The
Washington-based bluesman cut a swaggering figure on stage with his preacher-like
exhortations to “say yeah, children”, his shiny suits and his lacquered, James
Brown-style hairdo. His tenor voice both caressed and screamed the blues over
his powerful, stinging - and sometimes over-amped - lead guitar. And he loved
to walk the bar or walk through the crowd as he worked the strings.
Reviewing
a 1993 nightclub performance, music critic Peter Watrous of the New York Times
wrote that Parker would “play beautifully formed blues ideas, then throw in
be-bop lines worthy of George Benson. ... Though slightly ruffled by
distortion, his notes, pearly and fat, skip along to their own undulating
rhythms. And his singing, a high tenor moan, conveys more musical authority
than emotional weight. ... He was showing off his virtuosity there, as well.”
A
veteran of the “chitlin' circuit” of black theaters, Parker wrote two
much-covered hit recordings on the rhythm-and-blues charts, Blues Get Off My
Shoulder (1958), a somber blues ballad enlivened by his trenchant guitar work,
and Watch Your Step (1961).
Watch
Your Step, recorded at Edgewood Studios at 16th and K Streets for V-Tone
records, was a hit in the United States and England. The song's insistent riff,
which Parker said evolved from the Afro-Cuban jazz composition Manteca, caught
on with the mod subculture in London.
Jefferson
Airplane, Santana and the Spencer Davis Group (with singer Steve Winwood) all
covered the song. Its guitar motif was reprised in Led Zeppelin's Moby Dick and
the 1962 instrumental The Black Widow by fellow Washington guitarist Link Wray.
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