Hearing the blues up close
Scott Dirks grew up in Maywood, Illinois, where a neighborhood record store introduced him to the sound of blues and R&B before he understood much about the musicians. Radio made a more conscious impression in his teens. He remembered discovering a broadcast of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at a Fourth of July event and being drawn to the atmosphere their music created. A few years later, a small-room Muddy Waters performance became a decisive experience.
In his account to Chicago Radio Spotlight, Dirks dated that Waters show to around 1975. Sitting very close to the band made the music more immediate than the large rock concerts he already knew. He asked for a harmonica that Christmas and began buying Waters records. The interest expanded into collecting records, researching their makers, and playing the music himself. It also fed a broadcasting career that began in Chicago in the early 1980s and included work at the Loop and stations at 94.7 FM.
Learning from Chicago players
As a harmonica player, Dirks sought out musicians connected with Little Walter and the postwar Chicago scene. His performing associations included Dave and Louis Myers, Jimmy Rogers, Johnny Littlejohn, Jimmie Lee Robinson, Louisiana Red, and Jody Williams. They offered contact with distinct musical personalities as well as with the repertoire he knew from records. Little Walter’s music remained a particular focus, but the working environment put him alongside many different ways of playing and accompanying the blues.
That practical education informs the combination of activities that runs through his career. Dirks has written about musicians, played with them, helped produce their recordings, and introduced their work to radio audiences. His perspective joins close attention to older records with experience of living performers and recording sessions. He has also appeared as an interview subject for BluesHarmonica.com, discussing Chicago blues, production, playing technique, and the history of Little Walter’s music.
Producing harmonica-led records
Carey Bell’s Deep Down is an important example of Dirks’s production work. The Alligator album credits Bell, Bruce Iglauer, and Dirks as co-producers. Its recording sessions took place in 1994, with a band including Lurrie Bell, Carl Weathersby, Lucky Peterson, Johnny B. Gayden, and Ray ‘Killer’ Allison. Dirks also wrote the liner notes, connecting Bell’s musical development to the Chicago players he had known. Production and historical writing became complementary parts of the same release.
Good Luck Man continued that association with Bell. Dirks shared production credits with Bell, Iglauer, and guitarist Steve Jacobs. The album places Bell originals beside songs associated with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Johnny Young, and Big Walter Horton. Its sessions use two different supporting groups, allowing the music to range from down-home Chicago blues to a more contemporary rhythmic feel. The record received the W.C. Handy award for traditional blues album, an honor belonging to the album rather than an individual performing prize for Dirks.
His record-making work has also included Billy Boy Arnold’s Eldorado Cadillac, released in 1995, and projects involving Lurrie Bell, Jimmy Burns, and Jimmie Lee Robinson. These associations place him among singers and instrumentalists whose careers reached back into several periods of Chicago blues. He was helping make new records with veteran artists, alongside his interest in preserving the history of their earlier work.
Writing Little Walter’s life
In 2002, Tony Glover, Scott Dirks, and Ward Gaines published Blues with a Feeling: The Little Walter Story. The book examines Walter Jacobs as an individual musician within the development of electric Chicago blues. For Dirks, it brought a long-standing fascination with Walter’s records into a sustained historical project with two collaborators. Its subject was both a major recording artist and a figure whose story required work beyond the familiar songs and often-repeated anecdotes.
Dirks has continued discussing that research after the book’s publication. In the Happy Hour Harmonica podcast’s Little Walter retrospective, he traced his involvement in the book project to 1991. That long interval between the beginning of his work and publication suggests the scale of the undertaking. His knowledge of the recordings and his relationships within Chicago’s blues community contributed to a book that has become a continuing reference for musicians and listeners interested in Walter.
The book’s influence belongs alongside his playing and production. Readers can encounter the music through a historical narrative; record buyers can hear sessions he helped shape; audiences can hear him perform. Those forms of work reinforce one another without being identical. In particular, co-authoring Walter’s biography did not make Dirks merely a commentator on a finished tradition: he remained involved in making and performing blues with other musicians.
A continuing performing career
Dirks plays harmonica and sings with the Chicago Blues All-Stars, the group associated with Ray Allison and Daniel ‘Chicago Slim’ Ivankovich. On its 2013 album Red, Hot & Blue, he sings ‘Snatch It Back and Hold It’ and ‘Hoodoo Man Blues,’ bringing Junior Wells material into the group’s horn-supported, funk-oriented arrangements. The setting differs from a small traditional blues band, giving another view of his performing work beyond his Little Walter scholarship.
He also contributes harmonica to ‘Little Juke Joint’ on Michael Burks’s Show of Strength, released in 2012. Burks’s guitar-led music creates a different context again, with Dirks appearing as a guest within an established band. These recordings show how his playing has reached listeners through both ongoing groups and individual studio appearances.
His later work with Willie Buck brings many of his interests together. He has helped produce a studio album and played harmonica in a live ensemble drawn from Delmark’s roster. The attraction to Chicago blues that began with a close encounter with Muddy Waters continued through direct participation: sharing a bandstand, making a record, and finding the right contribution to a singer’s music.
On Good Luck Man, Bell’s own numbers include ‘Going Back to Mississippi,’ ‘Teardrops,’ and the instrumental ‘Bell Hop.’ The mix of new songs and repertoire from earlier Chicago players connects the album’s production to the same musicians and musical history Dirks explored as a writer. His shared producer credit recognizes work behind the recording rather than implying that he played its featured harmonica parts.