Every Friday around 11 a.m. Central, it’s time for Classic Americana on Radio Heartland. We pull a special track from the archives or from deep in the shelves to spotlight a particular artist or song.

Born in Mississippi on March 5, 1929, J.B. Lenoir was a Chicago-based blues player. An innovative musician, Lenoir played electric blues like many of his Chicago blues colleagues, but he also recorded many solo acoustic songs. Later, Lenoir created a type of blues music he dubbed “African hunch rhythm” that incorporated African hand drums into his backing band.

Growing up in Mississippi, J.B. Lenoir learned to play guitar from his music-loving father, Dewitt Lenoir, Sr, who also introduced J.B. to the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson, who became a major influence on J.B.; his other influences included Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Fed up with the racial discrimination of his home state, J.B. Lenoir first moved to New Orleans before making his way to Chicago. In Chicago, the great bluesman Big Bill Broonzy took Lenoir under his wing, helping Lenoir assimilate into the city’s burgeoning blues scene.

J.B. Lenoir could certainly sing a traditional blues song about broken hearts and bad luck — check out Lenoir’s cheeky, grooving track, “Talk To Your Daughter” — but he distinguished himself by playing songs that were overtly political. In his songs, J.B. Lenoir championed Civil Rights, and he decried the horrors of war. “J.B. Lenoir was always politically charged,” Bob Dylan, a fan of Lenoir, once explained on his Theme Time Radio Hour. “In 1954, he wrote a song called ‘Eisenhower Blues,’ which wasn’t totally complimentary.”

Lenoir’s record label felt the same way, and the management asked him to re-record the song as “Tax Paying Blues” for release in the United States. The original was released in Europe before it was eventually released in the United States after the White House had changed hands a few times.

In the 1960s, J.B. Lenoir recorded a number of protest songs in his signature blues style — such as “Alabama March,” “Vietnam Blues,” “Born Dead,” and the direct swipes at his home state, “Mississippi Road” and “Down in Mississippi” — that were recorded and released in Germany; Lenoir also toured Europe with his band in 1965. Our Classic Americana pick for this week is J.B. Lenoir’s song, “Alabama Blues,” another of his songs inspired by the Civil Rights movement.

Unfortunately, like a lot of Black musicians of the era, J.B. Lenoir was not compensated well for his songwriting and recordings, and he was working a second job as a dishwasher in the late 1960s. In 1967, Lenoir was accidentally struck by a car in Chicago. Released too soon from hospital, J.B. Lenoir died of complications from his injuries three weeks later at age 38. British Bluesman John Mayall paid tribute to J.B. Lenoir in two songs: “The Death of J.B. Lenoir” and “I’m Gonna Fight For You, J.B.”

External Links

J.B. Lenoir – Mississippi Blues Trail

The Blue Tide of History: Music, Family History, and the Healing Power of Blues – Rethinking Schools, article by Jesse Hagopian, whose ancestry is tied to J.B. Lenoir