The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Walker brings his soulful, gospel-tinged blues to The Kate
OLD SAYBROOK — It’s midwinter blues time!
These days, we get to see the great San Francisco-born blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker a little more often than we used to because for the past few years he’s lived in New York’s Hudson Valley.
So, just about nine months after Walker’s last local visit, which was to Cafe Nine in New Haven, he and his tight, deeply groovin’ band are back to play some soulful blues with a little bit of gospel flavor at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center on Wednesday. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.
Zac Harmon — a fine Mississippi bluesman who has an album, “Right Man Right Now,” out on Blind Pig Records — opens the show. Tickets are $27 and $30, available in advance at thekate.org or by calling 860-510-0453. The Kate is located at 300 Main St. in Old Saybrook.
Walker has been honored at the Blues Music Awards in Memphis as Best Contemporary Blues Artist of the Year, among many other honors.
An incendiary guitarist and fine vocalist, Walker is a fivetime Blues Music Award winner. He is touring behind his 2017 Mascot Records release, “Everybody Wants a Piece,” which was nominated for a Grammy.
Blues doesn’t come any more soul-drenched than Walker, who retains his deep Bay Area roots despite living here on the East Coast these days. He also still has roots in the gospel music he once played — and it always shows in his music, although fans might not always recognize it as such.
Walker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013 along with Earl Hooker, recently departed Chicago soul blues singer Otis Clay, pianist Little Brother Montgomery, “The Blue Yodeler” Jimmie Rodgers and Chicago guitar pioneer Jody Williams, who played on much of Howlin’ Wolf’s early work, as well as with Elmore James, Charles Brown, Jimmie Witherspoon and Otis Rush.
His induction came one year after the induction of his good friend and former roommate, Michael Bloomfield.
Back in the day, Bloomfield introduced Walker to the likes of Sly Stone, Carlos Santana, Steve Miller, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, Jorma Kaukonen, then of Jefferson Airplane, and even to jazz legend Wayne Shorter. He also helped nudge Walker’s blues in a more rockinfused direction.
But his blues education began much earlier.
Walker was backing touring blues artists by the time he was 16, an age when he served as the house guitarist at The Matrix, San Francisco’s legendary club of that time. He has been a stalwart on the national blues scene for decades after developing his blues in the diverse, soulful, psychedelic cauldron that was San Francisco in the 1960s.
As a teenager, he got the opportunity to play with and get to know legends such as “Mississippi” Fred McDowell, Ike Turner, Albert King, Freddy King, Robert Lockwood Jr., Lightnin’ Hopkins and others.
Walker dropped out of the blues scene and played nothing but gospel music — as a member of The Spiritual Corinthians — from 1975 to 1985, but came roaring back in 1986, when he released his debut album on Hightone Records.