Cotton’s uncle took him to live with Sonny Boy Williamson when he was but a mere nine years old.
“I didn’t really know nothing about the blues then, but I did know Sonny Boy because he played on that radio show. And then my uncle took me to (live with) him and I stayed with him for six years,” said Cotton. “When we first met, I just walked up and started playing for him and he started paying attention. Whatever he played today, I could play tomorrow.”
The thought of a pre-teenager living and juking all over the south with the notoriously irascible Sonny Boy Williamson might be cause for a bit of concern, but according to Cotton, that was not the case at all.
“He was really a sweet guy and he had a sweet wife … a really nice woman,” he said. “But they got on bad terms and she finally left him and went to Milwaukee.”
The teen-aged Cotton and Sonny Boy gigged all over Arkansas and Mississippi, with Cotton opening the show by playing outside the juke joints because he was too young to officially go inside the club.
“One day Sonny Boy went up to Milwaukee (after his wife) – just like that. He left and he left me his band. I was 15 years old then,” Cotton said. “But they (the band) was so much older than me … I was just a kid … I did everything that I could do to help, but that didn’t last too long and I couldn’t hold things together … maybe three or four months.”
Even though he was still just a teenager – and had no real home at the time – Cotton managed to survive in Memphis by playing on Beale Street. But it wasn’t long before his musical education hit chapter two, this time as part of Howlin’ Wolf’s band, The Houserockers.
Just as he had with Sonny Boy, even though he was a bit on the under-aged side of things, Cotton played juke joint after juke joint with The Wolf.
“I met him in West Memphis, Arkansas. He knew that I could play and that I was needing a job, so he asked me to come play with him,” Cotton said. “And I was with him for about two years. I played on his first recordings, ‘Moanin’ at Midnight’ and ‘How Many More Years.’ I thought he was a nice guy. If you left him alone and didn’t cause no trouble, you wouldn’t get none back.”
The story about how Sam Phillips first heard The Wolf sing and immediately fell in love with his voice is well-documented. But Phillips was also responsible for bringing Cotton into the studio to cut his first recordings, just as he had done for Howlin’ Wolf.
“I had this radio show on KWEM in West Memphis (when he was 17 years old) – and Sam Phillips called me up one day and said, ‘How’d you like to make a record?’ And I said, ‘I’d love it.’ So he told me to meet him the next Wednesday,” Cotton said. “Then we went in and he asked me to play some songs and I had a couple of blues songs – one called ‘Oh, Baby’ and one called ‘Straighten Up Baby’ – and I played them and he recorded them and they played those records a lot around Memphis.”
Cotton ultimately ended up cutting four sides for Sun Records.
- Terry Mullins / Blues Blast Magazine
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