Blues Around the Clock

By the time he passed away in 1997, blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon had scored five Top Ten hits and made more than two dozen albums. He continued performing well into the 1990s, until he was diagnosed with throat cancer. As it turns out, the ace blues shouter had got his start in Calcutta, where he found himself as a member of the merchant marine during World War II.

“I don’t know why I started singing the blues,” he told one interviewer. “Blues was hardly allowed in my home. My mother was a very religious woman and so was my father. I don’t know what made me become a blues singer. I really think, had I not been in Calcutta, India, and just heard Teddy Weatherford, who had been in the East for years and was from Chicago, if I hadn’t heard him play Benny Goodman’s arrangement of Why Don’t You Do Right?, I don’t think I’d ever be singing the blues.”

He sat in with Weatherford’s band many other nights during his time in port. Witherspoon told another interviewer: “I sang with Teddy Weatherford’s band over there – Around the Clock, very risqué tune. Wynonie Harris recorded it.  It was all suggestive blues.”

’ Spoon didn’t make any recordings in India, but his time in Calcutta seems to have left an impression on his family. His cousin, Diane Witherspoon, has performed in Bombay twice, in 2010 and 2012, and promises to return.