Little Milton

'What’s the point in listening to us doing it when you can listen to Slim Harpo doing it?' Mick Jagger asked that about a different Louisiana bluesman. He could just as easily have said it about Little Milton.James Milton Campbell Jr. started with a piece of wire nailed to the side of a Mississippi farmhouse and cotton-field wages saved up for a mail-order guitar. He ended up with a number-one record that became a Civil Rights anthem, a signature song that’s still a blues-festival singalong forty years on, and a guitar tone sharp enough to sit in the same sentence as B.B. King’s - without ever once sounding like an imitation of it.In between, he got eclipsed at Sun Records by a kid from Tupelo named Elvis. He watched two labels collapse out from under him. He hustled day work and one-nighters on the chitlin’ circuit even after he’d had a hit record, because that’s what the business asked of a Black bluesman in his generation, hit or no hit. And every single time, he picked his guitar back up and found the next stage.Little Milton: The Blues Is Alright follows that whole fifty-two-year run - Sun to Bobbin to Chess to Stax to Malaco, Nelson Street juke joints to the Montreux Jazz Festival to a final tour shared with the Allman Brothers - with the same steady, unshowy attention Milton brought to every gig he ever played. This is a book for blues fans who already know his name, and for anyone who’s never heard it and wants to know why they should.He never got the one crossover hit that makes a legend. He got something harder, and better: five decades of showing up. Put the record on. Start anywhere. The blues is alright.Know the story. Hear the blues differently.