redandwhiterag 
Everyone has their favourite artists and Bland is mine, at least in the R&B idiom. Bobby straddled the charts over many years and recorded in a variety of styles, but without widespread commercial pop success. Always a blues ballad stylist without peer, he had little difficulty in adapting to create the soul/blues hybrid represented by his albums from the 70s onwards.
One of the great guitar players but often underrated and sometimes criminally ignored, ‘Gatemouth’ was originally influenced by jazz players, which lead to a fluidity of style seldom found in other blues players. He is also a renowned multi-instrumentalist and plays harmonica, banjo, drums and, particularly, the fiddle. His music reflects an eclectic upbringing, where he was exposed to country, cajun and jazz as well as the blues.
The Clovers have a special place in the history of R&B as the first genuinely successful vocal group on the Atlantic label. They actually started out in Washington in 1946, built a career recording smooth ballads and bluesy jumps, and in the process became one of the most popular vocal groups of the 50s. They certainly weren’t a doo-wop group, although they were often categorised within that genre – if anything they were a typical R&B band with the vocalists taking many of the traditional instrumental parts.
Repeatedly touted as the funniest group in rock and R&B, this ‘accolade’ can often detract from the quality of the group’s vocal and musical arrangements to be found on the Leiber and Stoller masterminded Atlantic sides of the 1950s. The original forerunners of the group were the LA based A Sharp Trio, soon renamed the Four Bluebirds. It was as the Robins however that this group scored a number of hits on the R&B charts between 1949 and 1954.
Included here as representatives of the history of the vocal group within R&B, the Drifters have been around in one form or another for more than fifty years and counting – stalwarts of the early gospel and then R&B scene, purveyors of classic uptown soul in the 60s, undervalued but still worthwhile pop-soul in the 70s and over 50 hits throughout their history.
Eric’s music is a particular favourite of The Primer (and particularly of Mrs. No Name), a rich largely acoustic blues with elements of folk, country, soul, gospel and jazz. Son of the folk singer Leon Bibb, Eric grew up in the world of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan and these influences have never left him. Eric has himself stated that whilst his roots are definitely in black American music he has also been influenced by anything from Ravel through to singer songwriters such as Joni Mitchell – quite a heady mixture.
Who better to represent the classic sound of New Orleans R&B. His relaxed approach to music, along with his boogie-woogie piano style and easy going, warm vocals delivered a long series of national hits from the mid-’50s to the early ’60s. His basic approach rarely changed – but we don’t really care, because the approach he cultivated was based on pure musical charm.
This is a rarity. An entry in the R&B Primer Artists section that wasn’t on the original Shades of Blue site and so isn’t ported over from there. However, it has nonetheless been given a seemingly arbitrary date of production that sits alongside all the other artist entries. How can that be I hear you ask? Well, it’s simply that artists in the R&B Primer are listed alphabetically and the only way I could achieve that when porting over from Shades Of Blue was to structure the posts in date order (those pesky days of arranging orders manually are long gone) and I’m kind of a stickler for that kind of thing – a quality most often ascribed to the nerds in this tough old world, but I can take it!
Howard Tate was another in the great line of soul mystery men – he cut some of the very finest soul sides in the mid to late 60s and then all but disappeared. And yet those Verve sessions with Jerry Ragovoy were so fine people have constantly been driven to find him, to try and figure him out, just to try and get close to him. “Howard was distant, hard to get next to” – that’s what producer/writer Jerry Ragovoy has to say about his discovery and he probably knew him better than most!
The Soul Queen of New Orleans (a title bestowed upon her by officials of the city) was actually born in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, on February 18, 1941. She’s been a constant and enthusiastic ambassador for the city throughout her life. Her parents moved to New Orleans when she was a baby, and lived in a rooming house behind the Bell Hotel. The motel lounge had a jukebox, which young Irma would sneak off and listen to. In that way, she was exposed to many R&B luminaries and, apparently, Irma’s favourite record at that time was Percy Mayfield’s ‘Ida Red’.
A link between boogie woogie, blues balladry, country and early rock and roll. Amos Milburn was a contender for entry, but Hunter stole it through his more varied output. Although Ray Charles gets justified credit for the merging of R&B with the sounds of C&W, Ivory Joe had been sneaking elements of country into his ballads and jump blues as far back as the 1940s.
One of the ‘younger generation’ of players (although in Blues, the younger generation are often well into their 40s, 50s and beyond) Walker was born in San Francisco, California. His eclectic musical interests have taken a long time to develop into a cogent musical personality of their own – at one point, he even quit the blues and formed a gospel quartet.