Scratchin' The Wild Jimmy Spruill Story

 “My ‘scratchin’’ style came about because I sat down one day, I didn’t know what to play. It really came from ‘Kansas City’, that ‘chicka-chick-chick’. The guy who recorded me said ‘I don’t want that!’… I said ‘I’m gonna play what I want to play, if you don’t like it, forget about it. I got a name for scratchin!’”

That was how Wild Jimmy Spruill (June 9th, 1934 – February 15th, 1996) described his playing style to researcher John Broven, in 1986. He went on to explain it as “…up and down strokes, but I knew how to choke the strings… you had to choke all the way down the neck to get that scratchin’ sound. Then I bent the notes, eight notes above from where I started… you know, ‘Eeeeooowwww’ back down. It’s hard if you don’t know how to do it, but to me it come natural. It was my own sound. I don’t go behind nobody… if I can’t be my own person, I don’t bother with it!”
 Virtually everything we know about Jimmy Spruill is based on two interviews he gave fairly late in life – in Juke Blues (Autumn 1986, John Broven with Paul Harris & Richard Tapp) and Living Blues (May/June 1994, Margey Peters) – plus his many and various entries/namechecks in Vols 1 & 2 of Blues Records (1987 and 1994, respectively)...read more