Memphis Slim Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD)

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catalog number: BCD17687
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1-CD Digipak with 36-page booklet, 29 tracks. Total playing time approx. 79 min. In his... more

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Memphis Slim: Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD)

1-CD Digipak with 36-page booklet, 29 tracks. Total playing time approx. 79 min.

In his lifetime, Memphis Slim was probably the best-known blues singer in the world, moving from Memphis to Chicago and finally to Paris in the early 1960s. But it’s no exaggeration to say that Memphis Slim could rock with the best of them - and this CD is here to prove it!

Memphis Slim was born Peter Chatman in Memphis in 1915. His music was based on the raucous, driving piano of the barrelhouse during the boogie-woogie era.
The 29 rocking tracks on this Bear Family Records® CD here were all made in the USA before Slim moved to Paris.
They were made when Slim was still an integral and influential part of the American black music scene – the days when R&B was rock and roll, recorded between 1942 and 1961.
By the definitions of their time, tracks like Rockin’ The House, Pacemaker Boogie, Midnight Jump and the rest were rock and roll.
Memphis Slim Rocks, for sure!
We’ve included here Slim’s original version of Nobody Loves Me, his best-known song when renamed Every Day I Have The Blues and recorded by the giants of jazz, blues and rock.
Cross-label compilation (Bluebird, Miracle, VeeJay, Strand, King, Premium, United, Chess).
Compilation and liner notes by British blues and R'n'R expert Martin Hawkins.
Full-color, illustrated 36-page booklet and careful sound restoration round out this important release.

Although we’ve picked Slim’s rockinest tracks here, there is variety in his piano and vocal performances, and you can still hear all the elements of blues and gospel and R&B that shaped him.

When he took that music to Chicago in the 1940s and formed an R&B group, The House Rockers, many of the recordings he made then were firmly in the advance guard of rock and roll.

Slim always maintained a fine band of mainly Memphis musicians. These included sax players Ernest Cotton and Alex Atkins, and particularly the sensational guitar player Matt Murphy.

‘Guitar’ Murphy gained great prominence through the ‘Blues Brothers’ movie, and bluesman and producer Willie Dixon told ‘Living Blues’ that Matt ‘is definitely the best guitar player, the best one I heard anywhere.’

Talking in Paris in 1968, Memphis Slim said: ‘I’ve had a good life. Well, I had a very bad life, but it took a bad life to make it a good life for me. And I mean by that that I played my dues very early, and now I think I am reaping the benefit.’

By the time he died in 1988, Slim had become known around the world and the U.S. Senate had resolved that ‘Memphis Slim become an ambassador at large of good will for the United States.’

The Memphis Music hall of fame and the Blues Foundation hall of fame both have Memphis Slim among their inducted members. The Rock and Roll hall does not, but maybe when they hear these 29 rocking tracks they will find a place for the man who always rocked the house wherever he played.

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Article properties: Memphis Slim: Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD)

Interpret: Memphis Slim
Album titlle: Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD)
Genre Rock'n'Roll
Label Bear Family Records
Preiscode AR
Edition 2 Deluxe Edition
Artikelart CD
EAN: 4000127176875
weight in Kg 0.115

Memphis Slim - Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD) CD 1
01	Rocking The Pad	Memphis Slim
02	Harlem Bound	Memphis Slim
03	Old Taylor	Memphis Slim
04	Rockin' The House	Memphis Slim
05	Kilroy Has Been Here	Memphis Slim
06	No Mail Blues	Memphis Slim
07	Memphis Slim U.S.A.	Memphis Slim
08	Beer Drinking Woman	Memphis Slim
09	Pacemaker Boogie	Memphis Slim
10	Wish Me Well	Memphis Slim
11	Big Bertha	Memphis Slim
12	Nobody Loves Me	Memphis Slim
13	Back Alley	Memphis Slim
14	If You Live That Life	Memphis Slim
15	Midnight Jump	Memphis Slim
16	Trouble Trouble	Memphis Slim
17	Slim's Boogie	Memphis Slim
18	The Girl I Love	Memphis Slim
19	What's The Matter	Memphis Slim
20	Lonesome (Blue Blues)	Memphis Slim
21	Tia Juana	Memphis Slim
22	She'S Allright	Memphis Slim
23	Walkin' The Boogie	Memphis Slim
24	Gotta Find My Baby	Memphis Slim
25	Sassy Mae	Memphis Slim
26	Love My Baby	Memphis Slim
27	I'm Lost Without You	Memphis Slim
28	Let The Good Times Roll, Creole	Memphis Slim
29	Rockin' The Blues	Memphis Slim

Memphis Slim At his first session for OKeh in 1940 under the omnipresent Lester... more

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"Memphis Slim"

Memphis Slim

At his first session for OKeh in 1940 under the omnipresent Lester Melrose’s supervision, towering blues and boogie piano specialist John Len Chatman adopted the name of his father, Peter Chatman, as his recording alias. When he returned to a Chicago studio less than three months later, this time for Bluebird, he was billed as Memphis Slim. And yes, he was born in the Bluff City on September 3, 1915.

Slim started playing at age seven (his dad was conversant on the 88s as well as guitar), and by 16 he was manning the ivories at the Midway Café on Beale. St. Louis pianist Roosevelt Sykes was his principal influence, so indelibly that after Slim came to Chicago in 1937 and teamed with Big Bill Broonzy, the veteran guitarist strongly urged him to get away from Sykes’ style and develop one of his own.

After the war, Slim recorded for a vast array of Chicago indies, beginning with Hy-Tone in ’46. He inked a pact the next year with Lee Egalnick’s fledgling Miracle label; with his jumping House Rockers, Slim topped the R&B charts in 1948 with his after-hours original Messin’ Around. He posted four more hits the next year (Blue And Lonesome made it to #2), and in ’50 laid down Nobody Loves Me, transformed by Lowell Fulson into Every Day I Have The Blues. On Egalnick’s Premium logo, Slim enjoyed a 1951 hit with the wise and worldly Mother Earth before bouncing to Mercury and then United, where Slim scored his last hit in ’53 with The Come Back.

It’s unlikely Slim ever made a better series of recordings than the ones he did for Vee-Jay, in no small part due to the presence of Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, who first joined the House Rockers in 1952. Slim’s first date for Vee-Jay in January of ’58 produced two 45s, and following a Carnegie Hall concert with Muddy Waters in the spring of ’59, Slim and the House Rockers (Murphy, saxists Alex Atkins, John Calvin, and Ernest Cotton, bassist Sam Chatman, and drummer Billie Stepney) entered a Chicago studio on August 18 for a marathon session that produced his entire misleadingly titled ‘At The Gate Of Horn’ album. Slim revisited a lot of his past classics that day, including Messin’ Around. Murphy’s explosive presence makes it the definitive treatment (his solo is mind-boggling for its time).

Europe was a tantalizing touring possibility for veteran bluesmen such as Slim and bassist Willie Dixon. The duo performed in England in 1959, then zipped over to Israel the next year. "We discussed it quite a bit, and we thought we was gonna be makin’ a bigger buck," said the late Dixon. "We didn’t find out the pound in Israel was worth 33 cents until we got there, and it was too late then!" Nevertheless, Slim was sick of the tribulations he encountered back home. He made Europe his home in ‘62, living like a king in Paris until his February 24, 1988 death there.

Bill Dahl
Chicago, Illinois

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Customer evaluation for "Memphis Slim - Rocks (CD)"

From: Dusty Grooves On: 15 Sep 2023

Killer cuts with his Houserockers group, and work from a young guitarist Matt Murphy too!

A package that definitely lives up to the title – as it presents the hardest-wailing work recorded by Memphis Slim in the postwar years – including plenty of cuts that were a huge influence on early rock and roll, and many that have him in more of an R&B mode than usua! Slim's records weren't always upbeat, but the cuts in this set definitely are – and include some killer cuts with his Houserockers group, and work from a young guitarist Matt Murphy too