There’s a marvellous clip of Chuck Berry jamming with an elegantly dressed crooner on YouTube. The singer seems reluctant to relinquish his gin and tonic when Chuck forces his guitar on him. He eventually plays a few trademark licks and modestly tries to pass the guitar back but Chuck is away with the fairies.
The singer is Texas-born guitar pioneer Aaron “T-Bone” Walker who, in the early 1940s, kick-started a musical revolution by becoming the first blues guitarist to go electric. A former tap dancer and master showman T-Bone also did the splits, and was playing guitar with his teeth and behind his back, long before Chuck or Jimi Hendrix. BB King was inspired to take up guitar after hearing T-Bone’s classic Stormy Monday and in trying to emulate his tone said “I came pretty close but never quite got it…it’s like nobody else…that sound of being in heaven”.
T-Bone’s smooth West Coast sound fell out of favour in the ‘60s as America began to embrace rock and roll and soul and like many bluesmen he sought to revive his fortunes in Europe becoming a regular on the blues legend festival circuit. It was during one such sojourn in Paris that he recorded the Grammy award winning Good Feelin’, an album that demonstrated a harder funkier sound and briefly rekindled interest in his music on both sides of the Atlantic before his death in 1975.
I sing nothin' but the blues
Beautifully paced with alternate quick and slow numbers framed by a matching piano solo where T-Bone narrates "I sing nothing but the blues" this really is a "good feelin’" album. Recorded with a band of crack local musicians the music rolls and rumbles, it's urban and soulful, with T-Bone's fluid jazz-tinged lead lines and honeyed vocals superbly complemented by a honking horn section, a chugging bass, and some groovy Hammond organ.
This band really cooks and to have been in that smoky Paris basement studio at the exact moment when the brass section burst in at the start of track two must have been something else. Production is crisp and vibrant retaining a raw live edge that helps create an atmosphere of a band grooving together on one of those nights when it just “feels right". Like the man says, it is the blues, but it's so much more.