Snooks Eaglin – New Orleans Street Singer
Few formats are as unforgiving as a singer accompanying themselves on an acoustic guitar. This can be especially true of moonlighting electric players, and Snooks Eaglin is one flashy electrician, with fast fingers, a taste for distortion, and a name-that-tune repertoire that is said to top 2,500 songs. In 1959, Eaglin was already a familiar figure on the Crescent City rhythm & blues scene, but he was also known to busk in the French Quarter with his acoustic guitar. That’s where he was “discovered” by folklorist Harry Oster, who recorded the tracks collected on New Orleans Street Singer.
The Rev. Gary Davis used to say that the guitar player’s picking hand should approach the instrument as if it’s a piano, with the thumb covering the left-hand bass lines, and the other fingers filling out the right-hand melodies. Eaglin, who once played with legendary pianist Professor Longhair, holds to the Davis dictum. Still, while you can hear the influence of piano man Charles Brown on “Drifting Blues”, you can also hear the six-stringed strategies of Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins on “Walking Blues”.
Eaglin’s that rare songster who can make you listen anew to well-worn chestnuts such as “Careless Love”, “Trouble In Mind” and “Saint James Infirmary”. The key to these performances is that Eaglin takes them seriously, with up-close-and-personal vocals, and note-spilling guitar fills of great precision. The previously unreleased “One Room Country Shack”, with its powerful bass lines and fleet treble runs, is enough to make a guitar picker cry mercy.
68 minutes of acoustic blues, including a handful of alternate takes, is a lot to handle in a single sitting, but you’ll come back for more. That’s because Snooks Eaglin is a city slicker who’s got the country blues down cold.