The Album
T-Bone Walker was the pivotal figure who fused the single-string vocabulary of jazz guitar with the shouting urgency of blues singing, effectively inventing the vocabulary of modern electric blues guitar that every post-war player from B.B. King to Chuck Berry drew from. This compilation gathers his prolific Imperial Records sides cut in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1953, a period when Walker, already a star from his earlier Black & White sides, was at a commercial and creative peak, backed alternately by Maxwell Davis's house band and by the Jim Wynn and T. J. Fowler orchestras that gave these sides their jump-blues horn punch. The songs range from slow, aching blues like “Cold, Cold Feeling” to driving shuffle numbers, all delivered with Walker's instantly identifiable bent-note guitar lines and easy, conversational vocal phrasing. Walker's Imperial period extended the influence he had already established with “Call It Stormy Monday,“ carrying his sound into the early 1950s as rhythm and blues coalesced into a distinct commercial genre. His guitar style - playing behind his head, down on his knees, full of showmanship married to genuine musicality - set the template for the flamboyant blues guitar hero that would define the genre for decades. Critics and fellow musicians alike have long credited Walker as the essential bridge between prewar acoustic blues and the amplified, urban sound that shaped rock and roll. This set preserves a prolific, important stretch of that catalog for listeners who came to him later through his more famous Black & White era sides.