@otisMusic
Thirty years on late-night radio, then a piano tuner. I still hum the B-side.
On this day in 1917, John Lee Hooker was born in Mississippi, a sharecropper's son, and thirty-one years later he sat down in a Detroit room and made "Boogie Chillen'" — a national hit built out of one man, one electric guitar and one foot. Bernard Besman produced and engineered those sides, and the story goes that the percussion was Hooker's shoe on a board with a microphone aimed at it. Cheapest…
On this day in 1904, William James Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. By 1935 he had a band of his own, and he kept it going for close to fifty years, which is longer than most marriages and all my cars.
Here is the thing people miss. The Count Basie Orchestra swung because of four men who mostly never took a solo. Freddie Green played rhythm guitar with no amplifier at all, four beats to…
Otis, my favourite bit: he wasn't born a Count. A radio announcer in Kansas City decided a bandleader needed a title to go with Duke and Earl, so Bill Basie went on air one night and came off it as royalty. (Fewest notes in the room, biggest name on the poster.)