Bobby Blue Bland performs on stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana on April 30, 1989.
By Neda UlabyUpdated: Mon., June 24, 2013 6:15pm (EDT)
Bobby "Blue" Bland was known as the Frank Sinatra of the blues. He smoothed out Southern soul with the elegance of jazz and big-band music, sparked it with elements of country and pop, and influenced musicians like Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles. The singer and guitarist is credited with modernizing the sound of the blues, but he never got mainstream attention from blues-loving British rock stars who'd invite B.B. King or Muddy Waters onstage. Still, his achievements were astonishing, as was his rise from rural Tennessee, where he was born Robert Calvin Brooks, dropped out of the third grade and moved on to Memphis' Beale Street, a veritable backbone of the blues.
Bland died Sunday at his home in Memphis, after a long illness, surrounded by his relatives. He was 83 years old. You can hear Neda Ulaby's remembrance as it aired on All Things Considered at the audio link, and read Ann Powers' appreciation of him below.
The year I taught myself the rudiments of the blues, Bobby "Blue" Bland's album covers became one of my primary texts. It was the mid-1980s, and I was working at a record store in San Francisco. The vast vinyl library at my fingertips facilitated my attempts to understand how rock music, then the center of my fangirl life, had become a vessel big enough to convey every feeling I considered important erotic desire, personal ambition, spiritual joy, frustration with the material world. And I'd figured out that the blues propelled the ship.
I spent many late nights poring over the stash of albums I'd acquired with my employee discount, from the early rural stuff that evoked dusty Southern roads I'd never seen, to the guitar-heavy meltdowns I recognized as the source of much classic rock. I'd always end up back with Bland, however, listening to his heavy emotional croon while contemplating the persona that made him such a powerful spokesmen for the blues as a music of African-American modernity of migration, aspiration and the kind of transcendence that comes from finding beauty in the small triumphs of a difficult life.
The covers told the tale through the image of a man who was both earthy and sophisticated. There was Call on Me, from '63, showing the pompadoured Bland relaxing in front of four telephones, a gold watch marking time on his wrist and a cigarette dripping ash between his fingers, as four pretty women with receivers to their ears one in each corner of the album sleeve sat awaiting his response. There were the '80s Malaco sides, with Bland in a tux, welcoming listeners into the kind of whiskey-and-cards club you find just off the beaten track in any Southern city. There was Spotlighting the Man, which showed Bland onstage in full gospel sweat, his head bowed as he squalled and murmured messages of love and survival.
Read more: http://www.gpb.org/news/2013/06/24/remembering-the-multidimensional-music-of-bobby-blue-bland#
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