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EURREAL 'LITTLE BROTHER' MONTGOMERY

Eurreal Wilford Montgomery was born in Kentwood, Louisiana about 50 miles to the north of New Orleans on April 18, 1906. He was the fifth of ten children born to Dicy and Harper Montgomery. The family home was located in the middle of timber country and Eurreal’s father ran a honky-tonk where wood workers gathered on weekends to drink, dance, gamble and listen to music.

Most of the Montgomerys were musical. Harper played clarinet and Dicy played accordion and organ. Eurreal’s brothers and sisters all learned to play piano to one degree or another.
'Little Brother' Eurreal possibly was called by that name almost at the age of four, when he taught himself to play on a piano simple three finger blues, as he called them. Another tradition says he received his nickname because he looked like his father and therefore was called 'Little Brother' Harper. However, the name evolved into 'Little Brother' Montgomery, a nickname which stuck.
Montgomery had plenty of opportunity to hear older musicians playing at his father’s honky-tonk. He must have been a fast learner and an eager pupil watching what they did with their fingers and listening to their ragtimes, early blues and popular songs. Then he copied them and modified the songs into pieces that would later become regular parts of his repertoire. Jelly Roll Morton also had big music influence on 'Little Brother' Eurreal when he visited the Montgomery household on occasion.
Early at the age of eleven he dropped out of school and left home to work as travelling pianist. He played his way through Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas before he moved to New Orleans in 1923. In the mid-1920s Montgomery toured Louisiana with a variety of bands. He played with Sunnyland Slim and Delta bluesman and guitarist Skip James.

In 1928 he moved up to Chicago where he made a name for himself playing house rent parties almost every night in the week. While in Chicago Montgomery made his recording debut for Paramount Record Company in September 1930, including Vicksburg Blues and No Special Rider, which would become his signature tunes. As the Great Depression grew worse in 1931 he returned to New Orleans where he formed his own band, the Southland Troubadors, which toured the South and parts of the Midwest and usually publicized their gigs with short radio concerts. In 1935 Montgomery began recording for Bluebird Records and released his Vicksburg Blues No. 2 in the same year.

Montgomery left the Southland Troubadors in 1939. He resettled in Chicago three years later. For the rest of his life Chicago would be his base. During the next decades he often played in Chicago’s bars, local clubs and hotel lounges.

Because his repertoire alternated between blues and traditional jazz it came as no surprise that he occasionally appeared with musicians such as Baby Dodds, Lonnie Johnson and Franz Jackson or New Orleans jazz bands including Kid Ory’s Creole Orchestra in the Carnegie Hall concert in November 1948. Later in the mid 1950s he toured with young Otis Rush and about ten years later with Sippie Wallace.
After recording only sparingly between 1937 and 1959 he recorded the excellent album Tasty Blues in 1960 in a trio alongside with Lafayette 'Thing' Thomas (g) and Julian Euell (b). With these and many other recordings which followed in the next years his fame grew in the 1960s.
In the late 1950s he was discovered by wider white audience. In the following years Montgomery frequently became a world traveler giving concerts in UK and the European continent. He appeared at many blues and folk festivals at that time and was considered a living legend.