Search - Big Walter Horton, Alfred "Blues King" Harris :: Harmonica Blues Kings

Solid, Brilliant, Amplified 50's Chicago Blues

R. Suzuka | Chicago, IL USA | 03/20/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you are looking for great Chicago Blues this would be a good album to look into. Moments into the first track, I felt very refreshed by this album. Maybe it was Big Walter's perfect tone, or the pure, steady groove by his band (which in the first track includes Lafayette Leake, Willie Dixon and Fred Below), but whatever it was, I was hooked. The first two tracks, as the album notes point out, are Big Walter Horton's first recordings under his own name. Other tracks with Horton in them have him backing up vocalist Tommy Brown who's performance is also great.
Tracks 1-8 are with Big Walter Horton and Tracks 9-16 have Alfred "Blues King" Harris on harmonica, who is someone I was not familiar with before picking up this album. His harmonica playing is a little bit more breathy than Big Walter's but that's not bad at all, just different. A little more Jimmy Reed with some Sonny Boy Williamson II, but with a different approach than both of them. All in all, it's a great Chicago Blues album. One thing that I also like about this disc is that just about all the songs are relatively obscure and even if they are well known they haven't been overdone to my ears. I, by the way although not anything close to a Blues buff, am more of just a BIG BIG Blues fan (over 350 Blues albums and growing by the week). So really, you can see why lesser known songs make the disc sound much more refreshing for me, personally."