Snooks Eaglin
(Black Top)
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Blind since the age of two, Eaglin broke in on the scene in the 50s, first as a session guitarist and later as a member of the Flamingoes, a popular R & B combo led by Toussaint. By the end of the decade Eaglin was leading a double life of sorts. Folklorist Harry Oster started recording him in 1958, and the solo acoustic results presented Eaglin as a quaint bluesman smack-dab between rural urgency and urban smoothness. Released during the ferment of the folk-blues movement, these early recordings quickly endeared Eaglin to a small coterie of dedicated white college students who cagily sought out genuine old-timers in order to balance their obsession with people like Mike Bloomfield and John Mayall. Yet even Eaglin’s earliest output proves that he refused to hew to any single convention. On That’s All Right (OBC), a collection recorded by Oster in 1961 and reissued on CD in 1994, Eaglin nonchalantly complements blues ruralism with idiosyncratic takes on contemporary R & B hits by Ray Charles and Amos Milburn; Eaglin cut his musical teeth on the jump blues of the 40s and early 50s. But while pipe-smoking future hippies in crisp white shirts marveled over his stirring authenticity, Eaglin was making exuberant, blatantly commercial R & B geared toward folks more interested in getting down than studying bluesmen like mounted butterflies.
If his soulful singing hadn’t quite come into its own, his guitar playing had. Self-taught, Eaglin developed an unusual stinging style marked by a striking percussive quality; indeed, sometimes he seems to be snapping the strings. Without the benefit of watching others play, Eaglin learned not so much to strum the guitar as to hammer at it. The attack makes his playing instantly recognizable, whether he’s nailing punchy, single-note flurries (“I’m Slippin’ In”) and gnarled, chunky runs (“[Mama] Talk to Your Daughter”) or merely breaking down chords into gentle arpeggios (“That Certain Door”). Eaglin’s delicate interplay with Booker on “C.C. Rider” simultaneously spotlights his effortless lyrical fluidity and his understanding of the inherent soul contained within the blues. Whether jumping deep into the blues or playing more pop-oriented R & B material, his solos always sparkle with energy and feeling.
