Episode 255 – Recorded 8-24-24 – This Episode features a medley of great Blues and Gospel, Past and Present. We present 9 Great recording and interview snippets about the past and present artists for your enjoyment.  Featured artists are Jontavious Willis, John Primer and Bob Corritore, Otis Spann, Diunna Greenleaf, JP Soars, “Big Lucky” Carter, “Hound Dog” Taylor, Lucille Spann, Mud Morganfield.  Please give a listen.

This transcript was generated with speech recognition software and reviewed by human transcribers. It may still include inaccuracies. Please listen to the episode audio for precise quotes and email any queries to [email protected].

Jamie Anthony: Hi. Welcome back and thanks for joining us here today. I’m Jamie and I am a Blues Disciple. Now please join me for a little while to hear some excellent blues music from some of the masters of the blues. Blues Disciples is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, and please note that earphones or earbuds will definitely enhance your listening pleasure.

And if you’re listening to this podcast through our website, you can click on the playlist to expand its size for easier viewing of the playlist and the featured artist.

Today, our first artist is Mr Jontavius Willis, who was born in West Georgia in 1996, making him 27 years old. Jontavious grew up singing gospel music alongside his grandfather in their Baptist church in Greenville, Georgia. When he was 14 years old, Jontavious saw a YouTube video of blues legend Muddy Waters performing hoochiecoochyman and immediately caught the blues fever. For the most part, Jontavious Willis is self taught with guitar, blues harp and 5 string banjo.

One of his mentors, Taj Mahal, described Jontavious as his wonder boy and a wonder kind. At this point, Jontavious has several albums under his belt and has won numerous Blues Foundation Blues Music Awards for his albums and songs. JonTavious’ latest album, 20 20 four’s West Georgia Blues album, was produced by Jontavious and recorded at Capricorn Studios in Macon, Georgia. This album contains 15 excellent songs written by Jontavious Willis. On one of our earlier interviews with Jontavious podcast number 46, I had asked Jontavious how he got started in music and chose to focus on the blues.

Jontavious Willis: Well, my first experience with with music, as far as I can remember, was playing singing behind my grandfather at church when I was 3 years old. Around the age of 9 or 10, I started to take lessons for piano. And then about 11 or 12, I get trombone, started guitar at 14, and band, harmonica at 17, and banjo a little bit of banjo at 18. I stuck with the latter 3 and let let let go of the first two.

Jamie Anthony: That’s quite a plethora of instruments there. Breaking into the big time, how did you get an invite up to the stage when Taj Mahal was doing his performance in Atlanta?

Jontavious Willis: Well, he had seen a video of me and well, heard about a video and watched it and enjoyed it. So and then though we’re in the young folks from down south and that was from the culture doing the thing. And so he was like I gotta Episode. I thought that he would just want me to come to the Episode later on in the 60 that I’d get up and do 2 songs. That’s kinda how it started.

Yeah. My dad and my friend, we went to the concert together and sat right on the side of the chart.

Jamie Anthony: Now here is Jontavious Willis with his Charlie Brown Blues.

Jamie Anthony: A few months back, we had a joint interview on our podcast number 245 with major blues legend, Mr. John Primer and the great blues harp genius, Mr. Bob Corritore. These two gentlemen have been performing and collaborating on various projects for more than 10 years. And on that podcast, we shared a few of their remarks and the music from their latest album collaboration titled Crawlin’ Kingsnake.

But first, a little about John and Bob. John Primer was born in 1945 and started plucking at a diddly bow on the side of his house when he was 4 years old. And then he would borrow his cousin’s guitar whenever he had a chance and taught himself how to tune it and play it. Mr. Primer didn’t get his own guitar until after he had moved from Mississippi to Chicago when he was 18 years old. Over his career, John had been a principal member and band leader for blues greats Muddy Waters and Magic Slim before focusing on his own solo career.

Self taught blues harp great, Bob Corritore, was born in 1956 in Chicago where he studied and learned blues harp as a a teen by listening to and watching blues harp masters like Junior Wells and Big Walter Horton. Bob moved to Phoenix in the 1980s and has played with and produced recordings with many blues legends and artists. On their Crawlin’ Kingsnake album, John and Bob pulled together a great team of blues artists including John Primer with his excellent vocals and slide guitar, Bob Corritore with his brilliant blues harp, Bob Stroger and his steady electric bass. Jimmy Prime Time Smith with his great guitar work and supporting vocals, Anthony Geraci with his piano and West Star kept it all together with his drums. Here from our interview, John introduces and the band performs their rendition of the title song from their new album, Crawling Kingsnake.

How about John Lee Hooker’s Crawlin’ Kingsnake, your album title?

John Primer: Well, it was my earliest song when I was young. You can hear my walkin I was in Mississippi there. Maybe I heard in the cotton field and stuff singing.

So I got it from them. I didn’t know who made the song. I love that song and it’s a good song and I heard he and Muddy Waters sing it. And so, I got the idea to sing it when I heard Muddy sing it. I like the way Muddy did it cuz John Lee Hookie, he do a great song, but he’s strange the way he do it.

Jamie Anthony: Now we’ll hear from a very talented gentleman born in the Boston area in 1951 and who grew up with the love of the blues and, importantly, he had the talent and capabilities to allow him to perform and work with some of the very greatest blues legends of all time. That gentleman is guitarist, producer, and entrepreneur, Mr Peter Malick. Peter started playing guitar early in life, and by his teens, he proved he was ready for an incredible journey into the heart of the blues. So I’m going to jump ahead a few years here to the spring of 1969 when Peter Malick had his first opportunity to record with blues legends Mr Otis Spann, Mr Johnny Young, Mr Luther Georgia boy Snake Johnson, and Mr P Leary in New York for early blues and movie legend Miss Victoria Spivey’s Spivey Records. Here from my interview with Peter Malick on our podcast number 239, Peter tells us how the resulting April 1969 album titled “The Everlasting Blues versus Otis Spann” came about, and I introduced Otis Spann’s great composition, I’m a Bad Boy.

Peter Malick: So this all happened, you know, there’s this one week that I think it was maybe more than we may might might have been a couple weeks that I played with Spann at the Cafe a Gogo in Greenwich Village. And it was a quartet. It was, Spann, SP Larry, Johnny Young, who was quite a fascinating character himself – the world’s only blues mandolinist – and then myself. So when I got there and I went up to maybe went up to Spann’s room, we all stayed at the Albert Hotel, which was kind of like the rock and roll hotel for rock and rollers who couldn’t afford the Chelsea Hotel. And Victoria was sitting in there when I walked in, the first time I went up to the hotel, and she was quite a character.

I liken her to the blues version of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. It’s exactly what she was. She was living in this world that was like when she was this famous singer, which had been in the thirties, so it had been like 30 something years ago, but she was quite a character. And so she she was like, you know what? You know what, Pete? We’re gonna make a record. We’re gonna make a record. And I was, okay. And I didn’t really know the first time I met her, I really didn’t know the whole thing, but I quickly learned more about her. So some days later, she was like, okay, we’re gonna meet tomorrow at noon, here’s the address, and the address was the NOLA Penthouse Studios which was this midtown skyscraper, maybe not wasn’t a skyscraper, but it was fairly tall building.

And NOLA had an incredible history too. There were a lot of, you know, the early candid label jazz records were were, recorded there, and they did a lot of really cool stuff there. At the time a state of the art recording studio had an 8 track. Nola had a 3 track tape, but she didn’t wanna spend the money on the 3 track tape. So, basically, we recorded that album straight to mono.

It was like, recorded. It’s done. And and so it was just really we kinda winged it, is what it was. And one of the things that happened, which is sort of give you an idea of, what about the times and so forth. So Spivi, Victoria, was walking through the studio and tripped over Luther in Snake Johnson’s guitar chord and broke the chord.

So she was very upset about that. But, anyway, there wasn’t another guitar chord in the entire studio. So that’s why some of the tracks on the record, Snake isn’t playing guitar because he had no way to play guitar. And then at the end, she gave ...