JT’s Blues Blog # 6

Today’s featured artist: Fenton Robinson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fenton Robinson (September 23, 1935 – November 25, 1997) was an American blues singer and exponent of the Chicago blues guitar.

Biography
Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, United States, Robinson left his home at the age of 18 to move to Memphis, Tennessee where he recorded his first single “Tennessee Woman” in 1957. He settled in Chicago in 1962. He recorded his signature song, “Somebody Loan Me a Dime”, in 1967 on the Palos label, the nationwide distribution of which was aborted by a freak snow storm hitting the Windy City. Covered by Boz Scaggs in 1969, the song was misattributed, resulting in legal battles. It has since become a blues standard, being “part of the repertoire of one out of every two blues artists”, according to 1997’s Encyclopedia of Blues.

Robinson re-recorded the song for the critically acclaimed album Somebody Loan Me a Dime in 1974, the first of three he would produce under the Alligator Records label. Robinson was nominated for a Grammy Award for the second, 1977’s I Hear Some Blues Downstairs.

In the 1970s he was arrested and imprisoned for involuntary manslaughter in connection with a car accident. Paroled after nine months, he continued playing in Chicago clubs and later taught guitar.

Robinson died of complications from brain cancer, in Rockford, Illinois. Robinson’s signature song, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime” can be heard in The Blues Brothers on the radio when Jake (John Belushi) is being transported and paroled.

“Stay a player!”

Written by J.T. Butler