Most of what is known about Cleveland Steamer himself, comes from rumours and hearsay about him that circulated among British blues 'heads' in the early 1960s. Said to be the son of a poor black migrant from Mississippi and a southside Chicago whore known only as "Mama Rita" , he was said to have received his name from the place where his parents conceived him - on a Steamboat on Lake Missouri during a rare holiday.

He is said to have had a prodigous appetite - for food, whiskey and above all women. At 300 pounds, and rarely without a hamburger in his hand, he was a legend among chicago sidemen for his fecundity, one commenting: "Aint no group never wanted to play after Steamer, and aint no musician never wanted to use the can after him neither." It is rumoured that his talent for prodigious outpourings, was what earned him a living during the lean years of the depression: He appears to have put food on the table demonstrating his talent to respectable middle-class women he met on the streets of Chicago, an assertion which seems to be corroborated by some of his lyrics, as in the song: "Tyin'One Off' : 'You walkin on the wild side baby/On the South side of town/ye best be hoping ya man stay gone/while Steamers a-layin' one down."

This recording is from a 45 RPM disc first dropped by Cleveland Steamer on to the desk of then Domino records supremo/ethnomusicologist Rex T. Thorogood in 1949. Several test pressings were made, which never found their way to the music stores, as Thorogood died soon before the planned release - (rumoured to have been a stroke brought about by over-exertion while answering the call of nature, but recorded by the coroner as a heart-attack. )

Some of the test pressings, however, ended up in the hands of an American blues enthusiast, who copied them with an old fashioned wire tape-recorder, passing the recordings on to a friend of his in the British Merchant navy. From here, acetates were made, that floated across the Atlantic and found their way in to the hands of blues enthusiasts in The Beatle's home town of Liverpool, where they became a much-mythologised influence on the early British Blues scene.

5 Recordings, now known as the "Steamer Sides" , were known from this collection then and much passed around , albeit in degraded form, finding their way into the hands of British blues cognescenti such as John Mayall, Peter Green and the young Keith Richards.

Amazingly, during the terrible floods in New Orleans in 2005, a young looter in the South side of the city, came upon some discs floating in the water, which he kept, in case they turned out to be valuable. They passed from him to a local pawn shop, (for 5 dollars) and from there to a record shop in Scranton, Missouri. Steamer's name being far more obscure on that side of the Atlantic, they were placed at the bottom of a bargain bin, underneath a copy of Boney M's 'Nightflight to Venus" , where they were discovered by a British man on holiday with his family.

Subsequently sold to Columbia records for an undisclosed sum, they have been digitally remastered and restored to as close as is possible to the sound of the original 45 RPM record. We like to think it steams as much as it did the day it was dropped!