Who was/is Smoky Babe & Clyde Causey ? - CDs, Vinyl LPs, DVD and more
Smoky Babe & Clyde Causey
Back to the folk blues, and this time Harry Oster found Smoky Babe teamed with a harmonica player, Clyde Causey, born in 1939 in Clinton but resident in Baton Rouge. Causey was the drummer in a band formed in 1952 by Clarence and Cornelius Edwards and bass player Landry Biggs. He was related to the man who lived next door to Slim Harpo back in 1943 and may have been an important player in Harpo's early jam-session days. Clyde was proficient at a novelty style of harp playing that came down from local men like John 'Big Papa' Tilley who could blow one harp with his mouth and another with his nose. On this song, Causey sets up a kind of train rhythm while Smoky Babe worries about why his gal has treated him wrong.
Then Causey lets out with two wailing solos between which Smoky starts to recount all his gals' good features. It's a high-energy performance by both men. In later years, Causey took the name 'Harmonica Nose,' as described in a newspaper feature about a jam session held in the 1970s at back of bandleader Buddy Stewart's store: "Someone calls for the key of G and says, 'OK Nose, hit it, man.' Clyde Causey, a withered man of indeter- minate age, until now recumbent in his chair, bolts up, tapping with, yes, both feet at once to a rhythm only he hears. He works the harmonica above his head, then he kneels and plays... then he plays to the carpet for a while. ... Someone calls, 'Do it Nose, you getting it now,' as he hits a note heard clear to Brusly," some ten miles away. Clyde Causey died in 2010.
© Bear Family Records
Extract from: Various Artists - Blues Kings Of Baton Rouge (2-CD) - BCD17512
https://www.bear-family.de/various-bear-family-records-blues-kings-of-baton-rouge-2-cd.html
Copyright © Bear Family Records®. Copying, also of extracts, or any other form of reproduction, including the adaptation into electronic data bases and copying onto any data mediums, in English or in any other language is permissible only and exclusively with the written consent of Bear Family Records® GmbH.
More information about Smoky Babe & Clyde Causey on Wikipedia.org