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Blues Before Sunrise Live – Volume One
Delmark DE 699 (2004)
Compact Disc

Featuring John Brim, Billy Boy Arnold, Jimmy Burns, Big Wheeler

“An unpretentious collection of traditionally-oriented Chicago blues performances … Jimmy Burns concludes this collection with a strong rendition of Jimmy Rogers’ “You’re the One.” —Jazz & Blues Report

rec. October 20, 1996 live in Chicago at B.L.U.E.S.


1 Golden "Big" Wheeler– I'm Ready
2 Golden "Big" Wheeler– Down In Virginia
3 Golden "Big" Wheeler– She Loves Another Man
4 Golden "Big" Wheeler– Got A Feeling (I Got The Blues)
5 Golden "Big" Wheeler– I Gotta Go
6 John Brim– Be Careful
7 John Brim– Lonesome Man Blues
8 John Brim– Tough Times
9 John Brim– Ice Cream Man
10 Billy Boy Arnold– Streetwise Advisors
11 Billy Boy Arnold– Billy Boy Medley
12 Jimmy Burns– You're The One
13 Jimmy Burns– Leaving Here Walking

Benefit for Steve Cushing's famed syndicated traditional blues radio show- BLUES BEFORE SUNRISE with live performances recorded at B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted, Chicago

Benefit concert for Steve Cushing's 'Blues Before Sunrise' radio show. Rock solid Chicago style blues from one of the city's best-known clubs.

BIG WHEELER (1-5)
Big Wheeler - vocals, harp
Dave Waldman - guitar
Johnny Burgin - guitar
Steve Cushing - drums

JOHN BRIM (6-9)
John Brim - vocals, guitar
Illinois Slim - guitar
Sho Komiya - upright bass
Steve Cushing - drums
Dave Waldman - harmonica
Martin Lang - harmonica (last half of #9)

BILLY BOY ARNOLD (10-11)
Billy Boy Arnold - vocals, harmonnica
Johnny Burgin - lead guitar
Herman Costa - rhythm guitar
Sho Komiya - bass
Kelly Littleton - drums

JIMMY BURNS (12-13)
Jimmy Burns - vocals, guitar (#13)
Johnny Burgin - lead guitar
Martin Lang - harmonica (#12)
Sho Komiya - bass
Kelly Littleton - drums
Frank Krakowski- rhythm guitar (#12)

1 I'm Ready (Willie Dixon)
Big Wheeler 06:43
2 Down in Virginia (Jimmy Reed)
Big Wheeler 05:12
3 She Loves Another Man (James A. Lane)
Big Wheeler 04:05
4 Got a Feeling (I Got the Blues)
Big Wheeler 08:05
5 I Gotta Go (Little Walter)
Big Wheeler 03:32
6 Be Careful
John Brim
John Brim 04:33
7 Lonesome Man Blues
John Brim
John Brim 03:38
8 Tough Times
John Brim
John Brim 04:19
9 Ice Cream Man
John Brim
John Brim 04:01
10 Streetwise Advisors
Billy Arnold / Billy Boy Arnold
Billy Boy Arnold 04:10
11 Billy Boy Medley: Stormy Monday, Broken Hearted Blues, Sonny Boy's ...
Public Domain
Billy Boy Arnold 11:19
12 You're the One (James A. Lane / Jimmy Rogers)
Jimmy Burns 03:51
13 Leaving Here Walking
Jimmy Burns
Jimmy Burns 06:41


For 17 years DJ Steve Cushing has aired Blues Before Sunrise, the 'Blues Heritage Showcase', over Chicago's public radio station 91.5FM WBEZ, and for the last six years the rest of the country has also had a chance to hear his show via satellite syndication. Broadcast from midnight to 5 a.m., Blues Before Sunrise has long served an audience that includes loyal home listeners, musicians lounging on break, lovers in their living rooms, cab drivers and other service workers pulling the graveyard, and even teen airwave surfers discovering an entire musical world peopled by cats who were hip before them.

Blues Before Sunrise showcases blues as part of a cultural landscape that includes jump and jive, rhythm and blues, swing, doo ****, gospel, comedy, and recitation, and never is the music presented as kitsch or retro fashion in the way that some music has been exploited and trivialized. For Cushing the blues is a living African-American tradition with deep roots.

As a musician himself bearing substantial credentials with Magic Slim and The Teardrops, the Lee Jackson band and Smokey Smothers and The Ice Cream Men, Steve Cushing numbers among his friends and closest associates the artists on this recording-fellow musicians to whom this is a vital, thriving music as well as a means of making a living.

Now gone independent and seeking permanent sponsors, Blues Before Sunrise held a benefit concert at Chicago's B.L.U.E.S. on October 20, 1996 to purchase satellite time to keep the show on the air. The packed-to-the-doors fund-raiser featured artists Billy Boy Arnold, John Brim, Jimmie Lee Robinson, Taildragger, Big Wheeler, Jimmy Burns, Lurrie Bell, Willie Buck, Lester Davenport, Dave Myers, Sammy Fender and others&emdash;each an extraordinary practitioner of Chicago blues and together a full-credit, higher education history lesson in the blues. The portion of the show preserved on this CD is hair-bristling proof of among other things the constancy of the post-war sound and of the vitality of the ever-fruitful Chicago scene.

Vocalist and harp player Big Wheeler leads off backed by Rockin' Johnny Burgin, Dave Waldman and Cushing, as he was on his 1993 Delmark release Bone Orchard (Delmark 661), performing three original compositions solidly in the musical style of his other two selections, Muddy's 'I'm Ready' and Little Walter's 'Got To Go.'

Gary, Indiana native John Brim reprises four of his now-classic Chess sides supported by some of the original Ice Cream Men (named by Illinois Slim when they played behind Otis 'Big Smokey' Smothers who was one, and only coincidently also the name of one of Brim's numbers) Cushing, Dave Waldman, Slim (Tom Morris), and Sho Komiya on bass, and on the last cut, Martin Lange on harp.

Billy Boy Arnold still sounds like the young man he was when he waxed classic 45s 'Ain't Got You' and 'I Wish You Would' in the mid-1950s. 'Streetwise Advisor', a sly paean to the Bronzeville patter of his youth, is followed by a rock-the-house-down musical pastiche that begins as 'Stormy Monday' and leads into a medley of verses from his mentor Sonny Boy (John Lee) Williamson.

Johnny Burgin and The Lazy Boys provide crack period back-up with a contemporary freshness behind both Arnold and Jimmy Burns (they were also the studio band in Burn's recent release Leaving Here Walking (Delmark 694) and they appear with him weekly at Smoke Daddy's). Burns makes Jimmy Rogers' 'You're The One' sound brand new, then closes out in thrilling fashion with the soulful, minor-key title track to his CD, a fitting end that effortlessly stretches the blues boundaries.

These musicians (all of them heard regularly on Blues Before Sunrise) aren't 'revival' acts. They're out there every day playing music that would never occur to them as being 'old' or 'retro' but instead is part of an ongoing cultural tradition.

Put this platter on and spin your own private Chicago blues festival featuring some of the best current practitioners of the genre, courtesy of Blues Before Sunrise and Delmark Records. Then go out and see them live. And afterwards, tune in to the show.

And may the sun never set on Blues Before Sunrise, or the Chicago Blues.

--Justin O'Brien