Bobby Rush Rawer Than Raw

Bobby Rush
Rawer Than Raw
Deep Rush Records/ Thirty Tigers

It has been quite a few years since Bobby Rush's prior acoustic blues album, "Raw," was issued. "Rawer Than Raw" is another album of unplugged blues from the blues legend. On this release, just Bobby Rush with his voice, guitar, harmonica, and foot stomp, performing songs in tribute to Mississippi's blues heritage. Several of these songs come some of the greatest artists from that state, including Skip James, Skip James, Robert Johnson (Elmore James), Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson with several originals.

Classic blues recordings have always influenced Rush's music. He often reworked them when performing and recording. This influence is present with some of the originals here. One example is "Down in Mississippi," a reworking of J.B. Lenoir's "Mojo Boogie." Here and elsewhere Rush shows himself to be a more than adequate guitarist and harmonica player. Also, the robustness of his vocal belies his age.

There is also a capable, if not outstanding, rendition of Skip James "Hard Times." Howlin' Wolf appears to have left a deep impression on Rush, not merely in versions of "Smokestack Lightning" and "Shake It For Me." Wolf's influence also is heard in Rush's "Let Me in Your House." It is a one-chord blues with a repeated guitar riff with Rush's foot-stomping, adding to a mesmeric feel. Rush also performs an enjoyable jaunty reworking of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Don't Start Me Talking'," with his harmonica overdubbed over his vocal. There is a reflective original "Sometimes I Wonder," along with a spirited "Dust My Broom."

There is a consistent, entertaining quality in these performances. Bobby Rush shows himself a capable instrumentalist and invests considerable passion in his vocals on an entertaining album.

I received my review copy from a publicist. Here is a promo for this recording.

Stanley Booth Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, …

Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers
Stanley Booth
2019: Chicago Review Press
400 6X9 pages.

Author of the excellent collection of blues- and jazz-related pieces, "Rythm Oil," Stanley Booth, has another compilation of mostly blues- and jazz-related pieces in this new book (In addition to chapters on such folk as Bobby Rush and Phineas Newborn Jr, there is a piece on photographer Williams Eggleston). To say Booth is opinionated is an understatement, but to give a minor sense of the flavor of his writing there is this quote from the opening article, "Blues Dues" about reading a galley about a book on blues whose publisher sought his endorsement:

"So, finally, I picked up one of the proofs to look it over. I hadn’t read far before I came upon these words: “The weekend I was in Memphis …” Unlike many before him, who’d simply bought a lot of blues records, listened to them, and written a book, this writer had made the extra effort of going to the blues museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, passing through Memphis on his way there, thus becoming an authority. I, who lived in Memphis twenty-five years, going in the course of my research to the city and county jails as a guest more times than I cared to remember, found it hard to restrain myself from hurling the galley all the way back to New York. …

There’s the blues, an emotional state, and there’s the blues, an art form, or a group of art forms. Believe me, when you’re in the Memphis jail, city or county, you got the blues. When you’re in your cozy room, listening to Robert Johnson’s plaintive tunes, you’re hearing the blues. Two different worlds. But some people, people from Berkeley, or Boston, or wherever, are so highly imaginative that they make a leap of funk and become Spokesmen of the Blues. No, really, they make a living this way. People in Dublin, London, Kyoto, Amsterdam, and Lower Slobbovia read them and feel somehow enhanced, enlightened, end manned by the blues.

I never intended to have anything to do with the blues. They came into my life through my bedroom window when I was a child. It wasn’t a matter of choice. What I learned, I paid for in experience at the school where they arrest you first and tell you why later."

There are brief portraits like the one on King Oliver (that ends "Oliver died two months later, on April 10, 1938. His sister used her rent money to bring his body north and gave up her plot in Woodlawn for him. But there is still no headstone on the grave of one of the true founding fathers of jazz.") and a lengthier one on Ma Rainey which includes a brief history of minstrel shows and development of music to the blues before chronicling her life and career and another one on Blind Willie McTell with its detailed chronicling of McTell's Library of Congress recordings and the account that McTell was allegedly paid ten dollars for the session.

There are two chapters on Furry Lewis that are based in part on the close relationship between the two and tell Furry's story and gives a glimpse about how good Booth's writing is. "Furry put the candle down and leaned back in his chair. 'When I was eighteen, nineteen years old, he said, 'I was good. And when I was twenty, I had my own band, and we could all play. Had a boy named Ham, played jug. Willie Polk played the fiddle and another boy, call him Shoefus, played the guitar, like I did. All of us North Memphis boys. We’d meet at my house and walk down Brinkley to Poplar and go up Poplar to Dunlap or maybe all the way down to Main. People would stop us on the street and say, ‘Do you know so-and-so?’ And we’d play it and they’d give us a little something. Sometimes we’d pick up fifteen or twenty dollars before we got to Beale. Wouldn’t take no streetcar. Long as you walked, you’s making money; but if you took the streetcar, you didn’t make nothing and you’d be out the nickel for the ride.'"

Then Booth describes Furry's life today. "Furry has been working for the City of Memphis Sanitation Department since 1923. Shortly after two o’clock each weekday morning, he gets out of bed, straps on his artificial leg, dresses, and makes a fresh pot of coffee, which he drinks while reading the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The newspaper arrives in the afternoon, but Furry does not open it until morning. Versie is still asleep and the paper is company for him as he sits in the kitchen under the harsh light of the ceiling bulb, drinking the hot, sweet coffee. He does not eat breakfast; when the coffee is gone, he leaves for work."

There are chapters on Elvis, one on Elvis in 1967 and one on the aftermath of his death and what happened to Elvis' Doctor who became a scapegoat for some after Elvis passed away who believed (contrary to the autopsy which said Elvis did not die of drugs) the Doctor was responsible and pictured as a pusher. A chapter on The Memphis Soul Sound takes us to The Bar-Kays funeral; Otis and Steve Cropper working on and recording "Sitting At the Dock of the Bay"; Issac Hayes and David Porter working up a song; a visit to American Studio and Donald Crews and Dan Penn; and WDIA's annual Goodwill Revue including Carla Thomas story. Booth notes that the next night after the Goodwill Revue Otis Redding and most of The Bar-Kays would be dead.
In his history of Beale Street, the chapter "Beale Street's Gone Dry," he writes, "In 1959, having graduated from Sidney Lanier High School for (white) Boys in Macon, Georgia, I moved with my family to Memphis. I knew little about the place other than that it was on the Mississippi River and had an association with the kind of music I liked. I soon learned that Memphis was, if anything, even more “Southern” and puritanical than Macon, with no liquor served by the drink and almost no integration. Restaurants, taxis, hotels, parks, libraries, movies, all were segregated. Blacks still sat in the back of the buses. Whites who wanted to hear black music went to an all-white club called the Plantation Inn across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas, and listened to a singing group called the Del Rios or to Loman Pauling and the Five Royales. My first experience on Beale Street was being thrown out of a Ray Charles concert at the Hippodrome for sharing a table with some black classmates from newly integrated Memphis State University. There were tables for blacks and tables for whites, but no mixing allowed. 'What you mean, pattin’ these nigger girls on the ass?' a cop asked me. 'I haven’t patted anybody on the ass yet, sweetheart,' I said, finding myself seconds later face-to-face with the gravel in the alley. Living in Memphis, off and on, for twenty-five years, learning the blues, I would come to know those alleys, that downtown gravel, well."

Then there is a piece he wrote about Phineas Newborn, Jr., that ended up being an obituary in the Village Voice, where he traced the Newborn family history, including the father, drummer Phineas Sr. and brother, guitarist Calvin, as well as Phineas Jr.'s life and brilliant career, not ignoring the psychological issues this piano genius experienced. "Phineas Newborn, I would learn, was to some people a living symbol of African American genius, the ultimate product of a tradition whose roots are mysterious and deep. His family life and American music were one and the same, with a cast including Elvis Presley, B. B. King, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus. His style resembled that of Secretariat, or the young Muhammad Ali. He could think of things to do that no one else had ever done, and then he would do them. He had, another Memphis pianist once observed, “a boogie-woogie left hand, a bebop right hand, and this ... third hand.” But it was not simply unsurpassed technique that made his work so affecting: his music derived power from its own emotional range—the outer-space comedy of 'Salt Peanuts,' the nostalgic humor of 'Memphis Blues,' the rhapsodic sadness of 'The Midnight Sun Will Never Set,' the majesty of 'The Lord’s Prayer.'"

The article on Bobby Rush brought much about Bobby that went way beyond his musical persona, but assesses his stature as a major blues artist. "In the following account, I try to avoid invidious comparisons between Bobby Rush—it’s a stage name, and he likes it used in full—and great historical figures like B. B. King and John Lee Hooker, who have not made an exciting recording in years. Bobby Rush, in his mid-sixties, continues to make first-rate R&B records and to have the best stage show since Ike and Tina broke up. If my friend Mick Jagger were hip enough and wanted to revive his career—instead of endlessly dragging his scrawny ass around the planet regurgitating his greatest hits—he would cut Bobby Rush’s 'Jezebel.' But he’s not hip enough, nowhere near as hip as this senior citizen from Houma, Louisiana, southwest of New Orleans, within spitting distance of the Gulf of Mexico. Not Houma proper but a farm near there. Bobby Rush is the real thing, as country as a tree full of owls or a passel of possums. But he’s also at least as up to date as Kansas City."

There is a brief appreciation of Marvin Sease and extended one of his friend, the celebrated photographer William Joseph Eggleston. The closing chapter, which gives this volume its title is on legendary Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips and takes us from his heyday, through his fall and his funeral with Elvis and Priscilla there. This chapter, like practically everything in this superb collection of Stanley Booth's writing, authoritative, evocative, informative, and compelling reading.

I received a download to review from a publicist. Here is a video of Phineas Newborn.

Corey Harris Takes The Blues From Mississippi to Mali

Corey Harris certainly has distinguished himself over the years with his blues and world music recordings. Back in February, I looked back at one of his early recordings. Today I look back at one of his recordings that was contemporaneous with his participation in the Martin Scorsese series of films on The Blues that appeared on public television. The review originally appeared in the April 2004 DC Blues Calendar, and I likely received my review copy from the record label.

The PBS television series on the Blues that was presented by Martin Scorsese was generally a disappointment with the inconsistency of the series. Only two of the seven episodes were excellent. it is unfortunate that the producers of Blues Story did not receive the funding that Scorsese received. That hour sketch of the blues as told by the performers themselves illustrated the potential of a week long series that The PBS series teased us with but failed to deliver the goods.

Despite the prominence it gave the idiom, the only performers associated with the series that may have received a boost from the series were those featured on it and any boost in record sales was generally limited to the tie-in cds and dvds connected with the series. So ‘blues albums’ by Eric Clapton, The Allman Brothers and Jimi Hendrix were top sellers while the major blues artists of the past decade such as Joe Louis Walker and Lucky Peterson (both who had exceptional discs last year) probably could have had all their recordings available in Tanzania for the boost in gave their music.

One of the few artists who may have received a boost for his career is Corey Harris who appeared in the opening episode that Scorsese produced. That episode showed Corey traveling Mississippi and performing with Bobby Rush and Otha Turner and then to Africa where he performed with Ali Farka Toure and other Africans, illustrating the links between the music of West African and the blues in the US. Rounder issued late in 2004 Harris’ new disc Mississippi to Mali, which similarly explores the musical links. Harris performs with drummer Sam Carr and soul-blues legend Bobby Rush, the granddaughter of the late Otha Turner, Shardé & the Rising Star Fife and Drum band, Ali Farka Toure, another West African guitarist Ali Magassa and percussionist Souleyman Kane on a program of blues and African music that is fascinating and compelling.

After a fine instrumental, Coahoma, that evokes the slide playing of Furry Lewis, Harris delivers a fine rendition of the classic Tommy Johnson song Big Road Blues, backed by Rush and Carr before a rendition of Skip James’ recording, Special Rider Blues, where the guitar of Ali Farka Toure and the percussion of Souleyman Kane lend an insistent, almost hypnotic quality to the performance. This is followed by one of Toure’s originals, Tamalah, with its insistent accompaniment suggests the kinship of the Delta blues music and one of the musical traditions of Africa. The linkage is also suggested by the following Station Blues, a reworking of the blues waltz, Sitting on Top of the World, where Harris is joined by Shardé Turner and her fife and drum band.

Harris performs other downhome blues like Cypress Groove, 44 Blues, and Catfish Blues along with other performances with the Mali musicians up front. Mr. Turner, \a juke joint performance with Rush and Carr is a tribute to Otha Turner who died a week before he was supposed to record with Corey, while Charlene, a Harris original, displays how well he has integrated the influences of the Mali musicians in his guitar playing, vocal and the percussion of Darrell Rose. When this musical journey ends with Harris’ riveting rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, one recognizes one has been through an enlightening, but even more important, entertaining voyage of musical performances.

Corey writes in the liner notes, “As they say, ‘the roots of a tree cast no shadow.’ Our different histories, ages, cultures are all part of the same tree. Listen closely and you will hear the root. Give thanks.”

The Blues Boy's Welcome Home

During a discussion in on post-war blues list at yahoo.com, one of the editor's of the Penguin Guide to the Blues conceded that it should have included Artie 'Blues Boy' White. White was one of the 'soul-blues' acts omitted from this deeply flawed publication. Within the world of soul-blues, the Blues Boy was aptly termed with more of a straight blues feel. I remember seeing him at the Pocono Blues Festival, and that was a real pleasure. He was a terrific singer, person and pool player. The following review appeared in the Jazz & Blues Report in 1997.

Artie 'Blues Boy' White Artie White serves up another serving of first rate soul-blues on the his new Waldoxy release, Home Tonight. Material or production wise, this is a typical Malaco/Waldoxy set, with a tight band of guitarists, Big Mike Griffin and Andrew Thomas, bassist David Hood, keyboard whiz Clayton Ivey and drummer and co-producer Paul H. Lee. Add the Muscle Shoals Horns on the uptempo soulful opening number, when Artie tells his woman not to worry because Your Man Is Home Tonight. It’s followed by two straight-forward slow blues, Somebody’s Fool, and a terrific new Travis Haddix authored song, Man of the House, where Artie tells his woman he’s in a bad mood this morning and he just doesn’t give a damn, with Big Mike taking a nice stinging solo. The mood is reversed in Percy Strother’s soulful If You Don’t Love Me, sung from the point of view of the woman whose man is too often out of the house, warning that there is someone to take her man’s place. The blues dominates this album with Johnson and Mosley contributing Black Cat Scratchin’ as well as The More You Lie to Me, a tasty number set to a Jimmy Reed groove on which Bobby Rush adds nice harp (he also adds harp to the closing country-flavored soul ballad, One Step From the Blues). Waldoxy has hit the mark on this set. White is in terrific form and he’s given strong lyrics to work with on this release.

Ruf's Corrects Its Promotion of Luther Allison's Underground

Post: Updated November 7. Ruf has updated its website discussing Underground, supplementing its original release notes and suggesting a recording date of 1967-1968. When I drafted the original blog entry, the release notes were what is labeled the original release notes after Rien Wisse's updated release notes. The fact that Ruf acknowledged and corrected the error it is quite commendable. below is my original post as of November 2

Ruf Records has issued a CD of Luther Allison, Underground. In the release notes on the website it is stated:

"The discovery and release of Luther Allison's 1958 debut recording represents a blues find that surfaces with all the excitement of some long forgotten historical document. After sitting for 50 years in the home of Luther's wife, Fannie Allison, Luther's son Bernard unearthed these monumental recordings to show the music world the portrait of this artist as a young man."

Later, Art Tipaldi closes these notes,"One researcher note. The first tune here is titled "Hide Away." Research shows that Freddie King took portions of "Hide Away" from Hound Dog Taylor instrumental and that King didn't record that song until 1960. Could this then be the first recorded version of "Hideaway"? Gentlemen, start your search engines."

A sticker on the CD that I saw in a store states that these are 1958 recordings and never previously issued. This not true. First of all these recordings were previously issued and sold. I know because I bought a vinyl lp from Luther in 1971 called Underground with the 8 tracks that have been reissued. It was sold by Luther as if it was bootleg (I suspect he was still under contract to Delmark). The simple album label stated it was produced by Bobby Rush. Unissued. I suggest not.

The suggested 1958 recording date (the date taken from a Bobby Rush recollection) does not stand up to simple scrutiny. Nice fantasy to suggest that it might be the first recording of Hideaway, but one of the songs on this disc, the cover of the Ricky Allen classic, Cut You Loose, was not recorded until around 1963 (Allen did not even arrive in Chicago until 1960) so that if you want to suggest this is the earliest recording of Hideaway, then you also have to make the incredible claim that Luther made the first recording of Cut You Loose as well.

I suggest this was recorded between 1968 and 1970, after Luther's Delmark album was issued. It might have been intended primarily as a demo to be shopped to a bigger label which Luther also sold at gigs. Three of the eight songs on this were redone on Luther's 1972 Motown debut, Bad News is Coming, and Freddy King's The Stumble is on the Motown instead of Hideaway. I point out that no one should not be surprised that Allison performed and recorded King's instrumentals as he took over King's Chicago bar gig when the Texas Cannonball started touring because of the success of his classic Federal Recordings.

On the Post-War Blues List on Yahoo, Klaus Kilian first observed that "Cut You Loose" was recorded after 1958. He stated "Apparently Bobby Rush remembered the date wrong and [Ruf] took his word. However, anybody listening to the music who knows anything about the development of postwar blues should be able to realise that these tracks couldn't be from 1958. I mean, "Don't Start Me Talkin'" with a funk beat? "Cut You Loose" recorded years before Ricky Allen's 45? And with the exact same arrangement Luther did for Motown a little later?"

It will be interesting to see how many reviewers parrot the release notes. I would not be surprised to see a number reviewers out there get this wrong.

Added on November 7:

A Celebration of Pinetop Perkins

Pianist Joe Willie ‘Pinetop’ Perkins keeps going, seemingly as musically vigorous in his nineties as much younger blues acts. Born in the Honey, The Pinetop Perkins Story is an hour-long bio-documentary produced by Peter Carlson who put together Don’t Start Me Talking: The Junior Wells Story. A narrative provides the details on Pinetop’s life including the circumstances of his youth and later emergence as a star on the blues circuit. Blended in are some stock still pictures of southern plantation, town and juke scenes, some acting to recreate Pinetop’s youth, along with interviews of Pinetop along with his admirers and some performance clips from a variety of shows including King Biscuit Festival, the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise and some footage of him with The Nighthawks. Admirers include his colleagues with Muddy’s band such as Paul Oscher, who recalled when Pinetop replaced Otis Spann in Muddy’s band and, guitarist Bob Margolin and drummer Willie Smith. Others talking about Pinetop include Lonnie Brooks, Bobby Rush who tells a hilarious story about Pinetop who had some wisdom for men out on the town, Ike Turner recalling Pinetop’s influence and stature as a pianist, and Kim Wilson. Its an affectionate and loving performance that is as ingratiating as its subject. The DVD does not have any extras and does not seem divided into chapters, for those who that matters. It also comes with a CD of live performances, mostly Chicago performances with one studio track from a Bob Corritore that covers the same ground as his available recordings with versions of Chicken Shack, Mojo, How Long Blues, Ida B and the rollicking Down in Mississippi. Pinetop affably handles the material backed by Little Frank Krokowski on guitar, Bob Stroger on bass and Willie Smith on drums. The packaging erroneously credits Pinetop for Memphis Slim’s Grinder Man Blues, and Magic Sam for Rosco Gordon’s Just a Little Bit, titled here Little Bit of Your Love. Certainly a documentary that fans of the blues, especially Pinetop’s fans, will certainly enjoy.

Bobby Rush, Chick Willis, and more coming to DC area May 26

PICT1496 Bobby & dancer
Originally uploaded by NoVARon.

Big Pre-Memorial Weekend Blues Festival takes place at Lamont's at 440 Livinston Road, PoMonkey (or Indian Head in Charles County) Maryland, Saturday May 26. Music starts with Jim Bennett & Lady Mary followed by Big G coming all the way from Richmond. Then DC's legendary Bobby Parker is up with The Blues Night Band, followed by Chick Willis who will play with your poodle and also do "Stoop Down Baby, but insofar as he is playing with Jacques Johnson, one should expect some Albert King tributes and the saxman maybe will do his "Root Doctor." Finally Bobby Rush, appearing at Lamont's for the 1st time who certainly get the crowd really going. Hey the show is on the picnic grounds (unless weather forces it inside) and will end around sunset with an afterparty going on afterwards. So you can spend a day at one of the best lineups in this area and still go out and catch some more blues wherever you want to.
The phone number for Lamont's is (301) 283-0225