J.B. Lenoir - Biography
By Chris Morris
There were two sides to Chicago bluesman J.B. Lenoir. On the one hand, he was a blues entertainer. For years, the vocalist-guitarist plied his trade in the Windy City clubs and bars, decked out in a zebra-striped tuxedo, singing in his distinctively high, piping voice, playing a boogie style he called “the African hunch rhythm.” He also wrote such popular standards as “Mamma Talk to Your Daughter” (his only hit, performed by such contemporaries as Magic Sam) and, with bassist-songwriter Willie Dixon, “You Shook Me” (very profitably covered by Led Zeppelin on their 1969 debut album).
But his music also had a deeper aspect. From his earliest days as a recording artist, he wrote and played topical material. His first single, released by Chess, was “Korea Blues,” a 1950 number about the contemporaneous conflict. His 1954 45 “Eisenhower Blues,” about the economic crunch during the titular president’s first term, was so controversial that it was re-released as “Tax Paying Blues,” with its lyrical references to Ike expunged. By the ‘60s, Lenoir was writing forceful personal songs about racial discrimination in the South and the war in Vietnam. Few blues performers of the time made music that was so outspoken or affecting.
The outline of Lenoir’s career is similar to those of many of his contemporaries who moved north to Chicago in the ‘40s and ‘50s. He was born March 5, 1929, in Tilton, Mississippi. (Sources often give his birthplace as Monticello, Mississippi, but he identified Tilton as his hometown in a 1965 film interview.) From birth he went by his initials only – they stood for nothing; he pronounced his last name “Lenore” (as it was often misspelled), rather than “Len-war” (as his fan John Mayall sang it in his musical tribute).
His parents and brother all played guitar, and Lenoir took up the instrument at an early age. At 15, during a trip to New Orleans, he met the peripatetic harmonica player and vocalist Sonny Boy Williamson and his friend and sometime road partner, slide guitarist Elmore James, who may have influenced his decision to play professionally. (Lenoir would be a label mate of both musicians at Chess in the ‘50s.) In 1949, he moved to Chicago to try his hand at music full time.
Lenoir wound up recording for most of the important Chicago independent labels catering to the blues market. He made his first sides for Joe Brown’s J.O.B. Records; a couple, including “Korea Blues,” were licensed to the larger Chess organization. After several singles – including the propulsive “The Mojo,” recorded with pianist Sunnyland Slim – went nowhere commercially, Lenoir moved to Parrot Records, operated by the powerful local disc jockey Al Benson. After weathering the controversy over “Eisenhower Blues,” he made his only trip to the R&B charts with “Mamma Talk to Your Daughter,” which climbed to No. 11 nationally in July 1955.
He recorded for Chess’ Checker subsidiary from 1955 to 1958, but none of his singles struck pay dirt, and a good deal of his material for the label went unissued until the release of his posthumous compilation Natural Man (1970). (An expanded two-LP version, Chess Masters, appeared in 1976.) He recorded only sporadically in the early ‘60s, cutting obscure tracks for Vee-Jay and USA.
The Chicago blues scene began to dwindle in the early ‘60s as more sophisticated styles of R&B took hold among black audiences, but, like many of his contemporaries, Lenoir secured work in Europe, where listeners embraced a more primal sound. In 1965 – the same year writer Paul Oliver recorded him for the LP companion to his book Conversation With the Blues – he appeared as part of the American Folk Blues Festival, the touring compendium of US blues stars assembled by promoters Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, with musical direction by Willie Dixon.
Likely as a by-product of these AFBF appearances, Dixon sat Lenoir down in a Chicago studio with his acoustic guitar and drummer Fred Below for a pair of sessions in 1965 and 1966. Two albums worth of material surfaced much later on Lippmann and Rau’s L + R label, as Alabama Blues (1979) and Down in Mississippi (1980). As lively as his earlier work was, these are his most potent recordings, despite the acoustic setting. They include bouncy renditions of old crowd-pleasers like “I Feel So Good” and “Mojo Boogie,” but they also feature searing topical numbers like “Alabama,” “Move This Rope,” “Alabama March,” “Down in Mississippi,” “Shot On James Meredith,” “Vietnam Blues,” and “Vietnam” (an updated version of “Korea Blues”). Lenoir’s reputation as a blues original largely rests on this work.
By 1967, Lenoir had abandoned Chicago for downstate Champaign, Illinois, where he worked in a kitchen at the University of Illinois. He was involved in a rear-end car collision sometime in April 1967; though his injuries were not believed to be serious, he died on April 29, 1967, after a heart attack many believe was brought on by the accident. He was only 38. One of his greatest admirers, the British singer-pianist John Mayall, memorialized him in the song “The Death of J.B. Lenoir” on his Bluesbreakers album Crusade (1967).
While most of Lenoir’s output was reissued on CD, his music remained the province of dyed-in-the-wool blues fanatics for many years. In 2003, his profile received a major lift when he was featured in Soul of a Man, German director Wim Wenders’ feature-length contribution to the multi-part PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues. The film – which profiled Wenders’ favorite blues singers Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and Lenoir -- included striking, newly unearthed footage of Lenoir (shot in the mid-‘60s by blues fans Steve and Ronnog Seaborg) and covers of Lenoir’s songs by Los Lobos, Nick Cave, T-Bone Burnett, and Cassandra Wilson.