Sunnyland Slim

Sunnyland Slim displayed extraordinary staying power that aligned with his massive frame, sustaining his role as a revered Chicago blues piano elder long past the era when most contemporaries had passed. Over more than five decades the towering pianist hammered the keys across the Windy City, joining nearly every notable local figure and supplying studio backing for the bulk of them on multiple occasions.

Albert Luandrew entered the world in Mississippi and acquired his first skills on a pump organ. He performed in Delta juke joints and movie houses before settling in Memphis as his main base during the late 1920s, where he worked Beale Street and spent time with Little Brother Montgomery and Ma Rainey. The striking stage name he adopted came from the title of one of his most familiar numbers, the somber “Sunnyland Train,” a piece that honored the velocity and lethal force of the St. Louis-to-Memphis locomotive responsible for many deaths when it struck people crossing the tracks at the wrong moment.

Slim arrived in Chicago in 1939 and established himself as a highly sought piano player, working for a time alongside John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. In 1947 he cut eight sides for RCA Victor under the somewhat inaccurate billing “Doctor Clayton’s Buddy.” Had it not been for Slim’s intervention, Muddy Waters might never have reached Chess; the pianist’s 1947 Aristocrat session gave the Chess brothers their introduction to Waters. Although Aristocrat issued his stark “Johnson Machine Gun,” Slim also recorded for an array of other labels between 1948 and 1956—Hytone, Opera, Chance, Tempo-Tone, Mercury, Apollo, JOB, Regal, Vee-Jay (unissued), Blue Lake, Club 51, and Cobra—his voice projecting the same commanding resonance that marked his 88s. His singular keyboard touch likewise animated hundreds of other artists’ sessions throughout those years.

In 1960 he traveled to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, to make his first album for Prestige’s Bluesville subsidiary, with King Curtis adding incisive tenor saxophone accents on numerous tracks. The resulting Slim’s Shout remains one of his strongest efforts, containing definitive readings of “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” “Shake It,” “Brownskin Woman,” and “It’s You Baby.”

Like a firmly anchored oak, Sunnyland Slim endured through the decades. For a stretch he ran his own Airway Records imprint. As late as 1985 he delivered the solid Chicago Jump for the Red Beans label, accompanied by the same tight group that backed him every Sunday night for roughly twelve years at the North Side club B.L.U.E.S.

Serious illnesses occasionally sidelined him, yet he always returned, unleashing his signature Woody Woodpecker laugh and launching another buoyant slow blues exactly as he had for the previous half century. After a disastrous fall on ice while heading home from a gig triggered multiple complications, Sunnyland Slim succumbed to kidney failure in 1995, leaving a lasting absence.