Tampa Red - Guitar Wizard

"Out of the dozens of fine slide guitarists who recorded blues, only a handful — Elmore James, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson, for example — left a clear imprint on tradition by creating a recognizable and widely imitated instrumental style. Tampa Red was another influential musical model. During his heyday in the '20s and '30s, he was billed as "The Guitar Wizard," and his stunning slide work on electric or National steel guitar shows why he earned the title. His 30-year recording career produced hundreds of sides: hokum, pop, and jive, but mostly blues (including classic compositions "Anna Lou Blues," "Black Angel Blues," "Crying Won't Help You," "It Hurts Me Too," and "Love Her with a Feeling"). Early in Red's career, he teamed up with pianist, songwriter, and latter-day gospel composer Georgia Tom Dorsey, collaborating on double-entendre classics like "Tight Like That."

Listeners who only know Tampa Red's hokum material are missing the deeper side of one of the mainstays of Chicago blues. His peers included Big Bill Broonzy, with whom he shared a special friendship. Members of Lester Melrose's musical mafia and drinking buddies, they once managed to sleep through both games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader. Eventually alcohol caught up with Red, and he blamed his latter-day health problems on an inability to refuse a drink.

During Red's prime, his musical venues ran the gamut of blues institutions: down-home jukes, the streets, the vaudeville theater circuit, and the Chicago club scene. Due to his polish and theater experience, he is often described as a city musician or urban artist in contrast to many of his more limited musical contemporaries. Furthermore, his house served as the blues community's rehearsal hall and an informal booking agency. According to the testimony of Broonzy and Big Joe Williams, Red cared for other musicians by offering them a meal and a place to stay and generally easing their transition from country to city life.

Today's listener will enjoy Tampa Red's expressive vocals and perhaps be taken aback by his kazoo solos. His songwriting has stood the test of time, and any serious slide guitar student had better be familiar with Red's guitar wizardry."

Isn't it interesting how the fact that Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, and Leroy Carr were very popular and influential in the actual time, somehow now is turned against them and they are now viewed as less important than other far more obscure (i.e. less popular) contemporaries? Let me also mention that Red's kazoo playing is in a class by itself! I have never heard anyone make convincing MUSIC like this on that 'instrument'.

Tampa Red - The Guitar Wizard 1935-1953 [VINYL RIP]

Also known as "the Guitar Wizard," the blues musician Tampa Red was a master of the slide guitar..."Tampa Red" Whittaker, born in Smithville, Georgia, was raised in Tampa, Florida, and became one of the most prominent blues musicians in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1930s and 1940s. Whittaker made several successful recordings with "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, a blues pianist and fellow Georgia native. Though little known today, he was a popular and influential performer whose recording career extended from 1928 to 1960.

Born Hudson Woodbridge on January 8, 1904, in Smithville, Georgia, he was raised in Tampa, Florida, by his grandmother's family, the Whittakers, whose name he adopted. He was already known as Tampa Red when he arrived in Chicago in the mid-1920s, fresh from the southern theater circuit. He worked a day job but played guitar on street corners and in clubs, looking for a break. It came when he was hired to accompany Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, through whom he met pianist Georgia Tom Dorsey. In 1928 Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded "It's Tight Like That." A jaunty, ragtime-influenced number with whimsically bawdy lyrics, it was a national hit on the Vocalion label. Tampa Red and Dorsey recorded several successful follow-up songs as the Hokum Boys, and the "hokum" style became a depression-era fad.

Such early recordings demonstrate Tampa Red's already sophisticated slide guitar technique. Playing a metal-bodied National Tricone guitar and sliding a bottleneck along the strings, he created a clear and pure sound, marked by deft single-string solos. His session work appears on many recordings by other artists, including Sonny Boy Williamson and Memphis Minnie. His urbane musicianship stood in sharp contrast to earlier slide-guitar blues and would help set the direction for the postwar style.

With the repeal of prohibition in 1933, venues for blues music proliferated in Chicago, and Tampa Red became one of the city's hottest live acts, often with the backing of his band, the Chicago Five. With his close friends Big Bill Broonzy and Lester Melrose, a producer for Bluebird Records, Tampa Red was a leader of the Chicago scene. His wife, Frances, acted as his business manager, and their home became an informal boarding house, booking agency, and rehearsal space, where many newcomers to the city found encouragement and support.

By 1940 Tampa Red had made the transition to electric guitar, and he reached the top ten on the rhythm-and-blues chart several times in the postwar period. His 1949 song "When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too)" became a signature tune for the artist Elmore James. Robert Nighthawk, Fats Domino, and B. B. King also scored hits with cover versions of his songs.

His wife's death in 1953 was a blow from which Tampa Red never recovered. He had always been a heavy drinker, and his alcoholism became acute. Like many of his contemporaries, he was "rediscovered" by a new audience in the late 1950s. He went back into the studio in 1960, but his final recordings were undistinguished. He died destitute in Chicago on March 19, 1981, and was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame the same year. He is buried in Glenwood, Illinois.