Blues Before Sunrise 3: Guitar Slingers and Backbeaters by Steve Cushing
'Blues Before Sunrise 3: Guitar Slingers and Backbeaters' by Steve Cushing
Steve Cushing was a musical Studs Terkel, hosting a syndicated radio show, “Blues Before Sunrise,” for decades. This is the third book culled from interviews he conducted for the program, many of them with the sidemen behind familiar names such as Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters … even Chuck Berry. The old timers all had stories. Early Phillips recalled being on the road, crammed into a station wagon with the no-nonsense Howlin’s Wolf. S.P. Leary made his first drum, from cans and tire innertubes.
Cushing also includes a fascinating conversation with Johnny Parth, the Austrian record collector who exhaustively reissued rarities on LP and CD. He discovered jazz as a teenager in Nazi-occupied Vienna, where listening to African American music was underground and dangerous. Also interesting is Art Sheridan, owner of Chance Records, a Chicago indie in the ‘50s. He got into the music business sideways—his father’s electronics company started pressing shellac 78s with compression molding machines for King Records and other labels.
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