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Otis Spann

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category: Blues

At 8, Otis Spann was playing piano. At 14, he was performing with groups in Jackson, Mississippi. At 17, when his mother died, he was sent to Chicago, where his apprenticeship began in earnest. At 22, he was backing Muddy Waters.

Spann had the look. He wore suits and ties, slicked his hair. But he was a pianist — and although the bandleader regarded him as a brother, a pianist does not trump a guitarist. So it wasn’t until Spann ventured out on his own that there was proof he could sing almost as well as he played.

Musicians like Spann were poor and country, and when they moved to Chicago, they wrote and sang about what they knew and what they had — the blues, and relationships. They didn’t just sing; they felt the music, they lived the songs. So Spann’s singing is remarkable for its absence of distance. To watch videos of him is to watch a man in the throes.

But it’s the piano playing that confers immortality on Otis Spann. He was a two-handed player; he could pound rhythm and elaborate on a melody at the same time. He could boogie. And when Buddy Guy says “Gimme a little bit of it, Spann,” he can play quiet as grief. 

No wonder he appears on classics like Guy’s A Man and the Blues and Big Mama Thornton’s Ball ‘N Chain. [To buy the CD of “Otis Spann Is the Blues” and get a free MP3 download from Amazon click here. To buy the MP3 download, click here.]

I love Spann’s CDs because there is no vulgarity in them. No tricks, no updates. It’s just the blues, straight and unadorned. You can see why Eric Clapton and Keith Richards went to school on this music, and how they had to move beyond it; it couldn’t be done better.


And, too, the blues didn’t pay. Spann died, of cancer, at 40, just as his solo career was starting. For the next three decades, the marker on his grave was a piece of plywood. Seems almost too perfect, doesn’t it?