A drummer among Chicago bandleaders
Ray Allison built his career in the working bands of Chicago blues, becoming especially closely associated with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and James Cotton. Willie Buck also remembered employing him early in his career. The nickname ‘Killer’ became familiar to audiences, but Allison’s work was often the practical business of sustaining a singer or instrumentalist through a set. His recordings connect him to guitar-led bands, harmonica sessions, and later a group in which he moved forward as guitarist and singer.
By the late 1970s, Allison was playing with Buddy Guy. Stone Crazy! preserves him in a compact quartet recorded at Condorcet Studios in Toulouse, France, on October 31, 1979. Buddy and Phil Guy supply guitars, J.W. Williams plays bass, and Allison is the drummer. Produced by Didier Tricard, the album gives the rhythm section the task of supporting Guy’s extended guitar and vocal performances without a keyboard or horn section filling out the band.
The six-song program includes ‘I Smell a Rat,’ ‘Are You Losing Your Mind?,’ and ‘She’s Out There Somewhere.’ Its small ensemble makes the relationship between guitar, bass, and drums central to the record’s identity. Allison’s place in it is part of the continuity of Guy’s working music before the later major-label albums brought the guitarist another wave of attention.
Muddy Waters and the road
Allison became the drummer in Muddy Waters’s last working band. Rick Kreher recalled that the lineup settled around Allison after an initial period with another drummer. Kreher and John Primer played guitar, with Lovie Lee on piano, Earnest Johnson on bass, and Mojo Buford on harmonica. Allison was therefore part of a complete touring ensemble, accompanying Waters through the final phase of his performing career.
The November 1981 Checkerboard Lounge performance with members of the Rolling Stones captures that band in a particularly well-known setting. The occasion brought visiting rock musicians into a Chicago club, but the foundation was the working group already supporting Waters. Allison’s role continued behind the shifting guitar lineup and the attention surrounding the guests. It is an example of the reliability required from a drummer when the shape of an evening changes around the band.
After Waters’s death, Allison worked with James Cotton and continued appearing in the wider Chicago blues network. Alligator’s account of the Harp Attack! musicians describes Cotton recruiting him and identifies his recording work with Cotton, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, and Michael Coleman. The work moved him among bandleaders with different musical personalities while retaining a connection to Chicago’s postwar blues tradition.
Harmonica sessions and the 1990s
Harp Attack!, released by Alligator in 1990, brings Allison together with James Cotton, Junior Wells, Carey Bell, and Billy Branch. Michael Coleman plays guitar, Lucky Peterson piano, and Johnny B. Gayden bass. Four featured harmonica players could easily turn a session into a succession of unrelated spotlights, but the consistent supporting band gives the record a shared foundation. Allison and Gayden remain in place as the singers and soloists exchange parts.
The program ranges from ‘Down Home Blues’ and ‘Keep Your Hands Out of My Pockets’ to ‘Hit Man’ and ‘New Kid on the Block.’ Its musical interest includes the contrast among the four leaders, each bringing an individual attack and sense of time. Allison’s contribution belongs to the common rhythmic setting in which those contrasts can be heard. It is a major example of his studio work with harmonica players, rather than only with the guitarists with whom he was often associated.
Carey Bell’s Deep Down reunited much of that rhythm-section experience. Recorded in 1994, it includes Allison, Gayden, and Peterson, with Lurrie Bell and Carl Weathersby on guitars. Bell, Bruce Iglauer, and Scott Dirks shared production responsibilities. The album moves between down-home blues and funkier material, placing Allison in another setting where accompanying the harmonica and voice requires attention to both force and space. Its personnel also anticipates relationships that would reappear in his later group.
Allison’s continuing work with Buddy Guy included Slippin’ In, released in 1994. The album used both Guy’s Chicago musicians and players associated with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Double Trouble. Allison appears among the drummers, with Greg Rzab part of Guy’s regular rhythm section. The credit places him in another phase of Guy’s recording career, alongside the earlier French session and the live band work for which Chicago audiences knew him.
Guitar, singing, and the All-Stars
Allison later taught himself guitar and developed a front-line role with his own Killer Ray Allison Band. He also helped form the Chicago Blues All-Stars with Daniel ‘Chicago Slim’ Ivankovich. The change broadened the ways listeners encountered him: a musician previously identified primarily with drums now singing and playing guitar, while drawing on decades of experience accompanying other bandleaders. He retained close ties to the same pool of Chicago musicians.
The All-Stars’ Red, Hot & Blue appeared on Azure Music in 2013. Allison and Ivankovich play guitar and sing, Scott Dirks plays harmonica and sings, Roosevelt Purifoy handles keyboards, Gayden plays bass, and Jerry Porter is the drummer. The horn section includes Johnny Cotton, Garrick Patten, and Kenny Anderson, with Anji Brooks contributing vocals. Allison is out front in a larger, horn-supported ensemble, with Porter taking the drum chair.
The repertoire includes ‘Feeling Sexy,’ ‘Wonder Why,’ ‘Snatch It Back and Hold It,’ ‘Walking the Dog,’ ‘Wang Dang Doodle,’ and ‘Hoodoo Man Blues.’ Rather than treating the familiar titles as fixed arrangements, the band emphasizes funk rhythms and a revue-like exchange of singers and instrumental voices. Allison sings ‘Feeling Sexy’ and ‘Why You Treat Me This Way?’ The contrast with Stone Crazy! is substantial: a different instrument, a larger group, and a different place within the presentation.
A generous presence and a lasting record
Allison died in October 2016 at sixty. Tributes emphasized the pleasure he took in performing and his willingness to help other musicians. Ivankovich remembered his positive manner, and accounts of Allison’s later years describe players traveling to learn and perform with him. That generosity was another form of musical influence, carried through personal encounters as well as through the albums on which he appears.
His career can be followed through particular ensembles: Buddy Guy’s quartet, Muddy Waters’s final band, the common backing group on Harp Attack!, Carey Bell’s session musicians, and the Chicago Blues All-Stars. Each required a different contribution. Together, they preserve Allison as both a supporting musician and a performer with his own guitar and vocal identity, moving between those responsibilities across more than four decades.