“Little” Milton, Big Time Blues
August 21st, 2007 byStax had blues artists such as Albert King and Stax soul / R&B artists such as Johnnie Taylor and Isaac Hayes. But it’s important to remember another Stax artist who seemed to personify the best of both genres, one who sang in velvet like Bobby “Blue” Bland and play guitar with the hot sting of B. B. King.
“Little” Milton Campbell grew into a hurricane-strength force in southern soul and blues. He left the Mississippi small town he was born in when he was 15 to play guitar in regional blues and R&B tour bands, where he was picked up by Ike Turner’s keen eye. Turner delivered him to Sam Phillips’ legendary Sun Studios in Memphis, where Campbell recorded his first sides as “Little” Milton, backed by Ike Turner & the Playmates of Rhythm, in 1953.
In the 1960s, Milton stepped into the national music spotlight through numerous singles released on Checker, a subsidiary of the hallowed Chicago blues label Chess, Records. After the death of Leonard Chess, he signed with Stax Records (in a way, “coming back home” to Memphis) in 1971. Signing with Stax kept Milton in contact with southern soul and he released six albums before the label shut down, most notably the live set Grits Ain’t Groceries and the hits compilation Tin Pan Alley.
His appearance in the Wattstax concert documentary is both flattering and confusing. The music video for Milton’s 1972 blistering, soulful single “Walking the Back Streets and Crying,” which shows Milton performing the song abandoned in a railway yard and on a tenement rooftop, was inserted into the Wattstax film; the Wattstax soundtrack, however, features a superior live version of this same tune of unknown origin so it may or may not have been recorded during the Wattstax concert.
“Little” Milton Campbell was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and received the W.C. Handy Award for Blues Entertainer of the Year from the Blues Foundation, in 1988. He passed away in August, 2005.
