Walter Vinson
Musician · 1901–1975 · Bolton, Mississippi
Best known for
Songwriter
Walter Vinson was a Mississippi blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter best remembered as a founding member of the Mississippi Sheiks — the string-band partnership he formed with Lonnie Chatmon in 1928 — and as the credited co-author of the much-recorded standard “Sitting on Top of the World.” The Sheiks and their satellite groups laid down roughly a hundred sides in the first half of the 1930s.
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- Born February 2, 1901, in Bolton, Mississippi.
- Worked in the early to mid-1920s with Mississippi string-band musicians Son Spand, Rubin Lacey, and Papa Charlie McCoy.
- Teamed with fiddler Lonnie Chatmon in 1928 to form the Mississippi Sheiks.
- Recorded with the Sheiks and related groups — the Mississippi Mud Steppers, the Mississippi Hot Footers, the Blacksnakes — cutting about a hundred sides between 1930 and 1935.
- Said he wrote “Sitting on Top of the World” in a single morning after a dance in Greenwood, Mississippi; the song is credited to Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008.
- Continued recording after the Sheiks dissolved in 1933, working with Leroy Carter and Mary Butler before moving from Jackson to New Orleans and eventually to Chicago.
- Returned to public performance during the 1960s folk-blues revival before hardening of the arteries forced his retirement.
- Died in Chicago on April 22, 1975, at age 74.
- Inducted, with the Mississippi Sheiks, into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame in 2004.