Elvin Bishop

ELVIN BISHOP BIO

Elvin Bishop was just plain born to be a blues musician, even if it did take him a few years to know such a thing as blues music even existed. Growing up in the 1940s on a farm in Iowa with a loving but non-musical family, Elvin seldom heard music as a kid. “This was before TV,” Elvin says, “and on the radio you got a lot of Frank Sinatra and ‘How Much Is That Doggie In the Window’ type of stuff.”

The family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, when Elvin was 10, in 1952. Tulsa was “totally segregated,” says Elvin, “I mean, hard core. Oklahoma was not that far ahead of the rest of the South, I’d say.” Elvin remembers seeing Ray Charles in the Big Ten Ballroom with a rope stretched the length of the room to separate blacks and whites. “The one thing they couldn’t segregate was the airwaves,” says Bishop. “When rock and roll started up, in the mid-‘50s, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard showed up on white radio.”

And then, late one night when Elvin was 14 or 15, the atmospheric conditions a little rough, Jimmy Reed’s harmonica came cutting through the static from WLAC in Nashville, and Elvin Bishop’s life was changed. The song was “Honest I Do.” “That piercing harp came through, cutting in like a knife, and I said, ‘Oh, man, that’s it.’ I found out that blues was where the good part of rock and roll was coming from.”

After learning the guitar, Bishop was awarded a National Merit Scholarship in 1959, and he could have gone to pretty much any college he wanted, but chose Chicago, because that’s where the blues were. In the daytime, Elvin had made friends with some black guys who worked in the cafeteria, and started hitting the blues clubs at night. “In Chicago in 1960, I’ll bet there were 200 blues clubs. Any night of the week you could hear Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Little Smokey, Big Smokey, and a whole ton of people you never heard of.”

And his first week in Chicago, he came across Paul Butterfield, then Little Smokey Smothers, who taught him about the life of a bluesman as well: “Eating soul food, smelling the smells, seeing the real life that went with the music I’d heard on records.”
After playing with a lot of different people, including Hound Dog Taylor and Junior Wells, Elvin hooked up with Paul Butterfield to form the legendary Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who in 1965 recorded their self-titled debut that turned out to be a sea-change record for rock fans and musicians. An integrated band playing blues music in 1965 was unheard of, and introduced many people to the blues.

Bishop decided to venture solo, moving to the Bay Area and hooking up initially with Bill Graham’s Fillmore Records, then a few more labels before the big hit came in 1972 with “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” (including a powerful vocal by Mickey Thomas, later of Jefferson Starship).

Bishop’s newest release is Getting My Groove Back on Blind Pig Records, his first studio release in seven years. Bishop continues to tour the world “entertaining the people and maybe having a little too much fun myself.” Welcome back to Johnson’s Beach, Elvin.

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