Lurrie Bell
Lurrie Bell
3Arts
Born in the late 1950s, Bell was raised in a Chicago household steeped in the blues as his father Carey Bell played harmonica in Muddy Waters’s band. At 15, he started his first group and in 1977, at the age of 17, he was a founding member of The Sons of Blues and performed that year at the Berlin Jazz Festival. At 20, he joined the band of Chicago’s acknowledged Queen of the Blues: Koko Taylor. The firebrand Chicago blues guitar slinger – whom the Boston Phoenix declared “the most talented blues guitarist of his generation†– triumphed over a debilitating bout of mental illness that he endured through much of the 1980s and 1990s, even leaving him homeless for a stretch. The family of Bell’s life partner Susan Greenberg, who passed away in early 2007, provided the funds for him to finance a new recording and to start his own record label in the name of their daughter, Aria Bell Greenberg. Let’s Talk About Love was recorded in the late spring of 2007 and released later that year to great critical acclaim. Since then Bell has been named Living Blues Magazine’s Guitar Player of the Year three years in a row and in 2008 was honored as the publication’s Blues Artist of The Year. He has received six award nominations from the prestigious Blues Music Association and a nod by the Chicago Reader as Chicago Blues Artist of the Year in 2008. Bell’s life and career are both now flourishing and he performs regularly on stages throughout the world.
