SLEEPY JOHN ESTES

Live in Japan with Hammie Nixon

Delmark

By Bill Dahl

Sleepy John Estes had plenty of lost time to make up when he triumphantly returned to the recording studio under the auspices of Bob Koester’s Delmark Records in 1962.

The sightless acoustic guitarist hadn’t had a fresh platter on the shelves in a couple of decades, though he’d managed to cut a handful of unreleased sides for Chicago’s Ora Nelle label in 1948 and Sam Phillips’ Memphis-based Sun Records in ‘52 that did nothing to free him from his extremely impoverished living conditions in Brownsville, Tennessee.

From 1929 to 1941, Estes had been a prolific and popular blues artist on the Victor, Champion, Decca, and Bluebird labels, waxing the classics “The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair,” “Divin’ Duck Blues,” “Someday Baby Blues,” “Drop Down Mama,” and “Lawyer Clark Blues.” But those glory days were long in the rearview mirror by the time Sleepy John was rediscovered and reverently presented to the folk-blues crowd for their edification. 

Often accompanied on harmonica, jug, and occasional kazoo by his longtime pal Hammie Nixon (they started playing together in the mid-‘20s), Estes did a fair amount of recording during the 1960s, most of it for Delmark. The label even deposited him in a modern amplified setting in ‘68 in the wake of Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud, drolly christening the results Electric Sleep.

Estes was still going strong during the mid-‘70s, touring Japan twice with Hammie his loyal playing partner. Live in Japan is culled from four of the pair’s acoustic concerts over there, the first two dating from November of 1974 and the others from December of ‘76. Despite being in his mid-70s (Nixon was in his late 60s), Estes brought laudable enthusiasm to his vocals and strumming. Sleepy John and Hammie reprised “The Girl I Love” and “Divin’ Duck” as well as the Delmark-era “Broke And Hungry,” “Stop That Thing,” and “Rats In My Kitchen,” which Estes had first done for Sun.  

Equally deft on harp and jug, Nixon was a deeper, gruffer singer than Estes, the two handily complementing one another in much the same way that Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee did before personal animosity broke that legendary duo up. Estes and Nixon’s Japanese repertoire encompassed brief reprises of “When The Saints Go Marching In” and “Holy Spirit, Don’t You Leave Me” and Hammie’s spirited “Fox Chase” alongside the meatier “Corrina Corrina,” and “Tin Pan Alley,” all delivered with an authority honed over half a century.

The last four numbers on the disc find the pair sharing the stage with Yu Ka Dan, a sympathetic Japanese band that doesn’t intrude in the slightest on “Sleepy John’s Twist” (no relation to anything by Chubby Checker), “Love Grows In My Heart,” and “Brownsville Blues” (Estes didn’t shy away from singing about wanting to get his “ashes hauled” on the latter). The band-backed segment concludes with a short “Jesus Is On The Mainline.”

This would be Sleepy John’s last Japanese jaunt: he died in 1977 at age 78. These tapes were released in Japan but haven’t seen light of day stateside until now. These 21 live tracks are a nice addition to Estes’ discography.

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