Snooks Eaglin – New Orleans Street Singer

I have just purchased a CD of Snooks New Orleans Street Singer/That’s alright. It is very nostalgic for me.

I first had this album back in 1965. It was a beautiful old cardboard sleeve Folkways album. I was sixteen and avid about Blues. Those albums were hard to find. You had to hunt them out.

That Snooks album was different. It wasn’t the standard Blues that I was used to from Chicago with the likes of Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf, neither was it the country Blues of Robert Johnson, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Son House. This was softer, more melodic and varied. It was almost folk music with that drawling New Orleans voice.

Back then I did not know about New Orleans, Cajun and Zydeco, but I can hear all that in there.

I was very attached to that album. I used to study that sleeve and play it to death. It was an album I used to put on when I had girlfriends round. I was very intense about my music. If girls weren’t attuned to my likes in music they weren’t worth bothering with. I’m sure a number of my girlfriends of erst-a-year are now deaf from all that earnest exposure to Blues and R&B played exceedingly loud. I am not sure how many of them were really impressed.

A lot of my most valued Blues albums were borrowed and never returned. I leant 57 of my best to a friend called Adam when we went off to the States in 1971. When I came back he’d moved. All those rare Folkways and original imported albums. I can still remember them.

I am now listening to Snooks with his acoustic guitar for the first time for ages and ages and I can’t think why I have not chased him up sooner. What a delightful album. It hasn’t lost its lustre at all!!