Jimmy Witherspoon - Urban Blues Singing Legend

Witherspoon, Jimmy

'Spoon' was born in Gurdon, Arkansas in 1923. When he was in grade school, he won a county contest singing Water Boy. I guess from then on I knew I was destined to be a singer. His early influences were groups like the Ink Spots. Even so, he liked the blues singers he encountered - singers like Herb Jeffries, Jimmy Rushing and Leroy Carr. By fourteen, he'd decided he wanted to be a professional singer. One day he took off for California. Once in LA, he got himself a job washing up. After work he'd go to chicken joints, where he could sit in for a couple of songs. I used to sing up there with Art Tatum and Slam Stewart. By now, he was a fan of Joe Turner, who he'd seen singing with Duke Ellington. I was always inspired by him. I used to go to his house before I was singing professionally - he said I was going to be a great blues singer. But the war intervened. He went to sea. He returned to California. He worked in the shipyards during the week and sang the blues at weekends. After a couple of months, Jay McShann came through, looking for a singer Spoon would stay with the McShann band for almost five years and become a friend of the bandleader. But in his first session for Aladdin in 1945, Spoon merely shared the vocal duties. His first song was Walter Brown's Confessing The Blues, which he had made his own, as he did Hard Working Man's Blues. He was sole vocalist at a pair of 1946 sessions. The following year he cut his first session as a solo artist. McShann played piano on the next session, and brought his brother Pete to play drums. Spoon would record many times more, but his life was plagued with career fluctuations - the late 1950s brought him some hardship. But he persevered and found audiences who liked their singing with a tincture of jazz. There would be other successes and an effort of will that saw him conquer throat cancer. He'd enjoyed another upturn in his fortunes before he died at home in Los Angeles on September 18, 1997.

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