By Ed Enright | Published July 2025
This vinyl reissue of Walter “Furry” Lewis’ Back On My Feet Again from 1961 presents the iconic country blues singer and guitarist in the initial years of his historic career revival. Known for his soulful vocals and skillful, light touch on guitar, Lewis was among the earliest active bluesmen to find fame later in life amid the ’60s folk/blues revival. Born in the 1890s, Lewis began his career as a performer on Beale Street in Memphis, and in the late 1920s he cut his first sides for Vocalion and Victor. But during the Great Depression, he retired from music and turned to working menial jobs to make ends meet. Thirty years later, Lewis was given a second chance at stardom when music historian Sam Charters sought out the bluesman and encouraged him to return to the studio. His second album from that fertile period, recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis and originally issued via Prestige Records’ Bluesville imprint, Back On My Feet Again finds Lewis in a stripped-down setting, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar as he employs his signature stylings — including nimble finger-picking and explosive bursts of slide playing — and revisits several of his early recordings, including “John Henry” and “Big Chief Blues,” while weaving in traditional material like “Shake ’Em On Down” as well as newer compositions, “Back On My Feet Again” among them. As Back On My Feet Again ably demonstrated at the time, Lewis’ talents never wavered despite his lengthy break from music, and he ended up enjoying a career resurgence for the last two decades of his life (he passed in 1981). The album sounds better than ever now that it’s been remastered for 180-gram vinyl pressings that are currently available for pre-order (with a release date of Aug. 1). Back On My Feet Again can also be purchased as a download in hi-res and standard digital audio formats.
Another long-out-of-print blues classic being brought back to vinyl (and digital download) by Bluesville Records is Memphis Slim At The Gate Of Horn, recorded in 1959 for Vee-Jay. Named for his hometown and known for his commanding vocals and rollicking piano technique, Peter “Memphis Slim” Chatman (1915–’88) was one of the blues’ most versatile players and songwriters. He spent much of his youth touring the Southern bar and dance hall circuit before relocating to Chicago in 1939, where he found work as a sideman before finding his own voice as a performer and leading his own group starting in the mid-’40s. Slim and his band released a string of R&B hits, including “Blue And Lonesome,”“Mother Earth,” “The Come Back,” the 1948 chart-topper “Messin’ Around” and “Nobody Loves Me,” a 1949 B-side better known as “Every Day I Have The Blues.” When Slim recorded this collection of his best-known songs at The Gate of Horn, a Chicago folk club, he was joined by his longtime bandmates (including Matt “Guitar” Murphy and a solid horn section), and although their relatively short, well-paced set wasn’t captured during a live performance before an audience, it presents the superb pianist and always-clever wordsmith in his element, at the peak of his legendary blues powers.
