Little Joe Blue

Little Joe Blue entered the world as Joseph Valery, Jr. in Mississippi during 1934 and came to the blues comparatively late. From his teenage years through his twenties he absorbed the sounds of Louis Jordan, Joe Liggins, and B.B. King, yet he did not pursue music professionally until the late 1950s. Well into his twenties at that point, he assembled the Midnighters in Detroit toward the close of the decade. In the early 1960s Valery relocated to Reno, Nevada, where he began cutting sides to accompany his appearances in neighborhood clubs before shifting his base to Los Angeles. Between the early and middle years of the decade he appeared on Kent and on the Checker Records subsidiary of Chess, though reviewers continued to label him a B.B. King imitator well into the 1980s. The same approach that drew such criticism also fit Valery’s own strengths, and in 1966 he achieved a modest hit with “Dirty Work Is Going On,” a track that later entered the blues canon. From the late 1960s into the early 1970s he maintained longer associations with both Jewel Records and Chess, continuing to record through the close of the 1980s. During those years he worked across the South and subsequently in Texas and California, later traveling to Europe for festival dates that included the International Jazz Fest. At present only one compact disc remains available, the Evejim collection Little Joe Blue’s Greatest Hits, which reissues the 1980s LPs I’m Doing Alright and Dirty Work Going On. His performance of “Standing on the Threshold,” marked by a commanding vocal and sweeping horn lines over spare, incisive guitar and piano, is also featured on Jewel Spotlights the Blues, Vol. 1.