Henry Townsend

Roosevelt Sykes and Lonnie Johnson shaped Henry Townsend’s approach to music, and he became a powerful performer skilled on both guitar and piano. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he ranked among the players who established St. Louis as a major hub for blues in the United States.

Townsend moved to St. Louis at roughly the age of ten, arriving shortly before the decade began. By the close of the 1920s Columbia had signed him to a contract, resulting in several sides that featured his open-tuning slide guitar work. Two years afterward he produced comparable material for Paramount. Around the same period he took up piano, acquiring facility by playing along with Roosevelt Sykes recordings, and within a few years he was appearing in concerts alongside pianists such as Walter Davis and Henry Brown.

Throughout the 1930s Townsend worked frequently as a session musician alongside many leading artists of the day. Late in the decade he recorded several tracks for Bluebird, which proved to be his final sessions as a leader for a long time. During the 1940s and 1950s he maintained an active career as a sideman but released no solo recordings of his own.

A handful of sessions he directed in 1960 attracted little notice. By the end of the 1960s, however, regular appearances at blues and folk festivals across America sparked renewed interest in his work. He issued several albums on Adelphi and performed widely throughout the country. Toward the close of the 1970s he moved to Nighthawk Records.

By the early 1980s Townsend was widely regarded as a senior figure in St. Louis blues; he recorded for Wolf and Swingmaster while limiting live appearances to a few shows each year. The documentary That’s the Way I Do It aired on public television in 1984. Although largely retired by the late 1980s, he continued to perform occasional concerts until his death in 2006.