Cover photo © 2023 Janet Takayama

Since their formation over 20 years ago, the Cash Box Kings have been one of the finest traditional electric blues band in the world. Their recordings for Blind Pig Records, followed by the latest three albums on Alligator Records, have garnered the band multiple nominations for Blues Blast Music Awards as well as Blues Music Awards. Their latest release, Oscar’s Motel, is nominated for the 2023 Blues Blast award in the Traditional Blues Album category. Additionally, the band received a nomination in the Blues Band Of The Year category, while lead vocalist Oscar Wilson was nominated in the Vocalist Of The Year category.

Their first four albums were self-released on the Blue Midnight Records label, with two live albums book-ending two studio projects. The line-up during that period included Travis Koopman on guitar and Chris Boeger on upright bass. After that, the band’s line-up became more fluid, yet always featuring some of the best Chicago-style blues musicians.

From the start, Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith has used his mastery of the shuffle to be the rhythmic foundation on drums, appearing on all 11 albums the band has released. The other key band member is founder Joe Nosek, who shares lead vocal duties with Wilson while blowing some fine harmonica licks that build on the lessons he learned from the masters of the instrument.

The band name was offered by a friend when Nosek was trying to come up with something that captured the essence of the ensemble he envisioned.

“I needed a catchy name, and I had a buddy, Derek Taylor, who was a ethnomusicologist, working at the Smithsonian Institute. He is also a jazz  and blues critic. I said, all right, Derek, I need a good name for old school Chicago blues band. And he said, I got one for you, the Cash Box Kings. It is kind of a play on Cash Box magazine, which was sort of the Rolling Stone of R&B and blues back in the fifties and early sixties. If you were a Blues or R&B artist, you wanted your face, your name on the cover of Cash Box magazine. So Derek said, you guys should be the Cash Box Kings. I said, that sounds good. I liked the ring of it, and I think it’s served us well.”

Starting with piano lessons at the age of six, Nosek added the trumpet to his musical repertoire a few years later. Life was good until he got to high school.

“I also liked sports, and when I got to high school, I was under the false assumption that you could do both band and sports. You know, be in the high school jazz band and play sports. The first week of school, the band director told us, ok, you’ve got a car wash on Saturday and then a marching band competition on Sunday. And I said, well, no, I’ve got soccer games. And he said, you can’t do sports! So I said, why not? He said, you can’t do sports and play music. And I figured it’s going be a lot harder for me to play sports on my own, especially team sports like soccer and baseball, than it is to go out and do music on my own. So I decided that I would stick with the sports, and take up music on my own.

“So I shifted over to guitar and became an aspiring Bob Dylan and Neil Young impersonator for a bit, with my little harmonica rack. But then at some point early on, I heard Little Walter, which is when I said Bob Dylan and Neil Young are cool, but this is a whole other level. From that point, I knew I had to learn what these guys are doing on harmonica, not only Little Walter, but both Sonny Boy Williamsons, and Big Walter Horton, what they’re doing here. It was a lot different than Bob Dylan and Neil Young!

“A few years later, I got old enough where I could kind of sneak my way into Chicago Blues bars. My cousin was about five years older than me, a big blues fan, and he was good at charming bouncers to let this little, young punk into the blues bars. Then I started going down Chicago Blues fest every summer, you know, beginning of June. I’d catch  every act that I could, just running back and forth between the stages, seeing Otis Rush, the Myers brothers, Junior Wells, Jimmy Rogers, Willie Dixon, Sunnyland Slim, John Lee Hooker, all those cats. Seeing those guys play live made me realize that I needed to figure out what they were doing so I can play this music myself.”

Born in 1974 in Whitewater, WI, Nosek got bit by the blues once his family moved to Elmhurst, IL, a western suburb of Chicago, giving him much easier access to the city’s blues clubs. After graduating high school, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin Madison for undergraduate.

“My first year there I was thinking about being a music major. So I had to take a composition class. It was baroque choral composition, like Bach counterpoint and choral. I walk into the classroom. There’s only about 15 people in it. I looked at the professor and thought, man, that guy looks like Jim Schwall, the guitarist for the Siegel-Schwall Blues Band.

“I turned to the kid next to me and I said, hey, I think that’s Jim Schwall. And this 18 year old kid looks at me, saying, who the hell is Jim Schwall? Sure enough, it was Jim Schwall, who was working on his PhD in classical music composition. I wasn’t any good at baroque choral music. I’d turn in my compositions, and he would take his red and mark it all up, then tell me to see him during office hours.

“He’d start picking apart my composition, saying you used the diminished fifth here. It should have been a regular fifth. And then I’d say, what was it like seeing Howling Wolf back then? And he’d started talking about the Wolf, and it would usually devolve into him telling me stories of the good old days in Chicago. Then at some point he said, wait, wait, we are getting off track here.

“That class definitely made me decide that I did not want to be a music major, and indirectly pushed me back into doing my own thing with music. Jim would let me get up on stage from time to time when he’d play in town. And then I met the great harp player West Side Andy Linderman, and Clyde Stubblefield, who was James Brown’s drummer for many years. I couldn’t believe that Clyde Stubblefield was living in Madison.

“I knew he was funky drummer and here he was, playing in a club every Monday night. Eventually he and Andy would let me get up on stage and play with with them. Those are the two guys I kind of cut my teeth with. I also met James Earl Tate, a great bluesman who ran a blues jam here in Madison, and still does for the last 40 years. Tate was childhood best friends with Luther Allison.

“Luther lived in Paris at that time. But he would come to the States every summer to tour, but he would spend his down time with Tate so they could go fishing. And Luther would come down to Tate’s Blues Jam in this tiny club. Luther was real good to me. The times that I did play with him, he gave me guidance, told me what it would take to be a professional blues musician and make a name for myself. And he said, “you’ve got to stick with this, kid, because I know you can make it. I’m telling you right now, I don’t say that to everybody”. And that was some of the biggest words of encouragement I ever received.”

A few years later, Nosek’s band was opening on a show with Mississippi Heat, who had Kenny Smith on drums. They had met several times in Chicago, but that evening the conversation got serious.

“I told Kenny that I really want to start an old school Chicago-style blues band playing music  like the old Chess Records stuff. He thought that was a cool idea, saying that he loved that stuff but he only got to play it with his dad, drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith and his buddies, and they’re all in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Kenny wanted to play with some younger cats. This was around 2001. A couple months later, I decided to start my own band with Kenny and some like-minded guys in Madison to do what we could do to keep the old school traditional style blues going.”

That same night, another friend of Smith’s approached Nosek to say that he could tell the harmonica player had an affinity for the traditional sounds, but his current band tended to fall into a more modern, blues-rock approach. He introduced his buddy “White Lightning,” who turned out to be Travis Koopman, a plumber by day and a fine blues guitar player.

“When I met Travis, I asked him who his favorite guitar players were. He answered Son House, Luther Tucker, and the Myers brothers. I thought, all right, this guy obviously knows his stuff. So our original bass player, Chris Boeger, and I were playing in this country Delta blues band, fronted by Catfish Stevenson, doing a weekly gig. Catfish went on a motorcycle trip, it broke down, and he called to tell me he couldn’t do our show, that we needed to cover it.

“Needing a guitar player, I decided to call White Lightning. When he showed up with his amp and his guitar, I asked him if he knew “Juke,” the Little Walter classic. Yes. Do you know “Money, Marbles, and Chalk”? Yes. Do you know “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”? Yes. Three hours later I was like, man, where’s this guy been the last 10 years? We asked Travis if he wanted to join the band, which he agreed to on the spot.”

Another local musician, Todd Cambio, joined the new band on rhythm guitar and bass. He was a roommate of guitarist Joel Paterson, who would enter the story further down the road.

“It was like a dream to find more of the guys who had a similar vision. I think about six months into the band’s existence, we recorded a live album. It was only our fourth or fifth show, we didn’t rehearse, just they rolled the tape and we ended up releasing it as an album. It helped us get us on the map. A famous European blues critic, Andre Hobus with Soul Bag Magazine, bought a copy of that album when we were playing illegally on a street corner during the 2002 Chicago Blues fest. He got it before the cops kicked us out of the park. He ended up writing a great review which lead to us getting calls from Europe to do our first overseas tour.”

The band suffered a loss when Cambio decided to follow another of his passions, building guitars He started his own company, Fraulini Guitars, with an exquisite line-up of handcrafted instruments. But the hand of fate provided help.

“Right around that time, we met Billy Flynn. He started playing some gigs with us and, of course, was a perfect fit. He got a kick out of working with us young kids, reminding him of himself 20 years earlier. He remains our main guitar player, and produced our second album, Black Nigh Fallin’.”

Adding Flynn to the line-up certainly raised the band’s profile in the blues community, given the high regard his work has received over the years. But it took one more twist of fate to bring another key member into the picture.

“Oscar Wilson was living on the South side of Chicago with his family. Around 2005, he moved them to Janesville, WI, in an effort to escape the violence and drug dealing. It was tough because he had lived there his entire life, but he wanted his daughters to have a better life. Several years later, they graduated high school and moved right back to Chicago. Then Oscar lost his wife to cancer. He was alone in Janesville, of all places.

“One night he ended up at a blues jam at the local VFW, hosted by Travis and James Earl Tate. Oscar introduced himself to Travis, stating he played some harmonica and guitar in addition to singing. So Travis invited him up on stage. After a couple of songs, Travis’s eyes got real big. He knew I needed to meet Oscar. Travis asked him if he was a professional musician. Oscar replied no, but I grew up around the blues, and I love to play this stuff. When Travis asked him what his dream was, Oscar said it was to play on stage at Buddy Guy’s Legends.

“Travis told him, you are in luck, we have a gig there next week. And I am going to get you on it. The night of the show, Oscar showed up in a tangerine colored suit. I had never met him. He got on stage, we shook hands, I asked him what he wanted to do. He said a Muddy Waters song, one by B.B. King, and whatever the third one was. He sang three songs, the crowd went crazy, and he got three standing ovations. I’m standing there going, I think we are going to have to find a place for this guy in the band. And the rest is history.”

Things were really coming together for the band. But just before they started working on their fifth album, Koopman had a medical emergency that left him in a desperate situation.

“Travis was a self-employed plumber. He got real sick, and was hospitalized for ten days. He walked out with a $30,000 medical bill that he couldn’t pay. He needed health insurance, but at that time, with a pre-existing condition, good luck. Then the insurance company and the hospital started coming after him, threatening to take away his guitars and car. He was in a hard spot. He ended up moving to the Cayman Islands where he could get health insurance and steady work as a plumber. It hit us pretty hard as he was a founding member and a musical soulmate to me.”

When he first arrived in Madison, Nosek got to spend some time with Joel Paterson before the guitarist moved to Chicago, where he was a member of the Four Charms along with bass man Jimmy Sutton.

“With Travis gone, it was hard to find another guitar player that fit with our sound. Billy Flynn was playing as many gigs as he could, but he was on the road quite a bit, in demand from artists like Kim Wilson. I don’t quite remember how it happened, but once Joel started playing with us, it quickly became a real good fit. Both of them were I-94 Blues, which we released on Blue Bella Records, owned by Nick Moss. That was also the first album that the late Barrelhouse Chuck Goering played piano on. I’m really proud of it to this day. I think it’s one of the best recordings we ever made. And it was instrumental in getting us to where we are now.”

One day out of the blue, Nosek got a phone call from Jerry Del Giudice, one of the founders of Blind Pig Records. He had bought a copy of I-94 Blues, loved it, and told a stunned Nosek that it was one of his favorite blues albums of the last decade. And he wanted to talk about the Cash Box Kings joining his label. It was a surreal moment that had Nosek wondering if this was some kind of prank. But the offer was real, leading to a three record deal.

“It was a well established, well respected, visible blues label with a great track record. They believed in what we did creatively and musically. Jerry always gave us complete creative control and believed in our vision musically. He also liked the fact that it was young kids playing old school Chicago blues, but then we’d branch off into what we call Blues-abilly, which is a hybrid between the Sun Records blue sides and the Sun Records country and rockabilly sides. Our first album with them, Holler and Stomp, really gave us a shot in the arm and kind of brought us to new level of visibility in the blues world. It put us on the map as far as some of the major US festivals.”

Nosek graduated college with a degree in English linguistics. His plan pre-CBKs was to graduate, then go back to Chicago to teach high school English, doing music on the side. After he stumbled into several Linguistic courses in his final year,  he discovered that he really liked them, and had him pondering graduate school.

“I did get into Graduate School, and began teaching classes as a second language. Sometimes I would think about doing music full-time. But my Mom kept begging me to finish, telling me to get the degree, then go play music to your heart’s content. But the degree is what is going to get you health insurance. So I stayed, got the degree, and played music at the same time.

“I kept on teaching, jamming my foot further into the door, trying to be indispensable in my department. Eventually I was able to land myself a full-time gig there. And that led into a permanent position. And I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do two things that I’m passionate about. One is teach English and now, I teach people how to teach English. I have been doing that work for over 20 years.”

In 2015, just as their third album, Holding Court, came out on Blind Pig, Del Guidice and his partner, Edward Chmelewski, made the decision to sell their label to the Orchard Group. With the advent of Napster, I-Tunes, and downloading, the record business was in turmoil. But in appreciation of the work the Cash Box Kings had done, Del Guidice offered to put in a good word for the band with several labels. One of them was a main competitor, Alligator Records.

‘That started a prolonged back & forth conversation with Bruce Iglauer. I had met him, but didn’t know much about him. He always seemed like the Wizard of Oz, the mystic figure behind the scenes at this big blues label. I certainly had plenty of Alligator records in my library. Those first Hound Dog Taylor records are some of my favorite blues albums ever recorded. Bruce and Dick Shurman know more about Chicago blues than just about anyone I know.

“It took awhile for both of us to get comfortable signing a deal. He and his staff have been wonderful to work with, and he has been really good about respecting our autonomy as a band, in addition to supporting the songs about social and political issues Oscar and I choose to write about. That was one of the reasons that he was initially attracted to the band. His encouragement has meant a lot, because we are willing to stick our neck out and raise our voice about things that needed to be addressed in society.”

Being on Alligator gave the band’s profile another boost. Their second release on the label, Hail To The Kings, had the band’s fortunes on an upswing, with plenty of festival offers in hand. And then the pandemic hit.

“We all got knocked back to square one, especially Oscar. The rest of us have jobs while Billy still has plenty of work. I’d love to get Oscar and the rest of the guys all of the respect and notoriety I think they deserve. I going to keep pushing, but I’ll never take any of this for granted. My wife and kids have always supported me, as have my fellow band members. We are thankful for the blues fans, the Djs, writers, and publications like Blues Blast that help promote the music, because it sure ain’t Top 40!

Asked about his approach as a harmonica player, and as a bandleader, Nosek clearly favors a team approach.

“You have to take the ensemble approach. Everyone’s got their own little piece of the puzzle. And to make that sound right, everyone’s got to be staying in their lane, listening to each other, complimenting each other. When it’s time for you to step up and do your thing, you step up and do your thing, and then you go right back in your lane and you don’t overplay. You don’t step on people’s toes.

“When you listen to someone like Little Walter on his instrumental records, it is all about him. They were showcase pieces. I think some of my favorite sides that Walter ever recorded were when he was backing Muddy Waters or Jimmy Rogers, just playing the right thing at the right time. I have heard Sonny Boy Williamson II do solos where he played three notes, and those three notes mean more to me, touch me in a more profound way then some guy who gets on stage and play’s a thousand notes. It’s not about how many notes you play. It is playing the right note, at the right time.

“But at the end of the day, what I learned is the most important lesson was just to listen, and be a team member. Another was from Jerry Portnoy, who was Muddy’s harmonica player for a spell. I was at a club to hear Kim Wilson with a killer band. I think he had Billy Flynn and Nick Moss on guitar, Gene Taylor on piano, and Dave Myers on bass. It seemed like everybody was there, Pinetop Perkins, Billy Boy Arnold, just hanging out. I was about 20 years old.

“Kim was playing through a vintage amplifier. Jerry was standing next to me, so I said, Mr. Portnoy, what kind of amp is Kim playing through. Jerry looked at me as earnest as he could and said, kid, it doesn’t matter what amp it is, or what microphone he is using. He could be playing through a Fisher Price microphone, and Kim Wilson is still going to make it sound good. Do you know why? Because he has tone.

“That was a real eye opener for me. After some years of trying to learn the licks, I began to spend my time trying to get that tone. And I am still working on it. You can spend all the money you want on the gear, but if you don’t have the tone, don’t know how to play the right note at the right time, and understand when to sit back and be quiet, it will sound lousy. There may be a thousand harp players out there that are better than me. I take pride in not playing any bullshit. I get up on stage and try to play something tasteful, something that fits, and that adds to what the rest of the band is playing. At the end of the day, that’s my goal.”