Bell was born on the Davis Plantation, near Fort Deposit, Alabama. As a child he moved with his family to Greenville, Alabama. An older cousin, Joe Pat Dean, took Bell to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1919, where he learned to play the blues. In the early 1920s, Bell worked in agriculture and performed as a blues musician, often with his friend Pillie Bolling. He performed many times in Philadelphia and Ohio. His debut recording, of his own songs "Mamlish Blues" and "The Hambone Blues," was part of a four-song session for Paramount Records in Chicago in 1927. The word mamlish is of unknown origin; it was used in several blues recordings of that period. Bell stands as the most influential Alabama artist in pre-war blues recordings. With well over three-quarters of his material issued, Bell's "Mamlish Blues" and "Hambone Blues" came to define the style of the region and his contemporaries. His influences could still be detected in the 70s recordings of fellow Alabamian, John Lee.
He next recorded in April 1929, cutting eight songs for QRS Records, billed on the releases as "Sluefoot Joe", with Clifford Gibson playing guitar and piano. The rest of his recordings were made in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929 and 1930, and released by Columbia Records; on these records, he was billed as "Barefoot Bill from Alabama". Bell and Bolling played together on two tracks, "I Don't Like That" and "She's Got a Nice Line". Bell's own songs of that time include "Squabbling Blues", recorded on April 20, 1930, in which the singer, close to death, asks that if people are unable to agree on who should have his body, then it should be thrown in the sea, so they would "quit squabblin' over me". Barefoot Bill's songs tend to themes of imprisonment and voodoo.
Eventually tiring of the life of a traveling blues musician, Bell became a Baptist preacher, married and settled in Montgomery, Alabama. Bell died in Greenville in 1960, 1965 or 1966. The circumstances of Bell's death are shrouded in mystery but it is thought he died in the 60s during a civil rights march, however some sources suggest that his death was due to natural causes, murder on account of his involvement in the civil rights movement, or black magic.
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By arwulf arwulf
Ed Bell's Paramount record of his own "Mamlish Blues" is the kind of performance that has the power to suspend the listener in the eternal present moment. Its simple, repetitive, ascending, and descending scale evokes a magical sensibility that is echoed on the flipside, "The Hambone Blues," and the other two titles he cut in Chicago in September 1927. Bell's modest but substantial recorded legacy places him in league with more famous individuals such as Blind Boy Fuller, Tommy Johnson, Charlie Patton, and Robert Johnson. The magic that waits within Bell's recordings to be discovered by open-hearted listeners was clearly defined by trumpeter, multi-instrumentalist, composer, philosopher, and educator Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, who once said that growing up in the Mississippi Delta among blues musicians taught him "to feel that whatever I play relates to a gigantic field of feeling. To me, the blues is a literary and musical form and also a basic philosophy. When I get ready to study the mystical aspect of black people, I go to the blues; then I feel that I'm in touch with the root of black people."
Ed Bell was born in 1905 on the Davis Plantation near Fort Deposit, AL and moved with his family to Greenville where African-American string bands had been active for a long time. His older cousin Joe Pat Dean took young Ed to Muscle Shoals in 1919 where the boy learned to play the blues firsthand. Legend has it Dean soon resented Bell's popularity; his own career would be cut short when a jealous husband took him out around 1924-1925. Bell spent the first half of the decade gradually decreasing his involvement in agricultural labor while devoting ever more of his life to music, running with a posse of young players which included guitarist Pillie Bolling. Throughout the '20s, Bell was on the road a lot, gigging in Pittsburgh, PA and Toledo, Youngstown, and Cincinnati, OH. Bell's first four recordings, including the best-known, "Mamlish Blues," were cut in Chicago in September 1927 and released on the Paramount label. His next opportunity to record occurred in April 1929, when he cut eight sides for QRS at a studio in Long Island City, NY. Bell was identified on the label as Sluefoot Joe; Clifford Gibson of St. Louis sat in on guitar and piano. The rest of Bell's recordings were made in Atlanta, GA in 1929 and 1930. These records were released on Columbia with Bell now billed as "Barefoot Bill from Alabama," and his old friend Pillie Bolling sat in on some of the sides. According to his half sister Pauline Porterfield, Bell eventually wearied of the blues musician's life and crossed over from the sacred to the secular, becoming a Baptist preacher, marrying and establishing himself in Montgomery, AL as a reverend at the head of his own congregation. Once a regionally respected bluesman, Bell achieved the office of Moderator of the Southern District later in life and passed away in Greenville in 1966.