#28 - Bullfrog Blues

 Albums: Live In Europe (1972)

Also: Blues (2019), Check Shirt Wizard (2020)

When Rory Gallagher mooted a live album as his third solo outing, wanting to capture the energy of his live performance, his record label, Polydor, was somewhat hesitant. Nonetheless, in February and March 1972, he recorded shows from his European tour.  With Wilgar Campbell on drums and Gerry McAvoy on bass, the album was released on 14 May that year. It hit the top ten of the UK album charts and became his first gold record.

It also mostly featured songs that hadn’t been on Rory’s previous albums, several of them became firm fixtures of his live show from there on in. ‘Bullfrog Blues’ in particular has gone onto reach legendary status. It perhaps isn’t an exaggeration to suggest that several Rory fans would be delighted with a compilation album solely comprised of his various live versions of that one song.

‘Bullfrog Blues’ first came to the light of day with William Harris, who recorded it back in 1928. Harris was ‘discovered’ by Henry Columbus Speir, a white record store owner in Jackson, Mississippi, who also acted as a talent scout for a number of record labels including Columbia, Victor, Okeh, Paramount, Decca, Vocallion and Gennett. The majority of records he sold from his store were blues and it’s argued that if it wasn’t for Speir, much of the Delta blues would have been missed. Amongst those Speir brought to notice include Son House, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Bo Carter and the Mississippi Sheiks. As well as being regarded as some of the biggest names in the blues, Rory himself often cited them as favourites, interpreted their work in his own way, and in the case of the Mississippi Sheiks, even wrote a song about them!

Ted Gioia in his book Delta Blues, notes that when researcher Gayle Wardlow played William Harris’ recordings to older Mississippi blues musicians, they all commented that here was an authentic Delta player. Unfortunately, unlike the others picked up by H.C. Speir, William Harris appears to have disappeared down a black hole in history, though it’s thought that he may have been the first bluesman Speir signed. Very little is known about Harris outwith the songs he recorded for Speir in the late 1920s. Searches have been made with little success in the historic records for Harris. The only other information on him is anecdotal: he was said to have toured extensively, playing medicine shows, juke joints, house parties and street corners. He is also described as being religious and avoided drink, and guitarist Hayes McMullen recalls him at a house party in 1927, smartly dressed, cracking jokes and playing guitar whilst dancing with a woman at the same time. Other than that, there is simply nothing.

Nothing apart from ‘Bullfrog Blues’, which went on to be covered eleven times following its first release, including by Rory. Other notable versions include a late 1965 cover by John Hammond, which sounds close to the original and Canned Heat’s 1967 version, which, though called ‘Bullfrog Blues’, has developed with new lyrics. With old blues numbers, this is quite common. Certainly Rory took it and made it his own. There may be something of a personal bias here, but his version certainly blows Canned Heat out the house in terms of sheer raw energy. As Jamel_AKA_Jamal, a YouTuber who posts reaction videos to music requests, says in his recent video reaction to the 1976 Old Grey Whistle Test Rory Gallagher Special version of ‘Bullfrog Blues’, this is a band going crazy on stage.

If anything, it seems like Rory and his bandmates (in any of the line-ups of The Rory Gallagher Band) have a distinct case of the ‘Bullfrog Blues’ as described in the lyrics Rory puts to the song. A bizarre affliction that no medical intervention can cure but can only be dealt with by getting up and playing music. Rory varied the lyrics from performance to performance, but the gist is just the same. Got yourself in an uncomfortable state? Let the music take it out. The song itself seems to be the cure, which is probably handy as it’s a condition the entire family can have – “My mother got them, my father got them, my sister got them” – even Grandma gets affected!

For Rory, the main crux of the song appears to be the act of playing. He spends less time singing than he does enthusiastically letting rip on guitar, and the energy is passed around the band, each taking a solo and becoming the centre of attention, before everyone joins back in and continues to let rip even more. All the while, the audience is a bouncing, boogeying froth, getting more worked up as Rory gets worked up – rather famously at the Chorus Pour Paris 1980 show. ‘Bullfrog Blues’ closes the program and the audience leap up on stage, dancing around the band, with Rory eventually climbing on top of the amplifiers for a more scenic view!