Bob
Stroger's Home Page
I was born in
South East Missouri in a small town Haiti, where I lived on a farm.
I moved to Chicago in 1955. I lived in the back of a night club on
the West Side, where Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters played. It looked like
they were having a lot of fun and I made up my mind that what I wanted
to do was play music. I got married at an early age and I used to
watch my brother-in-law play music. His name was Johnny Ferguson and he
and JB Hutto had a band they called the Twisters. They were working
on 39'th and State Street in Chicago and I would carry them to work every
night and watch them. Then at home I would try to teach myself to play.
My cousin Ralph Ramey said that we should start a band and we did just
that. We got my brother (John Stroger), who played the drums, to learn
the songs we knew and in four months we were making some noise. We
went to a club and played two songs and the man said we had a job. It was
one of the better clubs, where musicians like Memphis Slim worked. The
owner wanted us to wear uniforms but we had no money to buy them, so we
got black tams and put a red circle in the top and called the band the
Red Tops and that was the way it started. We got so good that they
wanted the band to travel, but Ralph's wife did not wont him to travel.
so my brother formed a band with Willie Kent and myself and called it Joe
Russel and the Blues Hustlers. We played together for a while,but eventually
I decided to move on, because i wanted to travel more and see the world
and I found out you can make money doing this.
I joined a jazz
band and played with Rufus Forman for about 3 years, but we were doing
very little work. Then I met Eddie King and we talked. I told him I was
in a jazz band and we needed a guitar player that could play blues.
He sead OK and joined our groop, and we started playing blues and
RB and things took off. We called the band Eddie King and King Men, and
we stayed together for 15 years. Then we split up for about 2 years
and later we started the band up as Eddie King and Babee May and the Blues
Machine and we stayed together until Eddie King moved out of town. I quit
playing for 2 years becouse we were so close I did not want to play
with anyone but Eddie. Then I met Jessie Grean when I was playing
with Morris Pejo and he liked the way I played bass and one night Otis
Rush need a bass player, so Jessie said come and work with him. The rest
is history. I have been playing music for 39 years and I am still having
fun.
To view some more photos, click
here.
Cathi Norton's interview with me
To read more about my recordings, please click
here.
Learn about my brother John
Stroger.
Send me e-mail to: bstroger@megsinet.net
Various links to pages with info about me:
andygert
allmusic.com
Tony-O