After Campbell’s family moved to Chicago, he met his mother’s friend Muddy Waters. By age 12, Campbell was sitting in with Waters’ band.
Eddie C. Campbell may not have had major name recognition among the general public, but in Chicago’s blues circles, he was a towering guitarist, blues vocalist and songwriter whose career spanned decades.
Campbell’s career got underway in the ’50s and ’60s, but unlike many of his peers who also had roots in the rural South, he continued to play clubs and record new stuff in the 1990s and 2000s, too, not content to simply continue playing the standards.
“He epitomized the West Side sound, which included R&B and soul,” Chicago music historian James Porter said. “He had an excellent voice, an excellent blues voice, but he was more distinguished as a guitarist and a songwriter.”
Campbell died Tuesday of heart failure at home in Oak Park, his wife and manager, Barbara Mayson, announced on Facebook. He was 79.
“I have my own true sound,” Campbell told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1995, before a free show at the Harold Washington Library. “I write my own music, I arrange my own music, from bass to the horns.… Remember, just because I’m living on the South Side or living on the West Side doesn’t mean it is a South Side or West Side music.
“Blues are an individual’s music.”
Eddie C. Campbell performs at Buddy Guy’s Legends. The blues guitarist, known as much for his songwriting as for his performances, died Tuesday in his Oak Park home at age 79.
