Songfacts®:

• The only cure for William Harris' bullfrog blues is a trip down to New Orleans to soak up some music.
  
  Dig the music of the Cajun bands,
  Honky-tonk piano,
  Make you feel good,
  Open your ears,
  To rhythm 'n' blues
  
  It's great that we know the cure, but it would be nice to know what the ailment is, as well. Harris never clarifies what, exactly, "bullfrog blues" are. We only know that he has them, his parents and siblings have them, and even his grandmother has them.
• Little is known about bluesman William Harris other than the consensus that he must have been born and raised in the Mississippi Delta and that he recorded 16 songs over two sessions that occurred in 1927 and 1928. Even the bits of his story that we do know are mostly pieced together from hearsay, leaving room for doubt. But it's believed that Harris was part of a traveling medicine show, with medicine shows having been a sort of early variety show that included dubious medical cures in between musical performances. It's suspected that Harris was specifically with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels medicine show, which operated from the early 1900s to the 1950s throughout the southern United States.
• Henry Columbus Speir owned a music store in Jackson, Mississippi. From the 1920s through the 1930s, Speir hunted down talented blues musicians and recorded them. He singlehandedly launched the careers of many of the era's top musicians. One of the first people Speir recorded was William Harris.
  
  Harris sold a lot of copies of his cover of Jim Jackson's "Kansas City Blues," but his music didn't build a sustainable career, and he dropped out of the historical record immediately afterwards. To this day we don't know where or when he died or what he did after his recordings.
• Gennett Records released "Bullfrog Blues" as a single in 1928. In 1991, Document Records released all of Harris' songs on the Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order 1927 - 1929 album.
• Canned Heat covered the song on their self-titled debut album.
• "Bullfrog Blues" was a regular part of live shows for the '70s Irish music icon Rory Gallagher. A performance of the song closes out his third album, Live! in Europe.
  
  Writing for Sounds magazine in 1977, Mick Brown described a scene of Rory Gallagher doing a performance of "Bullfrog Blues":
  
  He did 'Bullfrog Blues' - 'Did you evaah?' - and immediately there were a thousand heads flailing and a thousand imaginary guitars being played in the audience. He took a solo. Lou took a solo. Gerry McEvoy took a solo. Rod DeAth took a solo. The audience took a solo...