BACKSTAGE PASS:

Go behind the scenes with staff writer Scott Dirks as he shares inside stories and additional details on the cutting room floor regarding Delta Groove artists and releases. This months article focuses on the Mannish Boys and their brand new studio release "Big Plans."

The Mannish Boys have made a name for themselves by featuring some of the most talented and experienced blues veterans in the business, backed by a crew of the very best sidemen working in blues today.  It’s this mix of old and new, fresh and well-seasoned, that ignites the fire that makes The Mannish Boys live shows and recordings so satisfying and exciting.

The new Mannish Boys CD, “Big Plans” features as the backing band four world renowned blues guitarists in Kirk Fletcher, Frank Goldwasser, Rick Holmstrom and Kid Ramos; veteran piano man Leon Blue sharing the keyboard duties with Rob Rio; Mannish Boys regular Tom Leavey divvying up the bass work with Larry Taylor and Jeff Turmes; storming blues harp played by Delta Groove head Randy Chortkoff and DG featured artist Mitch Kashmar; versatile sax man David Woodford adding texture, and anchoring it all, the great Richard “Big Foot” Innes on drums.  That lineup alone would easily be worth the price of admission for most acts, but as usual, the guest frontmen take the Mannish Boys to a whole other level.

Mannish Boys veteran Finis Tasby returns to handle the bulk of the frontman chores with his deeply soulful blues crooning; the man who answers the question “what if you combined Muddy Waters and Little Walter into one person?”, Johnny Dyer, once again is a featured guest on harp and vocals.  But as they used to say on those late night TV ads, “But wait, there’s more!”  This time out, two veterans of the Chicago scene join The Mannish Boys as special guests: singer Bobby Jones, and singer/guitarist Jody Williams.  Jones is a Louisiana native who began his career singing on Chicago’s south side in the 1950s.  Although he worked steadily in the clubs, and was a featured vocalist with Chicago’s legendary band The Aces (formerly Little Walter’s band, featuring brothers Dave and Louis Myers), Jones never made it into the recording studio during the early phase of his career.  This had less to do with Jones’s talent, and more to do with the glut of exceptional talent on the Chicago scene and the changing nature of blues and R&B at the time.  Eventually Bobby drifted away from the blues scene, and although he continued to sing and kept his voice in strong shape, for all practical purposes he was retired from music as a career for many years.  In the ‘80s he began a slow and somewhat uneven comeback, releasing his own LP to the southern soul market.  He followed this up with a handful of self-produced soul CDs in the 1990s, which showed that his voice was as strong as ever.  His song “Somebody Stole My Freak” got some attention at the ‘stepper’s sets’ on the soul circuit, but things slowed down again by the turn of the decade.  So when his friend Leon Blue brought him along for a Mannish Boys session, Bobby Jones was essentially an unknown new artist to most contemporary blues fans.  Look for that to change when those same fans hear his two vocal contributions to the new Mannish Boys CD, “Mary Jane” and “California Blues”.

The other special guest, singer/guitarist Jody Williams, is a lot better known now thanks to two highly acclaimed releases since his comeback in 2001 after a 30 year hiatus from music.  But Jody toiled away in the relative anonymity as one of Chicago’ busiest studio guitarists in the heyday of the blues in the 1950s; even though his name didn’t appear on the label of a lot of records, his playing was heard everywhere. In fact, Jody played on so many sessions and on so many classic recordings ‘back in the day’, that he is still rediscovering records he’s on that he’d forgotten all about.  Among the ones he does remember are some of Howling Wolf’s first Chicago recordings for Chess; upon arriving in Chicago, Wolf first used Lee Cooper on one session, then hired the teenaged Jody as the sole guitarist for his performing and recording band, a position Jody held until Wolf eventually brought Hubert Sumlin into the fold.  Jody’s guitar is heard on Howling Wolf’s recordings of “Baby How Long”, “Evil (Is Going On)”, “I’ll Be Around”, “Forty-Four”, “Who’ll Be The Next”, “I Love My Baby”, “I Didn’t Know”, “Moanin’ For My Baby” and others.  In the mid 1950s he also spent time in Bo Diddley’s band, and also at Chess he accompanied Bo on “Before You Accuse Me”, “Hey Bo Diddley”, “Mona” and the all-time classic “Who Do You Love”.  Since Jody was ‘only’ a sideman, he was not tied down to one label, so across the street at Chess’s rival Vee Jay Records he played guitar on most of Billy Boy Arnold’s classic recordings: “I Ain’t Got You”, “Don’t Stay Out All Night”, “I Was Fooled”, “I Wish You Would”, and “You’ve Got Me Wrong”.  (Also at Vee Jay, aural evidence suggests that Jody is most likely also the guitarist on the The Spaniels’ “Hey Sister Lizzie”, although this is one of the sessions Jody doesn’t recall.)  And just because he was already recording for Chess and Vee Jay, that didn’t mean he couldn’t also record for Cobra – it’s Jody, not Otis, taking the lead on Otis Rush’s classics “Groanin’ The Blues”, “If You Were Mine”, “She’s A Good ‘Un” and “Three Times A Fool”.  Other Chess sessions included are “Can’t Believe” and “One Kiss” with Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Witherspoon’s “Ain’t Nobody’s Business”, Floyd Dixon’s “Alarm Clock Blues”, Willie Dixon’s “Walking The Blues”, Louisiana swamp pop pioneer Bobby Charles “Why Did You Leave Me”, and famously, Billy Stewart’s “Billy’s Blues Pt. 1 & 2”, from which Jody’s guitar part was “borrowed” by Mickey Baker to create the Mickey & Sylvia hit “Love Is Strange”.  And although he’s not credited in any of the standard reference books, Jody says he remembers playing, along with members of Muddy’s band, on Sonny Boy Williamson’s first Chess session, which produced his classics “Don’t Start Me Talkin’”, “All My Love In Vain”, “Work With Me” and others.  Coming from anyone else this might seem like a slightly outrageous claim, but in light of all the other high-profile sessions Jody had already done, and Sonny Boy’s relatively low prestige on the local scene prior to this first Chicago session, it seems entirely plausible – besides, it’s not as if Jody had all that much to gain by padding his already bulging resume with this single session.  To all of this, add recording sessions with Harold Burrage on Cobra, Lou Mac on Blue Lake, Earl Phillips on Vee Jay, Bobby Davis on Bandera, even big band leader and trombonist Buddy Morrow on Mercury, and you get an idea how much in demand Jody was in the ‘50s, and why it’s hard to recall every single session and song he’s featured on.

And of course that doesn’t include any of the recordings he made under his own name. In 1955 he entered the studios for the local Blue Lake label and recorded four strong songs, including “Groan My Blues Away”, which he reprises for the first time on the new Mannish Boys CD “Big Plans”.  His next session as a leader was in 1957, when in between backing work for other Chess artists, when he stepped up front for the label and recorded “You May”, “What Kind Of Gal Is That” (a song he says he ‘bought’ from Junior Wells!), and his signature instrumental “Lucky Lou”.  Then after a two year hiatus from music which he spent in the Army stationed in Germany, he re-emerged on the Chicago scene in 1960, formed his own group and began working the clubs.  He recorded a few singles for small local labels, but when he was unable to gain any traction on the changing musical scene by the mid ‘60s, he eventually withdrew from music completely, and worked a day job until his now-well-documented comeback in 2001.

Delta Groove chief Randy Chortkoff was in the audience at the very first public performance of Jody’s comeback in Chicago in 2001, and organized Jody’s first-ever overseas gig at the Blues Estafette in Utrecht, Holland later that year, so it’s fitting that Jody should repay the favor by recording with The Mannish Boys.  And based on the results, it looks like these “Big Plans” are paying off.

Written by Scott Dirks