Jimmy Witherspoon & Robben Ford — Jump Blues Live 1972

For a handful of fruitful years during the 1970s, the two of them had quite the win-win scenario working: Jimmy Witherspoon—the consummate vocalist whose baritone started work when jump blues was in its heyday—needed a fretsman to soup up his touring band; Robben Ford—the young lion whose guitar, having come under the spell of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, spoke the era’s longhaired dialect of blues plus straight blues—was in need of a high-profile band.

Together, the resurgent veteran and the rocketing newcomer lit up stage after stage around the world, including this famous one, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, in West Hollywood, California: The Troubadour, where everyone from Butterfield and Bloomfield to Buffalo Springfield and Led Zeppelin roared.

And that is where we are on a Tuesday in March, as Jump Blues Live 1972 attends one of the early Witherspoon-Ford collaborations not too long after the team—piano, bass and drums, too—formed.

The five of them jelled quite solidly. Because bolting directly into “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” their attack of the Sonny Boy Williamson II tune is sharp and tight. While Witherspoon threatens to tell all, to dish the neighborhood dirt to ol’ Fannie Mae, a loping bassline hurries everyone over hill and dale, likewise dashed along by Ford’s stampeding licks and solo. And with that whip-crack, the show is off and running.

By that time, Witherspoon, 51, had already left quite the trail of shellac and vinyl, starting in the 1940s as part of Jay McShann’s famed band that had earlier fledged saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker. In the 1950s came sessions for Chess (“When the Lights Go Out”), Vee-Jay, Federal, and Modern (to name a few). The 1960s brought opportunities with blues (T-Bone Walker) and jazz (Ben Webster, Kenny Burrell, Richard “Groove” Holmes) cats alike.

Ford, 20, had stirred up a buzz around the Bay Area with a blues band made up of his brothers but named after their father (The Charles Ford Band), and also recently came off a stint with Charlie Musselwhite’s squad, as documented on 1971’s Takin’ My Time. Despite a limited résumé at the time, he was sitting atop a mound of all-hear-this potential that began materializing to wider acclaim alongside Spoon (as Jimmy was casually called).

Here, Ford quickly proves himself to be a major asset on whatever song the evening’s set called for, alternating between burn and chill over the course of its 42 minutes. Unlike “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” Little Walter’s “My Babe” simmers down—guitar included. That is, until one minute in, when breakout space opens up and a volcano erupts, spewing showers of scalding adrenaline across a surrounding oasis of ultra-cool swinging. Although here and gone in a flash, that solo does more than inject a shot of urgency into the casual stroll; those few seconds remind listeners that a sleeping lion is in the house, just itching to let loose whenever the need presents. That capacity has remained at the ready for thousands of nights since then, as Robben is still out there on the road and in the studio to this day.

In 1975, three years after this Troubadour performance, Witherspoon released an LP by the name of Spoonful. Ford was among the album’s many credited musicians, arrangers and producers—“many” being the operative word. Stripped of indulgent studio excesses (clavinet, horns, backup singers) and overloaded sign-of-the-times funkiness, this bandstand version of the title track cuts vastly closer to the bone, almost to the point of sounding like a completely different song. Still throbbing to a ramrod rhythm, just as songwriter Willie Dixon originally designed and as how Howlin’ Wolf performed it in 1960, “Spoonful” keeps on insatiably craving during Jimmy’s watch. However, whereas the original got slashed by guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s knifing fretwork, Ford instead pummels with a hailstorm shook by big, prominent, skyward bends.

Blues don’t stop piling on. The spicy “Around the Clock” revels in all-day “rolling.” “Past Forty Blues,” its opposing sequel, is a slow burn about being booted from the boudoir due to upper-age restrictions. Then, since misery loves company, “Nothing’s Changed” arrives to mop the floor with the narrator’s busted, post-abandonment heart.

Eventually, “Goin’ Down Slow” seeps on in. The deathbed confession grapples with mortality and lifelong reflection before ultimately settling on having no regrets. It’s an immortal blues standard that has been living on ever since St. Louis Jimmy Oden first confessed in the company of pianist Roosevelt Sykes in 1941. On the stage that night in 1972, it also becomes a model of great musical restraint. Spoon (who himself passed in 1997, at age 77) eases through the lines, choosing where to hover above or pound exclamation points into the moseying bassline and hushed drum patter beneath. Ford matches the mood with dignified bellyaching expressed in quieted fills and fine details so faint yet vital as to draw you in all the closer to concentrate on the wisps of smoke hanging in the air—before the sound gains volume, velocity and heat until peaking and then fading back down into the deep-blue pulse.

Yet feed that same guitar the rambunctious “Kansas City,” and those strings instantly pounce. As Witherspoon lyrically stands on the corner of 12th Street and Vine singing the city’s praises, Ford as well as sparkling pianist Paul Nagel each whoosh past with breakneck solos in line with the band huffing to keep up the hyper pace.

But if Witherspoon had a signature song, “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” was surely it:

“One day we’ve got ham and bacon,

 and the next day, ain’t nothin’ shakin,’

 Ain’t nobody’s business if we do”

Those classic opening lines that everyone from Freddie King to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins would also utter during their careers, remain just as relaxed in the early-1970s as when Jimmy first waxed them in the late-1940s. The moments of pin-drop stillness he leaves between lyrics amplify their emotional content louder than had they been hammered continuously. The straightforward rhythm section plus Ford’s guitar form a pillowy cushion upon which Witherspoon gently rests his tuneful call for privacy. So calmly in control, his mahogany voice even audaciously lingers on the single, final syllable (“do-oooooooo”) as seconds tick by, defying gravity until that one note gets bent ever so gently up and then down, right before making a feather-soft landing.

Having originally started out as a stylistic student of shouter Big Joe Turner, Witherspoon knew how to reconcile grace with power. Ford, for as young as he was, was similarly wise to their strategic merger. And the audience packed into the Troubadour in ’72—of which you’re now a part—encountered that fact as a memorable double-dose of fire and ice.

Label: Liberation Hall

Release date: 9/26/25

Label website: Liberation Hall

Artist website: Robben Ford.com

Reviewed by Dennis Rozanski