Guitar slinger Joe Louis Walker’s logged many miles on the road to success. These days he gets his mail at an address in upstate New York, but when it comes to the city of his birth Walker said, “I’ll always be a resident of San Francisco.”

Walker was born in San Francisco on Christmas Day in 1949. He is the youngest of five children. His parents brought their love of music with them from the South. From them, he was exposed early on to the great boogie-woogie piano players his dad loved such as Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis, and Albert Ammons. He also exposed to the guitar of T-Bone Walker for the first time. Later his mom would say, “He played nothing but B.B.”

When he was about ten, Walker began making music of his own. He borrowed violins, accordions, a clarinet and just about anything you could check out from Ben Franklin Junior High School in San Francisco’s Fillmore district.

His mom sent him to music classes when he was fourteen. Walker got his first taste of the life of an itinerant musician when he traveled with a drum line, which is like a drum corps. They became the mascot for the Rattlers, a black motorcycle club. The ensemble played up and down the state. They even did TV and radio commercials. They served as back up musicians for other acts as well. They eventually got a slot playing in a battle of the bands in San Francisco’s famed Fillmore Auditorium.

As a youth, Walker also played Shelton’s Blue Mirror, Minnie’s Can-Do, and the Off-Plaza in the Fillmore. He played the Player’s Choice, Club Long Island and Little Bo Peeps in the Mission District and in Hunter’s Point. Across the bay in Oakland. Walker played at the venerable Eli’s Mile High Club as well as Esther’s Orbit Room, Your Place II and Larry Blake’s in Berkeley.

One of Walker’s cousins was a bassist named Ted Wysinger. He had a gig backing Freddie Stewart in a band called Freddie and the Stone Souls.  Eventually, Freddie’s older brother Sylvester became band leader and the band was renamed Sly and the Family Stone.  Walker says he’s still friendly with that band’s Jerry Martini and Greg Errico, and that Freddie can still be found in Vallejo, running a church.  As for Sly, Walker says, “He’s unchanged in some ways, a riddle wrapped in an enigma.”

During this time, Walker began lifelong friendships with a number of other San Francisco musicians from that city’s burgeoning rock scene, including Bob Weir (Grateful Dead), Steve Miller, Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna), Jerry Miller (Moby Grape), Carlos Santana, and Mike Bloomfield.

Bloomfield moved to California after soaking up the blues in the Windy City of Chicago. Bloomfield, who Walker says became a major influence on him, was the first of many young white musicians to follow that route, along with Nick Gravenites and Elvin Bishop.

Although Walker’s musical career got off to an early start, that didn’t preclude him from serving his time working in restaurants, as a forklift operator, and many other jobs as well. 

Then things got really interesting.  Walker joined the musicians’ union and was living under the wing of pimp, songwriter, and guitarist Fillmore Slim, who he says practically raised him. “Everything was happening.” Walker says. “It was a convergence of everything. The Haight-Ashbury, the Fillmore, the Avalon. That’s what I grew up in.”

He was busy making a name for himself in those days, he recalls.  He shared stages with such now familiar name players as J.J. Malone, L.C. Robinson, Charlie Musselwhite and practically became the house guitar player at the Matrix.

After getting to know Johnny Cramer, another Chicago transplant, he moved into the Carmelita Avenue house in Mill Valley, just across the Golden Gate in nearby Marin County, that would become grand central to many young musicians, most famously Bloomfield, who named a tune “Carmelita Skiffle” after the musical abode. Ira Kamin, Rick Estrin, Bob Jones of We Five, keyboardists Cramer and Barry Goldberg also hung out and played there. After about six months, Walker and Cramer moved above Tamalpais High on Miller Street in Mill Valley.

It was a heady time of discovery and study. “I used to follow Muddy and Buddy Guy. I wanted to aspire to be them.  Butterfield, Taj and Danny (Kalb) Steve Miller, John Cipollina (Quicksilver Messenger Service), Ron McKernan aka Pigpen of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia all those guys were pretty much my age, they all wanted to be like those guys too.”

And then there was Bloomfield. “The most anti-rock star guitar player I ever met in my life. What made him and the Butterfield Blues Band, he played in so special,” Walker says, “was the time they’d spent in Chicago playing with blues forebears, Muddy Waters, Sunnyland Slim, Buddy Guy, and others. It’s a big difference, learning first-hand. I can tell when somebody’s played with those guys, there’s a direct connection.  That’s what distinguished the Butterfield band from the English players, such as Eric Clapton, who had to study and learn at first from recordings.”

“It’s no mistake, that the late Al Wilson of Canned Heat, who nonetheless gets missed, was so good.” Walker says. “Believe me. He was one of the few guys who played with Son House.  It’s also what made Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan stand out, is that they played with many of the previous generation of blues players like Albert King.” Walker continues, “Similarly, Bob Margolin’s long association with Muddy Waters, and Levon Helm with Sonny Boy Williamson, made all the difference to those players as well.”

Walker’s pursuit of his own career led him to leave Mill Valley for Vancouver in 1969 and Toronto the next year. By the mid 70’s, Walker began playing nothing but gospel music. For the next ten years he was part of the gospel group the Spiritual Corinthians.  “It was a good experience.” Walker said. By 1985 however he was back in the blues.  

Walker recorded five albums on Oakland’s Hightone label before signing with Polygram in the early ’90s. He recorded six more albums for that label. He went on to record almost a dozen more albums for a variety of labels, including Telarc, Evidence, JSP, and, most recently, three great albums for Stony Plain Records out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Walker’s most recent  album, “Blues Conspiracy, Live on the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise,” features Walker playing with Johnny Winter, Curtis Salgado, Tommy Castro, Nick Moss, Watermelon Slim, Franck Goldwasser (Paris Slim), Todd Sharpville, Kenny Neal, Tab Benoit, Mitch Woods, Henry Oden, Paul Nelson, Mike Finnigan and Stony Plain label mate and producer, Duke Robillard.

Walker plays Cara brand guitars. The company has five Joe Louis Walker models. They look like Les Pauls, and some feature three mini-humbucker pickups that get a “tighter, brighter sound,” Walker explained. He generally plays in standard tuning, even for his slide work, for which he credits Earl Hooker’s influence. He occasionally will mix things up with drop D, Vastepool, and open E tunings.

Joe Louis Walker has seen trends and fads come and go. The blues is still with us and so is Joe Louis Walker. He has won numerous awards and played at the Kennedy Center Honors in a tribute to one of his idols B.B. King. On that evening he performed in front of dignitaries both inside the world of music and inside the corridors of power including President Clinton and future Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

Joe Louis Walker has gone from the young gun from San Francisco to one of the senior ambassadors of the blues. He is still making music that is vital, fresh and yet steeped in his unique bay area upbringing and in that of his heroes.