A History of the Blues – Little Walter – My Babe

“My Babe” is a Chicago blues song and a blues standard written by Willie Dixon for Little Walter. Released in 1955 on Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess Records, the song was the only Dixon composition ever to become a number one R&B single and it was one of the biggest hits of either of their careers.

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Dixon based “My Babe” on the traditional gospel song “This Train (Is Bound For Glory)”, recorded by Sister Rosetta Tharpe as “This Train”. He reworked the arrangement and lyrics from the sacred (the procession of saints into Heaven) into the secular (a story about a woman that won’t stand for her man to cheat): “My baby, she don’t stand no cheating, my babe, she don’t stand none of that midnight creeping.”

Lyrics

My baby don’t stand no cheatin’, my babe
Oh, yeah, she don’t stand no cheatin’, my babe
Oh, yeah she don’t stand no cheatin’
She don’t stand none of that midnight creepin’
My babe, true little baby, my babe

My babe, I know she love me, my babe
Oh, yes, I know she love me, my babe
Oh, yes, I know she love me
She don’t do nothin’ but kiss and hug me
My babe, true little baby, my babe

My baby don’t stand no cheatin’, my babe
Oh, no, she don’t stand no cheatin’, my babe
Oh, no, she don’t stand no cheatin’
Everything she do she do so pleasin’
My babe, true little baby, my babe

My baby don’t stand no foolin’, my babe
Oh, yeah, she don’t stand no foolin’, my babe
Oh, yeah, she don’t stand no foolin’
When she’s hot there ain’t no coolin’
My babe, true little baby, my babe (She’s my baby)

She’s my baby (True little baby)
She’s my baby (True little baby)
She’s my baby (True little baby)
She’s my baby (True little baby)
She’s my baby

Songwriters: Willie Dixon / H. Burrage

Little Walter

Marion Walter Jacobs (May 1, 1930 – February 15, 1968), known as Little Walter, was an American blues musician, singer, and songwriter, whose revolutionary approach to the harmonica had a strong impact on succeeding generations, earning him comparisons to such seminal artists as Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix. His virtuosity and musical innovations fundamentally altered many listeners’ expectations of what was possible on blues harmonica. He was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, the first and, to date, only artist to be inducted specifically as a harmonica player.

Jacobs made his first released recordings in 1947 for Bernard Abrams’s tiny Ora-Nelle label, which operated out of the back room of Abrams’s Maxwell Radio and Records store in the heart of the Maxwell Street district in Chicago. These and several other of his early recordings, like many blues harp recordings of the era, owed a strong stylistic debt to the pioneering blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson I (John Lee Williamson).

Little Walter joined Muddy Waters‘s band in 1948, and by 1950 he was playing acoustic (unamplified) harmonica on Waters’s recordings for Chess Records. The first appearance on record of Little Walter’s amplified harmonica was on Waters’s “Country Boy” (Chess 1952), recorded on July 11, 1951. For years after his departure from Waters’s band in 1952, Chess continued to hire him to play on Waters’s recording sessions, and as a result his harmonica is featured on most of Waters’s classic recordings from the 1950s.

As a guitarist, Little Walter recorded three songs for the small Parkway label with Waters and Baby Face Leroy Foster (reissued on CD by Delmark Records as “The Blues World of Little Walter” in 1993) and on a session for Chess backing pianist Eddie Ware. His guitar playing was also featured occasionally on early Chess sessions with Waters and Jimmy Rogers.

In January 1952, talent scout Ike Turner tried to get Jacobs to record for Modern Records while in Helena, but Jacobs was on his way to Mississippi. They played together in Clarksdale.

Jacobs had put his career as a bandleader on hold when he joined Waters’s band, but he stepped out front again when he recorded as a bandleader for Chess’s subsidiary label Checker Records on May 12, 1952. The first completed take of the first song attempted at his debut session became his first number one hit, spending eight weeks at the top of the Billboard R&B chart.

The song was “Juke“, and it is still the only harmonica instrumental ever to be a number-one hit on the Billboard R&B chart. The original title of the track file was “Your Cat Will Play”, but was renamed at Leonard Chess’s suggestion. (Three other harmonica instrumentals by Little Walter also reached the Billboard R&B top 10: “Off the Wall” reached number eight, “Roller Coaster” reached number six, and “Sad Hours” reached number two while “Juke” was still on the charts.) “Juke” was the biggest hit to date for any artist on Chess and its affiliated labels and one of the biggest national R&B hits of 1952, securing Walter’s position on the Chess artist roster for the next decade.

Jacobs had fourteen top-ten hits on the Billboard R&B charts between 1952 and 1958, including two number-one hits (the second being “My Babe“^[11] in 1955), a level of commercial success never achieved by Waters or by his fellow Chess blues artists Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson II.

Following the pattern of “Juke”, most of Little Walter’s singles released in the 1950s featured a vocal performance on one side and a harmonica instrumental on the other. Many of Walter’s vocal numbers were written by him or Chess A&R man Willie Dixon or adapted from earlier blues themes. In general, his sound was more modern and up-tempo than the popular Chicago blues of the day, with a jazzier conception and rhythmically less rigid approach than that of other contemporary blues harmonica players.

Jacobs left Waters’s band in 1952 and recruited his own backing band, the Aces, a group that was already working steadily in Chicago backing Junior Wells. The Aces—the brothers David and Louis Myers on guitars and Fred Below on drums—were credited as the Jukes on most of the Little Walter records on which they played.

By 1955 the members of the Aces had each separately left Little Walter to pursue other opportunities and were initially replaced by the guitarists Robert “Junior” Lockwood and Luther Tucker and drummer Odie Payne. Among others who worked in Little Walter’s recording and touring bands in the 1950s were the guitarists Jimmie Lee Robinson and Freddie Robinson, and drummer George Hunter.

Little Walter also occasionally included saxophone players in his touring bands during this period, among them the young Albert Ayler, and Ray Charles on one early tour. By the late 1950s, Little Walter no longer employed a regular full-time band, instead hiring various players as needed from the large pool of blues musicians in Chicago.

Jacobs often played the harmonica on records by others in the Chess stable of artists, including Jimmy Rogers, John Brim, Rocky Fuller, Memphis Minnie, the Coronets, Johnny Shines, Floyd Jones, Bo Diddley, and Shel Silverstein. He also played on recordings for other labels, backing Otis Rush, Johnny “Man” Young, and Robert Nighthawk.

Jacobs suffered from alcoholism and had a notoriously short temper, which in late 1950s led to violent altercations, minor scrapes with the law, and increasingly irresponsible behavior. This led to a decline in his fame and fortunes, beginning in the late 1950s. Nonetheless he toured Europe twice, in 1964 and 1967 (the long-circulated story that he toured the United Kingdom with the Rolling Stones in 1964 has been refuted by Keith Richards).

The 1967 European tour, as part of the American Folk Blues Festival, resulted in the only known film footage of Little Walter performing. Footage of Little Walter backing Hound Dog Taylor and Koko Taylor was shown on a television program in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 11, 1967 was released on DVD in 2004. Further video of another recently discovered TV appearance in Germany during this same tour, showing Jacobs performing his songs “My Babe”, “Mean Old World“, and others, was released on DVD in Europe in January 2009; it is the only known footage of him singing.

Other TV appearances in the UK (in 1964) and the Netherlands (in 1967) have been documented, but no footage of these has yet been uncovered. Jacobs recorded and toured infrequently in the 1960s, playing mainly in and around Chicago.

In 1967 Chess released a studio album, Super Blues, featuring Little Walter, Bo Diddley, and Muddy Waters.

Legacy

The music journalist Bill Dahl described Little Walter as “king of all post-war blues harpists”, who “took the humble mouth organ in dazzling amplified directions that were unimaginable prior to his ascendancy.” His legacy has been enormous: he is widely credited by blues historians as the artist primarily responsible for establishing the standard vocabulary for modern blues and blues rock harmonica players.

Biographer Tony Glover notes Little Walter directly influenced Junior Wells, James Cotton, George “Harmonica” Smith, and Carey Bell. He includes Jerry Portnoy, Rick Estrin of Little Charlie & the Nightcats, Kim Wilson, Rod Piazza, and William Clarke among those who later studied his technique and helped popularize it with younger players.

Little Walter’s daughter, Marion Diaz Reacco, has established the Little Walter Foundation in Chicago, to preserve the legacy and genius of Little Walter. The foundation aims to create programs for the creative arts, including music, animation and video.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Little Walter among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.

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