Snooky Pryor

All Music Guide:

Only recently has Snooky Pryor finally begun to receive full credit for the mammoth role he played in shaping the amplified Chicago blues harp sound during the postwar era. He's long claimed he was the first harpist to run his sound through a public address system around the Windy City -- and since nobody's around to refute the claim at this point, we'll have to accept it! James Edward Pryor was playing harmonica at the age of eight in Mississippi. The two Sonny Boys were influential to Pryor's emerging style, as he played around the Delta. He hit Chicago for the first time in 1940, later serving in the Army at nearby Fort Sheridan. Playing his harp through powerful Army PA systems gave Pryor the idea to acquire his own portable rig once he left the service. Armed with a primitive amp, he dazzled the folks on Maxwell Street in late 1945 with his massively amplified harp. Pryor made some groundbreaking 78s during the immediate postwar Chicago blues era. Teaming with guitarist Moody Jones, he waxed "Telephone Blues" and "Boogie" for Planet Records in 1948, encoring the next year with "Boogy Fool"/"Raisin' Sand" for JOB with Jones on bass and guitarist Baby Face Leroy Foster in support. Pryor made more classic sides for JOB (1952-1953), Parrot (1953), and Vee-Jay ("Someone to Love Me"/"Judgment Day") in 1956, but commercial success never materialized. He wound down his blues-playing in the early '60s, finally chucking it all and moving to downstate Ullin, IL, in 1967. For a long while, Pryor's whereabouts were unknown. But the 1987 Blind Pig album Snooky, produced by guitarist Steve Freund, announced to the world that the veteran harpist was alive and well, his chops still honed. A pair of solid discs for Antone's, Too Cool to Move and In This Mess Up to My Chest, followed. Pryor stayed busy until his death in 2006.

Wikipedia:

Snooky Pryor (September 15, 1921 – October 18, 2006) was an American Chicago blues harmonica player. He claimed to have pioneered the now-common method of playing amplified harmonica by cupping a small microphone in his hands along with the harmonica, although on his earliest records in the late 1940s and early '50s he did not utilize this method.

Career [edit]

James Edward Pryor was born in Lambert, Mississippi and developed a Delta blues style influenced by both Sonny Boy Williamson I and Sonny Boy Williamson II. He moved to Chicago around 1940.

While serving in the U.S. Army he would blow bugle calls through the powerful PA system, which led him to experiment with playing the harmonica that way. Upon discharge from the Army in 1945, he obtained his own amplifier, and began playing harmonica at the outdoor Maxwell Street market, becoming a regular in the Chicago blues scene.

Pryor recorded some of the first postwar Chicago blues records in 1948, including "Telephone Blues" and "Snooky & Moody's Boogie" with guitarist Moody Jones, and "Stockyard Blues" and "Keep What You Got" with singer/guitarist Floyd Jones. "Snooky & Moody's Boogie" is of considerable historical significance: Pryor claimed that harmonica ace Little Walter directly copied the signature riff of Pryor's song into the opening eight bars of his own blues harmonica instrumental, "Juke," an R&B hit in 1952. In 1967, Pryor moved south to Ullin, Illinois. He quit music for carpentry in the late 1960s but was persuaded to make a comeback. After he dropped out of sight, Pryor was later re-discovered and resumed periodic recording until his death in nearby Cape Girardeau, Missouri at the age of 85.

In January 1973 he appeared with the American Blues Legends tour which played throughout Europe, alongside Homesick James. Whilst on this tour they recorded an album in London, Homesick James & Snooky Pryor, on Jim Simpson's label Big Bear Records.

Some of his better known songs include "Judgement Day" (1956), and "Crazy 'Bout My Baby" from Snooky (1989), "How'd You Learn to Shake It Like That" from Tenth Anniversary Anthology (1989) and "Shake My Hand" (1999).