Artist: Long John Hunter
Genre(s):
Blues
Discography:
Ooh Wee Pretty Baby
Year:
Tracks: 21
For often overly long, the fable of Long Gospel According to John Hunter has largely been a local ane, limited to the bordertown part betwixt El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. That's where the guitar player reigned for 13 age (beginning in 1957) at Juarez's notorious Lobby Bar. Its profuse, a great deal brawling clientele included locals, cowboys, soldiers from nearby Fort up Bliss, frat boys, and every variety of troublemaking holidaymaker in between. Hunter kept 'em altogether amused with his outrageous showmanship and slashing guitar riffs.
The Louisiana native got a tardily come out up on his musical comedy career. When he was 22 and laboring away in a Beaumont, TX box manufactory, he tended to a B.B. Rex show and was now mesmerized. The next solar day, he bought a guitar. A year by and by, he was leading at the saame bAR that B.B. had headlined.
Hunter's 1954 debut unmarried for Don Robey's Houston-based Duke label, "She Used to Be My Woman"/"Looney Child," preceded his displace to El Paso in 1957. Along the way, Phillip Baby-walker and Lonnie Brooks both picked up on his licks. Just Hunter's recording end product was slim -- a few hot just vague singles waxed from 1961 to 1963 for the petite Yucca logotype come out of Alamogordo, NM (standouts let in "El Paso Rock," "Midnight Perambulation," and "Border Town Blues"). Perchance he was simply to a fault occupy -- he held tribunal at the Lobby seven nights a workweek from sundown to aurora.
Fortuitously, Hunter's reputation is at last outgrowing the Lone Star state. His 1992 dress for the now-shuttered Spindletop imprint, Ride With Me, got the ball roll. Now, his 1996 dish for Gator, Edge Town Legend, should break this Texas vapours great to a far wider (if non thornton Thornton Wilder) sense of hearing than of wholly clock time before.
