(Henry Jesse James Townsend - Oct. 27, 1909 – Sept. 24, 2006)
DISCOGRAPHY 1962-2019 (19CD)
BIOGRAPHY
Henry "Mule" Townsend (October 27, 1909 – September 24, 2006) was an
American blues singer, guitarist and pianist.Townsend was born Henry Jesse James Townsend, in Shelby, Mississippi, and grew up in Cairo, Illinois. He left home at the age of 9 because of an abusive father and hoboed his way to St. Louis, Missouri. He learned guitar while in his early teens from a locally renowned blues guitarist known as Dudlow Joe.
By the late 1920s he had begun touring and recording with the pianist Walter Davis and had acquired the nickname Mule, because he was sturdy in both physique and character. In St. Louis, he worked with some of the early blues pioneers, including J. D. Short.
Townsend was one of the only artists known to have recorded in nine
consecutive decades. He first recorded in 1929 and remained active up to
2006. By the mid-1990s, Townsend and his one-time collaborator Yank
Rachell were the only active blues artists whose careers had started in
the 1920s. He recorded on several different labels, including Columbia
Records and Folkways Records.
Articulate and self-aware, with an excellent memory, Townsend gave many
invaluable interviews to blues enthusiasts and scholars. Paul Oliver
recorded him in 1960 and quoted him extensively in his 1967 work
Conversations with the Blues. Thirty years later, Bill Greensmith edited
thirty hours of taped interviews with Henry to produce a full
autobiography, giving a vivid history of the blues scene in St Louis and
East St Louis in its prime.
In 1985 he received the National Heritage Fellowship in recognition of
being a master artist. In 1995 he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of
Fame.
Townsend died, at the age of 96, on September 24, 2006, at St. Mary's
Ozaukee Hospital, Mequon, Wisconsin, just hours after having been the
first person to be presented with a "key" in Grafton's Paramount Plaza
Walk of Fame.