I’ve seen Robben Ford dozens of times in various formats and configurations, invariably interesting, often downright astounding. In the photograph shown here, esteemed music photographer Veryl Oakland perfectly captured Ford’s soul and energy on a June night in 1973, and I was in the audience.
As part of the Newport Jazz Festival West (at Berkeley Community Theater and the Hollywood Bowl), the “Guitar Explosion” featured Jim Hall, Barney Kessel, Mary Osborne, the duo of Herb Ellis and Joe Pass, T-Bone Walker, Shuggie Otis, Kenny Burrell, and Roy Buchanan. You could hardly ask for a more impressive roster of jazz and blues greats, but when I saw the Berkeley show, Robben created the most excitement. Playing an original calypso in the Sonny Rollins mold titled “For You,” followed by “Little Red Rooster” as a B.B. King type of shuffle, the only thing that could have slayed the audience more would’ve been if he’d started playing saxophone, too. And believe me, he could have.
Born December 16, 1951, Ford joined Charlie Musselwhite’s band in late 1970, after the blues harpist had hired older brother, Patrick, on drums. A month after his 19th birthday, they were in the studio cutting Musselwhite’s Takin’ My Time, which featured one Robben vocal. When I saw the band shortly after, Robben sounded like a jazzier Mike Bloomfield, having saved his lunch money years earlier to buy The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. He also dueted with Charlie on sax, and on break he amused himself at the piano.
In early ’71, the brothers formed one of the hottest groups in the San Francisco area. The Real Charles Ford Band (to differentiate from a pre-Musselwhite aggregation) enlisted bassist Stan Poplin and 18-year-old brother Mark, a harmonica phenom. I caught them almost weekly, and to this day I’ve never seen a band that could nail the Chess catalog and B.B. King, and then improvise over Brubeck and Coltrane jazz.
My first published article was an interview with Robben for Blue Flame, a blues fanzine edited by fellow teen Cary Baker. Sadly, the band broke up on New Year’s Eve and recorded The Charles Ford Band for Arhoolie a month later, to document what had been. I highly recommend it.
Forming his own group, Robben learned that blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon, whom he favored via a compilation called The Blues Box, was coming to Palo Alto’s In Your Ear club.
“I asked the owner, ‘Hey, man, can I open for him?’” Robben recently recalled from his home in London. “He wasn’t going to pay me, but I just wanted to do it. Spoon showed up with only a guitar player, so after our set he said, ‘I want you guys to back me up.’ We were like, ‘Yeah!’ I told him I’d play saxophone, because he had a guitar player. At the end of that first night, he said, ‘I know you were just being nice to my guitar player by playing saxophone, but I want you guys to play with me next week at El Matador.’”
Witherspoon’s week-long stint at the San Francisco jazz venue cemented the guys as his full-time band. The young white quartet (with Poplin, pianist Paul Nagel, and drummer Jim Baum) revitalized the career of the 52-year-old, who delivered a galvanic set at the Monterey Jazz Festival that September. As Ford took chorus after slow-blues chorus in “Going Down Slow,” Witherspoon urged him (and the crowd) on. “He really sold me,” Robben agreed. You can hear the result on Jimmy Witherspoon featuring Robben Ford – Live At The 1972 Monterey Jazz Festival, released in 2008.
Television performances – “One Of A Kind” and an installment of “Omnibus” – aired on PBS in ’73, showcasing the Gibson Super 400 Robben got in trade for his L-5. The Witherspoon personnel evolved to Poplin, drummer Jim Chanteloup, future Yellowjackets pianist Russell Ferrante, and two saxes – three when Robben joined in – typically preceding Spoon onstage with excellent Robben-penned jazz tunes. That year, I landed an interview with him for Guitar Player, which got a foot in the door for the career I’ve had for 50 years.
His subsequent tenure with fusion’s L.A. Express and 1974 tours with Joni Mitchell and George Harrison are well-known, yet the Witherspoon era is underrepresented – underutilized on Spoonful, smoking on Live Jimmy Witherspoon & Robben Ford, released in ’77.
Unfortunately, there’s precious little documentation of Ford’s Witherspoon period, with producer Mike Vernon barely utilizing him on Spoonful. Subsequent unsanctioned albums confuse fans and exploit Robben’s success. In ’91, he was reunited with Spoon for Live At The Notodden Blues Festival, released in ’92 on brother Patrick’s Blue Rock’It label. But if some board tape shows up 50-plus years hence, with no money going to Ford, the bandmates, or Witherspoon (who died in ’97), how is that not a bootleg?
Robben’s first solo album, The Inside Story, was released in ’79. Session work – oft-quoted “from Barry Manilow to Kiss” – collaborations with Larry Carlton, and stints with Jing Chi and Miles Davis followed, and he routinely racks up Readers’ Poll votes in Blues, Jazz, and Rock categories. His website mentions “16-plus albums under his own name,” with Two Shades Of Blue due in early 2026.
“Bad cat, man,” George Benson told me in 2009. “Always has been.”
© 2025 Dan Forte; all rights reserved by the author.
This article originally appeared in VG’s January 2026 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.