Bobby Parker Shine Me Up

Bobby Parker
Shine Me Up
Blacktop

Bobby Parker’s second Black Top album certainly shows that the acclaimed Bent Out of Shape was no fluke. | should caveat that Bobby is one of my favorite artists, and one of the benefits of living around D.C. has been the opportunities to see him relatively frequently and get to know him. 

A Washington area native, Bobby Radcliff once mentioned to me that years ago Parker was as good as his better known Chicago contemporaries. Listening to Shine Me Up, one would suggests that in some ways Bobby betters them. Ten of the eleven songs are Parker originals, and neither Buddy Guy nor Otis Rush have contributed any comparable body of new songs in recent years. And, they are good songs mixing hooks with catchy riffs and tasteful horn riffs covering a wide soul-blues palette. 

For example, It’s Unfair, a terrific slow blues, opens up with a James Brown horn part before Bobby sings about women treating men like toys as the band captures some of the flavor of the classic Stax recordings of the seventies. Bobby adds a pleading vocal and his buzz-saw guitar with the skill of a surgeon finely opening up his patient. The title track finds Bobby asking his woman to “Shine me up baby. Make me feel good for you and me. | feel dull and I’ve had a bad day darlin’, and | really need sympathy... .’ Splib’s Groove finds Bobby working over a go-go groove, and Somebody’s Coming In My Back Door is a classic blues theme freshly reworked by Parker. 

The one cover is a lesser known Little Willie John recording, Drive Me Home. The choice of the song may have been fortuitous, but Parker’s keen, high-pitched vocals owe a bit to the past rhythm and blues giant, although Bobby brings plenty of his own personality to the songs. It has taken Bobby Parker years to get to where he is now, which is one of the blues’ most sizzling vocalist-guitarists. He also happens to be one of the best songwriters in the idiom.

This review appeared in a 1995 issue of Jazz & Blues Report (Issue 205), and likely also appeared in the DC Blues Calendar, the DC Blues Society's newsletter. I probably received a review copy from Black Top Records. This may be available used or as a download. Here is Bobby Parker performing "Watch Your Step" a few months before he passed away in 2013.