Louisiana Red learnt his trade as a bluesman in the early 1950s, playing guitar in the clubs of Chicago and Detroit with Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Under their tutelage, he developed a flamboyant style as a fine singer with a distinctive voice, a powerful harmonica player and a brilliant slide guitarist. Also a highly original songwriter, he recorded prodigiously and had many fans in Europe, where he lived for much of his later life.
He was born Iverson Minter in Bessemer, a small mining town near Birmingham, Alabama. Confusion surrounds his date of birth, with 1932 and 1936 being cited. The passion with which he came to play the blues probably lay deep in the tragic circumstances of his early life, which he often alluded to in his songs. His mother died of pneumonia a week after he was born, and in 1941 his father was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. His childhood was divided between an orphanage and relatives in Mississippi and Philadelphia; the name he performed under was given to him as a child after a brand of hot sauce.
In the late 1940s he moved to Pittsburgh, where he heard a neighbour, Crit Walters, playing blues guitar on his porch. He asked Walters to teach him and was such a swift learner that he was soon earning loose change playing bottleneck guitar on the street corners of Pittsburgh, where he was discovered by the disc jockey Bill Powell.
He was invited to play on Powell’s radio show and a tape found its way to Scott Cameron, Muddy Waters’s agent, who passed it on to Chess Records. It invited him to Chicago, where he sat in with Waters’s band at Club Zanzibar. Backed by the band he recorded a session which resulted in the release of the single Soon One Morning / Come On Baby Now, released under the name Rocky “Playboy” Fuller.
But Chicago was awash with talented bluesmen and he was had to take a day job at an Oldsmobile factory near Detroit. By night he gravitated to the city’s Hastings Road district and its blues clubs, and began playing with a Detroit resident, John Lee Hooker.
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In 1954 he was sent to Korea to serve in the army. On his discharge in 1957, he moved to New Jersey, where he made his first recordings in 1960 under the name Louisiana Red on the single I Done Woke Up / I Had A Feeling.
His most notable recording from the period was the single Red’s Dream (1962), which included a graphic description of what Khrushchev could do with his missiles and a threat to shave Fidel Castro’s beard. It remains one of the finest and wittiest blues songs of the 1960s.
He followed with the 1963 album, The Lowdown Back Porch Blues, which included such declamatory songs as I’m Louisiana Red, performed in a style that owed much to the influence of Muddy Waters. As the popularity of the blues declined, he suffered some lean years, working as a railway guard and even as an itinerant fruit picker.
A revival came in the 1970s. He made his first visit to Europe in 1975 to play the Montreux festival and, like many black US bluesmen, found a warmer welcome than back home. In 1981 he settled in Germany.
Among his later albums Millennium Blues (1999) was a particularly fine set and included songs on which he reminisced about his early mentors. His final album, Memphis Mojo, appeared in 2011.
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Louisiana Red, bluesman, was born on March 23, 1932. He died on February 25, 2012, aged 79