From the West Memphis blues world to Chicago
Little Willie Anderson was born on May 21, 1920. Before moving to Chicago, he heard musicians around West Memphis, Arkansas, including Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Nighthawk and Robert Lockwood Jr. Those encounters gave him a grounding in harmonica and blues before his close association with Little Walter. His musical background therefore extended beyond the Chicago player with whom he would most often be compared.
Anderson arrived in Chicago in 1939 and eventually worked professionally as a sideman with Johnny Young. In the following decades he became familiar to the city’s blues musicians and club audiences. His career developed largely through live performance, with a long gap between joining that working community and making the album on which his later reputation rests.
Life around Little Walter
Anderson became Little Walter’s valet, driver and friend. The association gave him close access to a musician whose amplified harmonica and phrasing profoundly affected Chicago blues. Anderson absorbed so much of Walter’s style that he acquired the nickname “Little Walter Jr.” His identity as a performer became closely tied to that model, both in the way he played and in how listeners understood him.
The comparison could overshadow his own work. Anderson was also a singer and songwriter, and his eventual album contains eight compositions credited to him. His career illustrates how strongly an admired musician could shape another player while leaving room for individual repertoire. The influence is unmistakable, but it does not account for every part of the music Anderson later brought to a session.
Swinging the Blues in July 1979
Bob Corritore recorded Anderson at Birdland Recording Studio in Chicago in July 1979. The session became Swinging the Blues, produced for Corritore’s Blues Over Blues label. Corritore assembled a band with deep experience in Chicago blues: Robert Lockwood Jr. and Sammy Lawhorn on guitar, Jimmy Lee Robinson on guitar and bass, Willie Black on bass and Fred Below on drums. Pete Haskin added alto saxophone to “Lester Leaps In.”
The session reunited Anderson with Lockwood, a musician he had heard before coming to Chicago.
The ten selections include “Come Home Mama,” “Willie’s Women Blues,” “Late Night,” “69th Street Bounce,” “Looking for You Baby,” “Been Around,” “West Side Baby” and “Big Fat Mama,” all credited to Anderson. The remaining titles are “Lester Leaps In” and “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.” The program gave him opportunities to present original songs and instrumental ideas alongside material from the wider blues and jazz vocabulary.
The session behind the record
Corritore’s photographs preserve the people behind the July 1979 session. Anderson appears with Robert Lockwood Jr., Sammy Lawhorn, Fred Below and Jimmy Lee Robinson; other photographs show Corritore with Lockwood and Below. Jim O’Neal photographed Anderson and Lockwood together. The images place faces beside a set of credits that otherwise reaches many listeners only through the record sleeve.
For Corritore, the Anderson album was an early undertaking as a producer and independent label owner. He sought help from experienced figures including Dick Shurman and Bob Koester. Recording an older musician whom he had heard in Chicago clubs became part of a longer commitment to making records with blues performers whose work had received limited documentation.
Anderson’s music later appeared on Earwig’s 16th Anniversary Sampler, which included a selection from the Birdland session. That compilation put him among other artists in the label’s catalog and offered listeners another route into his music after his death. Along with the reissued album, it kept his harmonica and singing available beyond the clubs where he had worked.
Other Chicago recordings
Anderson also contributed to the shared album Blues from Chicago. A separate Chicago session in September 1979 brought him together with Eddie Taylor, Detroit Junior, Jimmy Lee Robinson and Odie Payne. His selections were “Had a Dream,” “Bad Door Knocker” and the instrumental “Willie’s Rock.” Those performances belong alongside Swinging the Blues in an account of his recordings, even though the latter remained his principal full-length album.
The two projects placed him among musicians he knew through Chicago’s working blues scene. On one, he led an entire program with a band assembled by Corritore; on the other, he shared the record with fellow performers. His recording history was small, but it was not confined to a single set of musicians or one appearance on an album.
Later club appearances and the Earwig reissue
Anderson continued appearing around Chicago, including sit-ins at B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted and the Broadway Night Club, owned by guitarist John Brim. Younger players encountered him in those rooms. Corritore later named him among the older harmonica musicians who offered informal guidance and opportunities to play, giving Anderson a role in passing on the music beyond his one album.
He died on June 20, 1991. Earwig acquired the album master from Corritore and reissued Swinging the Blues in 1994, with Michael Frank producing the reissue. The CD followed a 1993 remix and returned the session to circulation for another generation of listeners. Its significance lies in preserving Anderson as singer, harmonica player and composer with a band able to meet him on familiar musical ground.