Snooks Eaglin, Remember Snooks

REMEMBER SNOOKS EAGLIN

"Remember Me"

Snooks Eaglin was born in New Orleans on January 21, 1936, and died there, aged 73, on February 18, 2009.

For me he will always be the young man in dark glasses, playing his guitar surrounded by children on the porch of a wooden shack, as in the photograph by Harry Oster used on early Storyville LPs. I only saw him perform live on one occasion, much later in his career.

If I had to pick an all-time favourite 45 rpm single, it would be “Country Boy” b/w  “Alberta”, on the Storyville label, recorded at a session in 1961.

When I first came to love those songs, they were two of the highlights on an amazing long-playing record. I thought I had discovered the greatest blues-singer and acoustic guitarist ever, a master of both the six-string and the twelve-string guitar.

But Snooks was not just a blues-singer. He could play pop music, New Orleans R ‘n’ B, flamenco (“Malaguena”), rock ‘n’ roll, country ( “A Thousand Miles Away From Home”), whatever took his fancy. He wouldn’t be type-cast; but at the time he was first being discovered, when he was around 32, he seemed to have brought folk-blues into the modern age.

I always thought of him as a cross between Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.

He could interpret Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” in as exciting a way as Ray himself, and his version of “That’s All Right” was just as driving as the original by Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup or the classic rockabilly version by Elvis..

At the end of the day, he will be remembered for “Alberta” (which Eric Clapton has covered in similarly sensitive style) and “I’m a Country Boy, Down in New Orleans”.

According to Harry Oster, Dick Allan, Associate Curator of the Archive of New Orleans Jazz, “suggested most of the lines during an informal session at the home of Snook’s parents”.

Thus are masterpieces born.

Listening to him sing “I went to the Mardi Gras”, it’s sad to think that there will be no more Mardi Gras for the hugely-talented Fird Eaglin, Jr., once so inadequately labelled as Blind Snooks Eaglin, New Orleans street singer.

Here's Snooks' version of "Well I had my fun"

The track we should all be playing in memory of Snooks Eaglin is the transcendental spiritual “Remember Me”, the last track on the 1964 Storyville LP, “Snooks Eaglin: Portrait in Blues Vol. 1”.

We will remember him.

An excellent discography can be found on www.wirz.de/music/eaglfrm.htm