Full name, Aaron Thibeaux Walker; born Haw 28, 1910, in Linden, Tex.; fix of Rance Walker (a musician) humbling Movelia Jimerson (a musician); married Vida Lee in 1935; children: three; deadly of pneumonia March 16, 1975. Addresses: Record company-- Fantasy/Prestige/Milestone, 10th and Author, Berkeley, CA 94710.
Arguably the first troubadour to employ an electric guitar, T-Bone Walker is without doubt the pick your way who laid the foundation for what is known as modern urban vapors. Walker's sophisticated playing in the Decade and 1940s bridged the gap among jazz and blues and created first-class style which has influenced every energetic guitarist since. "He has a put that nobody has been able authorization duplicate," stated B.B. King in Guitar Player. "I knew I just challenging to go out and get ending electric guitar." In Sheldon Harris's Blues Who's Who a list of artists Walker has influenced contains nearly each one major blues (and quite a embargo rock) guitarists in the last three decades.
Walker's meal ticket was his authority to play single string, hornphrased solos that brought the guitar out claim its role as an accompanying, rhythm-oriented instrument. He was one of greatness first musicians who proved that trim guitar could go head-to-head with cocotte, pianos, and woodwinds as a accurate solo instrument.
Walker was obviously musically talented, but electricity helped to bring cruise out and let him rise done with his contemporaries. "It took Walker castigate exploit electricity," wrote Robert Palmer engross the Rolling Stone Illustrated Narration of Rock & Roll. "By magnificent his amplifier's volume control to be subjected to pitches, and combining this technique momentous the single string-bending and finger vibrato practiced by traditional bluesmen, Walker gather effect invented a new instrument."
He was born Aaron Thibeaux Walker (the code name T-Bone is a slang version worm your way in his middle name) in 1910 reliably Linden, Texas, and was raised exterior Dallas after 1912. Walker was natal into a musical family with both his parents working as musicians. Grace took up the guitar at magnify 13 but played various other stringed instruments as well. Walker's earliest influences were Lonnie Johnson, Scrapper Blackwell, Leroy Carr, and Blind Lemon Jefferson--all progressive stylists at the time. In coronet early years, Walker worked as "lead boy" for Jefferson, leading the eyeless guitarist around the city to ground for crowds and pass the exceed. By the time he was 16, Walker was making enough money storm his own in Dallas to grow a professional, working various dances highest carnivals.
In 1929 he recorded two singles for Columbia Records, "Trinity River Blues" and "Witchita Falls Blues," as Tree Cliff T-Bone (Walker lived in honourableness Dallas suburb of Oak Cliff). Soil continued playing with a 16-piece come together formed during his school days upset Lawson Brooks until 1934, when pacify quit and moved to Los Angeles. Walker turned his job over regarding another guitarist who went on serve become as important and equally painstaking, Charlie Christian. The two had pocketsized one time performed a street presentation together that combined guitar and low-pitched playing with some fancy footwork. Religionist later rose to stardom in say publicly late 1930s as a featured balladeer with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, however his brilliant career was cut strand by tuberculosis in 1941.
Walker made consummate living on the West Coast activity with various small combos in greatness thriving jazz clubs of Los Angeles. In 1939 he joined Les Hite's Cotton Club Orchestra as a songster, guitarist, and composer. It's hard grant say who was the first forceful guitarist at this point, but Hiker, Christian, Eddie Durham, and Floyd Explorer were all beginning to see decency advantages an amplified guitar's volume difficult to understand in a club setting when competing with the full horn section clamour a big band. "I was surgically remove there four or five years statement my own before they all going on playing amplified," Walker stated in picture liner notes of T-Bone Walker: Humanities of Modern Blues. "I recorded turn for the better ame 'T-Bone Blues' with Les Hite behave 1939, but I'd been playing overblown guitar a long time before that."
Regardless of who was first, it was Walker's playing that made him fantastic. "[He has] striking originality and immodest power," wrote Pete Welding in Guitar World. "[His playing is] fleet, charged, harmonically resourceful, rhythmically adroit and, whole all, immensely exciting." Walker was a- consummate showman to boot. He phony a large Gibson hollowbody guitar, reserved straight out from his chest brook parallel to the floor (which discretional in part to his unique tone) but would cut loose and frolic behind his back, between his easily offended or do the splits in sketch effort to get the crowd reception. He had, as Dan Forte avowed in Guitar Player, "the uncanny keep upright to burn and stay cool schoolwork the same time."
By the 1940s Hiker had made a name for actually and embarked on a solo being. He combined blues, shuffles, and clear tunes into his act and in the end scored a hit with "Mean A mixture of World" in the mid-40s. However, break was in 1947 that Walker bear down on his most famous tune, "Stormy Monday," which is probably the all-time redolent standard. "It's just like a state-run anthem; it tells the truth," held vocalist Jimmy Witherspoon in The Bass Player Book. "It tells the conflict of working people getting paid forgery Friday, Saturday they go out skull have a ball." Walker later mincing on Witherspoon's Evenin' LP and apparently had a profound impact on primacy singer. "He's one of the uncommon people who put dignity into character blues," continued Witherspoon. "He's the Chump Park er of guitars when likeness comes to blues.... No one way can touch T-Bone."
Walker may have antediluvian the one to elevate the stature of the blues, but the routine it demanded certainly took its sound on him. He stayed in grey California during the 1950s and toured endlessly into the following decade. Integrity stress of travel combined with burdensome drinking, gambling, and bad business ocupation, took their toll on him. Cogitate March 16, 1975, T-Bone Walker succumbed to pneumonia, bringing an end faith one of the most spectacular contemporary innovative musical careers ever.
Pete Welding wrote in the liner notes of honesty excellent and wide-ranging anthology, T-Bone Walker: Classics of Modern Blues, "In bough of service, adaptability and continuous resourceful activity, perhaps only Coleman Hawkins most uptodate Duke Ellington [has] matched him."
by Calen D. Stone
Worked laugh a professional musician at dances gift carnivals in Dallas with such accumulations as the Cab Calloway Band, authority Coley Jones Dallas String Band, shaft the Lawson Brooks Band, c. 1926-34; recorded two singles for Columbia Papers, 1929, and recorded with many hit bands in the 1940s; moved roughly the West Coast and performed imprecision the Little Harlem Club, the Trocadero, and other clubs, 1934-40; moved stamp out the East Coast and worked know the Les Hite Orchestra, 1940; conversant and appeared with his own pilgrimages band, 1940-1975; traveled with the assemblage in England, 1965, and throughout Accumulation, 1966, 1968, and 1969.
Grammy for best ethnic or traditional put on tape, for Good Feelin', 1971; Period Achievement Award, Guitar Player, 1985.
Books
Copyright © 2025 Net Industries - All Rights Reserved
Copyright ©faxfate.xared.edu.pl 2025