Blues musician who accompanied John Lee Hooker and won respect on the Detroit scene
The blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player Eddie Burns, who has died aged 84, spent most of his life in the northern US and was a mainstay of the blues scene in Detroit. However, that urban experience never concealed the fundamentally southern inspiration and shaping of his music.
Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, he grew up in the small town of Dublin, close to Clarksdale, where he became acquainted with the popular blues artists of the 30s and 40s by hearing their records in his grandfather's club. His favourites were, and remained, the singer and harmonica player John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson and the rough-hewn Mississippi singer-guitarist Tommy McClennan. He remembered a childhood encounter with "the other Sonny Boy" (Aleck "Rice" Miller), who would later become famous throughout the Mississippi delta for his appearances on the radio show King Biscuit Time.
Burns left home at 16 and, after a spell in Clarksdale, moved to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked for a couple of years for the Illinois Central railroad and for the John Deere tractor company, and played music with the guitarist John T Smith. In 1948, the two men relocated to Detroit. Burns recalled: "We was playing at a house party this particular Saturday night, in Detroit's Black Bottom, and we didn't know it but a celebrity was living right back of us in something almost like a horse stable: John Lee Hooker."
Burns went along to a recording session with Hooker and played a nagging harmonica accompaniment on Miss Eloise and Burnin' Hell. Hooker, in turn, accompanied Burns at a 1951 session produced by the Detroit entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, but these recordings would not be issued until many years later. "Eddie Burns is the [musician] I was closest to," Hooker told the blues writer Jas Obrecht. "When I first met him, he was only playin' harmonica, and oooh, he was so good!" But Burns was also developing as a guitarist, and in 1966, when he and Hooker were reunited on Hooker's Chess album The Real Folk Blues, he played guitar throughout.
Over several decades, Burns made many estimable records of his own. From the first, on his 1948 debut recordings with Smith, Papa's Boogie and Notoriety Woman, he showed his admiration for the urgent singing and playing style of Williamson, homage he continued to pay on Hello Miss Jessie Lee (1952), a reworking of Williamson's signature piece Good Morning Little School Girl, and on numerous later recordings. He had some regional success in 1957 with Treat Me Like I Treat You and in 1961 with Orange Driver, based on Williamson's My Black Name Blues, with a young and still barely known Marvin Gaye on drums.
These and other recordings, and his engagements at local clubs kept his name familiar to Detroit residents, but Burns could not afford to play music full-time, and relied on day jobs at the Dodge car plant and as a welder. Nonetheless, he was a respected figure on a Detroit blues scene that included Hooker, Bobo Jenkins, Eddie Kirkland, Boogie Woogie Red, Washboard Willie and Aaron "Little Sonny" Willis.
Thanks to the new international blues audience of the 1970s, Burns had the opportunity to visit Europe several times. In 1972, he toured the UK twice for the promoter Jim Simpson and made the albums Bottle Up and Go and Detroit Blackbottom. He returned in 1974 and with an American Blues Legends troupe in 1975, and recorded in the Netherlands for a French label in 1986. On his last album, Snake Eyes, made in Chicago in 2001, he revisited some of his early recordings, introduced new compositions built from recognisable foundations and created an attractive domestic ambience in acoustic guitar duets with his younger brother Jimmy.
Burns last played in public, with Little Sonny, at the Motor City Blues and Boogie Woogie festival in 2008.
He married in 1953 and had several children.
• Eddie Burns, blues musician, born 8 February 1928; died 12 December 2012