Joe Hill Louis

Joe Hill Louis generated quite a stir as a widely enjoyed one-man blues ensemble throughout Memphis in the 1950s. Without his unfortunate early death, broader acclaim would almost certainly have followed his name. Born Lester, sometimes called Leslie, Hill, he left home at fourteen and took up residence with an affluent Memphis household. After prevailing in a scuffle against another young man, he acquired the “Joe Louis” moniker. The multi-instrumentalist began with harmonica; by the closing years of the 1940s his solo performances had become a familiar draw at Handy Park and on WDIA, the pioneering Memphis broadcaster where he presented a quarter-hour show under the name The Pepticon Boy.

Billed also as the Be-Bop Boy, Louis first entered the studio in 1949 for Columbia, yet nearly all his later sides appeared on various R&B independents both prominent and obscure—Phillips, the brief initial venture launched by Sam Phillips, along with Modern, Sun, Checker, Meteor, Big Town, and House of Sound. At Big Town he recorded the fierce “Hydramatic Woman,” a number he had already cut for Sun in 1953 with Walter Horton supplying harmonica, although Phillips declined to issue it. Louis was thirty-five when tetanus claimed him after an infected thumb wound.