![]() T-Bone was a real showman and from him I learned how to do the splits on stage and how to play the guitar behind my head. T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown were popular in Texas then and I picked up a lot of their style. "You could really bend the strings on those. He began to play solid body guitars with thin necks. "He listened to me play in the B flat tuning and said,'You can't play anything with the guitar tuned like that.' He showed me how to tune the guitar properly." Unlike other New Orleans guitarists, Banister had no background in jazz. Banister had lessons from a Mexican guitarist while stationed in El Paso, Texas. Guitarist Snooks Eaglin took his place in Sugar Boy and the Chapaka Shawee, playing on the Carnival perennial "Jockamo" among other early Chess Records recordings. When I got in the service they told me to throw that clamp in the corner." īanister was drafted into the Army and served as a cook. " He played with a clamp on his guitar all the time. I wasn't good enough to solo then." At a 2011 Ponderosa Stomp Music History Conference in New Orleans Banister recalled how he studied blues guitarist Guitar Slim's playing at the Dew Drop Inn. We didn't have a bass player, so I'd play the bass patterns on the bottom strings. I'd just play the B flat chord open, then go to the four and five chords. I tuned the top three strings to a B flat chord and the bottom three strings regular. ![]() Influences and Techniques īanister said his musicianship was limited at that time. The Dew Drop's owner Frank Painia also booked the band at out of town dates. They performed at Club Tiajuana and the Dew Drop Inn. The record did not sell, but the band's popularity increased, assisted by their weekly radio broadcasts. Of the four songs recorded only two, "Early Sunday Morning" and "No One To Love Me", were released at the time, under the name The Sha-Weez. Potentially lucrative performance royalties were specifically excluded from the contract. The contract stipulated 1/2-cent per song to be divided between the writers and 1/2-cent per record to go to Dr. Dave Bartholomew, who was doing production work for Aladdin in New Orleans, signed the band. Daddy-O with Aladdin Records on November 23, 1952. The band's first recording session was through the intercession of Dr. Sugar Boy remembered, "We were all still in school so we could only play on weekends." He booked the band's first job at the Shadowland Club on Washington Avenue in 1952. Daddy-O wrote of the band as the "Chapaka Shawee" youngsters, in his column in The Louisiana Weekly, the name stuck. The band did not yet have a name, but they had an instrumental that was their theme song called "Chapaka Shawee", creole words they heard on the street that translated roughly as "we aren't raccoons". He invited them to perform on his Saturday morning radio show. Daddy-O (Vernon Winslow), New Orleans' first black disc jockey, who aired a daily show on WMRY. The other fellows in the band were Edgar "Big Boy" Myles, Warren Myles, Nolan Blackwell, Irving "Cat" Banister, and Alfred Bernard- just a bunch of youngsters having fun." In 1952, the group came to the attention of Dr. There weren't any guitar players in the band, so I bought a big hollow body Epiphone, a pickup, and amplifier from a music store on South Broad Street for $100." James "Sugar Boy" Crawford recalled, "During high school we had a little band, nothing real organized at first. "I was playing the trumpet until I was seventeen, but I got my front teeth knocked out," said Banister. Banister formed a band with some of his fellow students at Booker T. Irving Banister was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Louis and Elsie Mae Banister.
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