Probably the best known bluesman in the world and still active right up until shortly before his death in 2015! He’s had hits in every decade since he started recording over 50 years ago and in his time he’s recorded in a variety of styles and collaborated with many other artists, choosing collaborations with performers as musically diverse as Diane Schuur and U2.
When I ported over some of the entries from the old Shades Of Blue site, I limited the number of artists to twenty. Only recently, as I started to add to the initial list, did I notice a ridiculous bias against the female protagonists – so here is the first of a few to redress that initial chauvinistic imbalance, however unintentional. Most people know Betty Everett only for ‘The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)’, but there was far more to her music than that. Although her output was a little variable, she’s has actually always been one of Shades’ favourite singers.
A long time favourite of the Primer , if only for the soul classic ‘Let Me Down Easy’), Bettye LaVette doesn’t sound like anyone else. She’s is a soul singer who throws caution to the wind, often electrifying her audiences with pure unapologetic soul music – even if sometimes the histrionics in her delivery push her beyond the boundaries of anybody other than the committed or the die hard soul fan.
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.
Eva Cassidy didn’t have long to make her mark before cancer took her but the recorded legacy, though relatively sparse, is evidence enough of a great, maybe unique talent. Born into an artistic family, music was only one of a number of personal loves and she undertook many artistic endeavours in her short life, including painting, drawing, jewellery design and sculpture. All the more remarkable then, that the music she left behind was so well formed and fully realised.
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!