Joe Louis Walker was a remarkable singer, guitarist and songwriter, but above all he was a serious bluesman. If you were looking for a cheerful blues night out, hearing familiar songs and greeting them with shouts of “Yeah, boogie!”, Walker would not have been your best bet. From the first, he stood out as a composer of ingenious, intelligent songs, which he made sound blue regardless of their musical form. His allegiance was to the inner character of the blues rather than to its external structure.
The survival of the blues has always depended on its stock of known stories and familiar expressions. Walker, who has died aged 75, was deeply conscious of this tradition and drew on it with discrimination and skill, but often took the harder path of telling stories in freshly made language, his images drawn not from the ghost world of the blues’ past, but from life around him. “I swore I was gonna stay single – when I leave out and come back is up to me,” he sang in Personal Baby, “but I got to take a real good look at that Playboy philosophy.”
