(Curtis Ray)
(2CD)
BIOGRAPHY
In the 40's he moved to Chicago there he performed with his own band in
Blues clubs and churches! He played at the Mississippi Blues Festival &
Chicago Blues Festival. In the 80's he gave Wolf Records a cassette with
these great gospel & blues songs and told me to publish these.
He died 2006 in Chicago. He was an excellent singer and you can listen to
one of the greatest Chicago Blues voices! You can hear Alabama Red just on
one song on one other CD, a christmas CD from the label Electro-Fi Records,
so this is worldwide the only CD of Alabama Red.
Alabama Red is the professional nickname of a quite unknown blues musician,
named Curtis Ray. Alabama Red was born in 1927 in Panola, Alabama and
learned to sing and to play guitar and piano in different local churches he
used to go when he was a kid. Like so many other black men, he travelled and
settled in Chicago during the forties and soon he formed his own band,
playing regularly both in churches and around city blues clubs. In fact, he
was not a lucky man, because he never had the chance to go to the recording
studios.
In the eighties Alabama Red gave a cassette with some of his music to
Hannes Folterbauer, Wolf Records owner, to be published on a record. Now and
after so many years, we can finally listen to his music in this impressing
album. The overflowing rolling strength and passion of the thirteen songs,
is really amazing. Alabama Red is on vocals, piano and guitar, Jimmy Johnson
guitar, possibly Alan Batts organ and Howard Scott guitar and completely
unknown harmonica, bass, drums and sax players.
A great Chicago blues album that perfectly shows the music you could listen
in that city during the eighties. Unfortunately "Windy City Blues" is the
only album of this bluesman who died in 2006.
