Albert Luandrew, better known as Sunnyland Slim, became a legendary figure in Chicago blues history long before he died, and he lived to be inducted in to the Hall of Fame and garner a National Heritage Fellowship, but he never really became a widely popular recording star like his compatriots Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Buddy Guy. Sunnyland never had a hit on the Billboard charts despite a prolific recording career that spanned almost 50 years. He toured far and wide and had his loyal fans, but the size of his audiences, or of his paychecks, didn’t compare with those of many big-name blues artists. He never sought a more lucrative overseas residency the way his piano-playing friends Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd, and Willie Mabon did in Europe. The fact was that he never quit playing the small local blues clubs of Chicago as long as his health would allow, even when he was well into his eighties.
Sunnyland seemed so at home in the Chicago clubs — black or white, South Side or North Side, sometimes West Side — and so much a constant presence on the local blues scene — that it’s hard to imagine him having spent his musical career doing anything else. If he wasn’t a rich man, neither was he one who pleaded poverty. He made plenty of money over the years operating on the local circuit, truth be told, and only a portion of it from playing music. Long ago, even before his Chicago days, he’d learned to hustle, to deal, to connect with the right people, whether he found himself a job driving for the sheriff or running a gambling and good-time house. He’d picked cotton in Mississippi (where he was born near Vance on Sept. 5, 1906 or 1907) and fruit in Michigan, cooked meals for road gangs, and run his own storefront business in Chicago. He used to sell customers homebrewed whiskey, cut their hair, and take the rest of their money with crooked dice. Payoffs to Chicago’s finest were once part of the regimen. So, according to other musicians’ tales, were hot-tempered scuffles with band members and threats to record producers. But in later years he’d toned down his wild side. He remained a musical hustler, hauling a battered portable electric piano around to bars and hawking self-produced 45s and LPs on his own Airway label pressed by the Mexicans who ran the closest manufacturing plant.
He was, in short, a successful bluesman on his own terms, and more than that, a benevolent godfather who measured his success not in terms of hit records but by how many musicians he’d helped along the way. His generosity extended not to just the ones who went on to fame like Muddy, whom he’d taken to Chess (then Aristocrat) Records, but also to any number of newcomers who might need some guidance, advice, or a place to stay, not to mention the lady friends whose voices he paid to put on wax. It was this Sunnyland Slim — benefactor, mentor, patriarch — that his latter-day audiences came to know and love. To them he was a genial gentleman of the piano, cracking jokes between Woody Woodpecker laughs and incomprehensible ramblings, surrounded by adoring, respectful young musicians and listeners.
Sunnyland (the name taken from a song he wrote about a train called the Sunnyland) died in Chicago on March 17, 1995.
(Text adapted from Delmark Records liner notes by Jim O’Neal.)
— Jim O’Neal
www.stackhouse-bluesoterica.blogspot.com