Baton Rouge's Swamp Blues
The world, and Crowley studio, that built legends like Slim Harpo, Lazy Lester, Henry Gray, and all the rest
Find a Spotify Playlist of Baton Rouge's Swamp Blues music to accompany the article, here:
Swamp blues—the music Baton Rouge can claim as its own—might never have been heard beyond local juke joints if J.D. Miller hadn’t met Otis Hicks.
In 1946, Miller, a musician and songwriter in the southwest Louisiana city of Crowley, produced recordings by country-Cajun musicians Leroy "Happy Fats" LeBlanc and Oran "Doc" Guidry at Cosimo Matassa’s studio in New Orleans. In 1947, he built a studio at his home in Crowley and, during the next several years, launched several labels, recording artists the likes of Aldus Roger, Jimmy Newman, Clifton Chenier, Rusty and Doug Kershaw, and Wayne Toups early in their careers.
In 1954, at the invitation of Ray Meaders, a disc jockey at Baton Rouge’s WXOK known as Diggie-Doo, Miller traveled to Baton Rouge and listened to a blues band.
“In my judgment, they wasn’t too much of a band,” Miller told British writer John Broven in 1979. “And I was walking out the hall when I heard a guitar playing some of the low-down blues. I said, ‘Who in the world is that?’ … I turned ’round and went back in there, started talking to him. I asked him if he did any singing. He said, ‘I knows a few numbers.’ You know how he talked, real slow. So he sang two or three songs. I tell you what, they did things to me. I knew right then and there we had somebody we could sell.”
Otis Hicks was the “somebody” who inspired Miller to turn around. A forty-one-year-old blues singer and guitarist from LaSalle Parish, he’d moved to Baton Rouge in the late 1940s, some years after he’d served a ten-year sentence for manslaughter in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Hicks wasn’t a particularly original artist, but it didn’t matter. “I thought his music was just so real,” Miller explained.
"So [Otis Hicks] sang two or three songs. I tell you what, they did things to me. I knew right then and there we had somebody we could sell.” —J.D. Miller
Miller gave Hicks a new name: “Lightnin' Slim”. After his first three singles appeared on Miller’s Feature Records label, the producer’s 1955 deal with Ernie Young, owner of Excello Records in Nashville, secured national distribution for Miller’s recordings of Hicks and other Baton Rouge bluesmen. According to Miller, the Crowley sessions with those artists yielded ninety percent of Excello’s sales during Miller’s twelve years of dealing with the company.
[Read this: A poem by artist John Lawson about Lightnin' Slim—"Leaves Sound Like Keys"]
Hicks soon introduced Miller to the artist who’d become Excello’s and Baton Rouge’s biggest blues star. A singer, guitarist and stylishly expressive harmonica player, James Moore was born in the West Baton Rouge Parish community of Mulatto Bend on February 11, 1924—making 2024 is the centennial year of his birth. Before the release of Moore’s 1957 Excello debut, the otherworldly “I’m a King Bee,” Miller bestowed a colorful show business name upon him, too: “Slim Harpo”. “King Bee” wasn’t a breakout hit, but it has since become a classic that’s been re-recorded by innumerable major artists—including the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and John Belushi. In 2008, the Recording Academy inducted Moore’s original recording of the song into the Grammy Hall of Fame. His mournful 1961 country-blues ballad, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” became his first hit—rising to No. 17 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 34 on the music trade publication’s pop chart. In 1966, Moore reached Billboard’s No. 1 spot on the R&B chart with “Baby Scratch My Back,” a country-funky romp that also ranked No. 16 on the Hot 100 singles chart.
[Read these stories from our archive about the iconic Slim Harpo:
- "Snoopin' Around the Blues: British writer Martin Hawkins examines the life of legendary musician Slim Harpo in a new biography" by Ruth Laney
- "Still the King Bee: William Gambler thinks his stepfather Slim Harpo would be amazed to know that his music is still loved" by Ruth Laney
- "Whaddaya Know, There's Slim Harpo!: Blues impresario Johnny Palazzotto is documenting the life of the legendary musician" by Ruth Laney ]
Moore might have become even more successful if not for his unexpected death in 1970 at forty-five years old. He was preparing for his first European tour at the time of the fatal heart attack. Martin Hawkins, author of the 2016 Moore biography Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge, believes Slim Harpo had nowhere to go but up. “He’d have been known at blues venues all over the world,” Hawkins said following the book’s publication.
Like Slim Harpo, Leslie Johnson entered Miller’s studio by way of Lightnin' Slim. A singer, guitarist and harmonica player from Scotlandville, Johnson met Hicks on a bus going to Crowley. Accompanying him to a recording session at Miller’s studio, Johnson played for the session because the scheduled harmonica player didn’t show up. Renamed “Lazy Lester” by Miller, he soon recorded his own distinctive, country- and rock-and-roll-flavored blues classics.
Even though Johnson, Lightnin' Slim, Slim Harpo, and other Baton Rouge artists who recorded in Crowley were influenced by Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, they were nevertheless all unique. The “swamp blues” label later attached to them was perhaps more a consequence of their geographical location (Baton Rouge) and Miller’s production values than anything else. Like Sun Records in Memphis—famous for its rock ’n’ and rockabilly acts—Miller’s Crowley studio and the recordings he produced there possessed a special sound defined by his high technical and musical standards. As session keyboardist Katie Webster told John Broven: “When you go into J.D. Miller’s studio, you have to cut perfect records—you cannot make one mistake. You cannot get away with nothing in that studio.”
Miller also had an invaluable studio accomplice in Johnson (Lazy Lester). He worked as a resourceful arranger and session musician, adding harmonica and imaginative percussion to other artists’ recordings. His percussion work includes the woodblocks and bongos in Slim Harpo’s “Baby Scratch My Back,” and improvised percussion instruments for other recordings, such as newspapers and cardboard boxes stuffed with various quantities of paper. “All those effects that you hear, that was me,” Johnson told this reporter in 2006. “I heard the empty spaces and filled that up with something.”
Johnson also helped create the Miller studio’s signature echo, often described as “doomy.” The secret, Johnson said in a 2017 interview, was stucco walls covered by fourteen coats of Dutch Boy paint. The slick surface created a room so sonically alive that “you could snap your fingers and bust your eardrums in there,” Johnson said. “Yeah, J. Miller and I, we’d fiddle around with stuff and come out with something different.”
“All those effects that you hear, that was me,” Johnson told this reporter in 2006. “I heard the empty spaces and filled that up with something.”
The procession of Baton Rouge bluesmen to Crowley continued into the mid-1960s with Lonesome Sundown (Cornelius Green), Silas Hogan, Moses “Whispering” Smith, and Tabby Thomas. Although Miller’s partnership with Excello essentially ended in 1966, Slim Harpo continued with the label under its new ownership, releasing “Tip On In,” a Top 40 R&B song in 1967.
Harry Oster and Folk-Blues
While Miller worked with Baton Rouge’s electric blues artists, Harry Oster, an English professor at LSU, was making field recordings of traditional music in Louisiana. Between 1956 and 1963, Oster recorded old French ballads, Cajun music, African-American fiddle tunes, spirituals, prison work songs and, yes, blues. He recorded the majority of the recordings in southwest Louisiana and the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The acoustic folk-blues he captured existed in a world apart from Miller’s carefully crafted, commercially aimed Excello productions.
Oster met his greatest discovery, Zachary native Robert Pete Williams, when the singer-guitarist was serving a life sentence for murder at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Recognizing his talent and authenticity immediately, Oster recorded Williams at the Angola prison farm and founded an independent label to release the material, Folk-Lyric. Through Oster’s appeals to Louisiana’s governor, pardon board, and others, Williams received servitude parole in 1959 and was sent to work on a farm in Denham Springs. After the restrictions on his parole were lifted in 1964, he performed at folk festivals in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Oster later wrote that Williams’s improvisational, expressive style was “as close to pure folk tradition as anyone of his generation.” “All the music I play,” Williams told Oster, “I just hear it in the air. All of my blues that I put out, that was made-up blues. I make up my own blues, you see.”
Williams introduced Oster to Willie B. Thomas and James “Butch” Cage. A Mississippi native who played fiddle, guitar, and cane fife, Cage moved to Zachary in the late 1920s. Thomas was a country-blues singer and guitarist born on the same West Baton Rouge plantation as Slim Harpo. They’d been performing together for thirty years when Oster recorded them—a rare example of the pre-blues string band tradition in the Baton Rouge area. After the 1960 release of their album, Country Negro Jam Sessions, the duo performed at that year’s Newport Folk Festival and appeared in television specials and documentary films.
When Oster left LSU in 1963 to teach at the University of Iowa, his documentation of Baton Rouge folk blues was already extensive and invaluable.
Recording opportunities for other Baton Rouge artists stalled in the years after J.D. Miller’s partnership with Excello ended. But activity resumed significantly in 1970, the year Chris Strachwitz, owner of the California-based roots-music label Arhoolie Records, and Terry Pattison recorded Louisiana Blues. The multi-artist album features Arthur “Guitar” Kelley, Moses “Whispering” Smith, Silas Hogan, Clarence Edwards, and Henry Gray—a singer-pianist who played piano with Howlin’ Wolf’s band in Chicago for twelve years. Strachwitz also bought Oster’s Folk-Lyric Records and re-issued many of the label’s recordings—including those of Robert Pete Williams. Also in 1970, British producer Mike Vernon recorded the same lineup on Arhoolie’s Louisiana Blues for his Excello release, Swamp Blues. In addition, Excello went on to issue solo albums by Smith (Over Easy, 1971) and Hogan (Trouble, 1972 and Trouble: Best of the Excello Masters, 1995) as well as the multi-artist Blues Live in Baton Rouge at the Speak-Easy (1972).
The Blues Revival
In 1980, former Excello artist Ernest Joseph “Rockin’ Tabby” Thomas opened Tabby’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall in a former pharmacy on North Boulevard—creating a venue for himself and his peers Hogan, Gray, Kelley, Whispering Smith, and Raful Neal.
“All those guys, they didn’t have anywhere to play,” Thomas told this reporter in 1999. “They played little cafés. People didn’t pay to go see them, didn’t care nothing about them. But those guys had records out all over the world. They didn’t get the money for the records they made, but they kept the blues alive, plus they ignited the people overseas to know about Baton Rouge.”
[Read this story about the life and work of bluesman Tabby Thomas, from our February 2014 issue.]
The Blues Box also served as blues school for young performers, including Houma’s Tab Benoit, New Orleans’s Johnny Sansone, Baton Rouge’s Larry Garner and Troy Turner, and Thomas’s son, future Grammy-winner Chris Thomas King.
“They played little cafés. People didn’t pay to go see them, didn’t care nothing about them. But those guys had records out all over the world. They didn’t get the money for the records they made, but they kept the blues alive, plus they ignited the people overseas to know about Baton Rouge.” —"Tabby" Thomas
Blues fans from across the world visited Thomas’s genuine juke joint, the low-budget establishment that preceded the much better-financed House of Blues and B.B. King Blues Club chains. “I was just chosen for this thing,” Thomas said in a 1997 interview at the Blues Box. “I’m not on no ego trip. I’m just out here hustling, trying to take care of business.”
The 1979 opening of Tabby’s Blues Box and the 1981 staging of the first Baton Rouge Blues Festival signaled a local blues revival. Jimmy Beyer was the festival’s director, assisted by organizers Nick Spitzer, then director of the Louisiana Folklife Program, Joyce Marie Jackson (later chair of LSU’s Department of Geography and Anthropology), the Arts and Humanities Council of Greater Baton Rouge, and others. Thomas, Raful Neal, Moses “Whispering” Smith, and New Orleans R&B singer Ernie K-Doe performed at the inaugural festival, held on the Southern University campus, overlooking the Mississippi River.
“At the beginning of the blues festival, we were battling people who didn’t think a blues festival was appropriate,” Spitzer recalled in an interview conducted in 2023. “When we did it on the grounds of the Old State Capitol (in 1983), people asked why we were spending money on a blues festival—that kind of attitude. I got in trouble when I said the Baton Rouge blues guys were invited to Europe, but the Baton Rouge Symphony had to do car washes and bake sales to raise money to go to Europe. People didn’t like that, but it was true.”
After Spitzer, who’d later launch his long-running national radio show, American Routes, left Baton Rouge in 1985 for a position at the Smithsonian Institution, the blues festival continued as an annual event under various stewardship. Tabby’s Blues Box operated for twenty-four years, surviving a relocation from North Boulevard to downtown’s Lafayette Street before it closed in November 2004 with a marathon grand finale.
The Blues Box is fondly remembered history now, but another institution, the Thursday night blues jam at Phil Brady’s Bar & Grill, is approaching its fortieth anniversary. Like Tabby’s Blues Box, the Brady’s jam has served as a blues school for young and aspiring musicians, often placing them in the presence of blues elders. Other activities at Phil Brady’s include the Baton Rouge Blues Society’s annual all-star summer and Christmas events.
Another beloved, still-active home to blues performers in the area is Lloyd “Teddy” Johnson’s nearly fifty-year-old venue, the world-famous, always-decorated-for-Christmas Teddy’s Juke Joint in Zachary.
The Baton Rouge Blues Scene Today
The Excello generation of performers and their peers inevitably passed from the local stages. In 2020, the blues community lost one of its best-loved and longest-performing members, Henry Gray. Another example of a local talent known nationally and internationally, Gray played his piano almost until his death at ninety-five years old.
The Baton Rouge Blues Festival continues under the auspices of the Baton Rouge Blues Festival and Foundation. The foundation’s stated mission is “to promote, preserve, and advance the swamp blues music and culture native to Baton Rouge.” The lineup for the 2024 festival, scheduled for April 19–April 21, includes area talent as well as Mississippi blues artists Charlie Musselwhite and D.K. Harrell, and Baton Rouge-born genre-bending Louisiana French musician, Louis Michot.
Kenny Neal (Raful Neal’s oldest offspring), also one of the 2024 Blues Festival performers, and his fellow second-generation blues artist Chris Thomas King continue to spread the word about blues from Louisiana’s capital city. In 2021, King also contributed to blues literature, publishing his memoir/history of blues, The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music. Thomas’s and Neal’s decades-long international careers include a Grammy win for King and a nomination for Neal. Neal’s younger brother, Lil’ Ray Neal, their siblings, as well as younger Neal family members, form Baton Rouge’s first family of blues. They are joined by such other new-generation musicians as Jonathon “Boogie” Long, Leroy Bishop Toussaint, and others who keep the local blues flame burning.
[Read this profile of Kenny Neal from our 2023 Music Issue, by John Wirt: "Blues Keep Chasin' Me", or this article from the March 2023 issue about Chris Thomas King's book, which controversially argues that Baton Rouge is the home of the blues.]
Fifty-four years after his death, Slim Harpo remains the most recognized swamp blues artist. He’s the subject of Johnny Palazzotto’s 2023 documentary The Original King Bee, and the name behind Palazzotto’s Slim Harpo Music Awards, which have shone a light on blues artists, past and present, since 2003. Other tributes include Gibson Guitars’ 2021 unveiling of the Slim Harpo “Lovell” model guitar; the 2016 publication of Martin Hawkins’s biography Slim Harpo: Blues King Bee of Baton Rouge; the 2015 compilation album Buzzin’ the Blues: The Complete Slim Harpo by Germany’s Bear Family Records; the 2014 dedication of a Louisiana State Historical Marker near Moore’s grave in Mulatto Bend Cemetery; and, of course, the 2008 induction of Moore’s debut, “I’m a King Bee,” into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Other classic bluesmen from Baton Rouge hold their places in the city’s musical memory as well. In 2019, Martin Hawkins showcased them in Blues Kings of Baton Rouge, the 53-track CD set he produced for Bear Family Records. The collection features Cage and Thomas, Lazy Lester, Lightnin' Slim, Raful Neal, Slim Harpo, Tabby Thomas, Silas Hogan, Henry Gray, and more.
On the international stage, the Rolling Stones expressed their affection for Baton Rouge blues through their recording of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee,” a track on the group’s 1964 debut album, and in their remarkably faithful rendition of “Shake Your Hips” on the 1972 album considered their best, Exile on Main St. The Stones also acknowledged Slim Harpo’s predecessor at Excello, Lightnin' Slim, with their interpretation of his song, “Hoo Doo Blues,” a track on the group’s 2016 album, Blue & Lonesome. The British rock stars revisited the Baton Rouge scene again in 2018, selecting recordings by Slim Harpo, Lightnin' Slim, and one-time Baton Rouge resident Buddy Guy for their curated anthology of blues classics, Confessin’ the Blues.
In the Blue & Lonesome liner notes, Keith Richards gives credit where credit’s due: “If you don’t know the blues, there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll.”