Little Brother Montgomery was one of the foremost piano men in the blues for several decades, a product of a musical family in Louisiana that included two brothers (Joe and Tollie) and a nephew (Paul Gayten) who also recorded as blues pianists. Born Eurreal Wilford Montgomery on April 18, 1906, in Kentwood, a sawmill town north of New Orleans, Montgomery heard a myriad of pianists in his father’s juke joint and in his travels around Louisiana and Mississippi. Most of them would be forgotten to blues history but for Montgomery’s uncanny ability to recall and record their songs. Montgomery’s famous ‘Vicksburg Blues’ was a variant of ‘The Forty Fours,’ or ‘Forty Four Blues,’ a number he and some cohorts developed in the 1920s. Another Montgomery song, ‘The First Time I Met You,’ was rerecorded by Buddy Guy as ‘The First Time I Met the Blues,’ with Montgomery playing piano on the session for Chess Records. Montgomery first recorded in Chicago in 1930 but spent most of his early professional years in south Mississippi, where he played lumber camps, cafes and nightclubs, sometimes in a blues mode, other times leading a more jazz-oriented dance band. Among the bluesmen influenced by his music in Mississippi were Skip James, Sunnyland Slim, Arthur ‘Big Boy Crudup, and especially Willie Dixon. In a 1940 issue of Downbeat magazine, Dave Clark (also a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee) called Montgomery ‘the greatest piano man that ever invaded Dixie.’ Montgomery settled in Chicago in the 1940s and maintained a dual career as a blues icon and as a trad jazz bandsman. Montgomery also took pride in his ability to play pop songs, sentimental tunes and pretty ballads and often complained that record companies only wanted blues from him. But it was blues, often stately and elegant, edged with emotion from his quivering vocals, that earned him lasting fame. His prolific career included recordings for Paramount, Bluebird, Folkways and Prestige/Bluesville. Montgomery died in Chicago on September 6, 1985.
