15 Sleepy John Estes - Stop That Thing

Sleepy John Estes - Stop That Thing 3:21
(Nixon/Estes, P.D.)

Sleepy John Estes, vocal, guitar; Hammie Nixon, harmonica November, 1974 from Live In Japan (coming in 2014)

Sleepy John Estes “Stop That Thing”
Sleepy John Estes’ 1930s/early-‘40s recordings (including “Someday Baby,” the prototype for the now-standard “Worried Life Blues”), with their vivid lyric imagery intensified by Estes’ high-pitched, crying vocals, are among the blues’ most spellbinding. Long thought dead, he was found living in an abandoned sharecropper’s shack near Brownsville, Tennessee, by filmmaker David Blumenthal in 1962. Blumenthal sent word to Bob Koester, who seized the opportunity to introduce this blues legend to a new generation. This track, which also features Estes’ longtime companion Hammie Nixon on harmonica, is taken from an upcoming, previously unreleased live recording that Estes made in Japan in 1974.