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Satan’s Horn is a remastered and repackaged issue of an album originally released on Bohemia Music Organization, a small Los Angeles label. It won the Living Blues Critics Poll for best debut release and this writer was quite enthusiastic about it. Bailey is a Watts native who has played blues and jazz with Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McGriff, among others. Satan’s Horn is certainly an auspicious debut album. For those unfamiliar, a good reference point is of a street-wise Robert Cray, given similar instrumentation and a jazzy attack, although Bailey plays with a harder approach and his songs are structured in a more traditional blues vein. For example, Bad Times, Sad Times, is suggestive of B.B. King’s recording of The Thrill is Gone.
Bailey’s lyrical themes are a bit more earthy and urban centered than Cray’s. Rather than rueful observations of breaking up his motel liaison’s marriage, Bailey’s Saturday Night Special is a boast of his loving prowess. Other songs deal with crack addicted moms (Satan’s Horn refers to a crack pipe), hopelessness (on Cold to the Bone, where he plays acoustic guitar and the band plays sparingly behind him), and other street-level realities. All are originals, with the exception of solid treatment of Tampa Red’s Love Her With a Feeling (here credited to Lowell Fulson).
Bailey is a strong singer who has an unforced delivery and a tasty guitarist, and with this stunning debut now under the BMG distributed Zoo label, it will be easy to find and Ray Bailey will no longer simply be a figure that only some critics and a few other lucky aficionados have heard of. (With respect to this last sentence, remember this review was from 1995.)
