Mighty Joe Young

During the closing years of the 1970s and the opening stretch of the 1980s, Mighty Joe Young ranked among the foremost blues guitarists performing on Chicago’s developing North Side club scene. Although born in Louisiana, the guitarist grew up in Milwaukee and first built his name on the West Side of Chicago in the middle 1950s as a dependable sideman with Joe Little & His Heart Breakers before shifting his allegiance to harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold. Throughout the 1960s he appeared on Prestige and Testament sessions with Arnold and supported Jimmy Rogers on a 1958 Chess date.

Solo prospects opened fitfully: an early 1955 single on Louisiana’s Jiffy label and a 1958 release on Chicago’s Atomic-H imprint both failed to gain traction. Momentum arrived in 1961 when the fiery coupling “Why Baby”/“Empty Arms” appeared on Bobby Robinson’s Fire label. Between 1960 and 1963 Young served as Otis Rush’s rhythm guitarist; he also issued a string of notable 45s on several local imprints—“I Want a Love,” “Voo Doo Dust,” and “Something’s Wrong” on Webcor in the mid-1960s, another pressing of “Something’s Wrong” on the same label in 1966, “Sweet Kisses” and “Henpecked” on Celtex plus “Hard Times (Follow Me)” on USA in 1967, and “Guitar Star” on Jacklyn in 1969. In 1966 he made a guest appearance on Bill “Hoss” Allen’s nationally syndicated R&B television show The Beat, taped in Dallas, and contributed to late-decade recordings by Tyrone Davis and Jimmy Dawkins.

Delmark presented Young’s first long-player, Blues With a Touch of Soul, in 1971, yet the two mid-1970s Ovation albums—Chicken Heads (1974) and the self-titled set (1976)—more persuasively illustrated his blend of blues and soul. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s his principal Chicago venue remained Wise Fools Pub, where nightly crowds filled the room to hear him, often with Benny Turner, brother of Freddy King, on bass.

In 1986 Young launched a privately funded project intended to grant him full creative authority. Around the same period physicians determined that surgery was required to relieve a pinched nerve in his neck. Post-operative complications impaired his guitar technique; nevertheless he persisted with the recordings as a form of physical therapy, completing them in piecemeal fashion until Mighty Man finally emerged in 1997. Persistent health concerns continued, and Mighty Joe Young died in Chicago on March 25, 1999, at the age of 71.