Cedell Davis

Trackimage Playbut Trackname Playbut Trackname
Keep on Snatchin' It Back 00:00 Tools
Been Through Some Stuff (cLOUDDEAD Remix) 00:00 Tools
If You Like Fat Women 00:00 Tools
I Don't Know Why 00:00 Tools
She's Got The Devil In Her 00:00 Tools
Boogie Chillen No. 2 00:00 Tools
Murder My Baby 00:00 Tools
Baby, I Love You So 00:00 Tools
Every Day Every Way 00:00 Tools
Coon Can Mattie 00:00 Tools
Falling Rain Blues 00:00 Tools
Guitar Boogie 00:00 Tools
Keep On Snatchin It Back 00:00 Tools
Got To Be Moving On 00:00 Tools
Cold Chills 00:00 Tools
Sit Down On My Knee 00:00 Tools
In The Evening 00:00 Tools
Green Onions 00:00 Tools
The Horror 00:00 Tools
Chicken Hawk 00:00 Tools
Tojo Told Hitler 00:00 Tools
Worried Life 00:00 Tools
Reconsider Baby 00:00 Tools
Come Here Baby 00:00 Tools
I Want You 00:00 Tools
Catfish & Cornbread 00:00 Tools
CeDell's Boogie 00:00 Tools
Rock 00:00 Tools
Pay to Play 00:00 Tools
Rollin' & Tumblin' 00:00 Tools
Give Me That Look 00:00 Tools
My dog won't stay home 00:00 Tools
Mistreating Me 00:00 Tools
Rub Me Baby 00:00 Tools
Come on and Ride With Me 00:00 Tools
Hold Me Baby 00:00 Tools
So Long, I Hate to See You Go 00:00 Tools
Love Me a Little While 00:00 Tools
Play with Your Poodle 00:00 Tools
Woke Up This Morning 00:00 Tools
One of These Days 00:00 Tools
Ridin' in My '74 00:00 Tools
The Silvertone 00:00 Tools
Let Me Play With Your Poodle 00:00 Tools
Purty Women 00:00 Tools
Who's Lovin' You Tonight 00:00 Tools
Laura Mae 00:00 Tools
Broke and Hungry 00:00 Tools
Propaganda 00:00 Tools
Crap House Bea 00:00 Tools
Keep Your Mouth Closed Baby 00:00 Tools
Turn on Your Light 00:00 Tools
Teenie Weenie Bit 00:00 Tools
Love Blues 00:00 Tools
Need You So 00:00 Tools
Baby Don't Do It 00:00 Tools
Mistreatin Me 00:00 Tools
Get to Steppin' Baby 00:00 Tools
Fattin Frogs for Snakes 00:00 Tools
Yackity Yack 00:00 Tools
Kansas City 00:00 Tools
Can't Be Satisfied 00:00 Tools
Dust My Broom 00:00 Tools
Mississippi Story 00:00 Tools
Ain't Plannin' on Dyin' 00:00 Tools
People of the Mountain 00:00 Tools
Further on up the Road 00:00 Tools
Wind up Grac-a-Phone 00:00 Tools
Every Day Seem the Same 00:00 Tools
Ain't Feelin' to Go 00:00 Tools
I Gotta Girl She Lives Up on the Hill 00:00 Tools
You Got To Do The Boogie Woogie 00:00 Tools
Big G Boogie 00:00 Tools
It's Christmas Time 00:00 Tools
Hard Luck Blues 00:00 Tools
Got to Be Movin' On 00:00 Tools
Catfish Blues 00:00 Tools
Lonely Nights 00:00 Tools
Grandma Grandpa 00:00 Tools
So long 00:00 Tools
How Much More 00:00 Tools
Rollin' and Tumblin' 00:00 Tools
Love Blues (Feat. Annie Jantzer & Mike McCready) 00:00 Tools
When I Woke Up This Morning 00:00 Tools
She's Got the Devil in Her (feat. Ayron Jones) 00:00 Tools
I Need You Bad 00:00 Tools
Got To Be Movin' On (Feat. Annie Jantzer & Mike McCready) 00:00 Tools
Got to Move Down the Road 00:00 Tools
I Gotta Girl She Lives Up On t 00:00 Tools
Catfish Blues (Feat. Ayron Jones) 00:00 Tools
When I Woke Up Last Morning 00:00 Tools
Room 701 00:00 Tools
Grandma Grandpa (Feat. Scott Mccaughey) 00:00 Tools
Blues for Big Town 00:00 Tools
Rollin' and Tumblin' (feat. Annie Janzter & Mike McCready) 00:00 Tools
Chicken and a Hawk 00:00 Tools
Baby I Love You So 00:00 Tools
Sugar Mama 00:00 Tools
74 Is a Freight Train 00:00 Tools
John Lee Hooker / Boogie Chillen No.2 00:00 Tools
Everyday Every Way 00:00 Tools
Steve Cropper; Al Jackson Jr.; Booker T. Jones; Lewie Steinberg / Green Onions 00:00 Tools
Catfish Cornbread 00:00 Tools
Been Through Some Stuff 00:00 Tools
Traditional / Murder My Baby 00:00 Tools
Leroy Carr / In The Evening 00:00 Tools
Lowell Fulson / Reconsider Baby 00:00 Tools
Love Blues feat. Annie Jantzer & Mike McCready 00:00 Tools
Rollin' Tumblin' 00:00 Tools
She's Got the Devil in Her feat. Ayron Jones 00:00 Tools
Got to Be Movin' On feat. Annie Jantzer & Mike McCready 00:00 Tools
Catfish Blues feat. Ayron Jones 00:00 Tools
Bull Dog 00:00 Tools
Bull Dog Blues 00:00 Tools
Big Boss Man 00:00 Tools
Let Me Play With Your Poodie 00:00 Tools
Toja Told Hitler 00:00 Tools
Baby, I Love You So (feat. Shrive Alive) 00:00 Tools
Rollin' and Tumblin' feat. Annie Janzter & Mike McCready 00:00 Tools
Track 06 00:00 Tools
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CeDell Davis (born Ellis Davis; June 9, 1927 –September 27, 2017) was an American blues guitarist and singer. Davis was most notable for his distinctive style of guitar playing. Davis played guitar using a table knife in his fretting hand in a manner similar to slide guitar, resulting in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. He used this style out of necessity. When he was 10, he suffered from severe polio which left him little control over his left hand and restricted use of his right. He had been playing guitar prior to his polio and decided to continue in spite of his handicap, and developed his knife method as the only way he could come up with of still playing guitar. Davis passed away on September 27, 2017. He had recently suffered a heart attack. Davis was born in Helena, Arkansas, United States, where his family worked on a local plantation. He enjoyed music from a young age, playing harmonica and guitar with his childhood friends. Once he sufficiently mastered his variation on slide guitar playing, Davis began playing in various nightclubs across the Mississippi Delta area. He played with Robert Nighthawk for a ten-year period from 1953 to 1963. While playing in a club in 1957, a police raid caused the crowd to stampede over Davis. Both of his legs were broken in this incident and he was forced to use a wheelchair since that time. The hardships resulting from his physical handicaps were a major influence in his lyrics and style of blues playing. Davis moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas in the early sixties and continued his artistic work. In recent times, Davis' music has been released by the Fat Possum Records label to much critical acclaim. His 1994 album, produced by Robert Palmer, Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong, received a 9.0 from Pitchfork Media who called it "timeless." The Best Of CeDell Davis (1995) was also released, with help from Col. Bruce Hampton and The Aquarium Rescue Unit. The Horror of It All followed in 1998. His album When Lightnin' Struck the Pine, released in 2002, included work by musicians Peter Buck, Barrett Martin, Scott McCaughey, and Alex Veley. Discography The Introduction To Living Country Blues USA - 1981 (1 track of the 12) Living Country Blues USA Vol. 5 - 1982 (4 tracks of the 12 tracks) Living Country Blues USA Vol. 10 - 1982 (1 track of the 13 tracks) Feel Like Doin' Something Wrong - 1994 The Best of CeDell Davis – 1995 The Horror Of It All – 1998 When Lightning Struck the Pine - 2002 Highway 61 - 2003 Keep It to Yourself: Arkansas Blues, Vol. 1 - 2004 (4 tracks of the 23 tracks) Last Man Standing - 2015 Even The Devil Gets The Blues - 2016 --------- Cedell Davis was born Ellis Davis on June 9, 1927, in Helena, then a booming river town on the Arkansas bank of the Mississippi. He grew up there and in the upper Mississippi Delta around eight miles south of Tunica, on the E.M. Hood plantation, where his brother lived. Together with one of his childhood friends, Isaiah Ross (future Sun recording artist Dr. Ross the Harmonica Boss), Cedell began playing blues, first harmonica, then some guitar. Then tragedy struck -- during his ninth and tenth years he grappled with severe polio. He returned to Helena, to his mother, who was locally renowned as a healer, though she worked as a cook, and there he began the painful process of relearning, in fact rethinking the guitar, which he could no longer play in the conventional manner. "It took me about three years," he recalls. "I was right- handed, but I couldn't use my right hand, so I had to turn the guitar around; I play left-handed now. But I still needed something to slide with, and my mother had these knives, a set of silverware, and I kinda swiped one of 'em." This was the beginning of a guitar style that is utterly unique, in or out of blues. The knife-handle on the strings produces uneven pressure, which results in a welter of metal-stress harmonic transients and a singular tonal plasticity. Some people who hear Davis's playing for the first time think it's out of tune, but it would be more accurate to say he plays in an alternative tuning. Because the way he hears and plays intervals and chords is consistent and systematic. Davis began playing around the Delta as a young man, and over the years he continued to work in some of the world's most dangerous dives. Somehow he learned to project a kind of presence that defuses violence, keeping him miraculously whole amid raging chaos. There is something Buddah-like about that presence, a sense of having learned to deal with a physically violent world with his mind. It also enables him to compose and sequence verses for new songs on the spot and hold them in his memory for as long as necessary. Over the years Davis has played in Southern juke joints with a number of other musicians. His most significant and longest-lasting association was with the great Robert Nighthawk, who was considered the Delta's finest slide guitarist by no less an authority than Muddy Waters. They worked together for ten years straight, roughly 1953-'63, trading off "bassing" and lead duties song by song. During the early part of his time with Nighthawk, Cedell was based in St. Louis, where he got to know Big Joe Williams, Charlie Jordan, J.D. "Jelly Jaw" Short, and other leading lights. But during the last part of 1957, he was badly injured in a St. Louis tavern, when an apparent police raid caused a massive stampede. Before that, CeDell could at least walk on crutches. But his legs were broken in so many places during the stampede that he has been largely confined to a wheelchair ever since. On June 5, 1961, he "came back home to play." At first he was based in Helena, but after he secured a regular gig with Nighthawk at the Jack Rabbit (later the Jungle Hut) in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he settled there, and there he remained. Pine Bluff's other claims to fame include a massive U.S. Government chemical and biological warfare research and storage facility, located nearby; and according to Davis's song, "If You Like Fat Women," there are "more fat women there than any place I ever saw." Many listeners find Davis difficult: his sense of time, his sense of structure, that timing--not to mention his lyrics. Davis was a remarkable communicator, and quite possible the greatest hard core vocalist around. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.