Chicago, Illinois, resulting in most notably "The Dirty Dozens No. 2," which was not nearly as successful and the pianist was without a contract or label and again playing making the rounds at Memphis venues and in St. Louis bars. His 1938 session work in Aurora, Illinois, with the slide guitar player Robert Nighthawk and the mandolinist Willie Hatcher for Bluebird Records, was steady and long but also unsuccessful, and sometime in the 1940s he moved back to St. Louis and continued his career of playing in taverns. He also worked as a laborer in a public produce market until servicemen returned home to heavy lifting jobs. Revival and death Charlie O'Brien, a St. Louis policeman and something of a blues aficionado who applied many of his professional investigative methods to track down old bluesmen during the 1950s, "rediscovered" Speckled Red on December 14, 1954, who subsequently was signed to Delmark Records as the label's first blues artist. He experienced a small revival of interest in his music during the late 1950s and 1960s, his abilities still considerable, and worked around the St. Louis-area jazz scene, regularly as the intermission pianist for the Dixie Stompers, performing concerts with Dixie Mantinee and the St. Louis Jazz Club, played the Goldenrod Showboat, and played the University of Chicago Folk Festival in 1961, went to Dayton, Ohio, with Gene Mayl's Dixieland Rhythm Kings, and toured Europe in 1959 with Chris Barber. Several recordings were made in 1956 and 1957 for the Tone, Delmark, Folkways, and Storyville record labels. His age, however, had become a factor, and the remainder of the 1960s saw scattered performances. He died of cancer on January 2, 1973, in St. Louis, at the age of 80. Discography The Dirty Dozens, Delmark Records The Barrel-House Blues of Speckled Red, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1961 References External links Answers.com page on Speckled Red [ AllMusic biography] "The Barrel-House Blues of Speckled Red" Album Details of Folkways Records Biddle Street Barrelhousin' review Illustrated Speckled Red discography 1892 births 1973 deaths People with albinism African-American pianists American blues singers American blues pianists American male pianists Boogie-woogie pianists Jazz-blues pianists People from Hampton, Georgia Singers from Georgia (U.S. state) Deaths from cancer in Missouri St. Louis blues musicians Bluebird Records artists Delmark Records artists Blues musicians from Louisiana 20th-century American pianists Singers from Louisiana American male jazz musicians 20th-century African-American male singers