Before reaching the legal drinking age, Tommy Bankhead was already performing blues alongside legends that ranged from Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson to Joe Willie Wilkins, Robert Nighthawk, and Joe Hill Louis. He launched his career as a teenager and maintained his reputation as a first-rate blues musician for the next fifty years. A native of Mississippi, he moved to St. Louis by the close of the 1940s. Although his guitar earned him recognition, Bankhead also played bass, drums, and harmonica with notable proficiency.
His recorded legacy is modest yet distinctive: the 1983 single “Please Mr. Foreman” with the Blues Eldoradoes and the album Message to St. Louis, issued in 2000 by Fedora Records with the Cryin' Shames. His guitar also appears on Howlin' Wolf’s classic “Moanin' at Midnight.” Only one thousand copies of the Blues Eldoradoes album were pressed, many purchased directly by fans at Midwest club dates; Vintage Vinyl later reissued the recording as a limited-edition compact disc.
Despite the scarcity of releases, Bankhead regularly shared stages with the city’s finest, among them Little Milton, Oliver Sain, Ike Turner, Henry Townsend, and Albert King. When not performing he sometimes worked as a deputy sheriff or security guard. During the 1950s he assembled his own band, the Landrockers, which played roadhouses and bars in St. Louis and crossed occasionally into Illinois. In the still-segregated era he appeared at clubs such as the Morocco Lounge and the Hotel Harlem. His health began to fail in the 1990s, and he died of respiratory failure in 2000.
