Wild Child’s music and songs are in two videos seen
on Television and Cinemas
in Europe, North America and Australia.
“ALL TIED UP”
featuring:
THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT
THESE MEAN OLD BLUES
“NEW YORK ON THE EDGE”
featuring:
ANYONE CAN SAY THEY LOVE YOU
BABY DO YOUR THING
IT’S A PITY
These songs are from the
BULLSEYE CD #9518 – “THESE MEAN OLD BLUES”
Management and Bookings:
Live Earth Management
PO Box 07311
Detroit, MI 48207
or
PO Box 7440
Windsor, Ontario N9C 4G1 Canada
Phone/Fax: (519) 977-8427
Email: livearth@sprint.ca
On August 4, 1998 MC Records re-issued Lickin’ Gravy by harmonica player, singer, songwriter, Wild Child Butler. The recording has never before been issued on CD. Lickin’ Gravy was recorded in 1976 and in 1986 and features the cream of Chicago blues players including Pinetop Perkins, Sammy Lawhorn, Aaron Burton, Sam Lay and Jimmy Rogers. The 11 song CD features eight original compositions by “The Maverick of the Blues”, Wild Child Butler. He will record new material for MC Records in the future.
Wild Child Butler was born in Autaugaville, Alabama in 1936. Wild Child made a name for himself in the 50’s and early 60’s playing in Chicago and the rural juke joints in Alabama. He first recorded in 1964 and then hooked up with the legendary Willie Dixon who produced four Wild Child singles for Jewel Records from 1966 to 1968. Those sessions were highlighted by the dual harp numbers featuring Wild Child and the great Big Walter Horton.
Wild Child Butler’s resume is top notch. He has toured with Jimmy Rogers, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Cousin Joe and Roosevelt Sykes. His last two recordings were released in the ’90s on Rounder Records. Wild Child’s biggest influence is Sonny Boy Williamson II and yet his sound is all his own. A prolific songwriter, Wild Child Butler performs mostly his own compositions.
THE SWAMP-HARP KING
by Jerry Gaughan – 1989
On October 1, 1936, in Autaugaville, Alabama, a 13-year-old girl, Beatrice Butler, gave birth to the first of her nine children, a baby boy who was to become the subject of this interview: George Wild Child Butler. George remembers, “On Sundays some of the older ladies would come to the shack where we lived to visit my mother, and even as a toddler I would grab their legs and tug their skirts. The ladies would tell my mother that she had to do something about that Wild Child, and the name just stuck”. In fact, when you meet George Butler, one finds him to be a pleasant, highly personable man with a ready smile as big as an Alabama cotton field, and in no way in keeping with the image conjured up by the name Wild Child.
George Wild Child Butler is one of the most stylistically interesting and underrated blues performers in the business today. In this, an era when Blues is so frequently used with rock, soul and other more commercially viable music forms, Wild Child stands his artistic ground. Today George Butler plays and sings his blues in exactly the same authentic style that he developed and learned from his rural Alabama sharecropping mentors over forty years ago. Wild Child was asked: “If it meant that you could be far more commercially successful, would you change your style?” His answer was quick and definitive: “No I would not! Record companies have asked me to do that before. I wouldn’t do it then, and I wouldn’t do it now, just to sell more records. The way I do my blues, that’s me! The blues isn’t just something that I do, it’s something that I am”. George is polite but firm with his audiences: “Do BB King”, a patron calls, and Wild Child replies, “Perhaps BB King will play here sometime, but you’ve got the Wild Child up here tonight”.