Biography

radio contact: Kevin Johnson, promo@delmark.com

Click Here for more Delmark Releases!

Sleepy John Estes
On The Chicago Blues Scene
(originally titled Electric Sleep)
Delmark DE 619

…Later that year (1964), in a sub-cellar jazz club in Dusseldorf, while John was touring Europe for the first time with the American Folk Blues Festival, John sat in at an impromptu session with Hubert Sumlin (Howling Wolf's guitarist), Sonny Boy Williamson, Sunnyland Slim and some other local musicians. I was amazed at how comfortably John was able to sing with such relative modernists. I promised John that one day we would cut an album with such a sound…Complete notes by Bob Koester enclosed.

1. I Ain't Gonna Sell It 3:09
2. Laura Had A Dream 4:03
3. Divin' Duck Blues 4:22
4. Walking Down Beale Street 2:58
5. Everybody Oughta Make A Change 5:07
6. Need More Blues 5:48
7. Drop Down Mama 3:49
8. Airplane Blues 4:22
9. How To Sing These Blues 3:07
10, Sweet Little Flower 3:43
11. May West 4:57
12. Easin' Back To Tennessee 3:56
13. Newport Blues 5:05

All songs by John Adam Estes. 5-8, 12 published by Songs Of Universal Inc., BMI. All others P.D.

Sleepy John Estes, vocals, rhythm guitar
Sunnyland Slim, piano
Jimmy Dawkins, lead guitar
Carey Bell, harmonica, bass (2,4)
Earl Hooker, bass (3,9,11,13)
Joe Harper, bass (remainder)
Odie Payne, Jr., drums

Recorded December 3 and 5, 1968

Originally titled Electric Sleep
The title ELECTRIC SLEEP was a take-off on the title of Muddy Waters' ELECTRIC MUD. However, the similarities end there. While ELECTRIC MUD was psychedelic, ELECTRIC SLEEP simply combined a country blues artist with an electric Chicago blues band.


Album Production and Supervision: Robert G. Koester
CD Production: Steve Wagner
Recording: Dave Antler, Sound Studio
Mixed and mastered at Riverside Studio, Chicago by Steve Wagner (with inspiration from Dave Antler's original 1968 mix).
Design: ForDzine, Dave Forte


The first song John sang for me in his neighbor's shack outside Brownsville, Tennessee was "Driving Wheel", Roosevelt Sykes' great song which I only knew from the 1940 Decca 78. That was the year John concluded a five-year contract with that label and I assumed he had recalled the tune all those many years. I was mistaken.
"I got that off the radio last month-I believe it's by Junior Parker."
John Adam Estes is steeped in the rural tradition and has spent little of his life in Chicago. (He usually came to the city to record a few sides, celebrate a little, and return to Tennessee.) He did live in Memphis for a number of years and that city was as much his "scene" as Brownsville-especially after Heywood County went dry. John was living there when Parker, BB, Bland, Wolf, etc. were creating that early Memphis sound that is so important in the development of Chicago blues style.
On that first desperate concert tour on the way to make John's first album for Delmark (The Legend Of Sleepy John Estes, Delmark 603), John insisted upon dragging along an old amplifier which he never used because the college kids always had a nice Gibson just made for singing the blues. But out on 43rd and Drexel, in the home of John's sister, where John could really let his hair down, the amp was used and good times were had by all.
Another listening experience with Sleepy John Estes that helped shaped this album occurred when John first performed at the Newport Folk Festival. Hammie Nixon promoted the gig for the band in a waterfront bar that catered to black sailors and borrowed an amp for himself to give the Estes-Rachell-Nixon trio a decidedly non-rural sound. It was a new experience to hear Nixon's harp blown thru an amp and he made full use of all the potentialities. It was a whole new sound.
Later that year (1964), in a sub-cellar jazz club in Dusseldorf, while John was touring Europe for the first time with the American Folk Blues Festival, he sat in at an impromptu session with Hubert Sumlin (Howling Wolf's guitarist), Sonny Boy Williamson, Sunnyland Slim and some local musicians. I was amazed at how comfortably John was able to sing with such relative modernists-perhaps I should say modernizers. The ensemble had that strident, rugged, audacious sound of a band at Pepper's or Theresa's-a sound I had by that time come to fully appreciate. I promised John that one day we would cut an album with such a sound.
This was in the back of our minds when we started going around the various south and west side clubs of John's subsequent trips to Chicago. One night John sat in with Junior Wells' band at Theresa's. Sam Lawhorn also sat in on guitar. After the first tune, Junior-who usually takes his rest when others are sitting in-got back on the bandstand to back John up on harp.
Last winter John returned to Chicago for a weekend at the Quiet Knight, bastion of folk-blues on Wells Street. Yank fell ill after the first night so Jimmy "Fast Fingers" Dawkins (who had just finished recording his first Delmark album-Fast Fingers, Delmark 623) filled-in and acquitted himself so well that we decided to go ahead with the album. Sunnyland Slim was available for the piano chair and the legendary harmonicist Carey Bell had returned to music and was working on his first Delmark album (Carey Bell's Blues Harp, Delmark 622). He appears here on both harp and bass. Joe Harper, of Dawkins' blues trio, did most of the rest of the bass-work but earl Hooker dropped by the sessions and sat in for a few tracks. Odie Payne, Jr. was the logical choice for drums because of his long and wide experience accompanying blues artists of almost every generation. It was no easy task for the musicians to get down on john's Brownsville beat and there were the usual "country time" situations, but the end result was one of the most satisfying albums Delmark has ever issued: Sleepy John Estes-an integral part of today's blues.
-Robert G. Koester

The above is the original 1968 liner notes. Sleepy John Estes passed away in 1977.

Sleepy John Estes, The Legend Of… (603) with Hammie Nixon
Broke and Hungry (608) with Hammie Nixon, Yank Rachell, Mike Bloomfield
In Europe (611) with Hammie Nixon
Brownsville Blues (613) with Hammie Nixon, Yank Rachell, Ransom Knowling
Newport Blues (639) with Hammie Nixon, Yank Rachell
Blues From Up The Country (907) with Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams…
Yank Rachell, Mandolin Blues (606) with Sleepy John Estes, Big Joe Williams
Chicago Style (649) with Floyd Jones, Odie Payne
Carey Bell, Blues Harp (622) with Jimmy Dawkins, Eddie Taylor, Pinetop Perkins
Heartaches and Pain (666) with Lurrie Bell
Getting' Up (DVD 1791, CD 791) with Lurrie Bell
Jimmy Dawkins, Fast Fingers (623) with Eddie Shaw
All For Business (634) with Otis Rush, Voice Odom
Blisterstring (641) with Jimmy Johnson
Sunnyland Slim, Smile On My Face (735) with Lacy Gibson
House Rent Party (655) with Jimmy Rogers, Willie Mabon

Send for free catalog of jazz & blues:
Delmark Records, 1 800 684 3480, 4121 N. Rockwell,
Chicago, IL 60618
www.delmark.com
CP 1991 Delmark Records

Sleepy John Estes Biography by Barry Lee Pearson

Big Bill Broonzy called John Estes' style of singing "crying" the blues because of its overt emotional quality. Actually, his vocal style harks back to his tenure as a work-gang leader for a railroad maintenance crew, where his vocal improvisations and keen, cutting voice set the pace for work activities. Nicknamed "Sleepy" John Estes, supposedly because of his ability to sleep standing up, he teamed with mandolinist Yank Rachell and harmonica player Hammie Nixon to play the house party circuit in and around Brownsville in the early 1920s. The same team reunited 40 years later to record for Delmark and play the festival circuit. Never an outstanding guitarist, Estes relied on his expressive voice to carry his music, and the recordings he made from 1929 on have enormous appeal and remain remarkably accessible today.

Despite the fact that he performed for mixed Black and white audiences in string bands, jug bands, and medicine show formats, his music retains a distinct ethnicity and has a particularly plaintive sound. Astonishingly, he recorded for six decades on Victor, Decca, Bluebird, Ora Nelle, Sun, Delmark, and others. Over the course of his career, his music remained simple yet powerful, and despite his sojourns to Memphis and Chicago he retained a traditional down-home sound. Some of his songs are deeply personal statements about his community and life, such as "Lawyer Clark" and "Floating Bridge." Other compositions have universal appeal ("Drop Down Mama" and "Someday Baby") and went on to become mainstays in the repertoires of countless musicians. One of the true masters of his idiom, he lived in poverty, yet was somehow capable of turning his experiences and the conditions of his life into compelling art.