Witherspoon, Jimmy (1923–1997)

US blues and jazz singer. He was a revered master of the blues, renowned for his commanding stage presence. He is possibly best-known for his blues standard ‘Ain't Nobody's Business’, which he recorded in the late 1940s. He enjoyed a fruitful solo blues career in the early 1950s, before the onset of rock music (and the threat it posed to traditional rhythm and blues) prompted a change of tack, which saw him develop a jazz style, displayed to good effect at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1959. In later life Witherspoon guested at the concerts and on the albums of many other rock and blues performers who have been inspired by him, including Van Morrison and Eric Clapton.

Witherspoon's grounding was in gospel music, singing with the First Baptist Church choir as a child in his hometown of Gurdon, Arkansas. He ran away from home as a teenager, to seek his musical fortune in Los Angeles, California, in the 1930s, but his struggle for recognition was interrupted by the onset of war. After serving in the Merchant Marines, Witherspoon returned to California in 1944 and joined Jay McShann's band, with which he remained for the next four years, touring the clubs, ballrooms, and dance halls of the USA. In the 1960s he toured with Buck Clayton and Count Basie's bands, and kept going on the jazz club and festival circuit both in the USA and in the UK, until he developed cancer of the throat in the mid-1980s.