Floyd McDaniel born 21 July 1915

Floyd McDaniel (July 21, 1915 – July 22, 1995 in Chicago) was an American blues, jazz, rhythm & blues and doo-wop guitarist and singer. 

Floyd Edward "Butter" McDaniel was born in Athens, Alabama. He moved to Chicago around age fifteen, where he attended the renowned musical wellspring, Wendell Phillips High School. 'Guitar's been around me all my life,' he recollects, with many players in the family. He and some friends started playing on Chicago street corners like Roosevelt & Kedzie and the Michigan Avenue bridge, passing the hat and playing Louis Armstrong and Mills Brothers favourites. 

That led to gigs at the 1933 World's Fair and a tour with a washboard band called the Rhythm Rascals including a month in Detroit, and local work at the Spanish Club at Roosevelt and Mannheim. Its owner Doc Stacy set the band up in New York, where they were spotted at the Apollo Theatre and settled into a long residency at the Cotton Club as the Cotton Club Tramp Band. 'We was showstoppers, man,' Floyd recalls, playing in a show called 'Harlem Goes Broadway, Broadway Goes Harlem" and doing summer tours with a package headed by Cab Calloway. Floyd acquired the nick-name 'Butter' because of his chubbiness from Ben Webster and Billie Holiday. 

During the third year of the New York residency Floyd took the bus back to Chicago to see his family. He ended up joining Lindsley ("Jelly') Holt and the Four Blazes, replacing guitarist Jimmy Bennett; William Hill was the other guitar player. Floyd's tenure with the Blazes began in 1941 and lasted into the mid-fifties in various sizes and combinations. The group played their own material plus songs by the Ink Spots, Mills Brothers, Basie and 'all the popular tunes." Floyd remembers a lot of work back east and in the gambling center of Covington, Kentucky. Also in 1941 Floyd went electric. 

He had met pioneer amplified guitarist Charlie Christian in New York when Christian joined Benny Goodman's band, and Christian 'was my idol... I thought he was the cat's pajamas, man." Floyd also acquired chord knowledge from Ray Nance's guitarist Claude Adams and single note skills from John Collins during after-hours jams in Chicago on 55th Street. After Floyd married his second wife Margaret Dixon, he found out that her sister and T-Bone had collaborated on a dance act in Texas, and that their mother 'almost raised T-Bone.' The friendship between the two guitarists deepened as a result and was reflected strongly in Floyd's music. 

                              

The Four Blazes successfully released several '78s on Aristocrat Chicago Boogie (1947) and United Records such as Night Train, Rug Cutter, Perfect Woman, Please Send Her Back to Me, Mary Jo, All Night Long and Stop Boogie Woogie (1952) and as Five Blazes respectively the single Chicago Boogie.  

In 1957 Floyd bought a tavern at 155 W. 75th Street, running it for seven years. He stayed close to home but did go to Des Moines with Jump Jackson's band to back Sam Cooke. Then he joined a rock group ('they called me Pops") called the Y Knots, doing the likes of James Brown and Otis Redding tunes in the company of drummer Vince Chappelle and bassist Larry Exum, both well known to blues lovers. From there he went on in 1971 to one of the versions of the Ink Spots, with whom he stayed into the late '80s. At the 1986 Chicago Blues Festival he was a part of a Big 3 Trio reunion with Willie Dixon and pianist Baby Don Gaston; the experience rekindled Floyd's desire to be a blues man. 

Recordings were made in 1991 for Delmark Records with the band The Blues Swingers, led by tenor saxophonist Dave Clark, in a style inspired by 1940s blues and rhythm and blues ( Let Your Hair Down!, Delmark). Floyd has also found time to tour Europe, recording there with Little Willie Littlefield for the German CMA label and guesting on some '93 session, with Austria's Mojo Blues Band. Floyd never had such fully orchestrated accompaniment in the studio or as broad a forum for his talents, and the band had a rare chance to perpetuate what is too close to becoming a lost art in Chicago. Floyd also performed in 1994 at the Breminale Blues Festival in Bremen. 

He celebrated his 80th birthday the way he lived, singing and playing the guitar at the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge in Chicago. Through two raucous shows, which included the presentation of a birthday cake, McDaniel never left the stage. He spent the break there, too, signing autographs and flirting. Slung over his shoulder was his 1949 Gibson guitar, named Suzy after his long-gone basset hound. Then the evening drew to a close, the audience clamouring for a big finish. Instead, McDaniel, wearing his usual beret, gave them "One Hundred Years from Today," a quiet little tune about friends encountered in a future world. This was at 1.30 am 22 July 1995, that evening he died in Alabama of complications from a heart attack whilst driving his 1983 Oldsmobile down the Dan Ryan Expressway

(Edited from article by Dick Shurman for Bear Family, Chicago Tribune & Wikipedia)