938 session work in Aurora, Illinois with slide guitar player Robert Nighthawk and mandolinist Willie Hatcher for Bluebird Records was steady and long but also unsuccessful, and sometime after during the 1940s moved back to St. Louis and continued his career of playing taverns, as well working the public produce market doing manual labor until the servicemen returned home to heavy lifting jobs.

Charlie O'Brien, a St. Louis policeman and something of a blues aficionado who applied many of his professional investigative methods to track down old bluesmen during the 1950s, "rediscovered" Speckled Red on December 14, 1954, who subsequently was signed to Delmark Records as their first blues artist. He experienced a small revival of interest in his music during the late 1950s and 1960s, his abilities still considerable, and worked around the St. Louis-area jazz scene, regularly as the intermission pianist for the Dixie Stompers, performing concerts with Dixie Mantinee and the St. Louis Jazz Club, played the University of Chicago Folk Festival in 1961, went to Dayton, Ohio, with Gene Mayl's Dixieland Rhythm Kings, and toured Europe in 1959 with Chris Barber. Several recordings were made in 1956 and 1957 for Tone, Delmark, Folkways, and Storyville record labels.

His age, however, had become a factor, and the remainder of the 1960s saw scattered performances. He died on January 2, 1973, of cancer in St. Louis, at the age of 80."