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Originally Posted by averagebluesman  Ah man. I believe you man. Thats awesome you got to play with him and Wolf. Thats awesome you go to play his bass. What I would do to play with one of the original Chicago Bluesman. I would be stoked just to have someone to play blues with period. I have no car or amp to get me to a bluesjam. Okay. I've got a lot of questions and even more will probably pop into brain throughout the next few weeks. I won't bombard you with them. But heres a few.
What was his bass style like?
Did he just stick to shuffles, walks, and the like? In the video it looks like hes just shufflin back and forth. How complex did his style get?
Did he play with a pick, fingers, both?
Did he play any other instruments?
Did he play any other styles of music?
Once again thats cool you got to play with him? How did you meet up with him in the first place? |
How did I meet him?...
He actually came up and tapped on my shoulder at a nightly blues jam that Bob Reidy used to hold on the north side of Chicago. I was between bands, just idling at the time... he asked what I was doing Friday night? That's how it started.
The Wolf had been sick (kidneys) and then had a car accident and wasn't working much, this was just a couple years before he died. Andrew took the opportunity to go off on his own with his own band. We were called the Bluebloods. He made an album on (I think) Dharma (?) records. I wasn't on that as it was finished by the time we met. He did the singing and worked the young ladies. He left the playing to the band. The Wolf would come around once in a while and sing a tune... but he was pretty weak by then. I think he passed away in '76. We had a couple good years playing around the Chicago area... lots of adventures. That chapter opened many doors for me and I got to play with many blues greats in the last half of the '70's.
So I didn't actually see Andrew play bass all that much, mostly at his house on Soul Sundays at the invitation of his wife, Shirley, where I got to play his basses. Andrew played typical blues bass of the time, used a thumb-finger plucking style, and shuffled all right. Those cats had a funny (to me) technique of hitting the 1 and then moving 4 frets up to the 3 and finishing the pattern using the box up high... it seemed pretty inefficient, but it gets a very distinctive sound in a Chicago shuffle. There are still a few alive who do that, including Shorty Gilbert, but not many. Bob Stroger was / is one of the few older bass cats who played most patterns in one position like I tend to.
Andrew played guitar some but didn't when he was singing so it was more of a stage prop than anything else. At some point Andrew stopped booking as much and I was busy playing with Eddie Taylor, Hubert Sumlin, Sunnyland Slim and a whole bunch of other blues cats. Next we heard Andrew had gone back to Louisiana, and then not much later we heard he passed away. That was a surprise, as he had seemed very healthy.
As for me, I had a few more good years in that scene before moving out east. Much later I took a college "Blues" class and for a final paper I found a bunch of photos and wrote a paper describing some of my experiences in detail with this. If you're interested I could send you a copy if you PM me a snail mail address.
Thanks for your interest. And if you're ever able to locate the "Bluebloods" album, let me know. Mine disappeared years ago.
