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Jimmie Lee Robinson
Unlike
many of
his Chicago blues contemporaries, Jimmie Lee Robinson wasn't a
Mississippi Delta emigre. The guitarist was born and raised right in
the Windy City -- not far from Maxwell Street, the fabled open-air
market on the near West side where the blues veritably teemed during
the 1940s and '50s.
Robinson learned his lessons well. He formed a partnership with
guitarist Freddy King in 1952 for four years (they met outside the
local welfare office), later doing sideman work with Elmore James and
Little Walter and cutting sessions on guitar and bass behind Little
Walter, Eddie Taylor, Shakey Jake, and St. Louis Jimmy Oden. Robinson
cut three singles for the tiny Bandera label circa 1959-60; the
haunting "All My Life" packed enough power to be heard over in England,
where John Mayall faithfully covered it. Another Bandera standout,
"Lonely Traveller," was revived as the title track for Robinson's 1994
Delmark comeback album.
Europe enjoyed a glimpse of Robinson when he hit the continent as part
of Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau's 1965 American Folk Blues Festival
alongside John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, and Big Mama Thornton. After
that, his mother died, and times grew tough. Robinson worked as a
cabbie and security guard for the Board of Education for a quarter
century or so until the members of the Ice Cream Men -- a young local
band with an overriding passion for 1950s blues -- convinced Robinson
that he was much too young to be retired. His comeback was documented
by his first full length record, Lonely Traveller being released on
Delmark in 1994. In the mid-'90s he released Guns, Gangs, and Drugs on
his own Amina label. The beginning of 1998 found Robinson back in the
studio working on a set of mostly original songs that became his second
album, Remember Me, which was released in 2000 on the APO label. At the
end of 1998 Robinson began what ended up to be a 91-day fast to protest
the tearing down of the historic Maxwell Street area. He was a member
of Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition and wrote their theme
song, the "Maxwell Street Tear Down Blues" but decided a more direct
action needed to be taken. The fast brought attention to the cause,
including a front-page story in the New York Times, but ultimately the
area was almost completely demolished so that the University of
Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus could expand. In 1999 Robinson
recorded All My Life which was released in 2001. On July 6, 2002,
Robinson took his own life following a long bout with stomach cancer.
-Written
by Bill Dahl
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