24/08/2025
Little Milton : Every guitar player has tried at one time or another to sound like T-Bone Walker, and that bars none BB King, yours truly, you name 'em. To me he set a style and example that there's no way you could play the so-called progressive Blues without touching, somewhere in there, T-Bone Walker. I just don't think it can be done. It's like a trumpet player trying to play a trumpet and trying not to play a note of Louis Armstrong or WC Handy. It's literally impossible. He was the first guy to play single note solos, he used those Jazz chords, and his guitar accompanied his voice. He literally made the guitar sing to me, and talk to me. And most of the guitar players of that era were just chording, playing back-beat bass and stuff like that. I don't mean that they weren't that great, but his stuff spoke to me in a more sophisticated way. I been classified as a blues guitarist, blues singer, which is fine with me, 'cause the music I've done, I've loved it and I still do.
And they can call me anything they want as long as they don't call me late for dinner. But I've always had a thing about standing on a stage doing a full night of doing nothing but 12-bar blues - that would bore me. And T-Bone's style, or people like Percy Mayfield that did different things, that meant I could let myself out into different pastures.
When I finally got a chance to play with T-Bone I was thrilled to death. And I tell you, the day I was scheduled to meet him, I got there real early to make sure I'd see him. There was him and his chauffeur in this big Cadillac and man, you would have thought I was a woman waiting for a man that she admired to show up, I was just so excited! We had big laughs about different things, we set in the dressing room and got the guitars, and he showed me several things, and we really got to know each other. A few years later we got to be very decent friends. And he was a very intelligent guy. Some people, they think that all blues entertainers has got to be... non-educated, semi-educated, filthy, raggety, evil, broken-hearted, living in poverty, that they live the life they sing about. This is not true. This is definitely not true, this is a wrong concept.
