A disk jockey in Clarksdale, Miss., Wright brought the blues to the Delta. “That was a beautiful record I dropped on you for your listening pleasure,” he would tell listeners, rather than saying the name of the band or song — he simply assumed people already knew the giants of the blues, like B.B. King and Muddy Waters.
“Everybody in Clarksdale thought he was talking directly to them,” said Jim O’Neal, a record producer and the founding editor of Living Blues. In the 1950s, Ike Turner would drop by Wright’s studio and play live for an hour. For 50 years he worked six days a week, starting in 1947. Early “Soul Man” Wright died December 10 in Memphis at age 84.