Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
It’s barely January, and already a “bomb cyclone” storm has frozen pipes, disrupted travel, and much worse, all while a “tripledemic” tears through the population. Every year the Secret History of Chicago Music undertakes its annual Winter Blues series, and every year the season seems to find new ways to give us the blues. This time I’m starting my annual look at the Windy City’s blues legacy with guitarist John Primer, one of many artists who’s well-known among blues fans (often an obsessive lot) but obscure to the general population.
The blues is enough of a niche interest these days that only the most famous local artists enjoy wide name recognition—Muddy Waters, for instance, or Buddy Guy. Primer has played in Waters’s band and led the house band at one of Guy’s clubs. He’s learned from some of the best bluesmen the city has ever produced, and he’s been crucial to keeping the Chicago tradition vital.
John Primer was born March 5, 1945, in Camden, Mississippi, into a family of sharecroppers. His extended family shared a drafty shack on the Mansell plantation, with just a wood-burning stove for warmth. They had no running water, just a shared well a mile away, and they only had an outhouse when they could afford to have one dug. To make ends meet, everyone in the family worked—picking cotton, plowing fields—and while they worked, they often sang together. Primer’s father and an older cousin would play the blues at home at night, which gave young John his first exposure to the music. But when Primer was four, his father—himself only 22—was killed in a truck-driving accident.
After that tragedy, Primer’s mother moved to Chicago, vowing to send for him and his sister Barbara when they turned 18. Primer had a lonely childhood, raised mostly by his grandmother and aunts. He liked to sing in the woods, and he built a one-string instrument called a diddley bow. Diddley bows are often made of baling wire stretched between two nails in a board, with a glass bottle as a bridge; Primer nailed broom wire to the boards on the side of his grandmother’s home and used a brick as a bridge.
Soon Primer was singing at school for dimes on the playground. He also sang in church, which was an especially cathartic experience for him. His grandmother had a record player, and he fell in love with the likes of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Milton, Elmore James, and B.B. and Albert King. When he turned 18 in 1963, he finally followed his mother to Chicago.
Primer frequented Maxwell Street, historically a port of entry for immigrants and in those days still a mecca for salesmen and hustlers of all stripes, including musicians. At the marketplace, he honed his chops and earned some coin. He also met fellow bluesman Pat Rushing, a guitarist with a raw, dissonant style and an almost frightening growl of a voice. Primer and Rushing formed the Maintainers, who played regularly on Maxwell Street on Sundays and then started picking up west-side club gigs.
In 1968, Primer left to front a soul and R&B group called the Brotherhood Band, where his rough, earthy singing style began to evolve. In 1974, he landed his first important regular gig, becoming a member of the house band at Theresa’s, at 48th and Indiana. Among his bandmates at the club was former Muddy Waters sideman Sammy Lawhorn, who taught Primer to play slide guitar—now a key element of his style. The band often played seven nights a week, backing whoever came through: Junior Wells, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Smokey Smothers, Buddy Guy, Magic Slim, and many more. Lawhorn ended up mentoring Primer for decades.
Bassist Willie Dixon, whose songwriting had played a major role in shaping Chicago blues after World War II, saw Primer at that Theresa’s residency and invited him to join his Chicago Blues All Stars. In 1979 Primer hit the road with the All Stars, touring Mexico and Europe and polishing his skills in the exalted company of Dixon’s band.
John Primer and his band perform in 2018 in Don Odell’s studio in Palmer, Massachusetts.
Ever since Primer had heard Muddy Waters on his grandma’s phonograph, he’d dreamed of playing with him. In 1980 that fantasy became reality. Waters was putting together a new working band—it would turn out to be his last—and he recruited Primer, who became his bandleader. Even after Waters retired from performing in ’82 due to his failing health, the band stayed together for another year.
Radio station WXRT recorded several sets at Navy Pier in August 1980, including one by the Waters band in which Primer played; a track from that set appeared on the compilation Blues Deluxe. In 1981, Primer was part of a famous gig at south-side blues club the Checkerboard Lounge, where the Rolling Stones shared the stage with Waters’s band and guests such as Buddy Guy, Lefty Dizz, and Junior Wells. The whole celebrated concert was released in 2012 on CD and DVD.
John Primer was part of Muddy Waters’s band for the 1981 Checkerboard Lounge show with the Rolling Stones.
Buddy Guy had founded the Checkerboard Lounge in 1972 with L.C. Thurman, and he remained co-owner till ’85, when he left to launch his own venue, Buddy Guy’s Legends, which opened in ’89. Primer became the leader of the Checkerboard’s house band in the early 80s, a job he held for many years—the club moved from Bronzeville to Hyde Park in 2005 and closed in 2015. After his gig with Waters, Primer also toured with Magic Slim & the Teardrops for around 13 years, essentially becoming the group’s second front man with his perfectly coarse, raspy voice.
Lawhorn, Waters, and Magic Slim all contributed to Primer’s evolution as a bluesman. “From Lawhorn, Primer absorbed shimmering melodicism, harmonic sophistication, and an irresistible sense of serious-minded musical playfulness,” blues scholar David Whiteis wrote for the Reader in 1995. “In Waters’s band he gained confidence in his own slide-guitar playing and honed his instincts for the tonal and rhythmic subtleties of blues singing. More recently he’s picked up a healthy dose of Slim’s musical intensity and good-natured fierceness.”
Primer had been playing with Slim for almost a decade when he released his first album under his own name, 1991’s Stuff You Got to Watch (on Chicago label Earwig). His next album, in 1995, was also his major-label debut: The Real Deal came out on Atlantic subsidiary Code Blue. Primer used the occasion to launch his own group, the Real Deal Blues Band, which he’s led in one form or another ever since. “I hated to leave [Magic Slim],” he told Whiteis in a 2009 interview for Living Blues. “We had such a good thing going for us. But . . . be there so long as you can, then you gotta go. Let somebody else learn.”
John Primer plays a stripped-down acoustic tune in 2011 on WYCE radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The Real Deal probably should’ve given Primer’s solo career a bigger bump, but Code Blue folded shortly after its release. Though his major-label dreams didn’t pan out, Primer has amassed an impressive discography, appearing on almost 90 recordings as a leader or sideman.
Primer has continued to tour as well, though he hit the same wall as every other professional musician when COVID hit in early 2020. On March 11 of that year, Primer and the Real Deal Band (which includes longtime harp player Steve Bell, son of Carey Bell, and drummer Lenny Media) flew to Amsterdam to begin a European tour. The next day, the U.S. announced a ban on flights from Europe. Primer didn’t want to get stranded overseas with a canceled tour, so he bought return tickets for everyone before the ban went into effect at midnight.
“We had terrible flights home,” Primer told Chicago Blues Guide. “We had an 18-hour delay in Warsaw, Poland, so we had to get hotel rooms there for another $300. We went home with no money at all. I had to charge everything for all three of us. Our tour was going to last 19 days with 14 gigs. We were going to make $17,000 plus sell CDs and merchandise. All that gone because of COVID-19. This was the worst experience for us.”
Back in the States, Primer watched helplessly as his gigs were canceled further and further into the future, wiping his whole calendar clean.
“I am the only one working in my household and I support my band as well,” he said. “So this has been a lot for me to take in. I feel responsible for my family and my band. I also have a 15-year-old daughter and my wife works with me as my manager so I take care of everyone.”
John Primer & the Real Deal Blues Band livestream from Rosa’s Lounge in 2022.
Primer began livestreaming for tips from his basement studio on Sunday afternoons, and in May 2020 he released an album called The Gypsy Woman Told Me with harmonica player Bob Corritore, an old Chicago friend now living in Arizona. In September 2022, Primer followed it with Hard Times, on his own Blues House Productions label. He’s playing at Blue Chicago on Friday, January 6, and if COVID cooperates he’ll be taking a short UK tour in mid-January. He also has loads of suburban gigs lined up for February—check johnprimerblues.com/shows for details and updates. Assuming this winter’s wave of viruses doesn’t keep you at home till March, you should take your first chance to see this living legend work his magic.
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
