
For a while, Walker roomed with blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Joe Louis Walker has spent half a century playing and singing the blues. In the wake of his new record, Weight of the World, the San Francisco-born singer and guitarist looks back on what he’s learned, and what’s important in the blues.
Amid the San Francisco Bay Area’s dense fog, the Golden Gate Bridge stands as a de facto lighthouse, guiding those navigating the land and sea. In many ways, blues guitarist Joe Louis Walker embodies the essence of this Californian landmark. For over half a century in his professional musical career, Walker has been a beacon of inspiration, a potent conduit—sometimes navigating over choppy waters, but always bridging traditional blues with waves of soul, rock, and gospel.
Walker’s latest album, Weight of the World, is utterly vibrant. On “Hello, it’s the Blues,” he inquires, “What’s the blues?” Over the phone, Walker takes a poetic slant in answering the question. “One of the perfect phrases for me is what Shakespeare called the human condition,” he says. “If you have the human condition, you can be on top of the world material-wise and have the worst personal life in the world. What’s the blues? It’s just your good friend.”
Produced by Eric Corne, who has also recorded Glen Campbell and Lucinda Williams, Weight of the World displays a rich mix of musical styles, guided by Walker’s powerful vocal and guitar work, and replete with horns, strings, organ, and harmonica. The album breathes with the soul of a veteran player that has spent decades learning how to capture the spirit of blues, but in a way that substitutes its traditional voice of wicked tragedy with that of funk, gospel, and celebration. “You Got Me Whipped” swings with a smooth-as-silk guitar tone, while the lively “Waking Up the Dead” parades down Bourbon Street. “You can’t lose with that second line drumbeat,” Walker says. For “Hello, it’s the Blues,” he brings in a nylon-string acoustic. “You don’t hear nylon-string acoustic in the blues,” he remarks. “I’m playing classical scales. You hear the 12-bar, but when it goes to the B section, it changes. I like guitar players who can do that. God rest his soul—Jeff Beck did that all the time. He could go one way with a song and then really take it another. It’s an emotional song. I’ve got to bring emotion.”
Joe Louis Walker - The Weight of the World
For Walker, that emotion has been cultivated from the time he was born in 1949, on Christmas Day, to musical parents. His father was from Mississippi, and his mother, Arkansas, but the family settled in the eclectic Bay Area. As a young boy, his father’s Delta blues collection captured his attention, as did his mother's affinity for B.B. King. Walker first explored the violin before settling on the guitar when he was 9 years old.
San Francisco’s Fillmore District provided a hotbed of culture for the young Walker. Between guitar lessons, he played music with his cousins, but he also studied the masters of blues, from King and T-Bone Walker to Otis Redding and Meade Lux Lewis.
“You can be on top of the world material-wise and have the worst personal life in the world. What’s the blues? It’s just your good friend.”
By the time he was 14, Walker was a union-card-carrying working musician, finding early work writing jingles for Sly Stone’s radio program in San Francisco. The original Fillmore Auditorium was an essential part of his development. “When I was 14 years old, I took my grandma to see Little Richard at the Fillmore, when he got religion for a little while,” Walker remembers. “After that, the Fillmore Auditorium was like our community playhouse. It was only a half block from our school, and we had our battle of the bands there and played all kinds of music. Then, I was in a family band with my older cousins, and played all over.”
Walker admits the lifestyle he walked into isn’t for the faint of heart. “It’s something you have to have a constitution for,” he says. “I've spent years, years, in dark rooms, nightclubs, playing. It was normal for me to sleep until 12 in the afternoon [laughs], and then get up and go play.” By the time he was 16, he had moved out of his parents house to play professionally. His fate was sealed.
On Weight of the World, Walker showcases his veteran skills at blending blues, rock, soul, funk, and gospel.
Walker was an ambitious teen. He built street cred working in house bands along the Fillmore District and the wider Bay Area. Back then, he gigged at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland where he shared the stage with Stone, and both John Lee and Earl Hooker. Of all his stomping grounds, Walker recalls the legendary club the Matrix with particular fondness.
“I backed up a lot of older blues players, traditional guys,” he says. “I was partial to Mississippi Fred McDowell. He took a minute out with me when I was 16 and let me play with him at the Matrix. He was a country gentleman, and he told me some things about people in general. ‘Surround yourself with good people,’ and things of that nature. When I didn’t do everything he said, it seemed like it came true.”
“It’s something you have to have a constitution for. I’ve spent years, years, in dark rooms, nightclubs, playing.”
But then, San Francisco’s explosive Summer of Love in 1967 changed the city’s music scene forever. Walker remembers: “The young guys and older musicians could play seven nights a week, up and down Fillmore all the way to Haight. You could play jazz, blues, whatever you wanted—before Bill Graham and the hippies came to our neighborhood. For us young guys who had been there all the time, we’d see the Temptations. We would see Ike and Tina Turner when they never even thought about rolling on a river. It was exciting, and then it flipped on its head. Guys who had been playing the Fillmore all the time now couldn’t get a gig there.”
In 1968, Walker began a friendship that would follow him for the rest of his life. He met Michael Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band by chance at a bookstore the day after witnessing Bloomfield’s jaw-dropping set at the Fillmore. Bloomfield, says Walker, was one of the hottest young upstarts in Chicago blues music, thanks in part to going to “the well” to learn to play, consulting the greats. After Bloomfield quit the Butterfield Blues Band and Walker started his own band, the two became roommates. “He was a taskmaster,” says Walker. “He’d come in and give me a critique after shows. One time, he goes, ‘Man, it’s a good thing you can sing because you ain’t playing shit.’ And I wasn’t. I was just a young guy trying to copy all the different guitar styles that I heard. It was just mumbo jumbo. But that’s your growing pains.”
Walker says Bloomfield looked out for him in the early days. As time went on, Walker returned the favor. “Michael gave me guitars, a place to live, got me gigs and auditions,” says Walker. “I could never, ever in this world repay him. I did look out for him as far as driving him places because he wasn’t such a great driver, and [I was] keeping an eye out for him, getting the guitar for him. He had a ’59 Les Paul, and I’d put it in the back of the car because he had left it with no case or anything.”
Joe Louis Walker's Gear
Over 50 years, Walker has put out more than 30 records and guested on scores more. He played on B.B. King’s Grammy-winning 1994 record, Blues Summit.
Photo by Joseph Rosen
Guitars
- Zemaitis Pearl Front
- Zemaitis Metal Front “ZV”
- Zemaitis Greco BGW22
- Zemaitis acoustic with heart-shaped soundhole
- Spanish nylon-string guitar
Amps
- DV MARK Multiamp FG Frank Gambale Signature Guitar Head
- RedPlate Amp 2x12 with Dumble-style head and 2x10 cabinet
Effects
- Way Huge Smalls Aqua-Puss Analog Delay
- Dunlop MXR MC401 Boost
- Crybaby Q Mini 535Q Auto-Return Wah
- Dunlop Jimi Hendrix phaser
Strings, Picks, and Slides
- Dunlop (.010–.042)
- Dunlop medium picks
- Dunlop medium glass slides, metal slides, and brass slides for electric
Around the mid-1970s, Walker was evaluating his surroundings. When he took a break from music to take stock, he was shaken. “I saw that so many people, people that I had been fortunate enough to meet through Michael and Buddy Miles and others, were dying,” he says.
Sadly, in 1981, Bloomfield joined their ranks when the guitarist died from a drug overdose at age 37. Walker thoughtfully remembers his friend: “He was all about going from your heart to your head to your hands,” he says. “I switched my game totally, and if I hadn’t, I would be dead like a lot of those people. [Before he died,] Michael turned into a recluse. And a lot of other people, if they made it through the other side, they’re all now legends, but they went through some serious changes.”
After Bloomfield’s death, Walker turned to gospel music. He joined the Spiritual Corinthians Gospel Quartet, and connected with the material’s depth of feeling. “I tapped into that feeling when you’re singing,” says Walker. “It’s like when a blind person sings and plays. When you see Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, they go to another place. You can physically see it. They’re creating an emotion that nothing can stop. I think when you have that kind of channeling, that’s what any artist wants to do—is just have it flow.”
By the mid ’80s, Walker was beginning to circle back to blues music. He had a particular moment of clarity while playing the gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 1985. “I just said, ‘you know what? I’m a restless soul with music,’” he recalls. “Anybody listening to the 30-plus albums I’ve got, they’ll hear me doing all kinds of stuff. It was just a sign of things to come for me.”
“When you see Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, they go to another place. You can physically see it. They're creating an emotion that nothing can stop.”
Back in San Francisco, he formed a new backing band called the Bosstalkers, and signed with HighTone Records. While young blues cats like Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan were hitting the mainstream, Walker was staking out his own territory, releasing his debut, Cold Is the Night, in 1986 to critical acclaim.
Two years later, Walker was on the road touring with his idol, B.B. King. King had some sage words for his junior. “[He] told me, ‘I know your friends Robert Cray and Stevie Ray and all the younger people are making it, and you quit playing blues and all that, and now you’re playing again, but you’re going to have a long career,’” says Walker. Aside from a working relationship, King and Walker became friends.
Here, Walker wields his pearl-front Zemaitis guitar, but lately his Zemaitis Flying V has been his go-to.
Photo by Mickey Deneher
Walker followed his HighTone debut with 1988’s The Gift, his second of seven records with the label. “I’ve been fortunate as an artist,” he says. “I’ve never had a record label say, ‘You can't do this, you can’t do that.’” Beginning in 1993, Walker released a string of records with Polydor/PolyGram, all of which deepened and demonstrated his smokin’ guitar skills. Another major milestone arrived that same year: Walker shared duet responsibilities with B.B. King on the legend’s Grammy Award-winning Blues Summit album.
Walker’s 1997 album Great Guitars, produced by Steve Cropper, boasted a top-class cast of guest stars, including Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Ike Turner, and Bonnie Raitt. Walker tapped Raitt for the song “Low Down Dirty Blues,” which features male and female characters in a vocal back-and-forth. But there was a hitch. “Bonnie said, ‘Look Joe, I can do anything, but the record company doesn’t want me to sing on anybody’s stuff,’” remembers Walker. Later, Raitt heard Walker singing both his part and hers, and Cropper quipped about Raitt’s absence. She stormed out of the room—and returned a second later. “She says, ‘Fuck the record company. Give me a microphone,’” Walker laughs. “That’s the redhead I love.” The result is sheer blues excellence.
“Muddy would tell me to slow down. ‘Slow it down, because slide is not like playing regular guitar.’”
Through the 2000s, Walker collaborated with dozens of musicians and consistently released albums, touring behind them and making regular pilgrimages to popular blues festivals around the world. His albums Hellfire and Hornet’s Nest, produced by Tom Hambridge, explored stinging blues-rock and busted more genres. Walker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013, and netted a Grammy nod for his 2015 record Everybody Wants a Piece.
But he’s never lost his taste for blues building blocks. Journey To The Heart Of The Blues was an all-acoustic offering, just Walker and a piano, released in 2018. “I like variety, and I like to push myself,” he says. Always in demand for others’ projects, Walker played on Dion DiMucci’s Blues With Friends in 2020, and contributed music to the PBS documentary Driving While Black.
Joe Louis Walker came up playing the blues in San Francisco, but 1967’s Summer of Love shuffled the music out of the spotlight.
Photo by Frank White
Over a 50-year career, Walker has experienced soaring highs, but his most treasured are also the earliest: those times when he got to consult with his blues torchbearers, and play with the likes of Willie Dixon and Ronnie Wood. These teachers taught him lessons that he still holds dear. “I was fortunate to play with Fred McDowell, an old-school guy who played an acoustic by himself,” says Walker. “I played with Fred, and I lived with Bloomfield, who knew a lot about slide, and a lot about American music, period. He showed me some different tunings.”
A particular note from Muddy Waters sticks out in his mind, too. “Muddy would tell me to slow down. ‘Slow it down, because slide is not like playing regular guitar. You can just cancel the notes out if you play it too fast,’” recalls Walker. “Muddy was a master at slow blues. I mean, really slow. You can hear every word, every note, and every emotion that he wanted you to feel in a song.”
Ultimately, Walker wants to deliver emotionally fueled songs that take listeners to different places. “Some styles of music don’t modulate, switch keys, or use minor keys,” he says. “The keys are like colors. If you play a song in a certain key, it’s a color that draws a certain emotion. I like movement in music.”
YouTube It
With bends, slides, and warm yet hearty vocals, Walker performs this 2022 show at the Scranton Cultural Center with the same band featured on Weight of the World.
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An ode, and historical snapshot, to the tone-bar played, many-stringed thing in the room, and its place in the national musical firmament.
Blues, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, rap.… When it comes to inventing musical genres, the U.S. totally nailed it. But how about inventing instruments?
Googling “American musical instruments” yields three.
• Banjo, which is erroneously listed since Africa is its continent of origin.
• Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica, which was 37 glass bowls mounted horizontally on an iron spindle that was turned by means of a foot pedal. Sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with water-moistened fingers. The instrument’s popularity did not last due to the inability to amplify the volume combined with rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad.
• Calliope, which was patented in 1855 by Joshua Stoddard. Often the size of a truck, it produces sound by sending steam through large locomotive-style whistles. Calliopes have no volume or tone control and can be heard for miles.
But Google left out the pedal steel. While there may not be a historical consensus, I was talking to fellow pedal-steel player Dave Maniscalco, and we share the theory that pedal steel is the most American instrument.
Think about it. The United States started as a DIY, let’s-try-anything country. Our culture encourages the endless pursuit of improvement on what’s come before. Curious, whimsical, impractical, explorative—that’s our DNA. And just as our music is always evolving, so are our instruments. Guitar was not invented in the U.S., but one could argue it’s being perfected here, as players from Les Paul to Van Halen kept tweaking the earlier designs, helping this one-time parlor instrument evolve into the awesome rock machine it is today.
Pedal steel evolved from lap steel, which began in Hawaii when a teenage Joseph Kekuku was walking down a road with his guitar in hand and bent over to pick up a railroad spike. When the spike inadvertently brushed the guitar’s neck and his instrument sang, Kekuku knew he had something. He worked out a tuning and technique, and then took his act to the mainland, where it exploded in popularity. Since the 1930s, artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong and Pink Floyd have been using steel on their records.“The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.”
Immigrants drove new innovations and opportunities for the steel guitar by amplifying the instrument to help it compete for listeners’ ears as part of louder ensembles. Swiss-American Adolph Rickenbacker, along with George Beauchamp, developed the first electric guitar—the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 lap steel, nicknamed the Frying Pan—and a pair of Slovak-American brothers, John and Rudy Dopyera, added aluminum cones in the body of a more traditional acoustic guitar design and created resophonic axes. The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.
As the 20th century progressed and popular music reflected the more advanced harmonies of big-band jazz, the steel guitar’s tuning evolved from open A to a myriad of others, including E7, C6, and B11. Steel guitarists began playing double-, triple-, and even quadruple-necked guitars so they could incorporate different tunings.
In Indianapolis, the Harlan Brothers came up with an elegant solution to multiple tunings when they developed their Multi-Kord steel guitar, which used pedals to change the tuning of the instrument’s open strings to create chords that were previously not possible, earning a U.S. patent on August 21, 1947. In California, equipped with knowledge from building motorcycles, Paul Bigsby revolutionized the instrument with his Bigsby steel guitars. It was on one of these guitars that, in early 1954, Bud Isaacs sustained a chord and then pushed a pedal down to bend his strings up in pitch for the intro of Webb Pierce’s “Slowly.” This I–IV movement became synonymous with the pedal-steel guitar and provided a template for the role of the pedal steel in country music. Across town, church musicians in the congregation of the House of God Keith Dominion were already using the pedal steel guitar in Pentecostal services that transcended the homogeneity of Nashville’s country and Western clichés.
Pedal steels are most commonly tuned in an E9 (low to high: B–D–E–F#–G#–B–E–G#–D#–F#), which can be disorienting, with its own idiosyncratic logic containing both a b7 and major 7. It’s difficult to learn compared to other string instruments tuned to regular intervals, such as fourths and fifths, or an open chord.
Dave Maniscalco puts it like this: “The more time one sits behind it and assimilates its quirks and peculiarities, the more obvious it becomes that much like the country that birthed it, the pedal steel is better because of its contradictions. An amalgamation of wood and metal, doubling as both a musical instrument and mechanical device, the pedal steel is often complicated, confusing, and messy. Despite these contradictions, the pedal-steel guitar is a far more interesting and affecting because of its disparate influences and its complex journey to becoming America’s quintessential musical instrument.”The author dials in one of his 20-watt Sonzera amps, with an extension cabinet.
Knowing how guitar amplifiers were developed and have evolved is important to understanding why they sound the way they do when you’re plugged in.
Let’s talk about guitar amp history. I think it’s important for guitar players to have a general overview of amplifiers, so the sound makes more sense when they plug in. As far as I can figure out, guitar amps originally came from radios—although I’ve never had the opportunity to interview the inventors of the original amps. Early tube amps looked like radio boxes, and once there was an AM signal, it needed to be amplified through a speaker so you could hear it. I’m reasonably certain that other people know more about this than I do.
For me, the story of guitar amps picks up with early Fenders and Marshalls. If you look at the schematics, amplifier input, and tone control layout of an early tweed Fender Bassman, it’s clear that’s where the original Marshall JTM45 amps came from. Also, I’ve heard secondhand that the early Marshall cabinets were 8x12s, and the roadies requested that Marshall cut them in half so they became 4x12s. Similarly, 8x10 SVT cabinets were cut in half to make the now-industry-standard 4x10 bass cabinets. Our amp designer Doug Sewell and I understand that, for the early Fender amps we love, the design directed the guitar signal into half a tube, into a tone stack, into another half a tube, and the reverb would join it with another half a tube, and then there would be a phase splitter and output tubes and a transformer. (All 12AX7 tubes are really two tubes in one, so when I say a half-tube, I’m saying we’re using only the first half.) The tone stack and layout of these amps is an industry standard and have a beautiful, clean way of removing low midrange to clear up the sound of the guitar. I believe all but the first Marshalls came from a high-powered tweed Twin preamp (which was a 80-watt combo amp) and a Bassman power amp. The schematic was a little different. It was one half-tube into a full-tube cathode follower, into a more midrange-y tone stack, into the phase splitter and power tubes and output transformer. Both of these circuits have different kinds of sounds. What’s interesting is Marshall kept modifying their amps for less bass, more high midrange and treble, and more gain. In addition, master volume controls started being added by Fender and Marshall around 1976. The goal was to give more gain at less volume. Understanding these circuits has been a lifelong event for Doug and me.
Then, another designer came along by the name of Alexander Dumble. He modified the tone stack in Fender amps so you could get more bass and a different kind of midrange. Then, after the preamp, he put in a distortion circuit in a switchable in and out “loop.” In this arrangement, the distortion was like putting a distortion pedal in a loop after the tone controls. In a Fender amp, most of the distortion comes from the output section, so turning the tone controls changes the sound of the guitar, not the distortion. In a Marshall, the distortion comes before the tone controls, so when you turn the tone controls, the distortion changes. The way these amps compress and add harmonics as you turn up the gain is the game. All of these designs have real merit and are the basis of our modern tube–and then modeling—amplifiers.
Everything in these amps makes a difference. The circuits, the capacitor values and types, the resistor values and types, the power and output transformers, and the power supplies—including all those capacitor values and capacitor manufacturers.
I give you this truncated, general history to let you know that the amp business is just as complicated as the guitar business. I didn’t even mention the speakers or speaker cabinets and the artform behind those. But what’s most important is: When you plug into the amp, do you like it? And how much do you like it? Most guitar players have not played through a real Dumble or even a real blackface Deluxe Reverb or a 1966 Marshall plexi head. In a way, you’re trusting the amp designers to understand all the highly complex variations from this history, and then make a product that you love playing through. It’s daunting, but I love it. There is a complicated, deep, and rich history that has influenced and shaped how amps are made today.
Lenny Kravitz’s lead-guitar maestro shares how his scorching hit solo came together.
Hold onto your hats—Shred With Shifty is back! This time, Chris Shiflett sits down with fellow west coaster Craig Ross, who calls in from Madrid equipped with a lawsuit-era Ibanez 2393. The two buddies kick things off commiserating over an increasingly common tragedy for guitarists: losing precious gear in natural disasters. The takeaway? Don’t leave your gear in storage! Take it on the road!
Ross started out in the Los Angeles band Broken Homes, influenced by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, but his big break came when he auditioned for Lenny Kravitz. Kravitz phoned him up the next day to tell him to be at rehearsal that evening. In 1993, they cut one of their biggest hits ever, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” Ross explains that it came together from a loose, improvisatory jam in the studio—testament to the magic that can be found off-leash during studio time.
Ross recalls his rig for recording the solo, which consisted of just two items: Kravitz’s goldtop Les Paul and a tiny Gibson combo. (No fuzz or drive pedals, sorry Chris.) As Ross remembers, he was going for a Cream-era Clapton sound with the solo, which jumps between pentatonic and pentatonic major scales.
Tune in to learn how he frets and plays the song’s blistering lead bits, plus learn about what amps Ross is leaning on these days.
If you’re able to help, here are some charities aimed at assisting musicians affected by the fires in L.A:
https://guitarcenterfoundation.org
https://www.cciarts.org/relief.html
https://www.musiciansfoundation.org
https://fireaidla.org
https://www.musicares.org
https://www.sweetrelief.org
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editor: Addison Sauvan
Graphic Design: Megan Pralle
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
Tobias bass guitars, beloved by bass players for nearly half a century, are back with the all-new Tobias Original Collection.
Built for unrivaled articulation, low-end punch, and exceptional ergonomics, the all-new Tobias Original Collection comprises an array of six four and five-string bass models all offered in both right and left-handed orientations. The Tobias range features Classic, Killer B, and Growler models, and each is equipped with high-quality hardware from Babicz and Gotoh, active electronics from Bartolini, and the iconic Tobias asymmetrical neck design. Crafted from the finest tonewoods, Tobias Original Collection bass guitars are now available worldwide on Gibson.com, at the Gibson Garage locations, and at authorized Gibson dealers.
The bass world has been clamoring for the return of the authentic, high-end Tobias basses, and now, Tobias has returned. Combining the look and tone of the finest exotic tonewoods, such as quilted maple, royal paulownia, purpleheart, sapele, walnut, ebony, and wenge, with the feel of the famous Tobias Asym asymmetrical neck and the eye-catching shapes of the perfectly balanced contoured bodies, Tobias basses are attractive in look and exceptional in playing feel. However, their sonic versatility is what makes them so well suited to the needs of modern bassists. The superior tone from the exotic hardwoods, premium hardware, and active Bartolini® pickups and preamps results in basses with the tonal flexibility that today’s players require. Don’t settle for less than a bass that delivers everything you want and need –the look, the feel, and the sound, Tobias.
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For more information, please visit gibson.com.