Inspired by T-Bone Walker and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Little Joe Washington played a stinging, jazz-inflected blues guitar style that was made famous by a few renowned blues legends from Houston notably Johnny Guitar Watson, Albert Collins, and Johnny Copeland. Born in 1939 in Houston, Washington started playing the piano at five, and took formal lessons at nine or ten. He played the trumpet in the Jack Yates High School marching band, and from roughly 1958 to 1968, lived in Juarez-El Paso, gigging in rowdy joints catering to tourists and servicemen from Fort Bliss. He cut a few singles, for DONNA & FEDERAL one at the behest of (and backed by) the Champs, of “Tequila” fame, who had been amazed by one of Washington’s border bar shows.
