Jimmy Liggins

Jimmy Liggins (born October 14, 1922 in Newby , Oklahoma , † July 18, 1983 in Durham , North Carolina ) was an American R&B guitarist, singer, band leader , and record producer.

Live and act

The Liggins family moved to San Diego when Jimmy was about nine years old and his older brother Joe 15. When he had a hit with "Honeydripper" in 1944, he didn't immediately follow him into the music business, but was a disc jockey for a while , then briefly professional boxer; after all, he was Joe's driver on the band's tours for a year. After the success of his brother Joe, Jimmy Liggins also began a music career. He wrote songs and formed his own band in 1946. In 1947 he made his first recordings on Specialty Records with his band Drops of Joy . One of his first records, "Cadillac Boogie", was a direct precursor to Rocket "88" , which is often cited as the first rock 'n' roll record. Jimmy Liggins' Drop of Joy Orchestra recorded a number of numbers for Specialty from 1947 to 1952 that were successful on the Billboard Top 10 R&B charts . Pieces like "Tear Drop Blues", "Don't Put Me Down" and "Drunk" with well-known saxophonists like Charlie Ferguson , Maxwell Davis and Harold Land made Liggins one of the most successful bandleaders of the jump blues of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He toured with his band through the southern states of the USA , where his mixture of blues and rock boogie - in contrast to the more urban music of his brother Joe - was very popular and influenced many musicians of the post-war generation of southern blues and R&B.

In April 1949 he was accidentally shot while working in Jackson, Mississippi . After his recovery, he made a comeback with songs like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man", "Shuffle Shuck" and his last big hit "I Ain't Drunk", which was later re-recorded by Albert Collins - was released on Aladdin that same year Records and rose to # 4 on the Billboard chart in late 1952. In 1954 Liggins left Specialty Records and recorded a few more tracks for Aladdin before leaving the national music scene. In 1958 he founded his own label Duplex and released several singles over the next 20 years, initially in Los Angeles, then in San Diego, El Dorado in Arkansas, Tennessee and then in Madison (Florida) before he settled In the mid-1970s he settled in Durham (North Carolina) , where he ran a record store, a studio and was active as a nightclub organizer. When the Swedish label Route 66 published a compilation of Liggins' recordings from 1947-52 in 1981, his duplex label served as a distributor for the southeastern United States. In 1993 Liggins was inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame , like his brother Joe the year before .

Web links

• Biography at Allmusic Guide (engl.)
• Biography on Earthlink.net
• Jimmy Liggins in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame 1993