Bman's Blues Report

Born in Sunflower, Mississippi, in 1943, David Lee Durham was raised in the blues. He never darkened the door of a schoolhouse and moved from farm to farm to pick cotton. He could pick 400 pounds of cotton by the age of thirteen. Music was his release. Durham performed with a handful of famous bluesmen over the years and was part of a few different bands. But most knew him as the front man for The Ladies’ Choice Band, which originated in 1975. The band was the Sunday night house band at Club Ebony in Indianola for several years, where they also opened for B. B. King at his annual homecoming concert. In 2004, the band won the Delta’s Regional Blues Challenge.That same year, the Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola named Durham “Blues Musician of the Year.” Durham’s style was an amalgamation of all of the bluesmen he listened to over the years: B. B. King, Albert King, and Little Milton Campbell. That signature sound inspired his last group, The True Blues Band. The band recorded...