The Classic Sides 1947-1953

Slim always had an angle, always had a sideline that brought in the cash. But... 'Music wasn't really his biggest ambition,' bass player Bob Stroger said. 'He always wanted to help people, it looked like. Johnny Littlejohn, Mighty Joe Young, Robert Covington, Sunnyland had some input in their lives...' He was born in 1906 in Vance, Mississippi. He was always interested in music: 'I was a lover to the minstrel shows, and to hear music - organ, guitar - kind of did me in and look like it would stay on my mind. I'd cut up all your wood and kindlin' to get a chance to play your organ.' He ran away when he was eleven but his father brought him home. 'Finally, I told my grandfather I just couldn't stay there and he gave me five dollars and so I ran away for good.' Big for his age, Albert travelled for some years, picking cotton, working in lumber camps and on section gangs, always looking out for a piano and someone to teach him. Albert roamed throughout Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri. 'I started messing around with the average musicians. I couldn't play but in three keys, you know.' Ma Rainey hired him for a gig. 'And the first thing she stepped out on, she said, "B flat", she patted her foot to the guitar, and when she started out, she wasn't in the key of the guitar or me.' He became one of a mobile fraternity: 'All them best piano players was running up and down them roads... a piano player had a pretty nice way to go. He'd get him a girl everywhere he went and he could holler.' Once established in Chicago in a basement apartment, Slim adopted an 'open house' policy, where musicians could gamble, play and eat a square meal. 'He'd give away more than he'd sell sometimes,' Jimmy Rogers saied, 'but he'd sell whiskey and food and everything...' Here he is, in the chaos of a raucous life with the music he made and the musicians he made it with. Some of them are featured here - including Robert Lockwood, Floyd Jones, J.B. Lenoir and Jimmy Rogers.