John Primer & the Real Deal Blues Band

The career of legendary bluesman and Mississippi native John Primer exemplifies the history of Chicago blues, the iconic American sound pioneered by southern Black musicians who moved north during the Great Migration and electrified Delta blues for their new urban life. Born in Camden, Mississippi, John’s homecoming for the National Folk Festival brings his story full circle.

John Primer grew up in a large, extended family that relied on love and music to endure the hardships of sharecropping. Field hollers filled the workdays in the fields, with the release of blues on Saturdays and the balm of gospel on Sundays. After his father’s tragic death when John was four, his mother moved to Chicago to work and promised he could join her there when he turned 18. Until then, when not working or at school, John would listen to his grandmother’s blues records and dream of someday playing with Muddy Waters. Unable to afford a guitar, he constructed a “diddley bow” on the side of his grandmother’s cabin using a wire, two nails, and a brick. He played and sang any chance he got.

His mother was true to her word: a few months after his 18thbirthday, John moved to Chicago and immediately found work as a guitarist on the famed Maxwell Street. A decade later, he got one of the city’s best gigs for a working musician, playing seven nights a week in the house band at the renowned Theresa’s Lounge behind bandleaders like Junior Wells and Sammy Lawhorn. He also went on the road with Willie Dixon’s Chicago All Stars. In 1980, John’s childhood dream came true when Muddy Waters recruited John as guitarist and bandleader. After Waters’s death in 1983, Primer led the band of Chicago blues great, Magic Slim, collaborating with bassist Nick Holt, Slim’s brother, to originate the famous “Chicago lump” style, a distinctive driving blues rhythm about which John says: “There’s no turn around, you just go straight through.”

In 1995 Primer took his next step “straight through” the blues, debuting the Real Deal Blues Band, which he has now helmed for 30 years. He appears in Jackson with his longtime bandmates. Drummer Lennie Media honed his impeccable beats with Magic Slim, and Chicago Blues Hall of Fame bassist Melvin Smith is a veteran of Koko Taylor’s band. Harmonica great Steve Bell has been with Primer since the band began—indeed, the two have a bond that goes back to Bell’s childhood, when Steve listened raptly while John visited and jammed with Steve’s father, the incomparable Chicago harp master Carey Bell. After decades of collaboration, the musical conversations between John Primer and Steve Bell are the pinnacle of Chicago blues.

Reflecting on his decades working with some of blues’ biggest names, Primer says, “They gave me the torch.” He has proven to be a worthy bearer of their legacy, racking up a litany of awards, recording nearly a hundred albums with a who’s who of the genre, and thrilling audiences across the globe. His latest recording, Grown in Mississippi, showcases a dozen Mississippi artists who, like him, highlight the southern roots of his Chicago blues. The album, like his appearance at the National, marks a triumphant return.