Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown has never had anything close to any type of career retrospective or comprehensive reissue series that takes a look at his long and fruitful career. In the meantime, the twelve song Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown - The Original Peacock recordings is a good place to start your appreciation of the late, great Gate. The instrumental classic Okie Dokie Stomp as well as other songs familiar to fans of Brown’s music such as Sad Hour, Gate’s Salty Blues and Midnight Hour are also included here. I went with the tune, Dirty Work at the Crossroads which is a mind blowing, string bending odyssey where Gate takes his listeners on a wild ride.

Arnett Cobb is one of the great Texas tenors. Cobb had been a member of fellow Houston native trumpet player Milt Larkin’s great band which also included another Houston native Eddie “Cleanhead” Vincent as well as Illinois Jaquet. The sax man’s album, The Wild Man of the Tenor Sax 1943 – 1947 is a collection of his first sides as a band leader. It also has Cobb playing with Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra, Wynonie Harris and Dinah Washington. From this collection I chose the tune Papa Salty Blues which features the great vocalist, Dinah Washington.

Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins is considered to be the most recorded blues man of all time. He is as closely associated to Houston as any blues musician living or dead and is widely considered one of the most important post war country blues artists ever. His huge catalogue is now available mostly as a hodge-podge of compilations and box sets. We have many of these in the BLUES JUNCTION library, but my favorite is the five disc, 126 song box set whose title is fairly self explanatory, All the Classics 1946-1951. This box also includes the sides he cut in 1946 and ‘47 in Los Angeles for the Aladdin label.  Those sides can be purchased separately in a two disc 46 song box. I chose a tune from the big JSP box that was recorded in Houston at the Gold Star recording studio, Worried Blues.

Willie May Thornton is an Alabama native who moved to Houston in 1946 when she was twenty years old. She recorded the Lieber and Stoller penned Hound Dog in 1952. The Johnny Otis produced tune helped put Peacock records on the map. It was a big seller a few years before Elvis exposed the song to the white record buying public. I pulled this iconic tune from a great 1991 CD reissue entitled Hound Dog: The Peacock Recordings 1952-57. This collection pulls together eighteen great sides all recorded in Houston from the great Willie May “Big Mama” Thornton.   

Honk for Texas starring Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson is one of those great JSP box sets. This four disc, 103 track collection also features Jimmy Wynn. The disc includes recordings that the Houston native made under his own name as well as the sides he cut in New York City with Cootie Williams and his orchestra. All the great Vinson classics are hear including the iconic Kidney Stew Blues, Bald Head Blues and Juice Head Baby. The three and a half discs which are devoted to Vinson’s material are filled with the great, fun lyrics that are almost always imbibed with great meter as well as his patented Eddie “Cleanhead humor”. His instantly recognizable singing voice battles for the spotlight with his beautiful alto playing. I dropped a nickel on one of my favorite tunes, Lonesome Train.   

T-Bone Walker’s Rare and Well Done was recorded in Houston in the 1960s, but I wanted to share with our readers a place where you can hear what T-Bone Walker sounded like when he was a frequent headliner in the Houston ballrooms of the 1940’s. Walker’s influence on the Houston Blues Scene can’t be overstated. His electric guitar lines have served as the template for virtually every blues guitar player in his wake. The three disc, 75 track box set, The Complete Capitol/Black and White Recordings are all sides from the 1940’s. It may seem like an obvious choice but I selected the first version of one of the most famous and enduring blues songs of all time Stormy Monday.

Amos Milburn, like T-Bone Walker and so many other Texans, is more closely associated with the Los Angeles blues scene. The pianist and singer however was born in Houston in 1927 and died there 52 years later from complications as a result of suffering his third stroke. His most productive period was his stint at Aladdin Records where he produced 76 sides. Milburn’s calling card was songs about drinking and dissipation. Many of these including One Scotch, One Whiskey and One Beer, Bad Bad Whiskey, Chicken Shack Boogie and others became huge hits in the race record market. It is the hard charging, jump blues classic that was his first recording for Aladdin, his cover of Down the Road a Piece, helped make Amos Milburn a star. I pulled this from the seven disc, one hundred forty five track, box set, The Complete Aladdin Recordings, which was reissued by Mosaic Records. This set covers recordings from 1946 – 1957.

Junior Parker, like Johnny Ace, O.V. Wright and Bobby Bland has long been associated with Memphis at least as much as they are with Houston. Like Ace, Wright and Bland, Parker recorded extensively in Houston as part of the Memphis based Duke Record’s merger with Peacock records in the early fifties. The label fell under the control of Don Robey and thus the cross pollination of soulful singers, like the four mentioned here, melded with the swingin’ jazzy jump blues sounds that Robey championed. As we all know the results were spectacular.  There is a recently released box set of Junior Parker’s material entitled, Ride With Me Baby: The singles 1952-1961. It includes Parker’s Sun Records sides with such classics as such as Feelin’ Good and Mystery Train. There are also tracks from the RPM label and the extensive recording he did in Houston for Don Robey including one of my favorites Drivin’ Wheel. 

Pianist, vocalist and songwriter Big Walter Price had many singles released on the Peacock label in the 50’s and 60’s and remained a fixture of the Houston Blues scene until the time of his death last spring at the age of 97.  Rhino Records released a nice compilation in 1994 entitled, Texas Music Vol. 1: Post War Blues Combos. This is a pretty broad ranging and far flung assemblage of music that spans the time period from the late forties to the early seventies. You can find the usual suspects such as T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and others but this nice Texas taste test also might be the easiest place to find a few rare sides including Walter Price’s most famous recording, Pack Fair and Square.

Bobby Bland’s 1961 album Two Steps from the Blues is considered by many blues historians to be one of the most important recordings in blues history. It is a marriage of deep soul, blues and gospel that became the template for both the soul-blues sub genre as well as the 1960’s soul movement that came out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Great songwriting, wonderful horn arrangements and Bobby Bland’s commanding vocals dominate this record. Songs like Cry Cry Cry, I’ll Take Care of You and the standard Saint James Infirmary remained staples of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s live set’s for decades. I dropped a nickel on the spectacular I Pity the Fool.  

Albert Collins was born in Leona, Texas, but moved to Houston with his parents at the age of seven. The Cool Sound of Albert Collins is a collection of early 1960’s instrumentals save one vocal track, Dyin’ Flu. These 23 tunes showcase Collins’ already distinctive attack on his guitar. The sound is augmented by some very funky organ and often slightly off time horn arrangements. Somehow the whole formula works to make one of the best recordings of Collins’ career. The Iceman’s standard Don’t Lose Your Cool is given its first treatment here. It is still my favorite version of this tune.  Also recommended is The Complete Imperial Recordings (1968-70).

Johnny Guitar Watson, who was born in Houston in 1935, should be on everyone’s short list of the most talented blues musicians ever. He was, of course, an extraordinary guitarist who was both deeply rooted in the tradition, but an important innovator as well. He was also a gifted vocalist, pianist and songwriter. A Rhino Records compliation, The Very Best of Johnny Guitar Watson, that was released in 1999, is not the most comprehensive or wide ranging collection of tunes but this eighteen song collection focuses on his earliest and bluesiest sides. Motor Head Baby, I Got Eyes, Hot Little Mama, Gangster of Love and a great instrumental recorded with Floyd Dixon called, The Late Freight Twist are included here. However the slow blues classic Three Hours Past Midnight which features one of the most intense guitar solos ever recorded is my choice from this well conceived compilation.    

Bobby “Blue” Bland has a marvelous compilation of tunes that cover the first 30 years of his career, from 1952-1982. The two disc, 50 song compilation simply called, The Anthology is the only collection that includes all of Bland’s 25 r&b top ten hits.  Included here are Stormy Monday Blues, Turn on Your Love Light, Further on Up the Road, Blind Man, Yield Not to Temptation, It’s My Life Baby and others. I went with a tune that became a blues standard, I Smell Trouble which features Houston guitarist Clarence Holliman who was  a session player for Peacock records as early as his high school years when he would skip out of Wheaton High School in the Fifth Ward to play on Robey’s fledgling label. He was the principal guitarist on most of Bland’s 50’s sessions.    

Houston Homeboys: Texas Guitar Killers is an extraordinary compilation whose title is pretty self-explanatory. This twenty five song collection was released in 2011 on El Paso Records and available exclusively through Blue Beat Music. The album features a whole laundry list of Houston guitarists, both in bands with vocalists and in instrumental settings. The album’s opening track was a previously unreleased Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown tune entitled Swinging the Gate. The rest of the twenty four tracks feature everybody from Albert Collins, Earl Gilliam, Clarence Green, Cal Green, Texas Johnny Brown, Little Irvin and others from roughly a twenty year period from the late forties through late sixties. I pulled the tune Freight Train’s Rollin’ by Cal Green. This previously unissued recording from 1953 also features Connie McBooker on piano and vocals. 

Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters’ Full Gain is a 1998 Black Top Records release and it is an example of what made this label so special. This record helped put the players in this all star band of Houstonians back on the map. Gaines is at the helm here but he shares the spotlight and album cover with his Texafornian brother, vocalist and guitar player Roy Gaines, as well as guitarist Clarence Holliman. Vocalists Joe Medwick and Teddy Reynolds share vocal duties with Roy. This album has some fine instrumentals as well. It is one of these, Full Gain, which features all of these great players and in particular puts the spotlight on the terrific piano playing of Teddy Edwards.

Joe “Guitar” Hughes formed his first group in the 1950s called the Dukes of Rhythm which also included fellow Houstonian Johnny Clyde Copeland. He had played with both the Upsetters backing Little Richard and had been a part of Bobby Bland’s back-up band. It isn’t surprising that his very best album was the only project he did under his own name for the Black Top label, 1989’s If You Want to See the Blues. The title track is a simply stunning original Hughes penned that not only features Hughes’ not surprisingly terrific guitar playing, but a great turn behind the vocal mic.  

Clarence Holliman and Carol Fran’s Soul Sensation is the 1992 Black Top Records debut from this husband and wife duo. Fran is a vocalist of tremendous emotional range and flexes her prodigious vocal chops in an almost startling array of styles. Holliman’s guitar playing is nothing short of amazing. He stretches out on a few instrumentals and strattles the world of blues and jazz as he does in the beautiful love letter to Carol, in the instrumental Blues for Carol. This album, like the Texas Upsetters album, is a contemporary blues recording of the highest order and both are out of print.  

Gulf Coast Blues - Volume One is a compilation that features four of the artists on the Black Top Records roster we have previously discussed; Grady Gaines, the duo of Carol Fran and Clarence Holliman, Teddy Edwards and Joe “Guitar” Hughes. In 1990 I attended the CD release party for this album at Rockefeller’s Nightclub in Houston. It was a special evening as a packed house of fans and musicians gathered and reveled in the pride that comes from the release of a new album which put Houston’s own in front of, in those days, a large record buying public. The album of all original material closes with a Teddy Edwards composition where the pianist and vocals on the tune, Texas Son summarizes the down home feel of Houston at its best and that evening at Rockefellers.   

Texas Pete Mays was from nearby Double Bayou, Texas, but relocated to Houston in 1960. Mayes played with Bill Doggett, Lowell Fulson, Little Junior Parker, Big Joe Turner and others. He was firmly rooted in the T-Bone Walker tradition and had jazz chops good enough to have toured with the Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie bands. His recorded out put under his own name though is pretty scarce. The only album to get any wide spread distribution is the 1998 release on Antone’s Records entitled For Pete’s Sake. I dropped a nickel on the Mayes original House Party.

Milton Hopkins & Jewel Brown have been fixtures on the Houston blues scene for decades. Hopkins' career includes stints with Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters during and after the period that they barnstormed with Little Richard. Hopkins also had an eight year run with B.B. King’s orchestra in the 70’s. He has backed up some of the biggest names in blues and r&b including the great Sam Cooke. He is joined by longtime Houston resident and former Duke-Peacock recording artist, vocalist Jewel Brown. Hopkins, is a cousin of Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. Their self-titled 2012 release is the most recent recording loaded up on our jukebox. This is a solid, uptown, mostly up-tempo CD firmly rooted in the old school Houston tradition. I dropped a nickel on a Milton Hopkins original guitar instrumental entitled, Evening Breeze.