PABL003: The Man With The Gold Guitar

All songs written and performed by Tampa Red (vocals, guitar, electric guitar, piano, kazoo)

with Carl Martin (guitar, 17), Henry Scott (guitar, 16), Black Bob (guitar, 7, 10, 11?), Willie B. James (guitar, 2, 12, 13, 14, 20), Blind John Davis (piano, 3, 8, 15), Ransom Knowling (bass, 1, 3, 4, 6), Big Maceo Merriweather (piano, 1, 4, 6, 18, 19), Clifford 'Snags' Jones (drums, 18, 19), and others not known

Clearly some sides have survived the intervening years better than others, and it's interesting to find better overall sound quality lurking in the earliest of these recordings, 1934's Grievin' and Worryin' Blues than in some of the records from later in that same decade. It's easy to speculate on why this might be the case - I've noted similar declines in surface quality in UK pressed discs during the 1930's - but one should perhaps avoid jumping to conclusions.

I've avoided running these tracks in order of recording dates, and have instead compiled them to create a perhaps more musical flow for the listener. I am aware in doing this that each listener would probably make a different choice.

The two recordings from 1942 include one of Tampa Red's biggest hits, the innuendo-laden I Want To Play With Your Poodle, and what seemed to me its natural partner in crime, She Wants To Sell My Monkey. I will leave it to the listener to decide how best to interpret the lyrics here - what I find most musically interesting is how the addition of drums to the piano, guitar and kazoo instrumentation already common in earlier recordings, coupled with the ongoing development of his musical style, looks forward with astonishing foresight to the major revolution in popular music which was to arrive a decade or more later. Indeed, one can even hear in the off-beat kazoo playing, coupled with the jaunty rhythms, the origins of 1960's Jamaican ska music, which grew out of the copying and adapting of blues-based music to be heard on American radio stations picked up in Jamaica at the time, and would of course later slow down and evolve into reggae - by which time Tampa Red was destitute and largely forgotten...

Tampa Red

notes from Wikipedia

Tampa Red (January 8, 1904 - March 19, 1981), born Hudson Woodbridge but known from childhood as Hudson Whittaker, was an influential American musician.

He was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia. As a child he moved to Tampa, Florida, where he was raised by his aunt and grandmother and adopted their surname, Whittaker.

In the 1920s he moved to Chicago, Illinois where he began his career as a musician, adopting the name "Tampa Red" from his childhood home and red hair. His big break was being hired to accompany Ma Rainey and he began recording in 1928 with "It's Tight Like That", in a bawdy and humorous style that became known as "hokum". Early recordings were mostly collaborations with Thomas A. Dorsey, known at the time as Georgia Tom. Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded almost 90 sides, sometimes as "The Hokum Boys" or, with Frankie Jaxon, as "Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band".

In 1928, Tampa Red became the first black musician to play a National steel bodied Resonator Guitar, the loudest and showiest guitar available before amplification, acquiring one in the first year they were available. This allowed him to develop his trademark bottleneck style, playing single string runs, not block chords, which was a precursor to later blues and rock guitar soloing. The National guitar he used was a gold-plated tricone, which was found in Illinois in the 1990s and later sold to the "Experience Music Project" in Seattle. Tampa Red was known as "The Man With The Gold Guitar", and, into the 1930s, he was billed as The Guitar Wizard . (contributor's note: having seen & played this actual guitar, I can say with some certainty that it indeed was not gold plated, but nickel silver plated. There are a few possibilities as to how this misnomer came about; one, that he was the first black blues musician to make a lucrative living playing and writing blues, AND or two, that in the dim gas-lit halls of the day it certainly may have looked to be made of gold - Sean Sweeney.) [*see note below]

His partnership with Dorsey ended in 1932, but he remained much in demand as a session musician, working with John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, Memphis Minnie, and many others. In 1934 he signed for Victor Records. He formed the Chicago Five, a group of session musicians who created what became known as the Bluebird sound, a precursor of the small group style of later jump blues and rock and roll bands. He was a close friend and associate of Big Bill Broonzy and Big Maceo Merriweather. He enjoyed commercial success and reasonable prosperity, and his home became a centre for the blues community, informally providing rehearsal space, bookings, and lodgings for the flow of musicians who arrived in Chicago from the Mississippi Delta as the commercial potential of blues music grew and agricultural employment in the south diminished.

By the 1940s he was playing electric guitar. In 1942 "Let Me Play With Your Poodle" was a # 4 hit on Billboard Magazine's new "Harlem Hit Parade", forerunner of the R&B chart, and his 1949 recording "When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too)", another R&B hit, was covered by Elmore James. He became an alcoholic after his wife's death in 1953. He was "rediscovered" in the late 1950s, like many other surviving early recorded blues artists such as Son House and Skip James as part of the blues revival. His final, undistinguished, recordings were in 1960.

He died destitute in Chicago aged 77.

notes from Wikipedia

*This assertion is called into question by the notes on the history of National Reso-Phonic Guitars Inc. guitars at the company's website, compiled by Al Handa in 1998, which states the following:

"The guitar used was a gold plated tricone, and he was known as "The Man With The Gold Guitar." As Bob Brozman relates in his book, The History and Artistry of National Resonator Instruments, it "was a very early Style 4 Spanish guitar, with the separate fronds of chrysanthemums on the coverplate, rather than the later 'flow-through' design."

It was also a unique one, as only one other gold plated national ever been seen (a square neck Style 4). To this day, Tampa Red's guitar hasn't been found."