Fred Grady

A number of the true Chicago blues old-timers, such as for example Buddy Guy and even Muddy Waters, may have noticed Fred Grady like a somewhat towering and beefy teen enthusiastic about the all-night jam classes in the infamous Checkerboard Lounge. Ultimately Grady became a bluesman himself, one of the most essential entities in the electric-combo edition from the genre: the drummer. He started playing on pans and pots as a child, and was still surviving in the same South Part home whenever a visitors accident eliminated him from your globe of shuffles, boogies, and sluggish blues. After graduating from senior high school, the pans and pots long since changed by a genuine drum package, he followed deals that are believed better. Grady was a carpenter and a barber. He also started going on the highway in his past due teens with numerous groups which were booked into resort lounge circuits. T.H.E.M., created in 1972, bridged the space between your by-now traditional Chicago blues audio and fresh funk improvements. For Grady there might have already been no better method of becoming part of the procedure than to drum because of this band. Your choice to become listed on the group also designed he was right now playing in lots of of Chicago’s greatest blues clubs, not really resort lounges. Normally this visible led to careers with leaders such as for example Man, Otis Clay, John Lee Hooker, and Eddy Clearwater. In the first ’80s, Grady joined up with the Jimmy Johnson Blues Music group, which toured through the entire USA, Canada, and European countries. Two associates of the group dropped their lives in a 1988 motor vehicle accident that in hindsight was a prediction from the drummer’s very own death greater than a 10 years afterwards. He was recalled in obituaries as having been drumming busily till then, a great deal of his period spent hustling around Chicago with an unfortunately not-endless circular of freelance function.