[Harp-L] R.I.P. Snooky Pryor

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R.I.P. Harmonica Great Snooky Pryor
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Snooky Pryor
Distinctive harmonica player who returned to music late in life
Tony Russell 
Friday November 10 2006
The Guardian


Snooky Pryor, who has died aged 85, was the last of the group of harmonica players who distinguished the Chicago blues scene of the 1940s and 50s. If not quite the equal of men like Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Walter "Shakey" Horton or Junior Wells, he was none the less a player with a distinctive sound, and his contributions to the early development of the Chicago blues-band idiom are held in high regard. In particular, the recordings he made in the late 40s, both in his own name and accompanying the singers Floyd Jones and Johnny Young, established him among blues enthusiasts of the 1960s as one of the defining figures of the primeval Chicago scene.

At a time when even Muddy Waters was no more than an up-and-coming name, and blues activity was dispersed among small neighbourhood clubs and the weekend market on Maxwell Street, Pryor looked as likely as anyone to become a top-ranking bluesman, and his failure to do so seemed to be just another of those blues enigmas.

He was born in Lambert, Mississippi, spent parts of his early life in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, and had a spell of army service in the early 1940s before settling in Chicago. He had been playing the harmonica since he was 14, and gigged in the evenings and at weekends, in clubs like the Jamboree and the 708, with a circle of musicians that included Floyd and his cousin Moody Jones, pianist Sunnyland Slim and guitarists Eddie Taylor and Homesick James.

Pryor's harmonica playing, less orchestral than Little Walter's, had a piercing, penetrating attack that no doubt cut through the chatter in a club as decisively as it sliced the surface-noise of crudely made 78s. His 1948 recordings for the entrepreneur Al Benson's Planet label, such as Telephone Blues or, with Johnny Young, My Baby Walked Out and Let Me Ride Your Mule, have an intensity that is all the more remarkable when one realises that only two or three musicians are involved. His very first recording, an instrumental simply titled Boogie, uses a line that Little Walter would employ several years later on his career-making hit, Juke.

Pryor continued to play with his friends through the 1950s, finally winning a small break in 1956 when he recorded his songs Someone to Love Me and Judgment Day for Vee-Jay, one of Chicago's leading blues labels. Not long afterwards, however, he more or less retired from music, and when researchers tracked him down in the early 70s he had not played for about a decade. He had a well-paid job as a carpenter and a family to raise, and his spare time was given to Bible study.

Disenchanted by seeing little or no reward from his songwriting and recording, he declared that he had no interest in taking up music professionally again; indeed, for some time he refused even to talk to writers if he was not going to be paid for it. At the urging of his old friend Homesick James, however, he recanted, and in 1973 he joined him in the American Blues Legends package that toured Europe. While in England the two men also recorded an album for Virgin Records' Caroline label.

A tall, imposing but genial man, Pryor won the affection of blues enthusiasts wherever he went, and for some years he had more work and acclamation in Europe than at home in America. In the late 80s, when his children had grown up, he retired from his day job and returned to music. His 1991 album Back to the Country, made jointly with the singer and guitarist Johnny Shines, won an award from Living Blues magazine. Over the next 10 years he made a succession of albums, for such labels as Blind Pig, Antone's and Electro-Fi, of old-fashioned Chicago bar-band blues.

"If you make up your mind to survive," he said, "you know, you can make it," and on his last recordings, Snooky Pryor and His Mississippi Wrecking Crew, and Mojo Ramble, both made in 2001, his gruff, powerful singing and pungent harmonica playing seemed almost untouched by time.

·James Edward 'Snooky' Pryor, musician, born September 15 1921; died October 18 2006

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