Henry Townsend - 'Wave My Hands Bye Bye' live 1976

Townsend was one of the only artists known to have recorded in nine consecutive decades. He first recorded in 1929, for Columbia Records in Chicago, and remained active up to 2006. He performed on 35 recordings in 1935 alone. By the mid-1990s, Townsend and his one-time collaborator Yank Rachell were the only active blues artists whose careers had started in the 1920s. He recorded on several different labels, including Columbia, Bluesville Records, and Folkways Records.

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Townsend was born Henry Jesse James Townsend in Shelby, Mississippi to Allen and Omelia Townsend. His father was a blues musician who played guitar and accordion. When Henry was young, his family moved near Cairo, Illinois. Henry left home at the age of nine because of his abusive father and hoboed his way to St. Louis, Missouri. He learned guitar while in his early teens from a locally renowned blues guitarist known as Dudlow Joe. While trying to earn a living with his guitar, Townsend also worked as an auto mechanic, a shoe shiner, a hotel manager, and a salesman.

By the late 1920s he had begun touring and recording with the pianist Walter Davis and had acquired the nickname Mule, because he was sturdy in both physique and character. In St. Louis, he worked with some of the early blues pioneers, including J. D. Short. During this time period, he also learned to play the piano.

Townsend, a master guitarist and pianist, played an integral role in the vital St. Louis blues scene of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. His earliest years were spent in Shelby and then near Lula; the family was in Cairo, Illinois, when Townsend ran away from home and settled in St. Louis as a preteen. He made his recording debut in 1929, and during the 1930s he recorded in the company of leading blues artists including Roosevelt Sykes, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Robert Nighthawk, and Mississippi-born Big Joe Williams and Walter Davis. A prolific and spontaneous composer, Townsend claimed credit for writing the first version of the blues standard “Every Day I Have the Blues,” recorded by Tupelo native Aaron “Pine Top” Sparks in 1935.

Townsend continued to record with Davis after World War II but began working more outside of music as a hotel manager and debt collector. In 1961Townsend recorded his first album for folklorist Sam Charters, and over the next decades he toured, recorded several albums, and mentored younger artists in St. Louis. He received a prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985. In 2008 he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for his participation on the album Last of The Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen – Live in Dallas, which featured fellow nonagenarians Robert Lockwood, Honeyboy Edwards, and Pinetop Perkins.

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