John Primer

About

Also known as: Alfonzo Primer

John Primer spent years in the engine room of Chicago blues before anyone heard him front a band, and that apprenticeship is written all over his playing. He backed Junior Wells in the house band at Theresa's Lounge on the South Side, toured internationally with Willie Dixon's Chicago Blues All Stars, and then fulfilled a lifelong ambition by becoming Muddy Waters' guitarist and bandleader from 1980 until Waters died in 1983. It was Muddy who drilled into him the importance of keeping the old school blues tradition alive, and Primer took that seriously. He spent another 13 years with Magic Slim's Teardrops, where he helped develop the rhythmic "lump de lump" cadence that became a signature of the Chicago blues sound. His solo records on Wolf Records and Earwig picked up where those years left him, earning a W.C. Handy Award nomination for traditional album of the year in 1997. In 2008 he took a genuinely unusual turn, singing and improvising in front of the Chicago Sinfonietta Orchestra at Symphony Center in a specially commissioned orchestral setting of three of his songs.