Joe Houston, the honking R&B saxman whose wallpaper-peeling potency defined his sound, cut sides for nearly all the major independent R&B imprints operating out of Los Angeles throughout the 1950s. As the jump-blues era waned, he moved seamlessly into rock & roll, even issuing low-budget Twist and surf LPs on Crown whose style remained little changed from the approach he had taken ten years earlier. During the late 1940s he performed in Houston, Texas, alongside the ensembles of Amos Milburn and Joe Turner; it was Turner who secured the young saxophonist his debut contract with Freedom Records in 1949. Houston reached the West Coast in 1952 and began recording for an array of labels both large and small—Modern, RPM, Lucky, Imperial, Dootone, Recorded in Hollywood, Cash, and Money—while also appearing on the better-financed Mercury roster, where his lone national R&B chart success, “Worry, Worry, Worry,” registered in 1952. His method stayed straightforward and fiercely immediate: he would honk and wail at maximum force from every possible stance, whether kneeling, lying supine, or striding the bar top. The sides he made for the Bihari Brothers’ Crown imprint, released under the billing “Wild Man of the Tenor Sax,” deliver unrelenting energy; “All Nite Long,” “Blow Joe Blow,” and “Joe’s Gone” stand as towering demonstrations of single-minded sax intensity. Houston stayed musically active into the 2000s, placing greater weight on his blues singing than he had in earlier decades, until a stroke struck in 2005. He returned to the stage for a time afterward, then withdrew from public view to be with family and friends. Houston stepped away from performing altogether in 2012 and passed away in Long Beach, California, on December 28, 2015, at the age of 89.
