EDUCATION | EXHIBITIONS: ONE LP@DOCUMENTING JAZZ_2020: Bob Koester: Founder Delmark Records

Bob Koester talks about Hoodoo Man Blues, his life in music, the ins and outs of running the longest established independent American jazz and blues label. 

BK: That’s paradise. It’s freezing. We had a lot of snow a couple of days ago. 

WE: I was here actually. I got in on Sunday night from Los Angeles… 

BK: Oh I see. So you saw a little bit. 

WE: ..and it was chucking it down when I landed. 

BK: Maybe the last of the year [knocking sound]. That’s not wood though, that’s plastic, so that doesn’t count. 

WE: That’s wood. 

BK: Good to have a wood desk, that’s true. 

WE: I love all these as well. These are amazing. (rare 78s) 

BK: That’s a bunch of stuff we just bought. We keep them naked until a couple of regular customers see it so they know that there are new arrivals. 

WE: To check the condition. 

BK: Sure. 

WE: How long has this shop been here, Bob? 

BK: I’ve been here for 10 years. I was upstairs for 5 years. I was a block and a half away from 1962 and I have been in the business 61 years. 

WE: Wow.  

BK: I started in St Louis. Actually a little before I had a shop, I sold records out of my dormitory room at St Louis University for a year, mostly by mail. And then we opened a store, me and a friend. My friend collected Ellington and Billie Holliday and didn’t like any other jazz. He liked sweet bands so we only had to fight over two artists’ records. 

WE: Which jazz do you prefer, Bob? 

BK: Well, I like everything from early New Orleans jazz up through swing. Bebop I can understand now. The avant-garde, I record a lot of avant-garde on Delmark but it’s not my favourite music and I can’t say I understand it all but jazz changes over the years.  

As it goes from place to place it changes. Even in the traditional jazz era there was Chicago style, New Orleans style. Almost every major city had its own style of trad. I call it trad, I don’t like the word Dixieland. It’s basically…it’s seems vaguely racist somehow, I don’t know. Maybe a putdown, you know. But the south has done a better job of recovering from segregation than some major cities in the north so Dixie is not so bad maybe anymore.  

The record you have photographed – Hoodoo Man Blues by Junior Wells – was, well, I started recording blues back in St Louis in early ‘60s and we’re best known as a blues label. We have a little over 500 titles in our catalogue and a little less than half of them are blues – around 225 blues records. Bunch of trad. Bunch of modern. A few big band records. Quite a bit of avant-garde lately.  

The Hoodoo Man Blues was the first time a Chicago Blues Band went in the studio to make an LP, to not be confined to 2 minutes and 45 seconds or 3 minutes and 45 and I didn’t even realise that until about 20 years ago that we had a first, I have to say, Chicago working blues band because Muddy Waters did a few LPs with studio groups prior to that.  

There might have been some others that I can’t think of right now. It has been a major seller for Delmark. It won a Grammy as a classic blues record. Memphis Blues Organisation gave it an award. Quite a lot of good reviews. Sold…I don’t really know I think we’re approaching a third of a million, maybe half a million since 1965. That’s 40, almost 50 years. More than 50 years. Like the year before last, we sold 2000 LPs and 4000 CDs but that was a little more than usual. Usually, it’s 4 and a half, or 5 thousand but that year we did an expanded CD version of it, and raised the price a little bit.  

That’s about all I can say is that I can’t take much credit for how good it is because I just watched while Junior Wells produced it. It’s got Buddy Guy on it, by the way, who was Junior’s guitar player at the time although he had made records on his own. But that’s not unusual for sidemen in bands to have records on their own. And the story I sometime like to tell is Buddy didn’t wanted to ruin a little relationship he had with Leonard Chess at Chess Records so he said “maybe I should call Chess and see if it’s ok for him to be on the record”. Chess said [imitates voice] “OK. But he does his thing and you don’t use his motherfucking name” or maybe “the motherfucker better sing but don’t use his name”. So the first 7000 copies which covers the first 4 or 5 years, he is referred to… Well, there was a British chap working for me. A British guy, I should say, working for me. And I said, “what’s a good pseudonym for Buddy Guy?”. I thought I’d let him come up with a pseudonym and he said [British accent] “Well, a buddy is a friend and a guy is a chap so why don’t you call him Friendly Chap”, which we did.  

His name was Peter Brown. He later put out some reissued records in Englend, when he went back to England. Worked for me for a year or two, I think. Good man. Really good man. In fact, we had three Brits in a row, one of whom was somehow in the royalty.  

They had some deal over here where they didn’t have to pay income tax for a year and they took full advantage of that. Wait a minute, was there another one? Yes. Another guy.  

Man, I had a stroke 8 years ago and I fucked up my memory. He’s an active musician in New Orleans. Oh no, he’s from Sweden!  

But we’ve had several guys from other countries work here.  

So Junior was not as well-known then. He was known to blues collectors but in 1965 most of the interest in blues was in country blues. It started in New York where they didn’t have very many blues artists. They had Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. They had Lead Belly until he died. They had Reverend [Gary] Davis, who was a street-singing gospeller, and they had Champion Jack Dupree, a piano player, and that was about the whole blues scene they had there. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry dominated and most of the criticism and most of the writing about music did not pay much attention to blues.  

A few enlightened, mostly traditional jazz people, were into blues and people like Hugues Panassié were into blues in the late ‘30s and between Panassié and the British just about everybody I recorded, and anybody you can name, went to England. Chris Barber had a lot to do with that. He would take a blues artist and tour him in England for a month and several of the guys he pulled over there, piano players, Jack Dupree and Eddie Boyd and I can’t think who else right now but several of them moved to Europe.  

They couldn’t move to England because it’s very hard for musicians to move there from any other country but Chris deserves a lot of credit for that blues revival. He was bringing blues artists over, I think, just about as soon as he split from the guy whose band he was with. I forget the other guy’s name, but he was a member of the band and the whole band pulled away. 

Anyway, there was this relationship between traditional jazz bands and blues and it gradually built up. In the early ‘60s, there was a big rock thing here. I’m sorry, not rock, folk music and Peter Seeger had all kinds of groups, some of them pretty terrible. Groups of more than two people tended to be pretty showbizzy but that developed an interest in blues on the part of a lot of young Americans.  

They could go from Peter Seeger to Brownie McGhee to Big Bill Broonzy and once it got to Broonzy they were in the Chicago thing because he was the king of the Chicago blues back in the ‘30s and ‘40s.  

Then pretty soon, it was like Muddy Waters. Well, Muddy would bring his band to gigs and well, we don’t want the band we want just Buddy and a harmonica player, you know, but they got the band and until Dylan used a blues band in one of his appearances at Newport and they put him down for that. It was a white blues band, the Paul Butterfield Band with Mike Bloomfield. They put him down for that.  

It’s sort of interesting when Muddy Waters first went to Europe the Europeans hadn’t quite got into the city blues bands to the extent that they did pretty quickly. But Muddy went to Europe and he played acoustic guitar. He didn’t like it but that’s what they wanted. Then the next year he went over and he had a nice acoustic guitar instead of borrowing one which he did the first time and they said “Where’s the band?”. They had changed that much in one year. 

WE: I guess it’s kind of the whole, like the Yardbirds, John Mayall, the British bands. 

BK: All that came out of…the Beatles started…Well, there’s a thing. Chris Barber in between sets would switch from trombone to bass. The drummer would switch to washboard and the guitar player, who had a major hit here and you know his name better than I do because I can’t recall it, would play guitar and they would do blues and call it skiffle. And as you probably already know, the Beatles began as a skiffle band, influenced by Chris Barber. Chris would do that between sets at gigs and concerts and then he would bring on the blues artists and then they would play with the blues artists. Chris had a hit over here and doesn’t play trombone on it, he plays bass. And I can’t exactly remember his name now. Very embarrassed, because he had a bigger hit. 

Bob Koester: Jazz Record Mart, Chicago, April 2014 

Junior Wells: Hoodoo Man Blues, released 1965 

Junior Wellls performs Hoodoo Man Blues 

Bob Koester: Founder and record producer, Delmark 

Jazz Record Mart - the world's largest jazz and blues record store.