Artist: Various
Album: Music City Blues & Rhythm
Genre: Rhythm & Blues
Released: 2018
Something for every shade of Blues fan, from the Juke Joint to the Lounge. Includes 22 tracks making their debut appearance.
When I took delivery of 1500 reels of tape from the Music City label of Berkeley, California a decade ago, it was with an acute sense of trepidation. For decades the subject of rumour, conjecture and outright fantasy, the contents of this jealously guarded, long-coveted vault promised to reveal untold riches. After the last reel was spooled many months later, it was clear that this was all remarkable documentary evidence of how the local black music scene had evolved over the course of a quarter-century. Not that Ray Dobard had ever intended his relatively long-lived enterprise to have any cultural connotation. He was strictly a speculator.
As Lee Hildebrand explains in the historical notes, Ray Dobard did not record or release much in the way of hard blues. And therefore, save for ‘On My Way’, Al Smith’s excellent 1954 single on the label, most blues collectors have not paid much attention to Music City. To Dobard, pure blues was a form that was already somewhat out of favour with the clientele he hoped to cultivate, the more urbane black community who preferred jazz and adult-orientated “cool” blues, along the line of Nat Cole or Charles Brown. He soon found a more remunerative genre in the vocal group idiom, something that appealed far more to the ever-increasing horde of teenage consumers that came into his record store at 1815 Alcatraz Avenue.
But there is a fair tranche of blues amongst the Music City masters, the best of which have been brought together for this collection, and which together reflect the many colours of the blues during the 1950s. There is a noticeable difference between the smoother sound of the earlier cuts by Al Harris and Alvin Smith, many of which were taped at the principal pro facility available in the Bay Area, Sound Recorders in San Francisco, and the rough-hewn, dissonant recordings Dobard undertook. True to his brash, self-confident persona, in 1954 the fledgling record impresario tired of paying for professional studio time and instead purchased a basic monaural Ampex machine, threw up some egg cartons on the wall of a room adjacent to his store, and started to engineer sessions himself.
In his engineering and A&R capacities, Dobard frequently suffered from a lack of quality control, and this sometimes stretched to his blues recordings. There remain in the vault some intriguing but ultimately un-releasable recordings by K.C. Douglas and others. But in general the Music City sessions are up to the standard for many small studios and West Coast indies of the time and, at this far-removed juncture, they sport the sort of documentary feel that gives the listener a real inkling of the “street”. This was how the blues must have sounded in the juke joints and nightclubs of the San Francisco Bay Area of the early 1950s. Whether it be the mellifluous croon of ‘Here Lies My Love’ or the stentorian exhortations of ‘I Don’t Stand No Quittin’’, the finger-popping groove of ‘Brand New Baby’ or the colourful chaos of ‘Wrong Doing Woman’, it was the soundtrack of the era for the local black population.
Alec Palao
Tracklist
01 Music City Jump (inst) - Alvin Smith
02 Brand New Baby - Alvin Smith
03 Go To Bed With A Worry - Chick Morris & His Band vocal: Golden Boy
04 Moving Out Baby - Chick Morris & His Band vocal: Al Harris
05 I Don't Stand No Quittin' (alt) - Gloria Jean Pitts
06 Blues Made Me Cry - Chick Morris & His Band vocal: Al Harris
07 Tin Pan Alley - Sidney Grande
08 Lazy Bones (inst) - Roland Mitchell
09 She Moves Me - Jimmy (Mr. "T-99") Nelson
10 Wrong Doing Woman (alt) - Jasper Evans
11 Walking Blues - Johnny George
12 You Gotta Be Mighty Careful - The Richmond Boys
13 On My Way - Alvin Smith
14 No More Any More - Jimmy (Mr. "T-99") Nelson
15 Baby Call - Jimmy Raney (unconfirmed)
16 Here Lies My Love (tk 1) - Roy Hawkins as Mr Undertaker
17 Long About Midnight - Little Willie Littlefield
18 Doctor's Blues - Unknown male vocalist
19 Your Money Ain't Long Enough - Que Martyn's Orchestra vocal: Del Graham
20 Traveling Time - Al Smith
21 To Be Alone - Pee Wee Parham
22 Low Down Dirty Ways - Alvin Smith
23 Don't Know Where I'm At - Al Harris
24 Looking Just Like You - Little Willie Littlefield
25 Ease My Mind - Pee Wee Parham
26 You're The One - Gene Lee & The Blues Rockers
27 Roland's Blues (inst) - Roland Mitchell
28 Who Did It - Unknown male vocalist
No comments:
Post a Comment