Auckland Blues Club

Refreshing isn’t an adjective which can often be applied to the modern bluesman, but in Doug MacLeod’s case, it is entirely accurate. 
A guitarist, songwriter and singer of astounding ability and originality, MacLeod may be just the antidote for those tired of the same old songs by the same young revivalists.

Born in New York in 1946, MacLeod initially turned to music as a youngster to mask a personal stuttering problem. 

Blues did not make its impact however until his teens, when his family moved to St Louis – there he was dazzled when he first saw B.B. King raising hell in the clubs, playing his stinging brand of electrifying blues. 

As he put it, “I was just amazed at the sound, I had thought blues was a sad crying music, but then I saw everyone dancing to B.B.’s music and I just loved it”.

MacLeod played bass and sang with various local St Louis groups through his late teens, making the switch to guitar when he joined the Navy. 
While stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, he spent his off hours playing John Hammond style blues to the sailors, and also worked with singers Emmylou Harris and Juice Newton. 
He was playing hot guitar and doing pretty well until a friend took him aside and told him “you’re not as good as you think you are” and thrust some Bill Big Broonzy, Son House and Charlie Patton records in his face. 
MacLeod was astonished at the mastery these three had over the guitar, and rapidly set about learning the subtleties of their style. 
Also about this time has met Ernest Banks, a one-eyed Piedmont style bottleneck guitarist who claimed to have been with Blind Lemon Jefferson in Texas and who was probably the most significant influence on MacLeod’s career. 
MacLeod recalls, “One time I told him, "man, I don’t know anything about picking cotton or Hell-Hounds on my trail or anything like that, but I really like this man.  What should I do?”  He said, “If you want to be a bluesman write about what you know.  Write the truth, write about your life, and don’t ever play a note you don’t believe!” And ever since that time I’ve tried to sing about things I really know about, and to be more selective in my choice of material."

Eddie “Bluesman” Kirkland has a presence that is very difficult to ignore.
Not only does he have biceps to match Schwarzenegger’s; shirts that would look at home in Gary closet, and seemingly hundreds of hideously coloured turbans, but he shouts with a fierce voice, lyrics sweet and sincere enough to make even Donny Osmond puke, all the while standing on his head and mauling his glitter smothered guitar!

One has to wonder why this man has been largely ignored by the record companies and record buyers for so long.

“Bluesman” was born in 1928 in Jamaica and raised on a farm near Alabama, doing that thing that all great bluesmen seem to do before they become great bluesmen – picking cotton.

Initially a harmonica player, he began playing guitar for local parties and peanut shellings in his early teens, and fell under the influence of blues pioneers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red and later Lightin’ Hopkins and Arthur Big Boy Crudup.
Country music, as well as spiritual and gospel, also had a massive influence in moulding young “Bluesmen” sound – as he was later to say, “as long as it’s got feelin’ it’s the blues”.

After traveling a few years with the Sugar Girls Medicine Show, he eventually found himself in Detroit in 1948, working on the Ford Assembly line during the day and spending his evenings either boxing or playing house parties.
“I used to take my guitar and walk through the neighborhood pickin’ that guitar, man. About eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock at night. People’s shades would go up like that. They’d go to the phone and call their friends. Beggin’ for me to come in. Before you know it, man, there’s 15 peoples in the house”.

It was at one such house party that he met John Lee Hooker, and developed a relationship that served them both well for 4 or 5 years, touring and recording together regularly through to 1953.

Eddie “Bluesman” Kirkland’s first recordings under his own name were for Detroit’s RPM label in 1952, backed by Hooker, and he recorded sporadically through to 1962’s classic “It’s the Bluesman”, a mesmerizing album combining Kirkland’s gritty down-home sound with the sophisticated uptown musicianship of sax and god King Curtis and stellar guitarist Billy Butler.
He also toured with Otis Redding for a few years in the 60’s, and since then has been carving his niche as a wild and merciless performer throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia.