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Little Milton

Little Milton was a blues singer and guitarist, with a polished style somewhat like B.B. King. His best known hit was "We're Gonna Make It" (1965) but he wrote and recorded many other songs that would become blues classics.

Milton Campbell Jr. was born in 1934 in Inverness, Mississippi, and started playing the guitar by age 12. In 1951, as part of the Three Aces, he recorded "V-8 Ford" and "Nelson Street Blues". In 1952, while playing in local bars, he was spotted by Ike Turner who signed him up with Sun Records, for whom he made a number of singles, but without much success. In the late 1950s he helped set up the Bobbin Records label, and started producing. With Bobbin he helped Albert King make his first hits, and produced his own first hit "I'm A Lonely Man".

In 1962 his "So Mean To Me" got to #14 on the R&B charts. After some false starts, he released "We're Gonna Make It" in 1965, which reached #1 on the R&B charts, followed by "Who's Cheating Who?" which made it to #4. He released a number of hits in the next few years that were to become classics, including "Baby I Love You", "Feel So Bad" and "Grits Ain't Groceries". In the 1970s he started to add orchestration to his work, releasing the successful "That's What Love Will Make You Do" and "What It Is".

With the break-up of Stax records in 1975, Little Milton struggled to retain popularity. His last big hit "Ain't Nothing But A Number" was recorded in 1983, but he continued to perform, often to sold-out houses, for the rest of his life. Little Milton died in 2005 after a massive stroke.

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