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James Kinds – Love You From The Top (w/ Eddie Shaw)
Delmark DE 811 (2010)


Bluesman James Kinds was born in Drew, Mississippi in 1943 and moved to Chicago in 1959 where he quickly became involved in the music scene. He hung out at blues clubs on the west side and formed his first group, Oasis, in 1967. He recorded “Ada” in the mid-’70s for Cloud 9 and it’s still James’ show-stopping closer that he sang at the 2007 Chicago Blues Festival. In 1982, Oasis issued West Side featuring guests Barkin’ Bill, Eddie “Jewtown” Burks, Jimmy Dawkins and Hip Linkchain. In 1993, James drove his daughter to Dubuque, Iowa for college and while he was there he saw some wonderful real estate opportunities and made the move from Chicago. Since then he has continued to play the blues, issuing three CDs and maintaining a Chicago presence by visiting and performing here often. This was James’ first Delmark CD and features special guest Eddie Shaw on tenor sax.

1. Love You From The Top 3:56
2. If You Need It 4:49
3. I Got A Woman 3:31
4. Mason Dixon Line Blues 6:51
5. Crack Headed Woman 2:53
6. Oo Wee Baby 4:03
7. Peggy Sue 3:41
8. Take A Look At Yourself 3:52
9. Katie 4:44
10. Body Slam 2:48
11. I Didn't Go Home 4:55
12. Johnny Mae 4:26
13. I Can't Take It 4:58
14. My Mama Told Me 4:43
15. High Heel Shoes 4:26

All songs by James Kinds

James Kinds, vocals, guitar (right channel)
Al Poole, guitar (left channel on 1,4,8,10,11,13)
Anthony Dotson, bass
Claude L. Thomas, drums
Eddie Shaw, tenor sax (1,5,9,12)

Recorded September 19, 2009 and August 1, 2010 at Delmark's Riverside Studio, Chicago

More...
James Kinds has always possessed a powerful voice, cutting his teeth on southern Gospel and developing his own distinctive style as a young man. Born in 1943 in Drew, Mississippi, he first sang in the church choir, which led to his joining the Gospel quartet, Spirit Of Joy.

Inspired by juke-joint Blues and early Rock & Roll, he left Mississippi for Chicago in 1958 where he became a fixture on the local music scene mixing Blues with Soul and awing audiences with his explosive delivery and intense stage routine.

In Chicago, he started out with The Soul Seekers, and hooked up with Little Mack Simmons in 1961. In addition to doing some gigs with Kansas City Red, Roy Hytower, Lee Shot Williams, Little Caesar, Johnny B. Moore, and Eddie King, James has had the opportunity to work with Blues legends Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells, Ike Turner, Lonnie Brooks, and Bobby Rush.

Kinds wrote a song called “Ada” that garnered international attention and he was named “Best Blues Artist” by Blues News magazine in 1976. Kinds has also been featured in Living Blues magazine.

He was part of a European tour in 1977 that included a show at the Berlin Jazz Festival as part of The New Generation of Chicago Blues Revue, which also included Billy Branch and Lurrie Bell, among others, and was hosted by the legendary Willie Dixon.

James now makes his home in Dubuque, where he has been performing regularly with his current band, The All Night Riders. The band recently released their third album, Don’t Get It Twisted.

They have performed at several fests including the Prairie Dog Blues Festival. James had the honor of performing at the Chicago Blues Festival in 2007 and has been featured in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald several times.

The word has been spreading about James Kinds and he now holds the honor of being inducted into the Iowa Blues Hall of Fame.




In 1977, James Kinds was one of Chicago’s most promising young bluesmen. Blessed with a stirring, gospel-enriched vocal delivery, he toured Germany that year, boldly billed as “The New Generation of Chicago Blues.” A Living Blues feature confidently declared, “The best new voice in Chicago may well belong to James Kinds.” But unlike his co-stars Billy Branch, Lurrie Bell, and Johnny B. Moore, maintaining that high profile proved difficult, except on the West Side blues circuit that had long nurtured “the Kind Man’s” dynamic, soul-tinged act.
That would change after he relocated to Dubuque, IA in 1993. James made such a name for himself there that he was a 2008 Iowa Blues Hall of Fame inductee. Yet he’s never had a nationally distributed album properly spotlighting those golden pipes until now. Love You From The Top is sure to open a lot of eyes. Complete notes by Bill Dahl enclosed.


Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
Recorded, mixed and mastered at Riverside Studio, Chicago by Steve Wagner
Assistant mix engineer: Dave Katzman
Photography: C 2010 Marc PoKempner
Design, Kate Moss, Moonshine Design
Special thanks to Kevin Johnson




In 1977, James Kinds was one of Chicago’s most promising young bluesmen.
Blessed with a stirring, gospel-enriched vocal delivery, he toured Germany that year with a package assembled by Jim and Amy O’Neal that arrived boldly billed as “The New Generation of Chicago Blues.” A Living Blues feature confidently declared, “The best new voice in Chicago may well belong to James Kinds.” But unlike his co-stars Billy Branch, Lurrie Bell, and Johnny B. Moore, maintaining that high profile proved difficult for the singer, except on the West Side blues circuit that had long nurtured “the Kind Man’s” dynamic, soul-tinged act.
That would change after the singer relocated to Dubuque in 1993. James made such a name for himself in his new surroundings that he was a 2008 Iowa Blues Hall of Fame inductee. Yet he’s never had a nationally distributed album properly spotlighting those golden pipes until this one. Love You From The Top, cut at Delmark’s in-house studios, is sure to open a lot of eyes as to what Kinds can do vocally (he splits guitar duties with his longtime pal, Al Poole).
“I really was wanting to be on the Delmark label,” says James. Eddie Shaw’s lusty tenor sax adds to the steamy West Side ambiance on several tracks, just as he did on Magic Sam’s classic Delmark album Black Magic more than four decades ago. “Eddie goes way back for me,” says Kinds. “He was one of my mentors.”
The prolific Kinds displays a predilection for using ladies’ names as song titles (“Peggy Sue,” “Katie,” “Johnny Mae”), while the set’s hard-driving title track stems from personal romantic experience. “It was a friend of mine that I was singing about,” he confides. “Basically, all my music is something like that, about somebody that lost a love and is looking for one.” A churning R&B groove powers “I Got A Woman,” and Kinds does some intense testifying on the slow-grinding soul ballad “Take A Look At Yourself.”
Drew, Mississippi is a long way from Chicago’s West Side. Born April 23, 1943, James grew up there on a plantation situated on Blue Lake, eight miles outside Tutwiler. Singing in the Mount Olive Baptist Church choir gave him his first musical experience, yet he soaked up as much blues as possible within the confines of his religious home. “I got in trouble more than once about the blues,” James says. “You know how women are. They was really off into spiritual stuff, and they would catch me playing the blues. But I’d go right around the house and go right back!” He ordered his first guitar from a Sears, Roebuck catalog and taught himself how to play it.
Kinds formed a gospel quartet, the Spirit of Joy, when he was only 13. “We were some green boys, but we had that sound together,” he says. They never recorded but did perform on Clarksdale’s WROX radio, championed by deejay Early Wright. “’The Man With the Mouth All Over His Face,’ they called him!” laughs James, who had to turn down an offer a year later to join the famous Spirit of Memphis when his mother forbade him to go. “It did good until all of us got grown and started moving away to Chicago and Detroit, St. Louis,” he says of the quartet. “And I was without a group. About a year later, I moved to Chicago.” That was in 1959.
The 16-year-old arrived in the Windy City with clear-cut goals. “To go out on my own music, and to get somewhere where I could make me some money. I wasn’t making no money in the South,” he says. “I got to Chicago and got me a job, and that was alright.” At first he gravitated back to the church, joining the Soul Seekers. “I sung a little gospel in Chicago, but I wasn’t obligated to no group,” he says. In the end, however, the blues won out. Sitting in at drummer Kansas City Red’s joint on West Lake Street started the ball rolling.
“I heard about blues being there by word of mouth, and just went,” remembers James. “I picked one of the coldest nights in Chicago to go. And didn’t nobody show up for the gig, nobody but the musicians. So we were sitting around the heater there, and they started doing songs. Red asked me, he said, ‘Anybody in here know “Laundromat Blues”?’ I said, ‘I know it!’ And he said, ‘All right, let me hear you sing it!’ I did, and he said, ‘Well, bring your guitar Friday. You got a gig!’” Kinds would become a regular at Walton’s Corner and the 1815 Club on West Roosevelt Road.
James was a charter member when bassist Purvis Scott formed the Oasis in 1967. “I was working at Walton’s Corner, and one of the guys, the bass man in there, he was part owner at the time,” he says. “We just all got together, just started to playing together, doing different shows. He named the band the Oasis.”
“Ada,” Kinds’ 1977 debut 45, was cut with Oasis at Ed Cody’s studio on South Michigan Avenue and came out on the tiny Cloud – 9 label, which James had a piece of. It endures as James’ showstopping finale; he often roams through his audience while belting its impassioned lyrics. “To tell you the truth, ‘Ada’ kept me above board for years,” he says. “Everybody wanted to hear ‘Ada.’ I was singing it from my heart.”
Not long after the release of “Ada,” Kinds split for Los Angeles to work with Ike Turner at his Bolic Sound studios. The connection didn’t work out too well. “He wanted money, and he wanted results,” James says. “He’d give you a whole day to do something, as long as when that day was over with, you’ve got it.”
The 1993 move to Dubuque changed everything for Kinds. “I came out here to bring my daughter out here to go to school,” he says. “I liked the quietness of this town. There’s something about this town that’s really quiet. I said, ‘Well, I’ll stay here and write some blues.’” Eventually hooking up with a young trio, the All-Night Riders, James made three CDs for his own Full Clip label: 2004’s Dirty Old Man (Down To Earth), the next year’s The Blues Come Home, and Don’t Get It Twisted in ’07. James and the Riders went their separate ways in 2008. Now he’s ready to embark on the next chapter of his career, encouraged greatly by the release of this CD.
“I see it doing good things for me,” says James. “I believe it’s gonna take me places that I’ve been wanting to be at.”
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
ABS Magazine, No. 22: “Portrait James Kinds,” by Kevin Johnson and Jean-Luc Vabres
Living Blues, No. 25, Jan.-Feb. 1976: “Chicago Blues Today—A New Generation of Blues Part Three,” by Jim O’Neal
Living Blues, No. 36, Jan.-Feb. 1978: “The New Generation of Blues in Berlin,” by Tommy Lofgren

Other Delmark albums of interest:
Eddie Shaw & The Wolf Gang, Can't Stop Now (698) with Detroit Jr.
Magic Sam, Black Magic (620) with Eddie Shaw
Live (645) with Eddie Shaw
Rockin' Wild In Chicago (765) with Eddie Shaw
Tail Dragger, American People (728) with Eddie Shaw, Johnny B. Moore, Billy Branch
It Ain't Over, Delmark Celebrates 55 Years Of Blues (800 CD, 1800 DVD) with
Eddie Shaw, Billy Branch, Tail Dragger, Little Arthur Duncan
Johnny B. Moore, Rockin' In The Same Old Boat (769)
Troubled World (701)
Live at Blue Chicago (688) with Willie Kent, Karen Carroll
Willie Kent, Too Hurt To Cry (667) with Johnny B. Moore, Billy Branch
Lurrie Bell, Blues Had A Baby (736)
Jimmy Burns, Leaving Here Walking (694)