Artist: Johnny Copeland
Genre(s):
Blues
Rock
Discography:
Ghetto Child
Year: 2001
Tracks: 14
![Live In Australia [1990]](http://img.mp3fiesta.com/covers/16/16134/alb_62603_th.jpg)
Live In Australia [1990]
Year: 1997
Tracks: 10
Jungle Swing
Year: 1996
Tracks: 11
Texas Twister
Year: 1990
Tracks: 15
Showdown!
Year: 1985
Tracks: 9
Considering the quantity of time he spent steadily pealing from gig to gig, Johnny "Clyde" Copeland's prove to prominence in the vapors world in the early '90s wasn't all that surprising. A contract with the PolyGram/Verve label put his '90s recordings into the hands of thousands of blue devils lovers around the world. It's non that Copeland's gift changed all that a good deal since he recorded for Rounder Records in the 1980s; it's simply that major companies began to ascertain the voltage of dandy, tireless megrims musicians like Copeland. Unfortunately, Copeland was forced to dull down in 1995-96 by heart-related complications, in time he continued to perform shows until his demise in July of 1997.
Greyback Copeland was born March 27, 1937, in Haynesville, LA, around 15 miles south of Magnolia, AR (erst Texarkana, a hotbed of blues activity in the 1920s and '30s). The word of sharecroppers, his begetter died when he was selfsame thomas Young, simply Copeland was tending his father's guitar. His low gig was with his friend Joe "Guitar" Hughes. Soon after, Hughes "took sick" for a workweek and the cy Young Copeland discovered he could be a front man and cede vocals as comfortably as anyone else around Houston at that sentence.
His music, by his have reasoning, fell somewhere between the smelly R&B of New Orleans and the swing and leap blues of Kansas City. After his family (sans his begetter) moved to Houston, Copeland was uncovered, as a teenager, to musicians from both cities. While he was becoming interested in music, he also chased boxing, by and large as an avocation, and it is from his years as a boxer that he got his nickname "Clyde."
Copeland and Hughes fell under the spell of T-Bone Walker, whom Copeland low saw perform when he was 13 age old. As a teen he played at locales such as Shady's Playhouse -- Houston's preeminent blues club, horde to well-nigh of the city's best bluesmen during the fifties -- and the Eldorado Ballroom. Copeland and Hughes later formed The Dukes of Rhythm, which became the house band at the Shady's Playhouse. After that, he worn-out time playing on circuit with Albert Collins (himself a cuss T-Bone Walker lover) during the fifties, and besides played on stage with Sonny Boy Williamson II, Big Mama Thornton, and Freddie King. He began recording in 1958 with "Rock 'n' Roll Lily" for Mercury, and touched between several labels during the 1960s, including All Boy and Golden Eagle in Houston, where he had regional successes with "Please Let Me Know" and "Downhearted on Bending Knees," and later for Wand and Atlantic in New York. In 1965, he displayed a surprising prescience in terms of the pop market by cut a version of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" for Wand.
After touring around the "Lone-Star State triangle" of Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, he resettled to New York City in 1974, at the top of the disco boom. It seems moving to New York City was the c. H. Best vocation move Copeland ever made, for he had easy access code to clubs in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Boston, all of which tranquil had a spot for blues musicians like him. Meanwhile, gage in Houston, the baseball club scene was hurting, undischarged partially to the oil-related recession of the mid-'70s. Copeland took a day job at a Brew 'n' Burger restaurant in New York and played his blues at dark, finding centripetal audiences at clubs in Harlem and Greenwich Village.
Copeland recorded sevener albums for Rounder Records, showtime in 1981 and including Copeland Special, Make My Home Where I Hang My Hat, TX Twister, Delivery It All Back Home, When the Rain Starts a Fallin', Ain't Nothing But a Party (live, nominative for a Grammy) and Boom Boom; he likewise won a Grammy award in 1986 for his efforts on an Alligator album, Encounter! with Robert Cray and the late Albert Collins. Although Copeland had a booming, shouting voice and was a powerful guitar player and live performer, what most people don't realize is just how clever a songster he was. His latter-day releases for the PolyGram/Verve/Gitanes mark, including Flyin' High (1992) and Catch Up with the Blues, supply ample grounds of this on "Life's Rainbow (Nature Song)" (from the latter record album) and "Luck" (from the onetime record album).
Because Copeland was only six months old when his parents split up and he alone byword his male parent a few multiplication before he passed away, Copeland never completed he had transmissible a innate heart shortcoming from his male parent. He disovered this in the midst of some other typically hectic circuit in late 1994, when he had to go into the hospital in Colorado. After he was diagnosed with heart disease, he spent the next few age in and out of hospitals, undertaking a number of dear nerve surgeries. Early in 1997, he was waiting for a bosom graft at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. As he was waiting, he was assign on the L-VAD, a recent innovation for patients hurt from congenital nerve defects. In 1995, Copeland appeared on CNN and ABC-TV's Adept Morning America, wearing his L-VAD, offering the conception valuable publicity.
Scorn his health problems, Copeland continued to do and his always bouncy concerts did not diminished all that a great deal. After living 20 months on the L-VAD -- the longest anyone had lived on the device -- he received a heart transplant on January 1, 1997 and for a few months, the bosom worked fine and he continued to tour. However, the middle developed a defective valve, necessitating nerve operating theater in the summer. Copeland died of complications during middle surgery on July 3, 1997.
