Remembering Snooks Eaglin

Snooks Eaglin, who died on February 18 at age 72, was a quintessential New Orleans character – the “Human Jukebox,” as he was known locally, a guitarist and singer who claimed a repertoire of 2500 songs – blues, r&b, pop, rock, gospel, traditional – you name it, he played it. Eaglin recorded in every format, from solo acoustic to electric band with horns. And like many truly quintessential New Orleans characters, he never had a hit – though he caused jaws to drop nearly everywhere he played for more than half a century.

Even in a piano town, Eaglin stood out. Though hardly a showboat, he’s a stunningly dexterous electric finger-picker; he can squeeze an amazing number of notes into a short space without playing anything superfluous. He always sounds crisp and clean, never cluttered; his jagged lines burn with intensity even as they gleam with taste. Sometimes his lines seem to turn in on themselves momentarily, almost emulating a stumble, but he returns to his main theme so quickly that the effect is breathtaking. His tone is crystalline. As for his rhythmic approach, let’s just put it this way: he was Professor Longhair‘s favorite guitarist, and in many ways he created on his instrument something analogous to Fess’s pianistics. As a singer, Snooks early on resembled a more delicate, countrified Ray Charles, with a blurry quality to his voice that could be ghostly when he chose to emphasize it. In later years, he laced his melancholy with a vocal playfulness that helped make his singing style as singular as his guitar work.

Born in 1936, Eaglin was 19 months old when he went blind. He dropped out of Louisiana School for the Blind in Baton Rouge at 14 to pursue a music career in New Orleans. Two years later he won his first steady gig, as guitarist in Allen Toussaint‘s band the Flamingos, the only serious rival to Art Neville‘s group the Hawketts (“Mardi Gras Mambo”) on the teen circuit. After leaving the Flamingos, Snooks billed himself briefly as “Li’l Ray Charles,” but he made most of his money as a street musician in the French Quarter. That’s where folklorist/musicologist Harry Oster found him at the height of the folk era; Oster recorded him in seven sessions between 1958 and 1961 as an acoustic bluesman (occasionally joined by washboard and harmonica), with the material being released many times since on various labels and under various titles such as New Orleans Street Singer, That’s All Right and Country Boy Down in New Orleans. Strumming fluidly and picking precisely, Eaglin showed off a repertoire already broad enough to include traditional songs, novelties, contemporary urban blues and r&b, gospel and “Malaguena.” Those sides stand up well today as clearly being the work of someone with his own take on this whole happening folk-blues thing.

But just as clearly, his heart wasn’t always in it. Which can’t be said of the r&b he cut for Imperial from 1960 to 1963 with NOLA stalwart Dave Bartholomew arranging, producing and usually writing. But none of those records went anywhere outside the region, perhaps because the resemblance to Ray Charles was still a little too close, even though Bartholomew framed Eaglin’s voice with some classic second-line bands. Snooks was rarely recorded under his own name after that until 1987, when he released the first of five albums (one live) on New Orleans indie Black Top that together justify every claim ever made for him. The best is Teasin ‘You, the first of three (followed by Soul’s Edge and Live in Japan) using the George Porter Trio as his rhythm section; the former Meters bassist and his drummer Herman Ernest III cut Eaglin the deepest grooves he ever got to work with, and Snooks knew how to fill them. His guitar is alternately stuttering and stinging (“Baby, Please Come Home”), hammering (“When It Rains It Pours”), slinking (Willie Tee’s title song), bristling (“Traveling Mood”) and swinging (“Heavy Juice”). He leavens the funereal mood of “Black Night” by scatting to his guitar licks, cuts the dreaminess of “Sleepwalk” with a well-placed six-string snarl, and positively sizzles from beginning to end while simultaneously sounding loose and limber, as if he hasn’t a care in the world. His attitude rubs off; on “Heavy Juice” and “Red Beans” pianist Sammy Berfect, on leave from leading his local gospel group the Dimensions of Faith, plays some of the most fluid and funny variations on traditional NOLA r&b 88s ever caught on record.

Soul’s Edge is nearly as good, opening with a six-minutes-plus overhaul of Fats Domino‘s chestnut “Josephine,” on which Ernest reinvents Crescent City funk drumming while Eaglin alternately jabs and tip-toes with his guitar before laying down some muddy sheets of sound. His overwhelmingly weary reading of Dann Penn’s “Nine Pound Steel,” a 1967 Joe Simon hit, is punctuated by a guitar break that’s like a pained cry on a bleak night. He’s just as pumped up on the live album, highlighted by a madly swinging “Quaker City,” a guitar solo on “Josephine” that’s as gnarled as the roots on an ancient redwood, an even more going-down-slow “Black Night” and two delightfully off-the-wall remakes in the Isley Brothers ‘razor-sharp “It’s Your Thing” and Stevie’s swamp-inflected “(Boogie On) Reggae Woman.” With Snooks Eaglin, you could always expect the unexpected.