A1Blues.Com » 090 – Cash Box Kings

This week you will get to hear an interview with Cash Box Kings’ Joe Nosek and songs from their CD The Royal Treatment.
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As Joe will explain in the show, Cash Box Kings are a band that pays tribute to the blues sounds of the nineteen-forties and fifties. Bands like Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Big Walter Horton and Muddy Waters. Muddy Waters’ band has an extra closeness, because Kenny “Beedy Eyes” Smith, the drummer for Cash Box Kings, is the son of legendary Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. Willie as you know was the drummer for the Muddy Waters band in the late sixties and through out all of the seventies. When Joe Nosek first met Kenny Smith, he wanted to put together an old school blues band. Kenny said he would like that too, because most of the artists he was playing drums for were in their seventies or eighties. As luck would have it Joe finally did meet more younger blues artist that had the same kind of vision as Joe and Willie. While it is always exciting to see the old timers that are still around like Hubert Sumlin, Byther Smith, Magic Slim, and Big George Brock. They have been around a long time and just don’t have the strength or energy to put on the kind of show they did when they were much younger. The Cash Box Kings are young guys giving it all they’ve got, just like the originals did when they were starting out. Joe does whatever it takes to get his audience up and having a great time. Whether it’s sliding across the stage, dancing on the bar top, or just laying down great harp.

Cash Box Kings current CD The Royal Treatment sounds so much like a blues record of the fifties that if you didn’t know better you would swear they were some lost band from Chess and Sun Records. Out of the fifteen songs on this record, Joe or Travis Koopman (lead guitar & some vocals) wrote eight of them. Some of the other songs are Elmore James’ “Please Set A Date”, Sonny Boy Williamson I “My Little Machine”, Muddy Waters’s “Gypsy Woman”, Little Walter’s “Can’t Hold Out Much Longer”, and the classic Big Bill Broonzy song “Baby Please Don’t Go”. The songs, whether originals or covers, all fit together really well. At one point they do a Little Walter song and then go into a very beautiful original ,“Lou & Roxie’s Rhumba”, that features Joe’s harp playing. You would have thought Little Walter had picked these two songs to go together. If you’re ready for some old time stripped down raw blues, Cash Box Kings record The Royal Treatment is just what you want to pick up. Below is a link to where you can pick up this Cd as well as their other CD’s Black Night Fallin’ and Live! At The King Club.

Songs played in the show:
Don’t Go Drinkin’
Why Did I Start?
Lou & Roxie’s Rhumba
Gimmie Some of That
Life Is Tough

Cash Box Kings CD’s are all available at CD Baby Website