Snooks Eaglin: The Human Jukebox

The Human Jukebox

Snooks Eaglin could play anything. And we mean anything. Blues, rock and roll, jazz, country, Latin, pop standards — the man claimed to know about 2,500 songs, and if you shouted a request from the audience, odds were good he'd play it on the spot, note for note, like he'd been rehearsing it all week. That's how he got his nickname: the Human Jukebox.

Born Fird Eaglin Jr. in New Orleans in 1936, Snooks lost his sight to glaucoma before he turned two. His father gave him a guitar around age five, and the boy learned to play entirely by ear, absorbing everything that came through the radio — every genre, every style, every song. By eleven, he'd won a talent contest on WNOE radio. By his teens, he was playing in Allen Toussaint's band the Flamingoes.

Eaglin's career spanned more than five decades, and it defied easy categorization. Folklorist Harry Oster recorded him in the late fifties, capturing a raw acoustic blues style that got him labeled as a folk-blues artist. But then he went electric and started recording New Orleans R&B for Imperial Records in the early sixties, playing alongside James Booker and other local heavyweights. He could be a delta bluesman one minute and a funk guitarist the next.

His most productive period came during his years with Black Top Records from 1987 to 1999, when he finally got the kind of studio treatment his talent deserved. Albums like Baby, You Can Get Your Gun and Out of Nowhere showcased the full range of what Snooks could do — which was, essentially, everything.

Live shows were an adventure. Snooks never used a setlist. He'd play whatever he felt like, take requests from the crowd, switch genres mid-song, and keep the audience guessing for two hours. You never saw the same show twice, because Snooks never played the same show twice.

He died in New Orleans in 2009 at the age of seventy-two, having spent his entire life in the city that raised him. In a town full of guitar players, Snooks Eaglin was the one who could play everything — and make all of it sound like New Orleans.