Blind Willie McTell Volume 4 …and last for a while.

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, vast gangs of, mainly black, workers were employed in the pine growing areas of Northern Texas to siphon off resin and distil it into turpentine.  

Not only was it dirty and dangerous work, it was also pretty lonely as the logger camps were usually buried deep in the woods, far from the nearest town.

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Professor Longhair was a pianist, singer and songwriter born in 1918. After a series of street ‘jobs’ in New Orleans, such as tap dancing for tips and playing cards for money he finally got a break and began to release singles in 1949.
These singles were often big hits with a black American audience but he never managed to get that cross-over hit that might have made him as famous and as wealthy as Fats Domino.
He continued to record intermittently during the ’50′s but his style didn’t really evolve from his initial sessions in 1949. Indeed he had a habit of re-recording many of these originals over and over again. But by the mid ’60′s and the change in musical tastes heralded by the Brit Invasion, Professor Longhair had given up any hope of making any money from his music and, disillusioned, he ended up where he’d started – doing bad jobs such as sweeping up in a record shop.
This slightly sad biography doesn’t get close to indicating what an effect his handful of recordings from ’49 and the very early ’50′s had on the history of music. Without ever becoming a household name he was possibly the most important single inspiration for Rock’n'Roll.

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