Snooks Eaglin – New Orleans Street Singer

Posted on by Opher

I was introduced to the Blues by my friend Dick Brunning when I was fourteen. This was back in 1963 and he was only fourteen as well. I haven’t a clue where he got it from. It wasn’t popular back then. This was the time when the Stones, Animals, Them, Pretty Things, Yardbirds and all the other British R&B groups were beginning their impact. I had the privilege of having heard the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed before hearing the cover versions. Not that I didn’t love what those British bands did with the Blues, I did.

It was around 1966 that I discovered Snooks Eaglin. I found this Folkways cardboard cover album of Snooks’ New Orleans Streetsinger. Back then you could not hear it. You had to take a chance. I liked the look of the cover so I bought it. It set me back a quid.

I was quite excited by it. As was the way back then, I rushed home, put it on the dansette record player, turned up the volume, and sat back in my bedroom to listen while studying the album cover and reading the liner notes. I flipped it over and played the second side and then back through again.

I had discovered Snooks. He wasn’t like any blues I had heard before even though he was playing a few blues numbers I’d heard by the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Leadbelly. I didn’t know at the time why that was. There was a different sound, different rhythm and different drawl. There was some of the country blues but also folk elements. I was later to discover the other ingredient was that New Orleans sound. I loved it and played that album to death. I still have it.

I remember getting out a few of my old Folkways albums, Snooks, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Joe Williams and Lightnin’ Hopkins to impress a new girlfriend with my mature tastes and worldliness. She wasn’t at all impressed. She was mad about the Hollies. So that backfired.

So anyway, I’m sitting in my room listening to Snooks again. He takes me back in time.

This was one of my favourites.

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20 thoughts on “Snooks Eaglin – New Orleans Street Singer”

  1. Way back when we I first started buying records we had 3 weekly music papers. I used to buy ‘Melody Maker’, sometimes the ‘NME’, but never ‘Disc & Echo’ – I think it was called.
    Anyway, I would quite often see mention of the Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee duo. Somebody’s older brother had their album and I got to hear it. I hated it and was left with the impression that if this is ‘Blues’ music, I didn’t want to know. It didn’t sound anything like Cream.
    It was only later that I discovered just how terribly dull this duo were, it was no wonder they bored me to death. There were the ‘Foster & Allen’ of the Folk music world in Blues terms. Woefully bad. I dislike them even more so today.
    Thankfully, Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters cured my blatant malaise.

    1. I would partly agree Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee were a little bit like the easy listening end of the blues/folk scene. They seemed to me, a bit like Leadbelly and Bill Bill Broonzy, to tailor their sound for a white audience.
      Having said that I did like some of their early work, particularly on that old Folkways album with a great version of Sitting On Top of the World. I saw them live on Blues packages twice and they were quite good, though completely blown away by the likes of Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and Big Joe Williams.
      I quite liked them with Woody Guthrie but then I liked most things Woody Guthrie did and theirs wasn’t the best.

      1. That’s because it was new to everybody that heard it.
        With the likes of Big Joe Williams around, that duo really needn’t have bothered.

      2. Big Joe was larger than life. He only had a twenty minute slot but received such a great response from the crowd that he wouldn’t go off. They had to drag him off stage.

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  5. Reblogged this on Opher's World and commented:

    I had this album of Snooks – New Orleans Street Singer – when I was at school. I used to play it to death. It had such a laid-back feel to it – not quite Blues, not quite Folk and not quite Cajun. It was Snooks.

  7. I saw Sonny and Brownie on that Pete Seeger public television show. I’d heard a bit of blues before, but Sonny and Brownie became my favorites. And still are. I had already played harmonica, so what Sonny Terry did with it was just fascinating to me.. And then the spirit of it. Snooks’s recording is simple. The frankness of the lyrics and the directness of the blues was a breath of fresh, non-commercial air back then. And it still is.

    1. It was the same with me Bumba. The Blues represented something that wasn’t plastic and processed. It was real.
      I saw Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee perform twice. They came across on the Blues Tours along with Son House, Bukka White, Skip James and Muddy Waters. I was so lucky.

      1. I s
        As I’ve seen them as much as I’ve seen anyone. Maybe four or five times. In my one life novel, Francine, a Vegas hooker tells about a young man she knew years ago who stopped outside a record store to point out an album of theirs. Francine recalls telling the young n

      2. Sorry, writing on the phone. She tells him that when he’s older he’d outgrow his s enthusiasm for these things. And the young man answered No, he wouldn’t. Francine was a lovely but very bitter character.

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