John Primer is a living link to the departed giants of Chicago blues

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

It’s barely January, and already a “bomb cyclone” storm has frozen pipes, disrupted travel, and much worse, all while a “tripledemic” tears through the population. Every year the Secret History of Chicago Music undertakes its annual Winter Blues series, and every year the season seems to find new ways to give us the blues. This time I’m starting my annual look at the Windy City’s blues legacy with guitarist John Primer, one of many artists who’s well-known among blues fans (often an obsessive lot) but obscure to the general population.

The blues is enough of a niche interest these days that only the most famous local artists enjoy wide name recognition—Muddy Waters, for instance, or Buddy Guy. Primer has played in Waters’s band and led the house band at one of Guy’s clubs. He’s learned from some of the best bluesmen the city has ever produced, and he’s been crucial to keeping the Chicago tradition vital. 

John Primer was born March 5, 1945, in Camden, Mississippi, into a family of sharecroppers. His extended family shared a drafty shack on the Mansell plantation, with just a wood-burning stove for warmth. They had no running water, just a shared well a mile away, and they only had an outhouse when they could afford to have one dug. To make ends meet, everyone in the family worked—picking cotton, plowing fields—and while they worked, they often sang together. Primer’s father and an older cousin would play the blues at home at night, which gave young John his first exposure to the music. But when Primer was four, his father—himself only 22—was killed in a truck-driving accident. 

After that tragedy, Primer’s mother moved to Chicago, vowing to send for him and his sister Barbara when they turned 18. Primer had a lonely childhood, raised mostly by his grandmother and aunts. He liked to sing in the woods, and he built a one-string instrument called a diddley bow. Diddley bows are often made of baling wire stretched between two nails in a board, with a glass bottle as a bridge; Primer nailed broom wire to the boards on the side of his grandmother’s home and used a brick as a bridge. 

Soon Primer was singing at school for dimes on the playground. He also sang in church, which was an especially cathartic experience for him. His grandmother had a record player, and he fell in love with the likes of Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Little Milton, Elmore James, and B.B. and Albert King. When he turned 18 in 1963, he finally followed his mother to Chicago. 

Primer frequented Maxwell Street, historically a port of entry for immigrants and in those days still a mecca for salesmen and hustlers of all stripes, including musicians. At the marketplace, he honed his chops and earned some coin. He also met fellow bluesman Pat Rushing, a guitarist with a raw, dissonant style and an almost frightening growl of a voice. Primer and Rushing formed the Maintainers, who played regularly on Maxwell Street on Sundays and then started picking up west-side club gigs. 

In 1968, Primer left to front a soul and R&B group called the Brotherhood Band, where his rough, earthy singing style began to evolve. In 1974, he landed his first important regular gig, becoming a member of the house band at Theresa’s, at 48th and Indiana. Among his bandmates at the club was former Muddy Waters sideman Sammy Lawhorn, who taught Primer to play slide guitar—now a key element of his style. The band often played seven nights a week, backing whoever came through: Junior Wells, James Cotton, Magic Sam, Lonnie Brooks, Smokey Smothers, Buddy Guy, Magic Slim, and many more. Lawhorn ended up mentoring Primer for decades.

Lawhorn, Waters, and Magic Slim all contributed to Primer’s evolution as a bluesman. “From Lawhorn, Primer absorbed shimmering melodicism, harmonic sophistication, and an irresistible sense of serious-minded musical playfulness,” blues scholar David Whiteis wrote for the Reader in 1995. “In Waters’s band he gained confidence in his own slide-guitar playing and honed his instincts for the tonal and rhythmic subtleties of blues singing. More recently he’s picked up a healthy dose of Slim’s musical intensity and good-natured fierceness.” 

Primer has continued to tour as well, though he hit the same wall as every other professional musician when COVID hit in early 2020. On March 11 of that year, Primer and the Real Deal Band (which includes longtime harp player Steve Bell, son of Carey Bell, and drummer Lenny Media) flew to Amsterdam to begin a European tour. The next day, the U.S. announced a ban on flights from Europe. Primer didn’t want to get stranded overseas with a canceled tour, so he bought return tickets for everyone before the ban went into effect at midnight. 

“We had terrible flights home,” Primer told Chicago Blues Guide. “We had an 18-hour delay in Warsaw, Poland, so we had to get hotel rooms there for another $300. We went home with no money at all. I had to charge everything for all three of us. Our tour was going to last 19 days with 14 gigs. We were going to make $17,000 plus sell CDs and merchandise. All that gone because of COVID-19. This was the worst experience for us.” 

Back in the States, Primer watched helplessly as his gigs were canceled further and further into the future, wiping his whole calendar clean. 

Primer began livestreaming for tips from his basement studio on Sunday afternoons, and in May 2020 he released an album called The Gypsy Woman Told Me with harmonica player Bob Corritore, an old Chicago friend now living in Arizona. In September 2022, Primer followed it with Hard Times, on his own Blues House Productions label. He’s playing at Blue Chicago on Friday, January 6, and if COVID cooperates he’ll be taking a short UK tour in mid-January. He also has loads of suburban gigs lined up for February—check johnprimerblues.com/shows for details and updates. Assuming this winter’s wave of viruses doesn’t keep you at home till March, you should take your first chance to see this living legend work his magic.

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