_The finger-popping, head-bobbing joie de vivre that Dave Myers exudes all over his new CD is not readily apparent when I call him up to ask for an interview.

“You got all kinds of writers been coming to my brother and me down through the years, and now here you are, you expect something, too. I have lived and helped so many people, but I have always been poor. Little Walter, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, all the peoples out there. Sunnyland Slim, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—they didn’t want no Willie Dixon upright boom boom bass on their records, they wanted me to play the s— on my guitar. I’ve been called in to work my g—damn brains out on records by no-playing a—holes. Man, you just don’t know what I’ve lived. I am it, and I know I am it. Everybody can see where I can help them, but what the f—about me, man? I’m still living!”

At seventy-one years old, Dave Myers, it seems, has not made peace with the world. But he’s not lying about being “it.” When Muddy Waters electrified country blues in the ’40s, Dave and his brother, Louis, both guitarists, were shaking the farm dust from the blues and making it swing. Their playing was so tight and so exciting they didn’t need a front man; once they got one, they still didn’t need a drummer. And once they got a drummer, they didn’t need a bass. Hell, the bass instrument that could keep up with them had yet to be invented.

Now, after six decades in music as a backing artist, Myers is stepping to the foreground. His CD, You Can’t Do That (Black Top Records), is one of the finest blues albums in years. Completely swinging, it mixes influences from New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, and Chicago.

A few weeks after that initial phone call, Myers and I and a few of his friends are seated around his kitchen table. There’s a glass bowl with plastic vegetables in the middle of it, there’s cornbread from yesterday on the stove, and Myers is lighting a cigar. His wife died in the ’60s, and his son is grown with kids of his own. His brother, Louis, died in 1994. Myers is several years retired, after working thirty-five years at the Keebler cookie factory.

“I was born in Byhalia, Mississippi, and then we moved to Memphis. My daddy, he played all around the country at frolics and fish fries. They always called Daddy to make the music. Mama played, too. We saw them going to gigs to help feed us, that inspired me and my brother to play, too.”

The senior Myers also farmed, and a misunderstanding over a used John Deere tractor resulted in him fleeing the state. “I was about six, and I remember about twenty-five white men came to our house; they all had guns, shotguns, even the sheriff was with them. They slapped Mama around, tried to make her tell where he was. Daddy sent word and we came up to Chicago.”

It was 1942 and Muddy Waters was six years from having his first hit. “When we come here, there was no blues in Chicago. Nothing but swing music. Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, all that swing stuff. Jitterbug music. It was completely unfamiliar to us, and we sure couldn’t play it.

“Then we saw Lee Cooper,” Myers says. The loneliness that hangs over the house is being chased out by cigar smoke, exhaled as Dave begins to revel in his past. “He was sitting out front of his house, next door to us.”

Lee Cooper played a more modern style guitar and was called upon by a variety of artists when they recorded—he could handle the raw blues of early Howlin’ Wolf, the folksy blues of Big Bill Broonzy, and the gut-bucket leanings of Washboard Sam.

“Me and Louis, barely teenagers, we see his guitar and we shot right there. We was guitar fanatics. We watched his hands very hard, and he seed that. The next evening we laid down by his basement window, Louis on one side, me on the other, watching him practice. He looked up there and saw us, it was raining, so he put his guitar down. We jumped up to get away, but he came out, said, ‘Come on fellows, keep me a little company,’ so down we went.”

Cooper tutored the boys, and then used his pull to get them admitted to the prominent Chicago music school Lyon and Healy. “Man, you talk about excited, we was crazy. We were twelve or thirteen, there was very happy moments there.”

The brothers were young enough to adapt to the new sound, and they’d be among those responsible for killing it. “We learned that swing. We started playing house parties and when Chicago was being ‘invaded’ [during the Great Migration], everybody came to hear the Myers brothers playing that stuff. But we turned it around and got the blues out of it, the way we understood it. And that’s how we set the blues sound in Chicago.”

Muddy’s innovation was to jack up country blues, to give it a new power through cranked amperage, but the Myers brothers fused a new sound—their music took Benny Goodman to a Byhalia frolic.

That no one else could keep up with the brothers did not deter them. The duo split the duties, with Louis playing the lead and Dave setting the patterns.

“They used to call me the Thumper because I played so hard. What whupped it into me, we didnt never have no drums and I had to make a beat somehow. I’d thump the guitar to sound like an upright bass. And we’d stamp our feet when we played to keep the beat.”

In person, the Thumper’s fret hand hits the neck just below the chords, giving them an oomph as he slides into them, and the way his foot keeps time, it’s like another instrument. On the CD, the Thumper style is most evident on the instrumental track, “Dave’s Guitar Boogie.”

One night, the two brothers were playing a party with Arthur Big Boy Spires, and the girls were all over them, gushing about a young kid nearby who played harmonica. “This kid was funny, he was so small. He sit in with us, he could play all that Muddy Waters kind of stuff, and we clicked real good.”

The kid’s name was Junior Wells. Calling themselves the Three Aces, these upstarts began drawing crowds that rivaled those of Muddy Waters. One of their biggest fans was Muddy’s harmonica player, Little Walter. He was closer in age to the Myers brothers than to the musicians in Muddy’s band, and though Muddy’s group had trained him, Walter felt constrained.

As Myers tells it, “We was playing seven nights a week. I was handling all the business, all these guys needed to do was come to work. But one night Junior never showed up. People was lining up outside as usual. At the bar, there stands Little Walter, he was supposed to be on the road with Muddy. I questioned him. ‘Muddy and them here?’ ‘No, they ain’t here. I quit them.’ I said, ‘Look man, that’s y’all’s business, but I need a harp player, can you play with us?’ Boy, you talking about somebody playing, we loaded him up and he loaded us up, too.”

When Walter left him, Muddy sent for Junior Wells—the bands switched harmonica players. The Aces became Little Walter’s Jukes, and their first recording together, the single “Boogie,” proved them to be a major force on the Chicago scene. The song opens with Walter’s propulsive harmonica, accented by jazz-bomb drums and cymbals. The guitars kick in, Louis laying down a riff at the end of Walter’s hook, and the bass pattern that Dave plays on his six-string is so heavy that a jackhammer operator could wear it. This innovative band recorded many hits throughout the mid-’50s: “Mean Old World,” “Blues with a Feeling,” “Too Late,” and “Lights Out,” to name a few.

The electric guitar had been gaining popularity through the ’50s, but the invention of the electric bass wasn’t complete until an amp was made that could handle the rumble in the deep notes. Armed with such an amp, Myers did as much as anyone to bring the big band era to an end. “I run them out one by one. Word got around Chicago. Earl Hines, the piano player, his big band was playing the Ivory Lounge. The owner called me up, took me to lunch. He said, ‘You guys think you can hold this club together, this big club?’ He said, ‘Big shots come here.’ I said, ‘We play, man, jazz, blues, swing.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna set you up for Thursday. If we get through Thursday, you guys play right on through the weekend.’ We blew his mind. He said, ‘You guys are here tomorrow night and the next night, you don’t even have to go home.’ So we played there about five months, you could play on a gig a long time then. He said, ‘Why would I pay nineteen peoples when four can do it?’” Myers can barely contain his laughter. “When I toured down through Texas on that bass with guitarist Earl Hooker, man...Roy Milton, Floyd Dixon, and all them big bands, they coulda put that acoustic bass in a coffin and just buried it.”

The high times continued to be contrasted with troubles. While setting up to perform for a white graduation dance in Kentucky, Myers saw carpenters hanging a canvas across the front of the stage. “That’s when I like to got in trouble. I said, ‘Sir, I don’t entertain peoples hid behind things like that. We’re players, we entertain people, I can’t play for you like that.’ And the guy said, ‘You gonna play or you won’t leave here, the mayor will see to that.’ They sent four squads over there, said, ‘You’re gonna get a taste of a rubber hose and water all over you, what do you think of that?’ Something told me they would have to do to me whatever they have to do because I was not going behind there and play. And this one man standing nearby, he spoke up, said how ridiculous that sounds. Said, ‘They don’t care about your girls. Why did you bring these people here to embarrass them like that?’ He spoke up, and they probably would have killed me.”

The afternoon has turned to night and Myers’s cigar has gotten short. Little Walter died in 1968. Junior Wells died several months ago. Myers takes the guitar from his neck. When we leave, he’ll return it to its case, unhook the amp, turn off his record player.

“You don’t know, man, I done lived a life, wasn’t no happiness in it. The only thing I got a thrill out of was playing music. That’s been my happiness, and it ain’t never did nothing for me. I lived a heck of a life.”

_Monday night. We are in a trendy bar in a formerly run-down Chicago neighborhood. The house trio, in neo-rockabilly garb, has taken music lessons from Myers, and he regularly shows up to sit in.

And in he comes. A pale cap cocked back on his head, he lingers near the door, but shortly he’s seated at a crowded booth. Lithe hippie girls take turns hanging off his neck.

Rockin’ Johnny calls Dave to the front. Dave reaches for a spare six-string. He tunes a little, and the band falls in behind him. Then he sings his blues: “Nobody loves me, nobody seems to care.”