Sleepy John Estes with Yank Rachel - Mailman BluesMore about
Sleepy John Estes
From Stephan Wirz - American Music:
Illustrated Sleepy John Estes discography
See also
The Tennesseean Encyclopedia - Sleepy John Estes
And here are
23 mp3s of Sleepy John Estes 1929-1940 from
African African, an online encyclopedia of all things African-American, that for its
Rare Recordings and Video page alone--featuring videos and mp3s of civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Angela Davis; vintage films about Negro life from the 1930s through the 1960s and leading to copyright free streaming mp3 pages of select vintage jazz and blues singers like John Adam Estes, which is but a tiny slice of all the African African site offers--is best of the web worthy in its own self.
See also
Meeting Yank Rachel by Ron Hacker
In a similar vein, my friend
Jack Cook took a trip down south when he was 19 and met everyone still alive who recorded a pre-war country blues 78. Jack's encounters with Furry Lewis and Sleepy John Estes on that trip are American Splendor style worthy of illustration by someone like R. Crumb.
When Jack meet Sleepy John, John was living in a shack, thought the boards of the walls of which could been seen daylight, with his wife and children, furnished with a bed, a color TV and a pile of clothes. No one in Brownsville at the time seemed to know who he was. He later was moved to a low income apartment with solid walls and indoor plumbing, which is now preserved as a historical monument.
Jack also stayed with Yank Rachel in Chicago on that trip and remembers Yank as one of the kindest and most generous people he ever met. He remembers bedding down on a sofa in the TV room and noodling on his National over Rollin' and Tumblin' on slide in open G.
Yank stopped in to check on Jack and his friend and allowed as to how he hadn't heard that one for awhile--Yank, who'd played with Hambone Willie Newbern, the song's originator, in his very younger days--and took the guitar with a 'please' and then meditatively ran through about five choruses, each a unique variation as different from the last as the one before, and all this done without a hint of showing off. Jack recalls it as a marvelous moment.
Jack also recalls Sleepy John as being exactly that--sleepy. He was narcoleptic, not there, dozing most of the time he wasn't playing. It would take him aawhile to respond to a question. But when he pick up a guitar and began to sing--one never heard the blues sung so deeply. That was when he came alive and more than that, a force of nature.
Son House was like this when he sang as well. It was like he became possessed.
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posted by Haruspex at 10:29 AM on April 5