Pee Wee Crayton

Pee Wee Crayton absorbed the trailblazing electric guitar style of T-Bone Walker yet injected enough bold originality into his own approach to escape any label of mere imitation during the years right after World War II. His sessions for Modern, Imperial, and Vee-Jay reveal abundant flashes of inventive, high-impact guitar, most notably on the assertive instrumentals “Texas Hop,” “Pee Wee’s Boogie,” and “Poppa Stoppa,” all delivered with greater force than Walker customarily employed.

A native Texan like Walker, Connie Crayton shifted to Los Angeles in 1935 and later continued northward to the Bay Area. He joined the Bihari brothers’ Los Angeles-based Modern imprint in 1948 and quickly scored with the brooding instrumental “Blues After Hours,” a close relative of Erskine Hawkins’ “After Hours,” which ascended to the top of the R&B charts late that year. The fiery “Texas Hop” followed it up the listings soon afterward, trailed the next year by “I Love You So.” Crayton’s brief run of hits ended through circumstances beyond his control.

After cutting numerous sides for Modern without further chart success, he moved to Aladdin and then, in 1954, to Imperial. Working under Dave Bartholomew’s expert guidance in New Orleans, Crayton produced some of his strongest material—“Every Dog Has His Day,” “You Know Yeah,” and “Runnin’ Wild”—with his guitar pushed to searing intensity over the dense saxophone foundation that defined the Crescent City sound.

From there he attempted a comeback on Vee-Jay in Chicago; the Ray Charles-inflected “I Found My Peace of Mind” from 1957 looked likely to restore his momentum, yet it did not. Sporadic singles for Jamie, Guyden, and Smash in the early 1960s preceded a long period out of the spotlight until Vanguard released the album Things I Used to Do in 1971. Pee Wee Crayton’s profile rose again afterward as he resumed touring and issued additional recordings before his death in 1985.