Vinyl finds - Little Booker and others

As usual I spent Sunday morning searching for vinyl at a car boot sale and it proved to be a successful couple of hours. There were a couple of 45s worth a mention, and a listen, the first of which is this great rocker on the original US Ace label.
1. Little Booker - Open The Door/ Teen Age Rock.
This is, of course, James Booker, but on the A side he shows that he can sing like Little Richard as well as play piano and organ amazingly. The B side is an excellent rocking instrumental.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRDVQ4-ZsNk    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgxjgtmXWYk

2. Keith Relf - Mr Zero/ Knowing

Keith Relf was of course the lead singer and harmonica player with the Yardbirds, but when the band broke up he made a couple of solo records including this one, a folky song written by Bob Lind which failed to make the top 30. It's worth around £60 these days.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SwXpijNlxc



3. Geoff Bradford - Rockin' The Blues LP

I confess that I was unaware of the key role played by Geoff Bradford in the UK blues boom of the 1960s, largely because he recorded very little. But, as he says, himself, he was very nearly a Rolling Stone.  After playing in a skiffle group, the Sunrisers, in the late 50s, Geoff played at the Roundhouse blues club in Soho which was run by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. After joining a band called Blues By Six, led by Brian Jones and which included Charlie Watts on drums, Geoff played in Cyril Davies' All Stars and, after Cyril's deatrh, with Long John Baldry's Hoochie Coochie Men before fading from view. This 1979 LP was one of only a handful of records to bear his name and shows what a good guitarist he was. Geoff appeared on the Channel 4 programme Living With the Blues and here he plays Drop Down Mama, one of the tracks on the LP.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NbudEOhYI

 

The photo above shows some of the other LPs I found, many of which were Louisiana zydeco and blues albums. They included Slim Harpo's Trigger Finger, a highly collectable Blue Horizon LP worth £135 in mint condition. There's also a German issue of the American Folk Blues Festival tour of 1963, with a great photo section, featuring Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, Willie Dixon, Victoria Spivey, Matt 'Guitar' Murphy. Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Spann, Lonnie Johnson, Bill Stepney and Muddy Waters. I well remember seeing this great line-up at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon. There's also a lovely copy of the first Platters LP on Mercury and a Jimmy Witherspoon LP on Crown.