Leo "Bud" Welch (March 22, 1932 – December 19, 2017) was an American gospel blues musician and guitarist who didn't make his professional recording debut until he was 82 years old, by which time he was pretty much the last in a line of vernacular Mississippi guitarists who included R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Mississippi Fred McDowell.
Born in Sabougla, Mississippi, Welch grew up on his family’s farm in the tiny Calhoun County community. His early influences including listening to the Grand Ole Opry over the radio, and as a teen he learned guitar from an older cousin, L.C. Welch, with whom he formed a trio together with his younger brother, Arlanda. At 18, Welch moved to Grenada, where he played in a group with Alfred Harris and was soon playing at picnics and parties, working his way up to juke joints and clubs, playing mostly blues standards with a gospel edge, raw and urgent. Otherwise, he kept his day job, working over 30
years on a logging crew in the hill country. The influence of the region he called home, his years of musicianship, and his well-lived life blended together to create music that was as unique as he was.
After his conversion to evangelical Christianity, Welch, like McDowell, Rev. Gary Davis, and Blind Willie Johnson before him, developed an iconic, raw, hybridized gospel blues. From the mid-‘70s on, Welch was an established gospel performer in Bruce, leading groups including the Sabougla Voices and the Skuna Valley Male Chorus and hosting a gospel TV show on a local station.
Around 1975, when the blues began to wane as a popular music and the gigs began to dry up, Welch switched his sound to gospel, and took his blues riffs and Chuck Berry energy into the churches, developing a raw hybrid style that had the grit and moan of the blues laid under the urgent, passionate energy of call-and-response gospel.His music recording career started in 2014, after he was secretly recorded performing at his manager's birthday party. An offhand phone call to the Big Legal Mess record label brought him an audition and then a recording contract. Welch took his striking gospel blues into the studio, putting it down straight and with no frills, emerging with a debut album, Sabougla Voices, early in 2014. As part of his deal with Big Legal Mess, Welch promised the label that if they issued his gospel record, he would cut a blues album.
He delivered on it with I Don't Prefer No Blues. The set was produced by Bruce Watson, featured guitar work from Jimbo Mathus, and was issued in early 2015. After touring the globe, appearing in the European documentary Late Blossom Blues, and releasing Live at the Iridium (the only recording to place his gospel and juke joint blues side by side in the same program), Welch entered the recording studio with producer Dan Auerbach and sidemen Swift and Michaels. This line-up cut some 30 tracks live from the studio floor.
Welch fell ill in July, forcing him to cancel many previously booked appearances. His condition deteriorated and he died at his home in Bruce, Mississippi on December 19, 2017, aged 85.
Welch once expressed the satisfaction of his late-blooming career. “I’ve worked hard in the woods, cutting timber, running a chain saw for thirty-five years, got bit one time by a rattlesnake, but I’m still here. I’m making more money now than I ever did in the cornfields or cottonfields or woods, and I’m happy, I’m proud of what I’m doing. And I believe the Lord is too. The Lord always blessed me to make it over.”
(Edited from Wikipedia, AllMusic & Clarion Ledger)