Guitar Shorty flips the Blues

ILLUSTRATION by LUKE MCGARRY

Guitar Shorty started at age 17 and signed on as student with Willie Dixon for a moment, releasing (with Willie’s professorial treatment) a single under Chicago’s top-flight blues label Cobra. With guitarist Otis Rush as his second, Shorty knocked out “You Don’t Treat Me Right” and the swaggering “Irma Lee,” a roadhouse-rock number unfortunately all but extinct on vinyl in the wild. Those are credits from some of the American masters, and from then on the Shorty story absorbs a dazzling everyone-doing-everything-everywhere kind of quality. Hendrix gets a tangent and so does Albert King and Johnny Guitar Watson and Sam Cooke (who also sidemanned Shorty) and all the Dew Drop Inn gang turn up for a few nights, and though there is no specific mention of Esquerita or Earl Palmer, who would be too surprised? Shorty won his reputation on discipline and calisthenics—on the guitar and on the stage, reportedly doing seven encores anyway the night he dislocated his shoulder trying one of his famous plugged-in flips. And when he put out an album on Alligator in 2006—which pulled out an Album of the Year award for hammer-down blues rock like Kings B.B. and Albert on tracks like “What Good is Life?” and “Runaway Train”—he won the laurels he’ll never settle down enough to rest on.

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