Sylvester Weaver

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This article is about the country-blues musician. For the former president of NBC, see Pat Weaver.

Sylvester Weaver (born July 25, 1897 in Louisville, Kentucky; died April 4, 1960 in Louisville, Kentucky) was an American blues guitar player and pioneer of the country blues.

On 23 October 1923 he recorded in New York together with the bluessinger Sara Martin “Longing for Daddy Blues / I've Got to Go and Leave My Daddy Behind“, two weeks later as a soloist “Guitar Blues / Guitar Rag“. Both recordings got released on Okeh Records. These recordings are the first country-blues recordings at all. Especially “Guitar Rag“ (played on a Guitjo) went to be a blues-classic and got covered in the 1930s by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys as “Steel Guitar Rag“, this made it a country music-standard too.

Until 1927 Weaver recorded, sometimes accompanied by Sara Martin about 50 more songs, on some recordings from 1927 he was accompanied by Walter Beasley and the singer Helen Humes. Weaver often used the bottleneck-style, playing it with a knife. His recordings were quite successful, but in 1927 he retired and went back to Louisville until his death 1960. Though many country blues artists had a revival from the 1950s on, Weaver died almost forgotten. Only 1992 his complete work got released on two CDs, the same year his (up to then anonymous) grave got a headstone by engagement of the Louisville-based Kentucky Blues Society (KBS). Furthermore theKBS honors annually since 1989 persons, who rendered outstanding services to the blues with their Sylvester Weaver Award.

[edit] Works

• Complete Recorded Works Vol. 1 (1923-1927), 1992, Document Records
• Complete Recorded Works Vol. 2 (1927), 1992, Document Records

The content of this article comes from the equivalent German-language wikipedia article (retrieved August 10, 2006).