Jimmy Liggins

Jimmy Liggins ( born October 14, 1922 in Newby, Oklahoma, † July 18, 1983 in Durham, North Carolina) was an American R & B guitarist, singer, bandleader, and music producer.

Life and work

The Liggins family moved to San Diego when Jimmy was about nine years old and his older brother, Joe, 15 When this with " Honeydripper " in 1944 a hit, he followed him did not immediately into the music business, but was for a while a disc jockey, and then briefly a professional boxer; after all, he was a year working as Joe's driver on tours of the band. After his brother Joe the success Jimmy Liggins began a music career. He wrote songs and founded his own band in 1946. In 1947 he made ​​with his band " Drops of Joy ' first recordings on Specialty Records. One of his first albums, " Cadillac Boogie " was a direct precursor of " Rocket 88 ", which is often cited as the first rock and roll recording. Jimmy Liggins ' drop of Joy Orchestra took for Specialty 1947-1952 on some numbers that were successful in the Billboard Top 10 R & B charts. Songs like " Tear Drop Blues ", " Do not Put Me Down" and " Drunk" with such well-known saxophonist Charlie Ferguson, Maxwell Davis and Harold Land Liggins made ​​one of the most successful bandleader of the jump blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He toured with his band through the southern United States, where his blend of blues and rockin ' boogie - in contrast to the more urban music of his brother Joe - was very popular and influenced many musicians of Nachkriegsgenereration of Southern blues and R & B.

In April 1949, he was shot accidentally during an engagement in Jackson (Mississippi). After his recovery, he had a comeback with songs like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man, " "Shuffle Shuck " and his last major hit " I Is not Drunk ," which was later re-recorded by Albert Collins - appeared in the same year on Aladdin Records and rose end of 1952 at # 4 on the Billboard charts. 1954 Liggins left Specialty Records and took some pieces for Aladdin before he left the national music scene. In 1958 he founded his own label duplex and published it in the next 20 years, some singles, where he had his headquarters first in Los Angeles, then in San Diego, El Dorado, Arkansas, Tennessee and then in Madison (Florida), before he mid-70s in Durham (North Carolina) settled, where he ran a record store, a studio and was active as an organizer of a night club. As the Swedish label Route 66 in 1981 published a compilation of Liggins ' recordings of the years 1947-52, his duplex was used as a label distribution for the southeastern United States. In 1993, Liggins - like his brother Joe in the previous year - was admitted to the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.

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