Jesse Fuller - Move on Down the Line

An important document of an oft-neglected historical area of American vernacular music and a tribute to the talents of a quite remarkable folk-blues musician.Fuller, The Lone Cat (1896 - 1976) was one of the great blues troubadours. A remarkably expressive singer and fine 12-string guitarist, Fuller developed his unique one-man-band style around his fotdella (foot-operated bass) and harmonica/kazoo-rig. This CD includes his earliest recordings, including the original version of his classic San Francisco Bay Blues, together with a splendid session taped in London in 1965 for Topic Records. One track - John Henry - has been unavailable since the early 1960s. In the 1960s, the decade when the wider world reached out to embrace him, Fuller's San Francisco Bay Blues was one of the most popular numbers in the repertoire of blues and folk singers.But Fuller was not a blues musician, although he played blues. Neither was he strictly speaking a folk musician as the term was then understood, for his act incorporated elements of minstrelsy and vaudeville - in other words, show business - and he'd travelled far beyond the rurals to work in Hollywood. His own term folk songster best describes who he was and what he did.