October 2011. Whaddya Know —There's Slim Harpo!: Blues impresario Johnny Palazzotto is documenting the life of the legendary musician.

Johnny Palazzotto remembers the only time he saw Slim Harpo perform live. It wasn’t in a club—it was on a Baton Rouge street.

“He was sitting in his driveway on 36th Street when I drove past,” recalls Palazzotto in the control room of his downtown studio, with his rat terrier Maggie standing guard. “He had a harmonica around his neck and he was strumming on a guitar. I didn’t know who he was then. It was only later I realized that was Slim Harpo.”

That was in the mid-1960s, and the teen-aged Palazzotto was already a fan of blues music. “I used to listen to Diggy Doo [disc jockey Ray Meadows] on WXOK every afternoon after school,” he says. “He played a lot of great local and regional music—Fats Domino, Ray Charles. That’s where I first heard Slim Harpo’s ‘Tee-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu’ and ‘King Bee.’”

Born James Moore in Lobdell, Harpo grew up in a poor farming community in West Baton Rouge Parish. He left high school and struck out for New Orleans, where he worked as a stevedore. As a child, he had loved music. Unable to afford a guitar, he bought a ten-cent harmonica and taught himself to play it. Soon he had numerous “harps,” which he carried in a tackle box. He also began writing songs.

After moving to Baton Rouge, he played with local musician Lightnin’ Slim. Adopting the stage name Slim Harpo, he eventually recorded with J. D. Miller of Crowley, who leased the recordings to Excello Records in Nashville. Such songs as “Rainin’ in My Heart,” “I’m a King Bee,” and “Baby Scratch My Back” would become classics.

Harpo’s tunes appealed to such rising stars as Van Morrison, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds. The Stones covered “King Bee” on their 1964 debut album and “Shake Your Hips” on Exile on Main Street. The Kinks recorded “Got Love If You Want It” in 1964.

Those covers brought royalty checks, but for most of his career Harpo kept his day jobs—he worked construction, hauled scrap metal and sugar cane, even worked at a gas station. In 1949, he married Lovell Gambler and became a stepfather to her children. She often traveled with him, and she wrote, or cowrote, several of his songs.

To Palazzotto, Harpo’s music always stood out. “If you look at Slim’s lyrics compared to most other blues songs, it’s not, ‘Ooh, baby, you broke my heart,’” he says. “His lyrics are so untypical of the blues. Listen to ‘Don’t Start Crying Now’ and ‘Got Love If You Want It.’ They’re unique and written from a different standpoint. The roots is in the blues, but the simplicity of the chords and the interesting lyrics make his music more adaptable to rock and roll.”

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