Kid Thomas

Kid Thomas, aka Tommy Louis, aka Tommy Lewis, was and is one of the great unsung heroes of that crazy kind of music that skirts the fine line between blues and straight-out rock & roll. Though success constantly eluded him throughout his career, it wasnt for lack of talent. With a powerful voice that could emit banshee wails and Little Richard howls with consummate ease, and a harmonica style that, at his best ("Rockin This Joint Tonight"), sounded like Little Walter powered by a vacuum cleaner, Kid Thomas was a man who knew how to rock the joint, indeed. He was born Louis Thomas Watts on June 20, 1934, in Sturgis, Mississippi. About seven years later, his parents, Virgie and VT, moved the family up to Chicago. By the time young Louis reached street-wise, teenage manhood, he was taking harmonica lessons from Little Willie Smith, one of the many peripheral bluesmen on the Chicago scene, in exchange for giving Smith lessons on the drums, the Kid's original instrument. The late '40s and early '50s found him semi-gainfully employed blowing harp at Cadillac Babys and a dozen other clubs whose names are now lost to the mists of time. According to all accounts, he appears to have sat in with everybody at one time or another during the early to mid-'50s; Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and Bo Diddley all welcomed him onstage on a regular basis, while Thomas found himself even deputizing for his harmonica hero Little Walter on the not-so-odd occasion when said hero was too drunk to make it up to the bandstand. By 1955, Kid Thomas decided he needed to make a record to help promote his club appearances. Walking by the King-Federal distributors one day, he simply poked his head and announced that he'd like to record. As luck would have it, he was immediately introduced to Ralph Bass,...