[1] The recordings were a commercial failure, and Shines, frustrated with the music industry, sold his equipment and returned to working in construction.

[1] Shines toured with the Chicago All Stars alongside Lee Jackson, Big Walter Horton and Willie Dixon.

Natalie Mattson, a student at the University of Alabama, learned that he was living in the area and invited him to play at a campus coffee house, the Down Under, which she ran.

Shines played there on several occasions and brought his friend, blues artist Mississippi Fred McDowell, to perform with him.

With his intense vibrato, his observant, imaginative, yet tradition-soaked lyrics, and his incomparable slide guitar, he ought to be recorded once a year by the Library of Congress."

His final album, Back to the Country, with accompaniment by Snooky Pryor and Johnny Nicholas, won a W. C. Handy Award.

When Shines came back to the blues in 1965 he was 50, yet his voice had the leonine power of a dozen years before, when he made records his reputation was based on.