AKA: Walter Jacobs
Bio:
Walter Jacobs (Little Walter)
Little Walter is generally considered the first 'urban' blues musician. His sound was very modern, with a strong jazz feeling, and he played mainly composition or modern songs. He was the first musician of any kind to purposely use electronic distortion.
Little Walter (born Marion Walter Jacobs) (May 1, 1930 - February 15, 1968) was a blues singer, harmonica player, and guitarist.
After quitting school at the age of 12, Jacobs left Louisiana and travelled wherever he chose, working odd jobs, busking and honing his musical skills with Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Bill Broonzy, among others.
Arriving in Chicago in 1945, he fell into the thriving blues scene, occasionally finding work as a guitarist but garnering more attention for his harmonica work.
Jacobs grew tired of having his harmonica drowned out by electric guitarists, and adopted a simple, but previously little-used method: He cupped a small microphone in his hand while he played harmonica, and plugged the microphone into a guitar or public address amplifier. He could thus compete with any guitarist's volume.
Unlike other contemporary blues harp players, such as the original Sonny Boy Williamson and Snooky Pryor, who used this method only for added volume, Little Walter used amplification to explore radical new timbres and sonic effects previously unheard from a harmonica.
He joined Muddy Waters' band in 1948, and by 1950 he was playing on Muddy's recordings for Chess Records; Little Walter's harmonica is featured on most of Muddy's classic recordings from the 1950s. • Jacobs' own career took off when he recorded as a bandleader for Chess' subsidiary label Checker Records in 1952; the first completed take of the first song attempted at his very first session spent eight weeks in the #1 position on the Billboard magazine R&B charts - the song was "Juke", and it was the first harmonica instrumental ever to become a hit on the R&B charts. It was also the biggest hit to date for Chess.
Little Walter scored an impressive fourteen top-ten hits on the R&B charts between 1952 and 1958, including two #1 hits (the second being "My Babe" in 1955.)
Jacobs suffered from alcoholism, and had a notoriously short fuse, which led to a decline in his fame and fortunes in the 1960s, although he did tour Europe twice, in 1964 and 1967.
He died of injuries sustained in a fight a few months after returning from his second European tour.
His legacy has been enormous. The influence of his pioneering achievements on harmonica can be heard in virtually every blues harp player who has picked up the instrument since the early 1950s, from blues greats such as Junior Wells, James Cotton, George "Harmonica" Smith, Carey Bell, and Big Walter Horton, through modern-day masters Kim Wilson, Rod Piazza, William Clarke, and Charlie Musselwhite, in addition to blues-rock crossover artists such as Paul Butterfield and John Popper of Blues Traveler.
His 1952 instrumental Juke was selected as one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.