Going to Build Me a Playhouse: Blues Song Guide
Facts
- Writers credited: T-Bone Walker and E.J. White
- Original artist and release: T-Bone Walker, album Funky Town, Bluesway Records, April 1968, produced by Bob Thiele
- Context: part of Walker's later Bluesway-era catalog, a label that also released key B.B. King and Jimmy Witherspoon sides
"Going to Build Me a Playhouse" is a T-Bone Walker recording credited to Walker and co-writer E.J. White, released in April 1968 on his album Funky Town for Bluesway Records, produced by Bob Thiele. It runs about three minutes and forty seconds and sits fifth on the album's first side, part of Walker's later-career run of recordings for Bluesway, the ABC-distributed blues imprint that also released key sides by B.B. King, Jimmy Witherspoon, and other major blues artists during the same stretch of the 1960s.
By 1968, T-Bone Walker was already a towering figure in blues history, widely credited as one of the first and most influential players to bring the electric guitar to the center of blues performance in the 1940s, directly shaping the phrasing of B.B. King, Chuck Berry, and Jimi Hendrix among many others. His Bluesway-era recordings, made well into his career, show him adapting his jump-blues and West Coast swing roots to the more horn-and-rhythm-section-driven soul-blues sound that dominated the late 1960s blues market, while keeping his distinctive guitar voice intact.
The title's imagery, building a small, private shelter of one's own, taps into a durable blues and gospel-adjacent theme: carving out independence, privacy, or refuge, often in the aftermath of a relationship's collapse or as a declaration of self-sufficiency. It is a theme with relatives across the blues and R&B catalog, including Lightnin' Hopkins's differently titled but thematically adjacent "I'm Going to Build Me a Heaven of My Own," which works the same basic idea of constructing one's own emotional space rather than depending on someone else's.
"Going to Build Me a Playhouse" has circulated on later compilations drawing from Walker's Bluesway catalog, including blues radio playlists that still feature it as a deep-catalog Walker cut, a reminder of how extensive and still-underexplored his post-1950s recorded output remains compared to his more famous early Imperial and Black & White sides.
Find "Going to Build Me a Playhouse" on T-Bone Walker's official Bluesway-era reissues through Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Continue the thread from Further Up the Road or move on to Grown Men Cry, and browse more songs at our blues music guide.
