This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.

Editor’s Note: Betsy Phillips had a comment on her post this week in which she speculated on Sleepy John Estes’ influences. I thought I’d reprint it here, along with examples.
____________

[Sleepy John Estes’] first record comes out in 1929. There’s not much recorded music before he gets his start. Certainly, there wasn’t recorded music on the radio at the time. So, his influences would all have been live musicians.

I wish someone would do a good biography of him while people who remember him are still alive. But, it’s interesting, just in the little bit we do know of him, how linked in he was with other West Tennessee black musicians. He played with Yank Rachell (who wrote “She Caught the Katy” among other things) from Brownsville and Hammie Nixon, also from Brownsville, who came straight out of jug bands and who recorded with a lot of folks in Memphis, as well as Son Bonds, who was hooked in with Sonny Boy Williamson out of Jackson.

So, I have a guess at an answer to who’s influencing him, just based on how far apart towns are. But let me be clear that I am purely guessing. Rural West Tennessee has a large African American population. Like the Mississippi Delta, it’s cotton-growing country. Before the Great Migration, the population in the country would have been predominately African-American. My guess is that there was a small chitlin circuit that ran out of Memphis, over to Jackson and back–again, my guess, is that performers went up 51, first night in Millington, second in Covington, third in Ripley, fourth in Dyersburg, etc. with a stop in Brownsville at some point. My guess is that West Tennessee musicians would take to the circuit when they could and that’s how they were all meeting each other. Because Brownsville is near Memphis now–with a car–but it certainly wasn’t then. There had to be some mechanism that was bringing these guys into contact with each other.

I also suspect in a song like “Milk Cow Blues” that we’re hearing the heavy influence of black minstrel show music (obviously, music from the larger chitlin circuit).

Two things make me think that. We know that performers at the minstrel shows were, obviously, not amplified but needed to be heard above a crowd and we know that every minstrel show featured a marching band. If you listen to the song with those two things in mind, a few things jump out–you could march to that song, the guitar rolls in the song could be nods to the drum rolls you would have heard in a marching band, and you can bellow the lyrics (in fact, Robert Plant regularly did). Estes isn’t bellowing on the record, but, thanks to Plant, it’s not hard to imagine how you could project “Hey, sweet mama, let me be your kid” over the noise of a crowd.

So, that’s my guess–that his influences were the live performers he saw there in Brownsville, but that he probably had the ability to see a lot more good musicians coming through Brownsville then than we realize.