Sonny Landreth

   
Artist: Sonny Landreth

   Genre(s): 
Blues
   

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Discography:


   
 Grant Street

   Year: 2005   
Tracks: 11


   
 The Road We're On

   Year: 2003   
Tracks: 12


   
 Levee Town

   Year: 2000   
Tracks: 12


   
 Outward Bound

   Year: 1992   
Tracks: 11


   
 South Of I-10

   Year:    
Tracks: 12

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Southwest Louisiana-based guitarist, ballad maker and singer Sonny Landreth is a musician's musician. The megrims swoop guitar playing institute on his two Zoo Entertainment releases, Outward Bound (1992) and South of I-10 (1995) is classifiable and unlike anything else you've ever heard. His unorthodox guitar style comes from the way in which he simultaneously plays slide and makes fingering movements on the grate board. Landreth, world Health Organization has an leisurely personality, can play it all, like whatever good recording-session instrumentalist. His classifiable guitar acting can be heard on recordings by John Hiatt, Leslie West and Mountain, and other rock & rollers.


Landreth was natural February 1, 1951, in Canton, MS, and his family lived in Jackson, MS, for a few eld ahead settling in Lafayette, LA. Landreth, world Health Organization still lives in southwest Louisiana, began playing guitar after a recollective tenure with the trumpet. His earlier divine guidance came from Scotty Moore, the guitarist from Elvis Presley's band, only as time went on, he learned from the recordings of musicians and groups like Chet Atkins and the Ventures. As a teenager, Landreth began playing out with his friends in their parents' houses.


"They would table tennis us from one house to some other, and though we were all painful at beginning, as time went on we got pretty good. It's an evolutionary process, just like songwriting is," Landreth explained in an interview on his forty-fourth birthday in 1995. After his number one professional gig with accordionist Clifton Chenier in the 1970s (where he was the only White guy rope in the Red Beans and Rice Revue for for a while), Landreth struck out on his possess, but not earlier he recorded iI albums for the Blues Unlimited mark out of Crowley, LA, Blues Attack in 1981 and Way Down in Louisiana in 1985. If anyone is living proof of the penury to contract on in maliciousness of obstacles, it is Landreth.


The second of those iI albums got him noticed by some record executives in Nashville, which in turn light-emitting diode to his recording and touring work with John Hiatt. That lED to smooth more work with John Mayall, wHO recorded Landreth's radio-ready "Belgian Congo Square." More late, he's worked with New Orleans bandleader and pianist Allen Toussaint (wHO guests on several tracks on South of I-10, as does Dire Straits guitar player Mark Knopfler).


On Landreth's splendid albums for Zoo, the lyrics draw the auditor in to the sights, sounds, smells and estrus of southwest Louisiana, and a strong sense of place is plain in many of Landreth's songs. Although his style is altogether his possess and his singing is more than adequate, Landreth admits that writers like William Faulkner make had a large influence on his lyric writing. The fact that it's interpreted so retentive for academics at American universities to recognise the great soundbox of poesy that blues is concerns Landreth as well. Robert Johnson is Landreth's gravid hero when it comes to guitar playing. "When I finally discovered Robert Johnson, it all came together for me," Landreth said, noting that he too closely studied the recordings of Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Charley Patton.





Anne Briggs