Chris Trottier on Nostr: **More Blues on the South Side – Billy Boy Arnold**\ 1965 • Blues • Prestige\ ...

**More Blues on the South Side – Billy Boy Arnold**\
1965 • Blues • Prestige\
Apple Music

*Blues on the South Side* is the debut album from Billy Boy Arnold, one of the most important blues harp players of the latter 20th century and a major figure in the Chicago blues scene.

And hell, you could make a case that he’s one of the most unheralded rock musicians ever too. Want to hear his fingerprints? Put on Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley” and “I’m a Man.”

That harmonica? Billy Boy Arnold. That unique Bo Diddley sound? Billy Boy Arnold helped define it.

His own singles “I Wish You Would” and “I Ain’t Got You,” both recorded in 1955, are important too. The Yardbirds covered the first one. David Bowie covered the second.

But Arnold mattered to blues history even before that.

He has a direct line back to Sonny Boy Williamson I, who taught him harmonica when Arnold was 12-years-old. So right there, you’ve got that old “chugging” style being carried forward into the amplified era.

And he kept preserving blues history well into the 21st century. His autobiography, *The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold*, came out in 2021.

*Blues on the South Side* is such a captivating listen because it catches Chicago blues right before the British Invasion grabbed that sound and ran with it. That helped expose blues to a much wider audience.

But it's also a hinge point. In 1965, blues still primarily spoke to a Black American audience.

And that’s what makes this album hit so hard. It distills an important moment in Chicago blues through one of its greatest harp players.