06/01/2026
Remembering Lafayette Leake
On his Heavenly Birthday 🥳🎂💙🎶
HEY LOCO FANS - Happy birthday to keyboardist, singer and composer Lafayette Leake who played on many of your favorite blues classics. He worked for Chess Records as a session musician, and as a member of the Big Three Trio, during the formative years of Chicago blues. He played piano on many of Chuck Berry's recordings.
Leake was born in Winona, Missouri, and information about his early years is sparse. In the early 1950s he joined the Big Three Trio and began his association with Chess Records, where he worked closely with bassist, producer, and songwriter Willie Dixon.
Leake played piano on One Dozen Berrys, Chuck Berry's second album, released in 1958 by Chess. He was then on Chuck Berry Is on Top; Leake (not Berry's longtime bandmate Johnnie Johnson) played the prominent piano on the classic original rendition of "Johnny B. Goode", as well as "Rock and Roll Music". Leake played on numerous other Chess sessions from the 1950s through the 1970s, backing many Chess musicians, including Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, Billy Boy Arnold, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Little Walter, Homesick James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, and Koko Taylor. Leake gave Chicago blues musician Harmonica Hinds his first harmonica lesson.
During the 1960s, Willie Dixon formed the Chicago Blues All-Stars, with Leake as resident pianist. Leake toured and recorded with this group until the mid-1970s. After that he did little recording or touring, although he appeared with Berry at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1986, and recorded "Hidden Charms" with Dixon in 1988.
Besides being a respected performer, Leake was a composer. Fleetwood Mac, for example, recorded his song "Love That Woman" on their album The Original Fleetwood Mac. Leake's song "Wrinkles", performed by the Big Three Trio, was featured on the soundtrack of David Lynch's 1990 film, Wild at Heart.
Leake fell into a diabetic coma in his home in Chicago, where he remained undiscovered for several days, dying in hospital on August 14, 1990.
