James Edward "Snooky" Pryor (September 15, 1921 – October 18, 2006) was an American Chicago blues harmonica player.
Only recently has Snooky Pryor finally begun to receive full credit for the mammoth role he played in shaping the amplified Chicago blues harp sound during the postwar era. He's long claimed he was the first harpist to run his sound through a public address system around the Windy City -- and since nobody's around to refute the claim at this point, we'll have to accept it!
He was born in Lambert, Mississippi, spent parts of his early life in Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, and had a spell of army service in the early 1940s before settling in Chicago. He had been playing the harmonica since he was 14, and gigged in the evenings and at weekends, in clubs like the Jamboree and the 708, with a circle of musicians that included Floyd and his cousin Moody Jones, pianist Sunnyland Slim and guitarists Eddie Taylor and Homesick James.
He hit Chicago for the first time in 1940, later serving in the Army at nearby Fort Sheridan. Playing his harp through powerful Army PA systems gave Pryor the idea to acquire his own portable rig once he left the service. Armed with a primitive amp, he dazzled the folks on Maxwell Street in late 1945 with his massively amplified harp. Pryor made some groundbreaking 78s during the immediate postwar Chicago blues era.
His 1948 recordings for the entrepreneur Al Benson's Planet label, such as Telephone Blues or, with Johnny Young, My Baby Walked Out and Let Me Ride Your Mule, have an intensity that is all the more remarkable when one realises that only two or three musicians are involved. His very first recording, an instrumental simply titled Boogie, uses a line that Little Walter would employ several years later on his career-making hit, Juke.
Pryor's harmonica playing, less orchestral than Little Walter's, had a piercing, penetrating attack that no doubt cut through the chatter in a club as decisively as it sliced the surface-noise of crudely made 78s. During the 50’s Pryor toured the South and made more classic sides for JOB (1952-1953), Parrot (1953), and Vee-Jay ("Someone to Love
Disenchanted by seeing little or no reward from his songwriting and recording, he declared that he had no interest in taking up music professionally again; indeed, for some time he refused even to talk to writers if he was not going to be paid for it. At the urging of his old friend Homesick James, however, he recanted, and in 1973 he joined him in the American Blues Legends package that toured Europe. While in England the two men also recorded an album for Virgin Records' Caroline label.
A tall, imposing but genial man, Pryor won the affection of blues enthusiasts wherever he went, and for some years he had more work and acclamation in Europe than at home in America. In the late 80s, when his children had grown up, he retired from his day job and returned to music. His 1991 album Back to the Country, made jointly with the singer and guitarist Johnny Shines, won an award from Living Blues magazine. Over the next 10 years he made a succession of albums, for such labels as Blind Pig, Antone's and Electro-Fi, of old-fashioned Chicago bar-band blues. He also appeared on Bob Margolin's 1995 Alligator Records release My Blues and My Guitar.
"If you make up your mind to survive," he said, "you know, you can make it," and on his last recordings, Snooky Pryor and His Mississippi Wrecking Crew, and Mojo Ramble, both made in 2001, his gruff, powerful singing and pungent harmonica playing seemed almost untouched by time. Pryor stayed active on the Chicago scene until his death on October 18, 2006 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His son Richard "Rip Lee" Pryor is also a blues musician and performs in and around his hometown of Carbondale, Illinois.
(Edited from AllMusic, The Guardian & Wikipedia)