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re-released in 2001, with the result that
Shuggie Otis was soon back touring the
world, to generally excellent reviews.

Continuing the family tradition, both of
Shuggie’s sons from his 2 marriages
became musicians, one playing with his

father, and the other with his grandfather!

Although Shuggie continued to plow his
own musical furrow, he also took on the

road a 13-piece R&B band, The New
Johnny Otis All-Stars. However, his career
since the mid-1970s has always been
somewhat on the sidelines, considering

his huge talent, and as far as I can see his
most recent release was in 2018, with an
instrumental album entitled “Inter-
Fusion”, which featured former Vanilla

Fudge and Jeff Beck drummer Carmine
Appice. To me, it sounds something like a
cross between the work of Jeff Beck, and possibly the sort of thing Cream might be
doing if they had stayed together for in excess of 50 years!

Returning now to the work of his father, Johnny Otis continued twanging every bow
in his considerable armoury, and as an author produced ‘Listen to the Lambs’, a 1968
account of the Watts riots that took place in 1965, and ‘Upside Your Head! Rhythm

and Blues on Central Avenue’ (1993), which was effectively his autobiography. The
following year (1994) he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 1990
he and his wife had moved to Sebastopol, in Northern California, from where they

ran an organic orchard, and he continued hosting his weekly radio show.

Johnny died on 17th January 2012 (3 days before his discovery, Etta James), at the
age of 90, essentially of old age. His life had been a life very well lived, and there is

no doubt he carved for himself an important place in the history of American music.
Both he and his wife are interred at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena,
California.

Meanwhile, son Shuggie has dropped a little off the radar. He toured the UK in 2017,
with his band ‘Shuggie Otis Rite’, and apparently has done some touring since then,
but I can’t find anything specific. It would be nice to hear him playing some of his

tasteful blues guitar again, but I suspect we shall have to suffice by listening to his
work as a teenager (e.g. “Shuggie Otis Plays The Blues”, an Epic cd in the Roots and
Blues Contemporary Masters series). He sure can play the blues!