The Legends of Specialty Part 3

Among recent reissues in Fantasy's The Legends of Specialty series are the second volumes devoted to Roy Milton, Joe Liggins, Jimmy Liggins and Percy Mayfield along with a volume of Art Neville's Specialty recordings. Another reissue, Shouting the Blues, includes Joe Turner's recordings for the Texas Freedom label Big Maceo's Specialty sides, and recordings by Smilin' Smokey Lynn and H-Bomb Ferguson. Musically, most of these recordings date from the heyday of jump blues, the late forties through the mid-fifties. All six releases contain Billy Vera's perceptive annotations and discographical information. 

By virtue of his success with his brothers today, Art Neville is perhaps the best known of any of these artists. His Specialty Recordings: 1956-58 collect the recordings he made after recording Mardi Gras Mambo with the Hawketts for Chess. These early sides include some demos along with such sides as Oooh Wee-Baby, Cha Dooky Doo, with its famous distorted guitar and a duet with Larry Williams on Rocking Pneumonia and Boogie Woogie Flu. These sides did not enjoy great commercial success when initially issued, and while there is unquestionable historical interest to some of these sides, and fans of New Orleans R&B will be interested, this is one of the weaker Specialty reissues. 

Shouting The Blues is dominated by some great jump blues by Joe Turner and Smilin' Joe Lynn. Turner's eight songs were initially issued on the Houston Freedom label and three (including the rocking Adam Bit the Apple) include Goree Carter's T-Bone Walker inspired guitar and a great jump band. Big Maceo had suffered a stroke and was unable to play at the time he recorded his enjoyable, but not essential 1949 Specialty recordings. On these, his protege Johnnie Jones took the piano chair. Smilin' Smokey Lynn was a Los Angeles based shouter heard with trumpeter Don Johnson's band. He is an enjoyable singer, if not in the same league as Turner. Many of his performances are rehashed versions of R&B hits. State Street Boogie reworks James 'Widemouth' Brown's Boogie Woogie Nighthawk, the torrid Run Mister Rabbit, Run, derives from Hot Lips Page, and Feel Like Ballin' Tonight, derives from Roy Brown's Good Rockin' Tonight. The imaginative Chesterfield Baby, celebrates Lynn's women who satisfies his soul. Closing with two previously unissued tracks by H-Bomb Ferguson, this is an interesting but not essential collection. 

This review appeared in Jazz & Blues Report in 1993. I am splitting it up and will include this top paragraph with all three parts. I received my review copies from Fantasy Records. I am not sure about the availability of these albums, although one might check ebay. Here is Art Neville's Specialty Recording of Cha Dooky Doo.

Remembering James and Chuck

I was reading Holger Petersen's wonderful collection of interviews of blues and roots musicians, Talking Music 2," and Steve Miller remembered recording backing Chuck at the Fillmore in San Francisco, a recording that I once owned when it came out. Then later on Facebook I saw the posts about Chuck having passed away on Saturday March 18. This was sad news, especially after coming so shortly after blues harmonica legend James Cotton passing away as well.

I had the pleasure of seeing James Cotton a number of times over the decades, first seeing him in Cleveland in 1967around the time of The James Cotton Blues Band album on Verve Forecast. It was probably the first live blues performance I saw. Over the years I saw him at clubs (The Belle Star outside of Buffalo and the Maryland venues Twist & Shout and Tornado Alley) and festivals such as the Western Maryland Blues Festival and several times at the Pocono Blues Festival. Even after Cotton had surgery that limited his singing, he always had terrific bands and front men as singers. He was also such a warm person as well. Mr. SuperHarp will be missed.

I only had the pleasure to see Chuck Berry once at a music festival held only once at the Kennedy Center where he was backed by local DC area musicians led by Daryl Davis, who was his East Coast pianist of choice.  Others will have written about Berry's legacy but songs like "Johnny B. Goode," "The Promised Land," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Back in the U.S.A." and "Roll Over Beethoven" will forever be part of the soundtrack of our lives.

Here is a playlist of a few songs by each starting with Chuck Berry with "Johnny B. Goode."

Now a bit from James Cotton doing the Creeper which he first recorded on the album Pure Cotton, an album that in my humble opinion belongs in the Blues Hall of Fame, if it isn't already.

One of my favorite Chuck Berry recordings is "The Promised Land," which also was known from Elvis' cover as well as the cajun cover from Johnnie Allen. Here is Chuck doing it live.

James Cotton was an important member of Muddy Waters Band for many years and hear he is backing Muddy at the Newport Jazz Festival on "Got My Mojo Working."

Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" was one of numerous numbers that influenced the folks over in Great Britain.

James Cotton seen on Playboy after Dark in 1968/69 with Luther Tucker and apparently Rod Piazza is in this cip

Finally I close with Chuck Berry's "Sweet Sixteen" that the Beach Boys would be influenced by. The performance is from 2014 when Cotton received the Polar Music Prize, the Nobel Prize of the Music World.

Willie Egan's Old Fashioned Rock and Roll

Willie Egan was one of the less known rhythm’n’blues/rock & roll pioneers whose recordings were reissued on European vinyl LPs in the 1970s and 1980s. The UNI distributed Empire Musicwerks label hopes to lift him from his ‘obscurity’ with the release of Wow Wow: The Complete Vita/Mambo Sessions.


Egan, who died in 2004, was a Louisiana native whose family moved to the L.A. area when he was 9 years old. The liner notes suggest that he was a rocker in the vein of New Orleans legends Fats Domino and Smiley Lewis. Egan himself referred to Amos Milburn, Hadda Brooks, Camille Howard and Nellie Lutcher as his main influences while he had a vocal style akin to Little Willie Littlefield. J.R. Fulbright recorded him in 1949 (at the age of 16) for the Elko label, but it wasn’t until he was living in Watts and playing in clubs as the House Rocker that he was noticed by the A&R man for the Pasadena based Mambo/Vita label.


Paired with guitarist Lloyd Rowe, he produced 12 sides which, with four alternate takes, produces the 16 tracks on this somewhat short (about 32 minutes) CD. There is the loping instrumental Potato Stomp, where both get to display there skills, or the title track with echoes of the New Orleans sound perhaps filtered through the West Coast Jump Blues, itself a source of inspiration for Egan. Then the hard rocking blues, I Don’t Know Where She Went, as well as Willie’s Blues and Wear Your Black Dress.


Nothing fancy about the music here as it is a healthy dose of that old-fashioned rock and roll.

This review appeared originally in the November 2005 DC Blues Calendar and then the June 2006 Jazz & Blues Report (Issue 283). It is still available on CD as well as downloads. I likely received a review copy from Jazz & Blues Report.

"People Think That When White People Scream That’s It's Soul"

I am in the middle of reading John Einarson’s Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love (Jawbone Press), which details the rise and fall of the pioneering Los Angeles band and its charismatic leader. In the book, Lee recalls his first appearance at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. The opening act was Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding company and Lee was not overwhelmed by her singing.


“We headlined at the Fillmore and I remember I had to stand and listen to Janis Joplin scream. She was the great white hope for the blues, but all she did was scream. You see, people think that when white people scream that’s it’s soul. But that isn’t soul, it’s just screaming. I remember being in Washington, D.C. once, and the security guard asked me, when i walked on stage, “Hey Arthur, you gonna go up there and do some more screamin’?” Man, that really hit my heart and I haven’t written a screaming song since.”


I have about 2/3rd of this to still read, and up next after it is Phillip Radcliffe’s recently published biography of Mississippi john Hurt. (Both are purchases).


Oh here is another quote from pianist Brad Mehldau (from the Ottawa Citizen’s website) discussing non jazz acts at Jazz Festivals such as they hold in Ottawa. He recognizes the economic reality but he also mentions one aspect of what might be called other genres trading on jazz.

Brad Mehldau's most recent solo recording.

“The ill will starts when people trade on the term “jazz.” When I started doing the festival circuit, around 1990, I noticed that each year there would be a different genre to appear -- you’d have acid jazz, Klezmer music, DJs, etc. Not to belittle or question the validity that surrounds these kinds of music, but merely to show what I mean by trading on jazz, I’ve observed a common byline in the media that surrounds these different genres. It’s like “This is the new music that’s going to release us from a narrow definition of jazz.” The implication is that jazz isn’t hip enough in its own right, that it needs fresh blood, and aren’t we the listeners lucky that we’re going to get pulled out of the cobwebs? But this sentiment is full of bad faith. Why is this music appearing on a jazz festival then, when the whole subtext is that it’s too hip for jazz? In fact you could argue that often it’s the opposite case -- often musicians trade on the allure of jazz as a term to get over, simultaneously thumbing their nose at jazz. That’s a drag.


The full quote can be found at http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/jazzblog/archive/2011/06/22/brad-mehldau-on-non-jazz-at-jazz-festivals.aspx


I can find parallels with what he says with a lot of the so-called new blues, that I might suggest is similarly trading on blues as a genre. Artists playing music that twenty years ago would have been labelled rock without controversy is supposedly going to expand the blues audience, but bring an audience that will pretty much ignore “traditional blues.” 


I have a lot of respect for Ray Manzarek’s work with the Doors and Roy Rogers work with the late John lee Hooker and his own blues-rock music, but I don’t see a lot of festivals going out of their way to feature blues legends like Jimmy Johnson and Jody Williams, as they seem to be to feature this pair. A woman is featured on the cover of Blues Revue and yet I would be hard pressed to name one blues song on her most recent CD (which isn’t saying the music isn’t good, just that it ain’t blues). 

If promoting music like this (music that one might suggest is 'trading on the blues") is keeping the blues alive, perhaps the blues would be better off taken off life support. Let the music rest on its own qualities but just don't try to call it what it isn't.

Bo Diddley's Music Lives On

With the death of this legend, you can get a brief fix on you tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2XkjBVnpos&feature=related

For a nice appreciation of Bo that also discusses his ties to soul legends Billy Stewart and Marvin Gaye, check out

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/02/AR2008060201123.html

You will be missed Bo Diddley. You kept rocking until you could not physically do so.