Joe Louis Walker was a remarkable singer, guitarist and songwriter, but above all he was a serious bluesman. If you were looking for a lively blues night out, Walker would not have been your best bet. From the first, he stood out as a composer of ingenious, intelligent songs, which he made sound blue regardless of their musical form. His allegiance was to the inner character of the blues rather than to its external structure.
The survival of the blues has always depended on its stock of known stories and familiar expressions. Walker, who has died aged 75, was deeply conscious of this tradition and drew on it with discrimination and skill, but often took the harder path of telling stories in freshly made language, his images drawn not from the ghost world of the blues’ past, but from life around him. “I swore I was gonna stay single – when I leave out and come back is up to me,” he sang in Personal Baby, “but I got to take a real good look at that Playboy philosophy.”
He grew up in San Francisco, where his parents had moved from Arkansas, bringing with them a profound love of the blues. “My father would come home from work in construction and have his dinner and he’d have his record player right here. He’d put on Amos Milburn, Rosco Gordon, Howlin’ Wolf. And then, when he wasn’t playin’ it, my mother was – BB King, always BB King.”
Hanging out with older teenagers who had bands, he picked up the elements of guitar. When he was about 20 he fell in with the guitarist Mike Bloomfield and some of his colleagues who had left Chicago for the west coast. He played with this band and that, and had the chance to open a concert for Fred McDowell and spend time absorbing the older man’s slide guitar playing. But the market for blues and R&B covers bands was overstocked, and in 1975 Walker jumped genre to play guitar for a gospel group, the Spiritual Corinthians.
A decade on, he landed a place in the Mississippi Delta Blues Band, a group thrown together for a European tour. Back home, he pitched an audition tape to all the blues companies he knew of, and was signed by the Oakland label HighTone. Working with the production team of Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker – who had recently launched the recording career of Robert Cray – he achieved an impressive debut with Cold Is the Night (1986), its mostly original songs energised by spiky guitar. The album was voted the best blues recording of 1987 by the French Académie du Jazz, and its successors The Gift (1988) and Blue Soul (1989) helped Walker to winning contemporary artist of the year in the WC Handy blues awards three years running. Couched in more elaborate arrangements than its predecessors, Blue Soul set a standard by which his subsequent work would be measured.
And there was a lot of it. Between frequent tours of the UK and mainland Europe, he made six albums in seven years from 1993 for Verve, among them Great Guitars, a conclave of blues guitarists including Steve Cropper, Robert Lockwood Jr and Otis Rush, and Silvertone Blues, which found him turning his gaze backwards and drawing inspiration from blues duos such as Muddy Waters and Little Walter, not recreating but reshaping them.
That contract completed, he became a freelancing butterfly, flitting between labels including Telarc, Provogue and Stony Plain, but never, stylistically speaking, staying in one place long. He told me: “I don’t have this allegiance to Chicago blues – rah! rah! – or west coast blues – rah! rah! … Like my ex-ex-old lady said, I’m sort of all over the place … and it shows in my music.”
Take Pasa Tiempo (2001), with its covers of Van Morrison and Otis Redding songs, and Latin-tinged jazz instrumentals: clever music, if somewhat impersonal. But in the same year’s Guitar Brothers, the tension is sometimes so tight it is painful, as he stared bleakly at the collapse of a relationship: “Our bodies, they live together, but our hearts, they live apart.” A newcomer to Walker’s work, hearing those two records in succession, might not have guessed they were by the same man.
A bluesman so aware of the music’s history was obviously well suited to commemorative projects, and in the early 2000s Walker participated in tributes to Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, and contributed to albums celebrating the blues connections of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Then, in 2012, he was signed by Alligator, the leading blues indie label – 26 years after it had turned him down. Of his three albums for the company, the most surprising was Journeys to the Heart of the Blues (2018). Turning his back on every prevailing blues fashion, Walker assembled a setlist of blues from the 1930s, 40s and 50s and arranged them for an acoustic trio: himself on guitar, the keyboardist Bruce Katz and the English harmonica player Giles Robson. It was as if men like Big Bill Broonzy had been brought back to life and given quality studio time. Nobody was better equipped for such affectionate and accurate reanimation than Walker.
He is survived by his wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, whom he married in 2009, two daughters from earlier relationships, Lena and Berniece, a sister, a brother, and two grandchildren. An earlier marriage ended in divorce.
• Joe Louis (Louis Joseph) Walker, born 25 December 1949; died 30 April 2025
