LITTLE WALTER BLOWS IN Story and Picture By Valerie Wilmer IF ...

LITTLE WALTER BLOWS IN
Story and Picture
By
Valerie Wilmer
IF you’re a Muddy Waters fan, you’re almost certain to be wild for Little Walter,
too. Walter’s searing harmonica work was an outstanding feature of the first Muddy
sides heard over here, things like I Can’t Be Satisfied and Honey Bee, one of the
first they made together. Then there was his aggressive solo track, Evans Shuffle,
which you somehow imagined would be the work of a bigger man, not someone tagged
“Little”.
Thirty four year old Walter Jacobs hails originally from Alexandria, La., and is more
or less responsible for a whole new school of harpists. Jimmy Cotton, Junior Wells
and Little Junior Parker are all Little Walter men whose amplified harmonicas show
little in common with earlier, more rural, styles. Walter is a tough little French
speaking Creole who resembles a younger, less gnarled Jack Dupree, but lacks the
forthcoming generosity and humour of the pianist. His face is scarred in true bluesman
style, and he straightens and waves his hair in a dated Marcelwave manner. He has the
slightly vicious streak that Dupree also had and that is antipathetic to the picture the
jazz books give us of the bourgeois, aesthetic Louisiana Creole. So much for the stayat-home
historians.
Walter has been blowing harmonica since the age of eight. “I just liked the sound of
it, but what really made me choose it was that most of the kids - my mother, too tried
to dissuade me from play in’ it. Of course that made me more int’rested an’ the more
they tried to disgust me with it, the more I caught on. If you give up you lose the
fight, y’know, so eventually I got pretty good at it.
“The first harp-player I heard was a white feller, Lonnie Galston, who yodelled an’
played a lot of hill-billy stuff. Then the first Sonny Boy Williamson who I heard
when I was a kid. I’m not talkin’ ‘bout the new one that’s been over here - he’s just
livin’ on borrowed time! The first one was called John Lee Williams an’ he’s the only
one.”
In later years Walter heard Jazz Gillum but not until he had been making records for
some time did he come across Sonny Terry. “He’s good but he’s not really my kind of
harp player. All the rest of ‘em took their pattern behind me. Junior Parker’s ‘bout
my age an’ Wells an’ Cotton are maybe a little younger. Then there was a boy Henry
Strong who took my place with Muddy. I had to learn him how to blow harp.”
Walter and Muddy worked together at Chicago’s famous Smitty’s Corner for over
twelve years. The Jacobs family had moved North to the Windy City in 1939 and
nine years later the only boy in a family of six had waxed several sides under his own
name, the first being, Just Keep Lovin’. “Muddy had just made I Can’t Be
Satisfied an’ really he didn’t know nothin’ else to play but that one tune. He came to
my house with Jimmy Rogers who played guitar an’ we started a trio. That carried on
for three years or so.”
Unlike most American bluesmen who have recently impressed Britain’s budding
harp hipsters, Walter favours a chromatic instrument. He carries an odd assortment of
the small Hohner Marine Band harps around with him and claims he can get the same
overall effect from either instrument, the only difference being in the quality of sound.

“The big ones have a sound more like an organ, an’ the small one is rather loud unless
you know how to blow it. Music played real low is better to listen to than the loud
stuff. All these young kids they blow so much till they forget what they should really
be sayin’.”
Walter was not impressed to learn of the vast, army of harmonica players the British
R & B craze has thrown up. But later after hearing some of our local boys, he changed
his mind. Speaking of American performers, he said “There are some good musicians
in the white race who can really play their instruments, but they don’t have the
feelin’,” he declared. “You’ve got to live it to know it. You can pretend but that really
ain’t the soul of it. All your music has to have soul an’ without it it’s just ‘pluck,
pluck, pluck’. It’s the same in what they call jazz. When Louis Jordan was makin’
records an’ Nat ‘King’ Cole had his trio an’ Erskine Hawkins an’ Lionel Hampton had
swingin’ bands there was some soul. But the bands now they don’t have the feelin’.
Records today only kids buy ‘em. They look on the title of the record and name a
dance after it!” he laughed.
Juke and My Babe, two of Walter’s best-selling singles Stateside, have recently
been released here on Pye. “When I made Juke, just ev’rybody got them a harp. Since
then you see them standin’ on every corner blowin’ one o’ them things. Tell you this
— they used to only cost 35 cents in the States and now they’re three dollars an’ up.
Seems like it was my record did that!”
Well, a bluesman would not be a real one without his boast, and that was Little
Walter’s. His aggressive playing substantiates the boast though as anyone who heard
him in person will agree, He will be in England until November 1st, so you have
plenty of time to hear the man who is universally acknowledged to be the King of the
young harpists.
(Jazz Beat, October 1964, p. 14-15. In the Jan. 1965 issue there was a letter
pointing out there’s no harmonica to be heard on I Can’t Be Satisfied and that
Honey Bee has LW playing guitar not harp to which VW responded ‘next time I
shall not take any notice of what bluesmen say to me personally but will dutifully
play their records over’)