Cover photo © 2024 Marilyn Stringer
Musicians are everywhere. Many play for fun with family and friends. Others play in bands that develop a local or regional following. The next level is the touring artists who are still out there trying to make a living playing music full time. And then you have Bob Corritore, a man who embodies the blues in each of his endeavors related to the music.
As covered in his previous three Blues Blast interviews, Corritore has been nominated for numerous awards for his harmonica playing. He continues to host a long-running weekly blues radio program. He is responsible for the release of numerous albums on the VizzTone label featuring many of the best blues artists. In his spare time, he can be found running the Rhythm Room, a venue in Phoenix, AZ that features blues and roots music. One has to wonder how he can keep all of the balls in the air at the same time.
When he relocated from Chicago to the Phoenix area, Corritore quickly set out to create a blues radio program. What he lacked in experience was more than compensated for by the depth of his knowledge.
“This year marks the 40th anniversary of Those Lowdown Blues on station KJZZ, at 91.5 FM, for which I received a Keeping The Blues Alive award from the Blues Foundation in 2007. The program runs every Sunday night at 6 pm MST for five hours in real time. It’s kind of an exciting little goalpost we’re real proud of. Hard to believe, but I still love doing the radio show. For me, it’s a way that I get to study the historical aspects of the blues. My show, unlike most blues radio shows, is really
historically based as most of what I play is from the 1950s and 60s. If I do play new releases, they’re very much in the mold of that era.
“I also hit all of the different subsidiaries of the blues like gospel, Zydeco, boogie woogie, and and some of the early soul and R& B music, all part of the blues family It’s obviously a huge commitment, because I have a five hour program that I need to have available weekly to the station. It’s always best to do it live, and in today’s world, not a lot of radio personalities do that. If I’m in town, I’m going to do live radio.
“But last year I was on tour quite a bit, so I did prerecord numerous shows. It seemed like I was always in the production room recording a show, as it usually takes at least a two or three nights to put five hours together. You just make that commitment to do it. It feels like I’m reaching a lot of people. I have a lot of people in my community here in Phoenix that are huge fans of the show, as well as a following from all around the country and the world. That’s been very gratifying to me.”
For each show, Corritore selects several themes as his building blocks, making sure they balance each other out.
“For example. There is a new biography out about Blues Hall of Fame singer Johnnie Taylor entitled I Believe In You. My show might feature his music, and then Clifton Chenier, the King of Zydeco, might have a birthday. Those two are wonderfully contrasting styles that will make for interesting segments. But I don’t stay too long in any one segment. I’ll always throw in a base of Chicago blues each week. I have what I call a set of the Kings, which is B.B., Freddie and Albert. That’s something that people look forward to as kind of a marker in the show.
“Sometimes I’ll do a thing on the entire gamut of Chess Records, which not only was blues but got into soul and some soulful, bluesy jazz as well. I’m not going to play the rock side of what they did, but a little Ramsey Lewis in the mix is not a terrible thing.
“You could really do a five or 10 song set each hour and never get boring. Sometimes I might just do a set of the J.O.B. Record label, which was all down home, early fifties Chicago blues. And then I might take a look at the Specialty Record label or from New York, the Fire and Fury record labels that Bobby Robinson had. Right before Thanksgiving, I’ll do regular features on food blues, so you might get “Greasy Greens”, or you might get some good barbecue, but you’re going to get a whole plate full of blues on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Bottom line, I get to spend five hours with the music I love the most.”
His famous club is celebrating its 33rd anniversary on September 18. Looking back, the harp player is thankful he has been able to keep the Rhythm Room operating even through the challenges of the last few years.
“We’ve gone through all sorts of phases in conjunction with the different changes that have happened in our society. When we opened up, all of the older blues artists were still riding in vans, crisscrossing the country. That’s not happening as much anymore. We were doing nothing but blues and roots. We’ve had to expand our musical genres a little bit just to keep it going, plus the blues demographic is getting older, people aren’t going out as much as they used to.
“The club seems to be going strong. We’ve got great shows coming up, acts that we’ve worked with for years. I don’t think they’d think about playing any other place in our area. We look at the artists who have come back over and over again as part of our family. I think they view us in the same way. And when it comes to throwing some blues parties, we really can throw some blues parties!
“Over time, the house band shifts a bit. Everybody goes in their own directions, and in that moment, logistics change. But right now, we call our house band the Jimi “Primetime” Smith – Bob Corritore Blues Band, with guys I’ve been working with for years, Brian Fahey on the drums, Johnny Rapp on the guitar, and on bass, Dave Riley Jr., also known as Yani. Jimi Smith sings and plays guitar.
“Jimi “Primetime” Smith has been in town for, for eight years. He’s really become my right hand man. He’s the “go to” guy if you want a great guitar player, a great front man, singer, and a good friend. Then there’s people like guitarist John Primer, singer Oscar Wilson of the Cash Box Kings, and ageless bass player Bob Stroger who come on a regular basis. One of my early employers, singer Willie Buck, makes the trip regularly to the club. There’s a real Chicago connection that happens, and that’s a beautiful thing.”
The steady flow of artists through the area allowed Corritore to pursue another avenue for documenting the music, one that he continues to mine.
“The pandemic really drove it home, that I needed to get some of my unreleased masters out in my lifetime or it might not be done. When I opened the Rhythm Room in 1991, I had already produced some records. I had a great house band with drummer Chico Chism and Johnny Rapp. We could back up just about anybody in a traditional blues sense and really make a cool record out of that.
“So I started to go to work, offering people both the gig at the Rhythm Room, and if they were within a style I felt would be compatible for harmonica, I would offer them a second gig, doing a couple of numbers in the recording studio. It just became a lifestyle. And so now we’re talking three decades of recording things, just stockpiling them over many, many years. I’m sitting on all this amazing stuff, and of course, a lot of stuff just ended up in the vaults, with the idea that I’ll get back to that. Years later, I decided to pay attention to some really great music that needs to be heard.
“The pandemic really drove that home. It’s like, if I don’t do this now, when am I going to do it? I discussed this with my label, VizzTone Records, and Amy Brat, Richard Rosenblatt, and Bob Margolin were very supportive of this. Richard came up with the idea of calling it the “From The Vaults” series. I was off and running, preparing some of these old masters in such a way that they would be releasable. It’s been a wonderful little journey to go back in time and explore these old recordings. Some of the people are gone, but I feel like I’m back in the room with them when I’m listening to the sessions.”
The “From The Vaults” series is up to nine albums, and there will be two more coming out next year as well as some new releases.
“I also usually put out one release of newly recorded material per year. I differentiate between them because the newer ones have that cool cartoon art by Vince Ray, just a fantastic artist that has a very stylized thing that’s become the trademark look of my albums. But the Vault series are done by a different artist, Jim Giannatti, who has a different sense of composition, colors and has a great visual landscape that he always provides. So I’ve got two distinct styles. Within all of that, last year I put out five albums. I think the year before four or five records. By design, I only wanted to put out the album with John Primer, Crawlin’ Kingsnake, this year, because we felt it was such a strong record that deserves to get a bunch of attention.
“Next year, it looks like I’ve got three albums coming out. I’ll have Bob Corritore & Friends album that’ll have all sorts of great guests, including Bobby Rush, Thornetta Davis, Oscar Wilson, Jimi ‘Primetime” Smith, Bob Stroger and the singer formerly known as Nora Jean Bruso, then Nora Jean Wallace, but she now wants to go by Nora Jean. It’s got Tia Carroll singing on a track, Carla Dense who sang with Mississippi Heat, and Francine Reed on an amazing track that also includes Duke Robillard on the guitar. It’s a really powerful album that is 12 songs of just joyous blues.
“I’m also putting out a Willie Buck record. It’ll have some new unreleased stuff as well as some of the older things that we’ve done together. And that’s important symbolically for me because Willie Buck is the guy that hired me in my first real deal all star band. I show up to work to find Louis and Dave Myers are playing with Johnny “Big Moose” Walker and Byther Smith on second guitar, Odie Payne on the drums. If this is who I’ve been hired to play with, this is the ultimate situation. These were Southside gigs. Nobody was making any kind of money doing them. But, artistically, this was a really powerful thing. I was playing with some of my heroes and trying to fill those big shoes the best I could.
Another planned release will be called Early Sessions, a combination of some of the sides that were in Corritore’s very first record of 25 years ago, All Star Blues Sessions, plus some unreleased Little Milton, Sam Lay, and a remix of a Robert Jr. Lockwood track, in addition to a duet Corritore did with Lowell Fulson.
Born in Chicago, the harp player grew up in the North Shore suburb of Wilmette, IL.
“Blues was all around me, you just had to know where to look for it. I rode my bicycle to go pick up my first Muddy Waters record in downtown Wilmette at Paul’s Recorded Music. I heard all this great Little Walter on harp, which just blew me away. And so that, of course, was my main influence. Then there is Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells. James Cotton, George “Harmonica” Smith, these were all people that I heard and loved. You can’t get around Paul Butterfield, who had cool records out. I never really went in the Butterfield direction stylistically, but I really tried for the Little Walter sound and the others the best I could.
“You could go down to Maxwell Street and hear all that real down home street blues. I got to play with some cool people like guitarist John Henry Davis sitting in on Maxwell Street. Apparently I did well enough where they let me play a bunch of numbers before they said, okay, that was good. I just loved the sound. I was just drawn to it. And then I went off to Tulsa, Oklahoma to go to college, which was kind of an interesting move.
“It was kind of a cool thing because I was sort of a big deal in that town because I was playing Chicago style harmonica, so I got to work quite a bit. I’d go back to Chicago on the breaks, ingest all the Chicago blues lessons I could, then bring it to the Tulsa bandstands.. Then when I graduated, I went back, took on a job at a music distributor called Sound Unlimited and learned about the industry that way. I started a small record label called Blues Over Blues, so I got to sink my teeth into what it was like to produce a record. I produced some good ones while I was in Chicago, by harp players Little Willie Anderson and another by Big Leon Brooks.
“When I was first was old enough to get into the clubs, I was able to get valuable stage time sitting in with some of the greats. Lonnie Brooks really, really helped me out, as did Mighty Joe Young and Koko Taylor, trying to learn some stage credibility and how to work with bands. People like Sunnyland Slim and Eddie Taylor would call you up. It was really amazing. I never really understood how I was given that amount of credibility at the early stages of my playing, but that’s how it was in Chicago. I learned hanging around all the best harmonica players, listening to what they were doing, working very hard to be able to play harmonica in that language.
“If you can learn it, then you can have your own conversation in that language. What was really important to me is to have that particular sound. And once I achieved it, it seemed like I got a lot of respect from the elders, because they recognized that I was deep into it. Tail Dragger really took me under his wing. I often played with him over at the Delta Fish Market. What a great man. I miss him quite a bit. And I have to mention Big Walter Horton, because I would go every Sunday night to see him play over at Blues on Halsted, and that was like going to Blues Harmonica Church.”
All of that time learning the music eventually led Corritore to form a dynamic partnership with guitarist John Primer, another veteran Chicago artist well versed in the Chicago traditions. They now have four critically acclaimed releases together.
“Well, interestingly enough, I used to go see John over at Teresa’s Lounge when he just joined the house band. John and Sammy Lawhorn, another great guitar player, would sit next to each other. Junior Wells or James Cotton, many other people would come through there most nights when they were not on tour. And you’d get all this amazing blues. I knew John, John knew me, but not really well. Over the years, we’d be playing different festivals together or gigs. I actually didn’t play a show with him until 2012.
“His agent called me up and said, Hey, John would like to come out to Phoenix and have your band back him up. I’m like, yeah, let’s do that. Why don’t we plan on a recording session? As soon as we started playing together, there was this natural Chicago chemistry. You can’t really explain it. But when you’re from Chicago and you play in that style, it becomes a kind of unspoken bond that you have. We went in the recording studio, and from the first couple bars, we just knew that we had a thing. So, this new record, Crawlin” Kingsnake, is our fourth project together, and people have just opened their hearts to it. It kind of recreates the 1960s Muddy Waters sound. We all feel it is a special occasion.
“When I was growing up, my parents told me I was supposed to go to business school in college and that was my predetermined path. But when Louisiana Red followed me out to Phoenix and we were living together. I realized that I shared the passion that Red had for the music. I could fool myself and try to do day gigs that didn’t involve music. I just would never be inspired, but I’d wake up every day inspired by music.
“It’s just a joy when you’re working with guitarists like Billy Flynn, Jimi “Primetime” Smith, Bob Margolin, or Primer. That’s a powerful thing. But we don’t have a Jimmy Rogers, John Brim, Henry Gray or a Tail Dragger anymore. That’s part of how I grew up, was playing with Tail Dragger. It’s sad to say goodbye to some of the people that really have paved the way. I think we both know at this point in our lives that kind of stuff is going to be happening on a regular basis. That’s a sad thing.”
The intrepid artist admits that there are times when he feels overwhelmed by too much of a good thing. Still, he wouldn’t want it any other way.
“Sometimes I run on inspiration, because I can wear myself out pretty good. I wake up in the morning, excited about the next cool thing I’m going to do. On top of that, I’ve gotten so much recognition for this that it humbles me, almost freaks me out, but I’m proud of it. Traditional blues, particularly Chicago blues, played well is in short supply. There’s some really wonderful young people coming up that I think will really carry it on, but there’s not too many of the older generation that are still active.
“I really appreciate that the world allows me this place to be able to put out records. I’m thankful to have a great record label like VizzTone and prior to that, great labels like Hightone, Delta Groove, and Blue Witch who helped me move into a place of validity in the blues scene. I’m really thankful to all the people all around the world that like my little niche. Every day I feel blessed, hoping that I am worthy of this attention I’ve been getting. I’ve got a particular sound, a style that I’ve nurtured over many, many years, no more or no less than who I am, but I’m proud of where I’ve come to. I do my best to be a servant of the blues. That’s my job in life, by my own definition.”
Other Bob Corritore Blues Blast interviews:
with Marty Gunther 11/29/2019 – https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-bob-corritore-2
with Terry Mullins 5/22/2019 – https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-bob-corritore
with Chefjimi Patricola 4/7/2011 – https://www.bluesblastmagazine.com/featured-interview-bob-corritore-1
