Joe Louis Walker, a blues master and musical omnivore whose snarling guitar work, gritty vocals and introspective songwriting earned him the praise of Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger and many others over a six-decade career, died on April 30 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 75.
His wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, said his death, in a hospital, was from a cardiac-related illness.
Mr. Walker recorded more than 30 albums for a variety of labels, starting with “Cold Is the Night” in 1986. He toured extensively and was a staple of blues festivals around the world. He won the Blues Music Award (formerly the W.C. Handy Award) multiple times and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.” He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.
Along the way he traded riffs with blues powerhouses like B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.
The keyboard innovator Herbie Hancock deemed him “a singular force” with a “remarkable gift for instantly electrifying a room.” Mick Jagger called him “a magnificent guitar player and singer.” The jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea playfully anointed him “the Chick Corea of blues.”
Critics, too, felt Mr. Walker’s power. “His voice is weather-beaten but ready for more; his guitar solos are fast, wiry and incisive,” Jon Pareles wrote in a 1989 review in The New York Times, “often starting out with impetuous squiggles before moaning with bluesy despair.”
Mr. Walker came of age musically during the flowering of psychedelic rock in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and he was also fluent in jazz, gospel, soul, funk and pop. On his album “Great Guitars,” released in 1997, he collaborated with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Ike Turner and Taj Mahal.
Mr. Walker considered himself more of a blues explorer than a purist. “When I picked up a guitar, I did not say I was gonna be a blues artist, or a rock artist,” he said in a 2021 interview with NPR. “The idiom,” he added, “finds us.”
In an interview with Living Blues magazine, Mr. Walker recalled that the jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, with whom he recorded several times, once told him: “You know, Joe, if you’re ahead of the curve, people ain’t gonna like you, but if you join the pack, you’re gonna be like everybody else. So just stay ahead of the curve and maybe they’ll catch up to you.”
Louis Joseph Walker Jr. was born in San Francisco on Dec. 25, 1949. His father was a longshoreman and construction worker; his mother, Mildred (Siles) Walker, was a nurse. When he was a child, an older sister started him calling him Joe Louis after the Black boxing champion, and the name stuck.
His parents sent him to a predominantly white Roman Catholic elementary school, believing that it would give him the best education. While the experience was at times traumatic, he said, it taught him to deal with the racism he would encounter as an adult.
He took up the guitar at age 8 and at 16 became a house guitarist at the Matrix, where Jefferson Airplane was the house band. “At the Matrix, I was a young cat still learning his craft, but guys like Magic Sam and Albert King took a liking to me,” Mr. Walker said in a 2021 interview with The Chicago Tribune. “They could see I was sincere and I would learn from them.”
During those years, San Francisco was overflowing with rock luminaries. Sly Stone was a neighbor, and Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist who backed Bob Dylan in his much-dissected electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, was his roommate for several years.
“He was a few years older, but he was huge part of my development,” Mr. Walker told The Tribune. “Everyone would come to pay homage to Michael. Bob Dylan would come to the house.”
The city was overflowing with drugs, too, and Mr. Walker and Mr. Bloomfield were hardly immune to their lure. By the mid-1970s, Mr. Walker had reached his limit. “A lot of my friends were dropping like flies,” he told The Tribune, “and I made a point to change, or I would have been an obituary like everyone else.” (Mr. Bloomfield died of a heroin overdose in 1981).
He kicked drugs and enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music and English. He also abandoned the blues for a decade, joining an Oakland gospel group, the Spiritual Corinthians.
After performing with that group at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Mr. Walker rekindled his love of the blues, formed a band called the Bosstalkers and signed to HighTone, an Oakland label. His debut effort, “Cold Is the Night,” was produced by Bruce Bromberg and Dennis Walker, who had recently helped propel another blues guitarist, Robert Cray, to stardom.
In 1988, the Times critic Peter Watrous described Mr. Walker as “a fluttering blues guitarist” whose “lines seem blown by the wind” and “a singer with a Cadillac of a voice who can sound as if he’s not faking passion.”
Mr. Walker continued to show off his free-ranging musical sensibility on the 2020 album “Blues Comin’ On,” joined, among others, by the Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen and the singers Dion DiMucci and Mitch Ryder, of “Devil With the Blue Dress” fame.
In addition to his wife, his survivors include a sister, Ernestine; a brother, Roy; and two grandsons.
On the release of his soul-inflected album “The Weight of the World” in 2023, Mr. Walker told Living Blues that he wished he had a dime for every interviewer who had ever asked him to define the blues.
The album included a musical answer to that question: “Hello, It’s the Blues,” a song on which he said the blues was “speaking in the first person.”
“It’s in your heart, your soul, and your mind, you just don’t know it,” he said. “Because everybody’s got the blues, from the president on down to the dogcatcher, you know?”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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