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On Wednesday brilliant New Orleans singer and guitarist Snooks Eaglin died after suffering a heart attack. He was 72. To me Eaglin represented the wonderful sprawl of New Orleans music as much as any single person–on his recordings he mostly killed it with the blues and R & B, but he was kind of an old-school songster, a musician who could tackle just about anything. In a Reader piece I wrote about a reissue of Eaglin material from the early 60s, I quoted Allen Toussaint, who once called him “a human jukebox.” Blind since boyhood, Eaglin developed a highly distinctive, funky, and percussive guitar style early on, using his thumb to snap the strings.
Aldina Duarte, Mulheres ao Espelho (Roda)Sam Rivers, Dimensions & Extensions (Blue Note)Cheikha Rabia, Liberti (Dinamyte/Buda)Phantom Orchard, Orra (Tzadik)Various artists, Every Mouth Must Be Fed 1973-1976 (Pressure Sounds)
