Joe Louis Walker, Virtuoso Blues Musician, Dead at 75

Joe Louis Walker, the virtuoso guitarist and electric blues musician whose work captured the breadth of the genre, died late last month. He was 75. Walker’s family confirmed the musician’s death, adding that the cause was cardiac-related illness. He was surrounded by his wife of 16 years, Robin, and two daughters, Leena and Bernice. 

Revered by his peers as a “musician’s musician,” Walker enjoyed a lengthy career, during which he worked with artists like Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Mark Knopfler, and Steve Cropper, while earning praise from the likes of Herbie Hancock (“the Chick Corea of Blues”) and Aretha Franklin (who called Walker “The Bluesman”). He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, named a USA Fellow by United States Artists, received multiple W.C. Handy and Blue Music Awards, and a lifetime achievement prize from the Mississippi Valley Blues Society.  

Walker was born and raised in San Francisco, began playing the guitar as a kid, and by the late 1960s was gigging around the Bay Area as a teenager. He found himself dabbling as much in the blues as the burgeoning psychedelic rock scene, hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, playing with Mississippi Fred McDowell at the legendary rock club the Matrix, and befriending — and later rooming with — Michael Bloomfield. 

But Walker’s efforts to build a career of his own faltered. He drank, did drugs, and eventually landed in jail in the early Seventies. “I was a wild kid,” he told Rolling Stone in 1990. “I was just into making money for a drink or getting high.”  By the mid-Seventies, Walker was working odd jobs and soon started playing with the gospel group, the Spiritual Corinthians. But a performance with the group at the 1985 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival drew him back to the blues.

In a 2023 interview with Premier Guitar, he recalled the revelation he had at the festival’s gospel tent. “I just said, ‘You know what? I’m a restless soul with music.’ Anybody listening to the 30-plus albums I’ve got, they’ll hear me doing all kinds of stuff. It was just a sign of things to come for me.”

Walker released his debut album, Cold Is the Night, in 1986, and over the next four decades, exhibited that adventurousness with albums that explored the vast world of the blues alongside strains of electric blues, jazz, soul, rock & roll, and R&B. In 2016, he was nominated for his first (and only) Grammy, Best Contemporary Blues Album, for Everybody Wants a Piece.

Walker released what would be his last album of new material, Weight of the World, in 2023. Earlier this year, he returned to his debut album and re-recorded it as Cold Is the Night Reimagined. “We reimagined it because of all the excitement we had making it,” Waker said in a clip explaining his decision to return to the album. 

Speaking with Rolling Stone in 1990, just as his career taking off — albeit belatedly — Walker said serenely, “If I keep doing what I like to do and keep getting enjoyment out of it, then that to me is the main thing.”