BUKKA WHITE leggenda del blues (registrazione ALAN LOMAX) 1966

Booker T. Washington White, just "Bukka" to friends, was a country blues guitarist and was a cousin of Riley B. King (who was about twenty years younger), better known to everyone as "B. B. King," to whom he later gifted a guitar and revealed the basics of the "trade."

He was born in the early 1900s in the State of Mississippi near Houston, and despite his name, White was Black. At nine years old, he started playing the violin and guitar, with his father (who worked in the railways) as his teacher, who also knew about saxophone, piano, drums, and mandolin.

He served three years in prison for shooting a man (he claimed it was self-defense), then withdrew from the scene during World War II and was rediscovered by Bob Dylan, who in '61 re-recorded one of his old blues songs (rearranging both the music and the lyrics) recorded twenty years earlier, titled "Fixin' to Die Blues." This was a lucky break for Bukka, who from then on began writing new pieces and touring across the States until the mid-1970s.

A terrible illness took him to the heavens at the age of seventy, and amen!

#legends of the blues