[Dixielandjazz] Henry Townsend obit - St. Louis Blues guiotarist.

[Steve Barbone]

>From the Glasgow (Scotland) Herald. September 27, 2006. He was one of the
last surviving links to Blues Guitar legend Robert Johnson.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone



Henry Townsend

Blues guitarist; born October 27, 1909; died September 24, 2006. Blues
musician Henry Townsend, who ran away from his family as a boy and stayed in
St Louis for a prolific career spanning eight decades, has died at age 96.
Townsend died Sunday of a pulmonary embolism in Grafton, Wisconsin, where he
was being honoured by a local blues association.

Townsend, who wrote and published hundreds of songs, began his recording
career in 1929 and continued to make records in every decade since, an
accomplishment that put him in rare company, said Mark O'Shaughnessy,
president of BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups, a St Louis blues club.

"He was the patriarch of St Louis blues," O'Shaughnessy said. "He wasn't in
it for the money. He believed in the music. It told a very honest story."
Townsend, who often performed with his late wife, Vernell, was in Grafton to
be honoured as the last surviving artist with the old Paramount Records. The
label recorded one-quarter of all the blues material produced from 1929 to
1932, including so-called "race records" by black artists for black
audiences.

He arrived on Thursday, and was hospitalised on Friday evening. The Grafton
Blues Association brought a plaque honouring him to his hospital room hours
before he died.

Townsend was born in Shelby, Mississippi, grew up in Cairo, Illinois, and
left for St Louis as a nine-year-old to "avoid a whipping from his father".
His father played a button box accordion, but young Henry loved the guitar,
and bought himself one. He also learned the piano.

While working as a shoe-shine boy in St Louis, he came to know a generation
of piano players who had grown up on ragtime and were teaming up with
guitarists to experiment with the blues. He decided on a career in blues
guitar after hearing budding bluesman Lonnie Johnson perform in the old
Booker T Washington Theatre in St Louis.

In the 1930s, Townsend played with blues greats Roosevelt Sykes, Walter
Davis and Robert Johnson. In those days, record label scouts gathered up
local musicians in cities such as St Louis, and took them to a studio for a
recording session, Belford said.

Townsend and other blues musicians fell into near oblivion when the juke box
replaced live music. It was not until the late 1950s, when the old blues
"race records" were rediscovered during a growing folk revival, that
Townsend, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams and others found renewed
popularity. They toured the US and Europe and found new audiences, Belford
said.

Townsend, who won a National Heritage Award in 1985 that recognised his
being a master artist, never stopped performing.