J.B. Lenoir never achieved the level of stardom of some of his Chicago blues contemporaries, but his musical and political legacies ensured that he would be remembered long after his death at the age of 38 in 1967. On the Chicago scene he was most renowned for boogies and blues, sung in such a high-pitched voice that some listeners thought the singer was female. “Mama, Talk to Your Daughter” (his only chart hit, from 1955), “How Much More” and “Mojo Boogie” entered the repertoires of many other Chicago bluesmen. Lenoir also created a small political stir with a lament on economic woes that he titled “Eisenhower Blues.” But it was his 1965-66 recordings, made for the European market and seldom heard in America until years later, that have earned him posthumous acclaim as a spokesman for civil rights and the antiwar movement. Those moving songs, produced by Willie Dixon (who would record more political material himself in subsequent years), include “Alabama March,” “Born Dead,” “Down in Mississippi,” and “Vietnam.” Lenoir was one of the rare bluesmen of his era to speak out so overtly on such topics in his songs. Lenoir (pronounced Lenore), who was born on March 5, 1929, on a farm near Monticello in southern Mississippi, learned guitar from his father, and lived in Gulfport and New Orleans (the city he saluted in “Mojo Boogie”) before moving to Chicago in 1949. He toured Europe in 1965 and 1966 and was poised to take his career to a new level, at least overseas, but at home he had taken a kitchen job at the University of Illinois. All too soon, he was gone – three weeks after an auto accident, Lenoir’s heart failed. He was pronounced dead on arrival at an Urbana, Illinois, hospital, on April 29, 1967. British blues icon John Mayall recorded two songs in tribute to a “friend and great poet,” and released a Lenoir LP on his Crusade imprint, and filmmaker Wim Wenders brought the J.B. Lenoir story to life in his documentary Soul of a Man, part of Martin Scorsese’s The Blues series on PBS in 2003.
