Music Blogs

Ask any real connoisseur of soul and old-school R&B who the best African-American male singer of the last 50 years is, and chances are they'll nominate Bobby "Blue" Bland. With Simply Red's Mick Hucknall paying homage to "Blue" on his new Tribute to Bobby album, here's an introduction to the great man's work.

When Howlin' Wolf left Memphis for Chicago in late 1952, Sun Records' Sam Phillips was left with a crop of younger blues singers who in time would become leading lights of the rhythm and blues sound. B.B. King, Junior Parker, Little Milton and Bobby Bland were Memphis-based singers influenced as much by the smooth Texas/West Coast blues of T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, Charles Brown and Amos Milburn as by the gritty gutbucket blues of the Mississippi delta.

Both King and Bland, who remained close friends and musical partners long after their Memphis apprenticeship, grew up singing in the Baptist church and gravitated more towards the impassioned, sobbing style of a Roy Brown than to the hoarse barking of the Chicago blues men. As much as Ray Charles, whose melding of R&B and gospel still gets most of the credit for the blueprinting of "soul" music, King and Bland began to move away from the 12-bar blues form and to incorporate gospel styles and arrangements into their songs.

Bobby "Blue" Bland is the owner of a cavernous baritone that made the gospel-infused "blues ballad" all its own. Ray Charles may have been the greater innovator, James Brown the more dynamic symbol, and Sam Cooke the schoolgirl pin-up, but Bland--who couldn't have been given a less appropriate surname--was as much a prime mover of "soul" singing as any of them

If such early blues sides as "Lost Lover Blues" (1955) and "Woke Up Screaming" (1956) showcase Bland belting in a hard but quite stylized way, punctuated by sudden distraught falsetto shrieks, the mellower, more stoical timbre that came to the fore with the aid of Duke Records arranger Joe Scott was stylistically a blend not only of blues and gospel but of white crooning and country influences too.

Two impulses inhabit the voice of "Cry, Cry, Cry" (1960), "I Pity the Fool" (1961), and the whole of the classic Two Steps From The Blues album (1961) that featured both those hits. One is gentle and bittersweet-sad, its elegantly considered diction modeled on the likes of Perry Como; the other is angrily eruptive, its gargled squall borrowed from gospel greats Ira Tucker and C.L. Franklin, father of Aretha. On most of Bland's classic sides--from the definitive reading of T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday" (1962) all the way through to the 1969 version of "Since I Fell For You"--he eases through songs with the care and control of a jazz singer, getting by on the sheer beauty of his hugely resonant tone. At key moments, however, he bursts and lets loose the imploded squawk that's been his vocal signature for many years. As he once said of "Save Your Love For Me," "I sing it pretty and then go into the preacher stuff…"

Joe Scott gets much of the credit for nurturing the interplay between these two modes of singing--not least from Bland himself. "Without [Joe] I would not have been the singer I am," Bobby told me when I met him in London in 1989. "In fact, I would probably have gone home to Rosemark, Tennessee, and given up as a professional singer" (something that Modern Records, who'd cut him earlier, astonishingly suggested he do). In a chapter on Bland in his 1966 book Urban Blues, Charles Keil reported the rumor that Bland was entirely Scott's creation, and it's certainly significant that the latter had produced both R&B and gospel records from Duke boss Don Robey.

The two poles of Bland's style in his early '60s heyday would seem to be 1) uptempo sanctified numbers such as "Turn On Your Lovelight" and "Don't Cry No More," neither of them far from the fervent gospel-blues of Ray Charles (a less interesting singer), and 2) the hushed, austere concentration of "I'll Take Care of You" and "Lead Me On," where Bobby's Baptist reverence coalesces beautifully with his balladeering "classiness." "My favourites are 'I'll Take Care Of You' and 'Lead Me On'," he said in 1969, "because they've got more of a spiritual touch to them." They were still his favourite songs when I spoke to him 20 years later.

Between these poles lie the bulk of Bland's great recordings: "Stormy Monday," "I've Just Got To Forget You," "Two Steps From the Blues," and the versions of Charlie Rich"s "Who Will The Next Fool Be?" and Big Joe Turner"s "Chains Of Love". Whether he's singing such horn-blasted protosoul anthems as "Ain't Nothing You Can Do" and "That's The Way Love Is," or country-influenced ballads such as "Share Your Love With Me" and Billy Sherrill's "Too Far Gone"--the latter featured on his 1975 "country" album Get On Down with Bobby Bland--Bland takes songs over and fills them up with his vast power. As the novelist James Bey once wrote, Bobby's voice is "the lion that lies down with the lamb."

If it was Bland's great fortune to have enjoyed the stream of great songs published under the pseudonym "Deadric Malone"--Don Robey's vehicle for plundering the work of impoverished songsmiths--then he made the songs all but uncoverable, so definitive was the master's touch he stamped them with. As much as Sinatra or Aretha, he is a singer's singer.

By the late '60s, when Bland parted company with Joe Scott, his larynx had taken on the slightly frayed, gravelized quality that defines it to this day. The secret is that it has only the faintest crack in it; because its owner never misused or abused it, it never splits too coarsely. Listen to the sound as it fills out the whole skull on "Chains Of Love" (1969) or 1973's "This Time I'm Gone For Good": there is nothing else in blues or soul quite like the dignified, withering resignation of this voice. "He is a screamer without being a shouter," wrote the jazz critic Gary Giddins, "always in control and never crackling into a desperate B.B. King yell."

Bland's pipes were still in full working order when he played London's Hammersmith Odeon in 1989. Following on the heels of the cheerfully feisty Johnnie Taylor, his slightly glazed and tottering appearance belied a serene majesty. Within a few numbers--a medley of "That's The Way Love Is," "Ain't Nothing You Can Do," and his first blues hit "Further Up The Road"--the audience was rapt. If Bobby held himself back, chewing diffidently through consonants and flinching away from the mic, when he let the voice sail it sounded more richly resonant than ever. When he wound up the set with "I'll Take Care Of You" and "Stormy Monday," the band barely whispering behind him, it was clear the years had taken no toll at all.

Bland's post-Duke career--the label was sold to ABC in 1973 (and subsequently to MCA) and Bobby went as part of the package--has been a patchy affair in the main. Gary Giddins captured the pitfalls of the ABC period in his fine essay "Bobby 'Blue' Bland Meets the White Folks": as with B.B. King after the 1969 hit "The Thrill Is Gone," ABC attempted--not without success--to turn him into a product that would appeal to hip rock fans. The resulting His California Album, Dreamer and other albums were recorded in Los Angeles and for the most part consist of hokey ersatz soul like "Yolanda" and "Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City."

Predictably, Get On Down With Bobby Bland was slammed by countryphobic rock critics, despite being far closer to Bland's southern roots and producing one of his peak performances in "Too Far Gone," previously a hit for Tammy Wynette. This was Bland at his resplendent best, building from an airy baritone whisper to an aching howl, sailing by with effortless grace and barely dipping down to touch the consonants in each exquisite phrase.

A pair of live albums with B.B. King notwithstanding--they're fun but hardly inspirational--there's little of lasting value in the remainder of Bland's recorded oeuvre. In the mid-'80s, after some dismal albums on MCA, he found a retirement home of sorts in Malaco Records down in Jackson, Mississippi, after which he made a handful of pleasant if undemanding records. If 1985's "Members Only" was a great song, Malaco--run by two white southerners reared on Bland's Duke classics--never came up with anything to match it.

Bland keeps on trucking, however, seemingly determined to outlive his many disciples and imitators on that endless highway of one-horse towns and one-night stands--and forever taking two crucial steps from the blues.

Hear an audio interview with Bobby Bland, and read more articles and reviews about him, at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 12,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.