Sammy Lewis – A Message in a Bottle

Some blues stay in your head for a lifetime. Such is the case with Sammy Lewis’s ‘Somebody Stole My Love’.

Lewis was – and I hope is - a Memphis singer/harmonica player best known for his 1950s collaborations with the guitarist Willie Johnson. ‘I Feel So Worried’ was one of those Memphis blues of the ‘Feeling Good’ school and it is well known to blues/rockabilly fans, partly because of its inclusion on the famous 1970s Sun blues compilation, Blues Came Down From Memphis.

‘Somebody Stole My Love’ was recorded at some point in the early 1970s and it was something else again. This soulful minor blues was released on the independent (meaning ‘one release’) 8th Street label and it was later included on a bootleg compilation from the dutch Sundown concern.

The song stood out from the start because of the band format. Unusually,the band comprised acoustic guitar, electric bass and drums. This configuration had been used, to generally corny effect, on the Chess ‘Folk Blues’ albums of the 1960s, but Lewis’s band was distinctive and purposeful. The sound was not nostalgic, but forward-looking, in the manner, say, of the contemporary small acoustic-led band of Bill Withers.

Lewis’s vocals were fluid and sensitive. I can still hear the last verse:

All day long/ I’ve been crying out for you/ All day long, pretty baby/ I’ve been crying out for you/ Now you’ve gone and left me baby/ Tell me what in the world am I’m gonna do?

The singing was matched by the most delicate and melodic harp playing. Unusually, Lewis played in fourth position, using a G harp to play in B minor. This resulted in some startling filigree phrases in the upper register which sounded almost like chromatic slides. Fourth is a difficult position to work in, partly because of the relative scarcity of obvious bends and ‘Somebody Stole My Love’ displayed evidence of much forethought. The opening lines (working down from the 5th) were remarkably pretty and, throughout, Lewis produced phrases of deft beauty.

A couple of years ago, I made a little effort to get in touch with Sammy Lewis – just to record my appreciation. The opening came about as a result of a brief message, posted to a strange little website called ‘Top Twenty’ (or something similar). A lady wrote that Sammy was her grandfather and that any fans of his Sun work ‘should hear the stuff he plays around the house’.

I’d love to (although my post went unheeded at the time) . ‘Somebody Stole My Love’ is a total jewel of a record and it deserves to be more widely known. Sammy Lewis is a tremendous bluesman and this little post is intended to serve as a cyber-message in a bottle – if only to let Sammy know how he touched the soul of a blues follower thousands of miles across the pond.