Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin - Ebbets Field, Denver, CO, 1973, Late Show

Yesterday, I posted the early show of Big Mama Thornton playing at Ebbets Field in Denver in 1973, with Tommy Bolin on lead guitar. Here's the late show.

Most of what I'd want to say about this was said in my write-up for the early show. So please read that. Just a quick recap: it would be plenty interesting to have a recording of blues legend Big Mama Thornton performing at a small club like this in 1973. But a nice bonus is having Bolin on guitar. He was living in the area at the time, shortly before joining the James Gang and then later joining Deep Purple, and he sometimes would back up blues artists when they were passing through town. This seems to be the only instance of that that luckily got recorded.

As with the early show, if you listen to this, it's pretty clear Thornton was winging it, singing whatever song came into her head at any moment. Bolin and the rest of the back-up band probably had no practice time with her, and did a good job trying to keep up with her. 

One nice thing is that the songs in the late show are almost entirely different than those of the early show, with only "Hound Dog" and "Swing It on Home" being the same. And apparently that was Thornton playing the short drum solo at the end of the last song.

If anyone knows the names of the instrumental second and third tracks, please let me know, so I can give them proper names. I did some Internet searching and found someone who had played with Bolin who knew the name of the first song, or I never would have been able to name that instrumental.

As with the early show, the music is unreleased and the sound quality is excellent. 

This album is 47 minutes long.

01 Swamp Carol [Instrumental] (Tommy Bolin)
02 Instrumental Jam (Tommy Bolin)
03 Blues Shuffle [Instrumental] (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
04 Pack Up My Troubles (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
05 Good Morning, Little Schoolboy [Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl] (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
06 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
07 Oh Happy Day (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
08 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
09 He's Got the Whole World in His Hands (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
10 Go Down Moses - He's Got the Whole World in His Hands [Reprise] (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
11 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
12 Drink on the Table (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
13 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
14 What'd I Say (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
15 Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
16 Swing It on Home - Drum Solo [Edit] (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/WNLRoRCv

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/VLaXtYf8pAPGlJP/file

The cover image shows Big Mama Thornton on the "Dick Cavett Show" on July 22, 1971. That's the case for the early show cover image as well. I thought it would be nice to have her in the same clothes for the covers of the early and late shows. 

Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin - Ebbets Field, Denver, CO, 1973, Early Show

The next installment of Ebbets Field radio broadcast concerts is something unexpected: blue legend Big Mama Thornton performing with Deep Purple lead guitarist Tommy Bolin! There are early and late shows, with the two of them quite different. Here's the early show.

Thorton is best known for the song "Hound Dog." She had a hit with it in 1952, before Elvis Presley's version. Her version sold half a million copies, which was a remarkable amount back at that time. She's also well known for a song she wrote, "Ball and Chain," after Janis Joplin did a great version of it in the late 1960s. Her time in the spotlight in the 1950s didn't last long, since she only had that one hit. But in the 1960s and into the 1970s she had a career revival playing in blues and/or folk clubs and festivals. At the time of this concert, she was about 46 years old.

Here's her Wikipedia page:

Big Mama Thornton - Wikipedia 

Tommy Bolin was born and raised in Iowa, but his family moved to Boulder, Colorado, in his late teens. He began playing in local bands. One of them, Zephyr, released a couple of albums, and toured nationally, though they didn't have any hits. After that band broke up around 1971, he joined a couple other short-lived bands, and wrote a lot of songs. In 1973, he joined the James Gang (after Joe Walsh left) and dominated it, writing nearly all the songs for two albums. By 1975, he'd left the James Gang and joined Deep Purple for about a year. He also released solo albums in 1975 and 1976. But he died of a drug overdose at the very end of 1976.

Tommy Bolin - Wikipedia

Anyway, the reason I mention all this about Bolin is because it's relevant in explaining how his involvement with Thornton came to be. In 1972 and 1973 especially, Bolin was at loose ends and living in Boulder, often without a band. During this time, he developed a good relationship with Chuck Morris, who owned the Ebbets Field venue (and a couple more in the area). Often, when blues musicians were passing through town and were lacking a backing band, Morris would get Bolin and/or some of Bolin's friends to provide the backing. (Bolin would make the drive from Boulder to Denver in less than an hour.) Or sometimes Bolin would just ask to sit in. In this way, he played with many musical greats, including Howlin' Wolf, Albert King, and Chuck Berry. Usually, these big names would be greatly impressed by Bolin, who was far from being just an inexperienced local musician. 

It seems none of these shows pairing Bolin with these blues legends were recorded... except for this one with Thornton, somehow. I don't know if this was broadcast on the radio at the time, like other Ebbets Field shows, or if just got luckily recorded by the venue anyway. Bobby Berge and Stan Shelton rounded out the backing band. 

Chances are there was little to no practice between Thornton and the backing band beforehand. You can hear at times where Thornton starts a song and just expects the other musicians to figure out what's going on and join in. But it's also clear that she respected Bolin's lead guitar playing, as can be seen by the space he was given to solo, especially with the two instrumentals at the beginning. (If anyone knows the names of those songs, if they have names, please let me know. I also had to figure out the names of the other songs. Please let me know if I got any of them wrong.)

Surprisingly, not only was Thornton a great blues vocalist, she could also play drums pretty well. That's her playing a short drum solo near the end of this recording.

This album is 46 minutes long. 

01 Instrumental Jam (Tommy Bolin)
02 Blues Shuffle [Instrumental] (Tommy Bolin)
03 Blues with Intro (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
04 Little Red Rooster [Early One Morning] (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
05 Rock Me Baby (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
06 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
07 Shake, Rattle and Roll - Hi Ho Silver (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
08 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
09 Ball and Chain (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
10 Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
11 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
12 Swing It on Home - Drum Solo (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)
13 talk (Big Mama Thornton with Tommy Bolin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/fnNa7zWg

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/XF5Bz0rmGxi8TR1/file 

The cover image shows Big Mama Thornton on the "Dick Cavett Show" on July 22, 1971. By the way, looking at the cover, you may wonder that she doesn't look like a "Big Mama." When she was younger, she was most definitely big - at one point, she weighed about 450 pounds. But years of heavy drinking gave her health problems that caused her to lose a lot of weight by the early 1970s. By the time she died in 1984, she only weighed about 95 pounds.