Jimmy McCracklin
Encyclopedia
Jimmy McCracklin is an American
pianist
, vocalist, and songwriter
. His style contains West Coast blues
, Jump blues
, and R&B
. Over a career that has spanned seven decades, he says he has written almost a thousand songs and has recorded hundreds of them. McCracklin has recorded over 30 album
s, and owns four gold records
.
in 1938, later settled in Richmond
, California
, and began playing at the local Club Savoy owned by his sister-in-law Willie Mae "Granny" Johnson. The room-length bar served beer and wine, and Granny Johnson served home-cooked meals of greens, ribs, chicken, and other southern cuisine. A house band composed of Bay Area
based musician
s alternated with and frequently backed performers such as B. B. King
, Charles Brown
, and L. C. Robinson
. Later in 1963 he would write and record a song "Club Savoy" on his I Just Gotta Know album.
His recorded a debut single
for Globe Records, "Miss Mattie Left Me", in 1945, and recorded "Street Loafin' Woman in 1946. McCracklin recorded for a number of labels in Los Angeles
and Oakland
, prior to joining Modern Records
in 1949-1950. He formed a group called Jimmy McCracklin and his Blues Blasters in 1946, with guitarist Lafayette Thomas
who remained with group until the early 1960s.
His popularity increased after appearing on the TV
pop
Dick Clark's American Bandstand
in support of his self written single "The Walk" (1957), subsequently released by Checker Records
in 1958. It went to No. 5 on the Billboard
R&B
chart
and No. 7 on the pop chart
, after more than 10 years of McCracklin selling records in the black community on a series of small labels. Jimmy McCracklin Sings, his first solo
album
, was released in 1962, in the West Coast blues style. In 1962, McCracklin recorded "Just Got to Know" for his own Art-Tone label in Oakland, after the record made No. 2 on the R&B chart. For a brief period in the early 1970s McCracklin ran the Continental Club in San Francisco. He booked blues acts such as T-Bone Walker
, Irma Thomas
, Big Joe Turner
, Big Mama Thornton
, and Etta James
. In 1967, Otis Redding
and Carla Thomas
had success with "Tramp", a song credited to McCracklin and Lowell Fulson
. Salt-n-Pepa
made a hip-hop hit out of the song in 1987. Oakland Blues (1986) was an album arranged and directed by McCracklin, and produced by World Pacific. The California rock-n-roll "roots music" band The Blasters named themselves after McCracklin's backing band The Blues Blasters. Blasters' lead singer Phil Alvin explained the origin of the band's name: "I thought Joe Turner’s backup band on Atlantic records – I had these 78s – I thought they were the Blues Blasters. That ends up it was Jimmy McCracklin. I just took the 'Blues' off and Joe finally told me, that’s Jimmy McCracklin’s name, but you tell ‘im I gave you permission to steal it."[1]
McCracklin continued to tour and produce new albums in the 1980s and 1990s. Bob Dylan
has cited McCracklin as a favorite. He played at the San Francisco Blues Festival
in 1973, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1984 and 2007. He was given a Pioneer Award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation
in 1990, and the Living Legend and Hall of Fame award at the Bay Area Black Music Awards, in 2007.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
pianist
Pianist
A pianist is a musician who plays the piano. A professional pianist can perform solo pieces, play with an ensemble or orchestra, or accompany one or more singers, solo instrumentalists, or other performers.-Choice of genres:...
, vocalist, and songwriter
Songwriter
A songwriter is an individual who writes both the lyrics and music to a song. Someone who solely writes lyrics may be called a lyricist, and someone who only writes music may be called a composer...
. His style contains West Coast blues
West Coast blues
The West Coast blues is a type of blues music characterized by jazz and jump blues influences, strong piano-dominated sounds and jazzy guitar solos, which originated from Texas blues players relocated to California in the 1940s...
, Jump blues
Jump blues
Jump blues is an up-tempo blues usually played by small groups and featuring horns. It was very popular in the 1940s, and the movement was a precursor to the arrival of rhythm and blues and rock and roll...
, and R&B
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a...
. Over a career that has spanned seven decades, he says he has written almost a thousand songs and has recorded hundreds of them. McCracklin has recorded over 30 album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
s, and owns four gold records
Music recording sales certification
Music recording sales certification is a system of certifying that a music recording has shipped or sold a certain number of copies, where the threshold quantity varies by type and by nation or territory .Almost all countries follow variations of the RIAA certification categories,...
.
Biography
McCracklin joined the United States NavyUnited States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
in 1938, later settled in Richmond
Richmond, California
Richmond is a city in western Contra Costa County, California, United States. The city was incorporated on August 7, 1905. It is located in the East Bay, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is a residential inner suburb of San Francisco, as well as the site of heavy industry, which has been...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
, and began playing at the local Club Savoy owned by his sister-in-law Willie Mae "Granny" Johnson. The room-length bar served beer and wine, and Granny Johnson served home-cooked meals of greens, ribs, chicken, and other southern cuisine. A house band composed of Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
based musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
s alternated with and frequently backed performers such as B. B. King
B. B. King
Riley B. King , known by the stage name B.B. King, is an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter.Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at No.3 on its list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time. According to Edward M...
, Charles Brown
Charles Brown (musician)
Charles Brown , born in Texas City, Texas was an American blues singer and pianist whose soft-toned, slow-paced blues-club style influenced the development of blues performance during the 1940s and 1950s...
, and L. C. Robinson
L. C. Robinson
L. C. Robinson was an American blues singer, guitarist, and fiddle player. He played a stand-mounted, solid-body, electric steel guitar, the sort often heard in Western Swing bands...
. Later in 1963 he would write and record a song "Club Savoy" on his I Just Gotta Know album.
His recorded a debut single
Single (music)
In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a recording of fewer tracks than an LP or a CD. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats. In most cases, the single is a song that is released separately from an album, but it can still appear...
for Globe Records, "Miss Mattie Left Me", in 1945, and recorded "Street Loafin' Woman in 1946. McCracklin recorded for a number of labels in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
and Oakland
Oakland, California
Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...
, prior to joining Modern Records
Modern Records
Modern Records was an American record label formed in 1945 in Los Angeles by the Bihari brothers. In the 1960s, Modern Records went bankrupt and ceased operations, but the catalogue went with the management into what became Kent Records. This back catalogue was eventually licensed to the UK label...
in 1949-1950. He formed a group called Jimmy McCracklin and his Blues Blasters in 1946, with guitarist Lafayette Thomas
Lafayette Thomas
Lafayette Thomas was an American blues singer, and guitarist.-Career:Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Thomas first heard blues guitar from his uncle Jesse Thomas, but Lafayette Thomas did not play professionally until 1947, in San Francisco, California.The bulk of his recordings were with Jimmy...
who remained with group until the early 1960s.
His popularity increased after appearing on the TV
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
pop
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
Dick Clark's American Bandstand
American Bandstand
American Bandstand is an American music-performance show that aired in various versions from 1952 to 1989 and was hosted from 1956 until its final season by Dick Clark, who also served as producer...
in support of his self written single "The Walk" (1957), subsequently released by Checker Records
Checker Records
Checker Records is an inactive record label that was started in 1952 as a subsidiary to Chess Records in Chicago, Illinois. The label was founded by the Chess brothers, Leonard and Phil, who ran the label until they sold it to General Recorded Tape in 1969, shortly before Leonard's death.The label...
in 1958. It went to No. 5 on the Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
R&B
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs
Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, is a chart released weekly by Billboard in the United States.The chart, initiated in 1942, is used to track the success of popular music songs in urban, or primarily African American, venues. Dominated over the years at various times by jazz, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, soul,...
chart
Record chart
A record chart is a ranking of recorded music according to popularity during a given period of time. Examples of music charts are the Hit parade, Hot 100 or Top 40....
and No. 7 on the pop chart
Billboard Hot 100
The Billboard Hot 100 is the United States music industry standard singles popularity chart issued weekly by Billboard magazine. Chart rankings are based on radio play and sales; the tracking-week for sales begins on Monday and ends on Sunday, while the radio play tracking-week runs from Wednesday...
, after more than 10 years of McCracklin selling records in the black community on a series of small labels. Jimmy McCracklin Sings, his first solo
Solo (music)
In music, a solo is a piece or a section of a piece played or sung by a single performer...
album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
, was released in 1962, in the West Coast blues style. In 1962, McCracklin recorded "Just Got to Know" for his own Art-Tone label in Oakland, after the record made No. 2 on the R&B chart. For a brief period in the early 1970s McCracklin ran the Continental Club in San Francisco. He booked blues acts such as T-Bone Walker
T-Bone Walker
Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker was a critically acclaimed American blues guitarist, singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who was one of the most influential pioneers and innovators of the jump blues and electric blues sound. He is the first musician recorded playing blues with the...
, Irma Thomas
Irma Thomas
Irma Thomas is an American Grammy Award-winning soul and rhythm and blues singer from New Orleans. She is known as the "Soul Queen of New Orleans"....
, Big Joe Turner
Big Joe Turner
Big Joe Turner was an American blues shouter from Kansas City, Missouri. According to the songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him." Although he came to his greatest fame in the 1950s with his pioneering rock and roll recordings, particularly "Shake, Rattle and...
, Big Mama Thornton
Big Mama Thornton
Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton was an American rhythm and blues singer and songwriter. She was the first to record the hit song "Hound Dog" in 1952. The song was #1 on the Billboard R&B charts for seven weeks in 1953. The B-side was "They Call Me Big Mama," and the single sold almost two million...
, and Etta James
Etta James
Etta James is an American blues, soul, rhythm and blues , rock and roll, gospel and jazz singer. In the 1950s and 1960s, she had her biggest success as a blues and R&B singer...
. In 1967, Otis Redding
Otis Redding
Otis Ray Redding, Jr. was an American soul singer-songwriter, record producer, arranger and talent scout. He is considered one of the major figures in soul and R&B...
and Carla Thomas
Carla Thomas
Carla Thomas is an American singer, who is often referred to as the Queen of Memphis Soul. She is the daughter of Rufus Thomas.-Childhood:...
had success with "Tramp", a song credited to McCracklin and Lowell Fulson
Lowell Fulson
Lowell Fulson was a big-voiced blues guitarist and songwriter, in the West Coast blues tradition. Fulson was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He also recorded for business reasons as Lowell Fullsom and Lowell Fulsom...
. Salt-n-Pepa
Salt-N-Pepa
Salt-N-Pepa is an American hip hop trio from Queens and Brooklyn, New York, that was formed in 1985. The group, consisting of Cheryl "Salt" Renee James, Sandra "Pepa" Denton, and Deidra "DJ Spinderella" Roper, was one of the first all-female rap crews....
made a hip-hop hit out of the song in 1987. Oakland Blues (1986) was an album arranged and directed by McCracklin, and produced by World Pacific. The California rock-n-roll "roots music" band The Blasters named themselves after McCracklin's backing band The Blues Blasters. Blasters' lead singer Phil Alvin explained the origin of the band's name: "I thought Joe Turner’s backup band on Atlantic records – I had these 78s – I thought they were the Blues Blasters. That ends up it was Jimmy McCracklin. I just took the 'Blues' off and Joe finally told me, that’s Jimmy McCracklin’s name, but you tell ‘im I gave you permission to steal it."[1]
McCracklin continued to tour and produce new albums in the 1980s and 1990s. Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...
has cited McCracklin as a favorite. He played at the San Francisco Blues Festival
San Francisco Blues Festival
Debuting in 1973, the San Francisco Blues Festival is the longest running blues festival in the United States. Tom Mazzolini, the event's producer, founded the blues festival to educate the public about the history and evolution of the blues...
in 1973, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1984 and 2007. He was given a Pioneer Award by the Rhythm and Blues Foundation
Rhythm and Blues Foundation
The Rhythm and Blues Foundation is an independent American nonprofit organization dedicated to the historical and cultural preservation of rhythm and blues music....
in 1990, and the Living Legend and Hall of Fame award at the Bay Area Black Music Awards, in 2007.
Selected discography
| Year | Title | Genre | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 1951-1954 | West Coast blues | Classics |
| 2004 | 1948-1951 | West Coast blues | Classics |
| 2003 | 1945-1948 | West Coast blues | Classics |
| 2003 | Jumpin Bay Area 1948-1955 | West Coast blues | P-Vine Japan |
| 1999 | Tell It to the Judge! | West Coast blues | Gunsmoke |
| 1997 | The Walk: Jimmy McCracklin at His Best | West Coast blues, Soul-Blues | Razor & Tie |
| 1994 | A Taste of the Blues | West Coast blues | Bullseye Blues |
| 1992 | The Mercury Recordings | West Coast blues, Soul-Blues | Bear Family |
| 1991 | Jimmy McCracklin: My Story | West Coast blues | Rounder |
| 1991 | My Story | West Coast blues | Rounder |
| 1981 | All His Bluesblasters | West Coast blues | Ace |
| 1978 | Rockin' Man | West Coast blues | Stax |
| 1972 | Yesterday Is Gone | West Coast blues | Stax |
| 1971 | High on the Blues | West Coast blues | Stax |
| 1969 | Stinger Man | Soul-Blues | Minit |
| 1968 | Let's Get Together | West Coast blues | Minit |
| 1966 | New Soul of Jimmy McCracklin | West Coast blues | Imperial |
| 1966 | My Answer | West Coast blues | Imperial |
| 1965 | Think | West Coast blues | Imperial |
| 1965 | Every Night, Every Day | West Coast blues | Imperial |
| 1963 | My Rockin' Soul | West Coast blues | United |
| 1963 | I Just Gotta Know | West Coast blues | Imperial |
| 1962 | Jimmy McCracklin Sings | West Coast blues | Chess |