Eddie Kirkland

Eddie Kirkland, who has died aged 87, was a singer and guitarist who first made his mark during the early 1950s on the fertile Detroit blues scene. 

Eddie Kirkland Photo: REX

 

Famed for his acrobatic onstage antics (which included performing somersaults and playing while standing on his head), he earned his nickname “Gipsy of the Blues” by touring incessantly during a lengthy but chequered career which often found him on the road 40 weeks of each year.

Kirkland released only a dozen solo albums, but as a session player and bandleader was associated with much better known figures in blues and soul, including John Lee Hooker, Little Richard, Ruth Brown and Otis Redding. Despite this, financial success largely eluded him, and he would often sleep in his car while touring.

He invented his own unique open-chord guitar style, updating the acoustic delta blues to electric, using his thumb rather than a pick. “He plays like a funky pianist, simultaneously covering bass lines, chord kick and counterpoint,” observed the writer Chris McDermott in 1994.

In 1977 Kirkland met the British blues-rock group Foghat at a festival in New York. They based themselves in the city and maintained their friendship with Kirkland for the remainder of his career; his final recording was as a guest on their 2010 album Last Train Home. On hearing of his death, their drummer Roger Earl recalled: “What made him a great blues man in my eyes was that he told stories, he sang stories. He was a very rare breed. He was born for the road.”

Eddie Kirkland was born to a 12-year-old mother in Jamaica on August 16 1923. Shortly afterwards she moved with him to New Orleans and, later, to Dothan, Alabama. While working the local cotton fields, she would leave her toddler in the shade at the ends of the rows, which is where he first heard the blues — in the form of “field hollers” sung by the other workers. She bought her son a harmonica when he was four, and he later recalled how his playing once caused a rattlesnake to move on.

As a child Eddie sang in a church choir and learned guitar from a local bluesman called Blind Murphy. In 1935 he stowed away in the tour truck of the Sugar Girls Medicine Show. This brought him his first job as a performer, earning $12 a week – very good money at the time.
This lasted for a year, after which he briefly attended a school in Indiana. As a teenager he boxed and played guitar in New Orleans, and during the Second World War he joined the US Army. After being discharged, Kirkland settled in Detroit, where his mother then lived.
It was at a house party there in the late 1940s that he met John Lee Hooker, with whom he began to tour and to record as a second guitarist. During the 1950s Kirkland worked as Hooker’s road manager and made several solo recordings for small independent labels; but it was not until 1962 that he released his first full-length solo album, It’s The Blues Man!, with the saxophonist King Curtis backing him. After this, he parted company with Hooker and settled at Macon, Georgia, where he would live for much of the rest of his life.
In 1962 Kirkland got a gig playing with Otis Redding. This led to the recording of his biggest hit (as “Eddie Kirk”), the raucous, rough-hewn The Hawg. It was a perfect showcase for his searing, half-shouted vocal style, rhythmic guitar and harmonica, but instead of producing a follow-up he abandoned music to earn his living as a mechanic.
In the early 1970s he was encouraged out of musical retirement to record two more albums, but another fallow period followed before there were three more discs, for the Deluge label, in the early 1990s. His most recent solo album was Booty Blues (2006). In recent years he had been a frequent visitor to Europe, often touring with Finnish group Wentus Blues Band.
Eddie Kirkland died while on the road. Even in his eighties, he insisted on driving himself to gigs, and he was attempting a U-turn in Homosassa, Florida, on the morning of February 27 when his car was struck by a Greyhound bus. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and nine children.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/8369382/Eddie-Kirkland.html