Bobby "Blue" Bland An Original American Art Form

Bobby "Blue" Bland

Bobby "Blue" Bland (born Robert Calvin Bland on January 27, 1930 in Rosemark, Tennessee) was an American singer, who created tempestuous arias of love, betrayal and resignation, set against roiling, dramatic orchestrations, and left the listener drained but awed. We called it the Blues. He was an original member of The Beale Streeters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZMNEieo44k

Bland's son Rodd said that failing health had forced his dad off the stage earlier this year 2013. "He had a hole in his stomach that had become tumorous, and it was emptying into his bloodstream."

He said Bland passed away from natural causes at his home in Germantown, Tennessee. "He was in my arms," his son said. "But I'm not going to lie. I could have used at least 20 more years."

A website in Bland's name credits the singer with being "one of the main creators of the modern soul-blues sound."

"He never b**ched about not getting his due," said his son, who formerly was a drummer in his father's band. "When I took him to Beale Street for ribs and catfish, fans would come up to him. He was always courteous, polite and kind. And humble. That's what I admired."

Bland's song "Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City" was sampled on Jay-Z's 2001 album, "The Blueprint.Bobby 'Blue' Bland, who has died aged 83, was among the great storytellers of blues and soul music. In songs such as I Pity the Fool, Cry Cry Cry and Who Will the Next Fool Be, he created tempestuous arias of love, betrayal and resignation, set against roiling, dramatic orchestrations, and left the listener drained but awed.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSo47llUMWg
It was a skill that came gradually. His husky voice was gorgeous from the start, but as a young man he followed BB King – for a while literally, as his valet and chauffeur – and his singing took on a special character only after he began to study the recorded sermons of the Detroit preacher CL Franklin, Aretha's father. "That's where I got my squall from," he recalled. That alchemy of blues and gospel cadences would create one of the most affecting voices in black music.
He was born just north of Memphis in Tennessee and in his late teens he hung out in the city with King, the pianist Rosco Gordon and the singer Johnny Ace, an informal musical gang known as the Beale Streeters. He made a few recordings for Chess and Modern, and then signed with Duke. After a few inconsequential singles, he began working with the bandleader Bill Harvey and the arranger Joe Scott, and within a few years, in pieces such as Little Boy Blue and I'll Take Care of You, this collaboration transformed his recordings from the equivalent of low-budget B-movies to widescreen epics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZYSiRvUA7M
For much of the 50s Bland toured the "chitlin' circuit" of southern clubs and theatres with Duke's other star, the singer and harmonica player Little Junior Parker, in a revue called Blues Consolidated. That was also the title, in 1958, of their first, shared, album, notable not only for hits such as Bland's Farther Up the Road, which topped the R&B chart in 1957, but also for its overheated sleevenotes by "Dzondira Lalsac" (probably Duke's proprietor Don Robey), in which Bland becomes "the freewheeling master rogue of the Blue Note, rockin' 'em this and that-a-way, across the forty-eight!!!".
Some of Bland's best work, done under Scott's direction in 1960-63, appeared on the albums Two Steps from the Blues, Here's the Man... and Call on Me, such as the ferocious homily Yield Not to Temptation, the joyous Turn on Your Love Light and a virtuoso reading of the blues standard (Call It) Stormy Monday, featuring a guitar line by Wayne Bennett that has become a blues guitarists' set piece. Occasionally, saccharine songs and lush orchestrations would move Bland rather more than two steps from the blues, but his admirers endured his straying and waited for him to find his way back with poised renderings of strong material such as Blind Man and Black Night.
During the 60s Bland placed more than a dozen records in the R&B top 10, reaching No 1 with I Pity the Fool and That's the Way Love Is, but his kind of soul music was being eclipsed by the catchier sounds of Motown and the funkier ones of Stax, and by the end of the decade he was working less and drinking more. Duke was sold to ABC, which made Bland the object of crossover marketing, rebranding him as a mainstream soul singer. Bland dutifully strolled into the Technicolor sunsets of His California Album (1973), Dreamer (1974) and Reflections in Blue (1977), and in Get On Down with Bobby Bland (1975) he sauntered along Nashville's Music Row.
Bobby 'Blue' Bland's core audience was African American, mature and predominantly female. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives Some relief from this high-sugar diet was provided by recorded encounters with his old friend King, the first in 1974 at a studio-recorded junket where they genially reminisced and swapped favourite songs, the second in 1976 at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, where Bland, previously rather the junior partner, was more assertive and received top billing. They continued to give joint concerts for years afterwards.

 When blues singer Bobby "Blue" Bland was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, his longtime friend B.B. King, considered one of the most successful and influential blues singers of the 20th century, praised Bland not just for the blues recordings he'd been making for decades, but he also added, "There's no better singer in any genre."
While King and other blues artists were increasingly performing for young white listeners, Bland preferred to tour the southern circuit and play to his core audience: African American, mature, predominantly female. Having spent the early 80s making half a dozen lavish albums for MCA in a vaguely Barry White manner, in 1985 he signed with Malaco, a Mississippi company specialising in southern soul, and the move brought him closer to the people who cared for him most. This last stage of his recording career produced 10 albums of well-honed material by Malaco's inhouse writers and producers, in which he embarked again on the stormy seas of heartbreak and ecstasy with an even surer hand on the wheel. His last release was Blues at Midnight in 2003.
Bland was admired by artists including Van Morrison, who featured him at some of his concerts, and Mick Hucknall, who made the album Tribute to Bobby in 2008. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and received a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 1997.
He is survived by his wife, Willie Martin Bland, and his son Rodd, who is also a musician.
• Bobby Bland (Robert Calvin Brooks), blues and soul singer, born 27 January 1930; died 23 June 2013
 He released a couple of unsuccessful singles for Chess Records in 1951, and Modern Records in 1952. That year, Bland entered the Army and returned to music upon his discharge in 1955. His first successful single was "It's My Life Baby", showcasing a new, more mature sound. He was signed to the Duke Records label in 1956.
Bland's glottal gargle sound was patterned after Aretha Franklin's father, the Reverend C. L. Franklin. For all his rough and raw vocal projections, Bland was backed by a band that delivered some of the smoothest and most modulated arrangements in the Blues genre. Sometimes referred to as "the Lion of the Blues", Bland was as regal in appearance as his band was musically mellow. His album covers tell the story, showing Bland beautifully manicured in the sportsman style, his large frame nattily dressed and dripping with conspicuous, but tasteful jewelry. Though not conventionally handsome, Bland had a certain magnetism that had a profound affect on his fans.
Guitarist Pat Hare contributed to Bland's first national hit, "Farther Up The Road" (1957). Clarence Holliman was his guitarist for most of his 1950s sides, including "Loan A Helping Hand", "I Smell Trouble", "Don't Want No Woman" and "Teach Me (How To Love You)". In the 1960s, Bland was working with Wayne Bennett, including "Turn On Your Love Light" (1961) and "Yield Not To Temptation" (1962); he was by then a superstar and world-famous entertainer. Other popular records from this period were "Grits Ain't Groceries," "Little Boy Blue," "I Pity the Fool," "Stormy Monday Blues" and "Two Steps from the Blues."
After Duke was sold to ABC Records in 1973, Bland's career began to diminish. Though he continued recording throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bland never regained his former fame on recordings, but toured and became a major influence on the Soul blues sound.
In 1992, Bobby Bland was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Bobby 'Blue' Bland, who has died aged 83, was among the great storytellers of blues and soul music. In songs such as I Pity the Fool, Cry Cry Cry and Who Will the Next Fool Be, he created tempestuous arias of love, betrayal and resignation, set against roiling, dramatic orchestrations, and left the listener drained but awed.
It was a skill that came gradually. His husky voice was gorgeous from the start, but as a young man he followed BB King – for a while literally, as his valet and chauffeur – and his singing took on a special character only after he began to study the recorded sermons of the Detroit preacher CL Franklin, Aretha's father. "That's where I got my squall from," he recalled. That alchemy of blues and gospel cadences would create one of the most affecting voices in black music.
He was born just north of Memphis in Tennessee and in his late teens he hung out in the city with King, the pianist Rosco Gordon and the singer Johnny Ace, an informal musical gang known as the Beale Streeters. He made a few recordings for Chess and Modern, and then signed with Duke. After a few inconsequential singles, he began working with the bandleader Bill Harvey and the arranger Joe Scott, and within a few years, in pieces such as Little Boy Blue and I'll Take Care of You, this collaboration transformed his recordings from the equivalent of low-budget B-movies to widescreen epics.
For much of the 50s Bland toured the "chitlin' circuit" of southern clubs and theatres with Duke's other star, the singer and harmonica player Little Junior Parker, in a revue called Blues Consolidated. That was also the title, in 1958, of their first, shared, album, notable not only for hits such as Bland's Farther Up the Road, which topped the R&B chart in 1957, but also for its overheated sleevenotes by "Dzondira Lalsac" (probably Duke's proprietor Don Robey), in which Bland becomes "the freewheeling master rogue of the Blue Note, rockin' 'em this and that-a-way, across the forty-eight!!!".
Some of Bland's best work, done under Scott's direction in 1960-63, appeared on the albums Two Steps from the Blues, Here's the Man... and Call on Me, such as the ferocious homily Yield Not to Temptation, the joyous Turn on Your Love Light and a virtuoso reading of the blues standard (Call It) Stormy Monday, featuring a guitar line by Wayne Bennett that has become a blues guitarists' set piece. Occasionally, saccharine songs and lush orchestrations would move Bland rather more than two steps from the blues, but his admirers endured his straying and waited for him to find his way back with poised renderings of strong material such as Blind Man and Black Night.
During the 60s Bland placed more than a dozen records in the R&B top 10, reaching No 1 with I Pity the Fool and That's the Way Love Is, but his kind of soul music was being eclipsed by the catchier sounds of Motown and the funkier ones of Stax, and by the end of the decade he was working less and drinking more. Duke was sold to ABC, which made Bland the object of crossover marketing, rebranding him as a mainstream soul singer. Bland dutifully strolled into the Technicolor sunsets of His California Album (1973), Dreamer (1974) and Reflections in Blue (1977), and in Get On Down with Bobby Bland (1975) he sauntered along Nashville's Music Row.
Bobby 'Blue' Bland's core audience was African American, mature and predominantly female. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives Some relief from this high-sugar diet was provided by recorded encounters with his old friend King, the first in 1974 at a studio-recorded junket where they genially reminisced and swapped favourite songs, the second in 1976 at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, where Bland, previously rather the junior partner, was more assertive and received top billing. They continued to give joint concerts for years afterwards.
While King and other blues artists were increasingly performing for young white listeners, Bland preferred to tour the southern circuit and play to his core audience: African American, mature, predominantly female. Having spent the early 80s making half a dozen lavish albums for MCA in a vaguely Barry White manner, in 1985 he signed with Malaco, a Mississippi company specialising in southern soul, and the move brought him closer to the people who cared for him most. This last stage of his recording career produced 10 albums of well-honed material by Malaco's inhouse writers and producers, in which he embarked again on the stormy seas of heartbreak and ecstasy with an even surer hand on the wheel. His last release was Blues at Midnight in 2003.
Bland was admired by artists including Van Morrison, who featured him at some of his concerts, and Mick Hucknall, who made the album Tribute to Bobby in 2008. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and received a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 1997.
 Though he possessed gifts on a par with his most accomplished peers, Mr. Bland never achieved the popular acclaim enjoyed by contemporaries like Ray Charles and B. B. King. But he was nevertheless a mainstay on the rhythm-and-blues charts and club circuit for decades.

His vocals, punctuated by the occasional squalling shout, were restrained, exhibiting a crooner’s delicacy of phrasing and a kind of intimate pleading. He influenced everyone from the soul singers Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett to rock groups like the Allman Brothers and The Band. The rapper Jay-Z sampled Mr. Bland’s 1974 single “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” on his 2001 album, “The Blueprint.”

Mr. Bland’s signature mix of blues, jazz, pop, gospel and country music was a good decade in the making. His first recordings, made in the early 1950s, found him working in the lean, unvarnished style of Mr. King, even to the point of employing falsetto vocal leaps patterned after Mr. King’s. Mr. Bland’s mid-’50s singles were more accomplished; hits like “It’s My Life, Baby” and “Farther Up the Road” are now regarded as hard-blues classics, but they still featured the driving rhythms and stinging electric guitar favored by Mr. King and others. It wasn’t until 1958’s “Little Boy Blue,” a record inspired by the homiletic delivery of the Rev. C. L. Franklin, that Mr. Bland arrived at his trademark vocal technique.

“That’s where I got my squall from,” Mr. Bland said, referring to the sermons of Mr. Franklin — “Aretha’s daddy,” as he called him — in a 1979 interview with the author Peter Guralnick. “After I had that I lost the high falsetto. I had to get some other kind of gimmick, you know, to be identified with.”

The corresponding softness in Mr. Bland’s voice, a refinement matched by the elegant formal wear in which he appeared onstage, came from listening to records by pop crooners like Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett and Perry Como.

Just as crucial to the evolution of Mr. Bland’s sound was his affiliation with the trumpet player and arranger Joe Scott, for years the director of artists and repertory for Duke Records in Houston. Given to dramatic, brass-rich arrangements, Mr. Scott, who died in 1979, supplied Mr. Bland with intricate musical backdrops that set his supple baritone in vivid relief.

The two men accounted for more than 30 Top 20 rhythm-and-blues singles for Duke from 1958 to 1968, including the No. 1 hits “I Pity the Fool” and “That’s the Way Love Is.” Steeped in vulnerability and emotional candor, his performances earned him a devoted female audience.

Though only four of his singles from these years — “Turn On Your Love Light,” “Call on Me,” “That’s the Way Love Is” and “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” — crossed over to the pop Top 40, Mr. Bland’s recordings resonated with the era’s blues-leaning rock acts. The Grateful Dead made “Love Light” a staple of their live shows. The Band recorded his 1964 single “Share Your Love With Me” for their 1973 album, “Moondog Matinee.” Van Morrison included a version of “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” on his 1974 live set, “It’s Too Late to Stop Now.”

Mr. Bland himself broke through to pop audiences in the mid-’70s with “His California Album” and its more middle-of-the-road follow-up, “Dreamer.” But his greatest success always came in the rhythm-and-blues market, where he placed a total of 63 singles on the charts from 1957 to 1985. He signed with the Mississippi-based Malaco label in 1985 and made a series of well-received albums that appealed largely to fans of traditional blues and soul music.

Mr. Bland was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992 and received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1997.

Robert Calvin Brooks was born on Jan. 27, 1930, in Millington, Tenn., just north of Memphis. His father, I. J. Brooks, abandoned the family when Bobby was very young. His mother, Mary Lee, married Leroy Bridgeforth, who also went by the name Leroy Bland, when Bobby was 6.

Mr. Bland dropped out of school in the third grade to work in the cotton fields. Though he never learned to write music or play an instrument, he cited the music of the pioneering blues guitarist T-Bone Walker as an early influence.

After moving to Memphis in 1947, Mr. Bland began working in a garage and singing spirituals in a group called the Miniatures. In 1949 he joined the Beale Streeters, a loose-knit collective whose members at various points included Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon, Earl Forest and B. B. King, all of whom went on to become popular blues performers as solo artists.

Mr. Bland also traveled as a part of the Johnny Ace Revue and recorded for the Chess, Modern and Duke labels before being drafted into the Army in 1952. Several of these recordings were made under the supervision of the producer Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis; none sold particularly well.

After his time in the service Mr. Bland worked as a chauffeur, a valet and an opening act for the Memphis rhythm-and-blues singer Junior Parker, just as he had for Mr. King. He toured as a headliner throughout the ’60s, playing as many as 300 one-night engagements a year, a demanding schedule that exacerbated his struggles with alcohol. He performed widely, in the United States and abroad, until shortly before his death.

In addition to his son, Rodd, Mr. Bland’s survivors include his wife, Willie Mae; a daughter, Patrice Moses; and four grandchildren. Rodd Bland said his father had recently learned that the blues singer and harmonica player James Cotton was his half-brother.

Mr. Bland’s synthesis of Southern vernacular music and classy big-band arrangements made him a stylistic pioneer, but whatever he accomplished by way of formal innovation ultimately derived from his underlying faith in the emotional power of the blues.

“I’d like to be remembered as just a good old country boy that did his best to give us something to listen to and help them through a lot of sad moments, happy moments, whatever,” he said in a 2009 interview with the syndicated “House of Blues Radio Hour.”

“Whatever moments you get of happiness, use it up, you know, if you can, because it don’t come that often.”

He is survived by his wife, Willie Martin Bland, and his son Rodd, who is also a musician.

If Mr. Bland lacked the pop-music name recognition of B.B. King and Ray Charles, that did not make him any less influential as an artist. Many of Mr. Bland’s recordings, such as the blues “Further On Up the Road” (1957), later covered by Eric Clapton, and the gospel-flavored “Turn On Your Love Light” (1961), covered by the Grateful Dead, became rock music standards.
Van Morrison, who covered Mr. Bland’s 1964 hit “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do,” often cited him as a seminal influence, and the two singers later recorded together. Mr. Bland’s version of T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday,” with an extended solo from guitarist Wayne Bennett, inspired a later version by the Allman Brothers Band. Rapper Jay-Z recently sampled Mr. Bland’s 1974 recording “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” on his 2001 album “The Blueprint.”
Mr. Bland placed 23 top-10 hits on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues charts between 1957 and 1975 and had a strong following on the so-called “chitlin’ circuit,” the ballrooms and clubs that catered to predominantly black audiences. He played as many as 300 one-nighters a year.
Other soul-blues singers such as Little Milton, Z.Z. Hill and Artie “Blues Boy” White borrowed heavily from Mr. Bland’s style, though none approached his career longevity.
“Bobby Bland brought the sound of black gospel music into the blues and thereby helped transform black music of the 1950s into the soul style of the 1960s,” rhythm-and-blues historian Robert Pruter said in an interview. “He is considered the pioneer of a distinct form of rhythm and blues called ‘soul-blues,’ thereby influencing a host of later blues singers.”
“It is not an exaggeration to say that Bobby Bland is one of the titans of late 20th century African-American music, close to equal in importance to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke and James Brown,” Pruter added.
Mr. Bland could bring a tender, soothing vulnerability to the often-machismo world of the blues. When the warm, gentle side of his singing gave way to a harsh guttural scream, it served to emphasize the tension inherent in his songs.
He developed the squalling style from recorded sermons by Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father, and adapted the rough, gargling sound that the senior Franklin used to exhort the congregation to his own singing voice.
During his affiliation in the 1960s with Duke Records, a Houston-based company, Mr. Bland’s work was often defined by the collaboration with trumpeter and arranger Joe Scott. Scott’s urbane horn charts, rooted in the big band era and modern jazz, contrasted with the brash soul sounds of Motown and Stax records. Mr. Bland’s slow songs such as “Two Steps From the Blues” were lushly scored, and his up-tempo songs pulsed with brassy fanfare that often built to a crescendo.
Bland, who died Sunday at 83 at his home in Memphis, Tenn., of complications from an ongoing illness, never achieved the broad-based recognition of fellow blues musicians such as King, Muddy Waters and Lightnin' Hopkins. But he was lauded almost universally by blues enthusiasts for his vocal mastery that spanned the gamut from throat-searing growls to gossamer sighs throughout an up-and-down career that ran more than 60 years.

"I often joke that people can sit around in bars all night arguing over who the greatest blues instrumentalists are," Jay Sieleman, president and chief executive of the Memphis-based Blues Foundation, said Monday. "But if they're talking about the greatest blues singers, they wouldn't get past the first beer without mentioning Bobby 'Blue' Bland."
Best known for hits including "Farther Up the Road," "Turn On Your Love Light," "I Pity the Fool" and "Stormy Monday Blues," Bland carved out a distinctive niche that bridged the gap between earthy rural blues singers such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Muddy Waters and more urbane jazz vocalists like Nat King Cole and Charles Brown, prizing meticulous diction as much as soul-wrenching emotion.
He's been cited as an important influence by many blues, rock and pop singers and groups who followed, notably Van Morrison, Eric Clapton and the Band. Even B.B. King, for whom Bland once worked as a driver before his own career took off, has said if there were another singer he could sing like, it would be Bland.
He placed more than 60 singles on the R&B charts over a near-three decade span from 1957 to 1985, the majority of them making it to the Top 30. The bouncy, gospel-inflected "Turn On Your Love Light" was subsequently recorded by dozens of other artists, including Jerry Lee Lewis, the Righteous Brothers, Delbert McClinton, James Cotton, the Sir Douglas Quintet and the Grateful Dead, but it was Bland's definitive recording that was voted into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
"He was such an inventive singer," said Lauren Ontkey, the rock hall's vice president of education and public programs. "He sang real hard blues but also had this incredible melodic sense and could sing around a really snarly guitar as well as around a string section."
Robert Calvin Bland was born an only child on Jan. 27, 1930, in Rosemark, Tenn., about 25 miles northeast of Memphis. He was raised by his mother, and did not meet his father until after he became famous.
As a youth he began singing with the gospel group the Miniatures, and gravitated to Memphis where he started hanging out with King, Herman "Little Junior" Parker and other musicians who frequented the clubs on Beale Street.
Referring to King, Bland once told the Washington Post, "He'd let me hang around and get some kind of experience. I drove his car; I did anything I could to get my foot in the door. He gave me the opportunity and I still thank him today."
That scene in Memphis gave rise to a group of musicians who began performing and touring together under the name "the Beale Streeters," with Bland among their ranks.
He recorded in the early '50s for producer Sam Phillips' Sun Records label, several years before Phillips launched the careers of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, but those records didn't generate much attention beyond Memphis.

Bland found a style of his own after having his musical career interrupted by a three-year stint in the U.S. Army. Having been exposed to smoother West Coast-based singers including Cole and Brown, Bland incorporated their suave sophistication with the grittier style he'd grown up with.
Emerging from the military just as rock 'n' roll was starting to explode, Bland began to hit his stride, establishing his name at Duke Records in 1957 with "Farther Up the Road," which went to No. 1 on Billboard's R&B chart and reached No. 43 on the overall pop listing.
He struggled with alcohol dependence in the late '60s and early '70s, but eventually recovered. He remained popular among longtime blues and R&B audiences and toured regularly until recently, when health issues forced him to cut back.
One possible reason Bland never received the kind of recognition beyond blues circles accorded King, Waters and John Lee Hooker was that he wasn't a guitarist.

"In this day and age," the Blues Foundation's Sieleman said, "I think it's easy to overlook people who just sing. The guitar has become such a prominent part of our musical culture [in the blues]. But the more you listen to Bobby, the more you appreciate the phrasing, the way he could deliver a song. They call him the Frank Sinatra of the impeccable phrasing and what he could do with a song."
Bland was given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 and selected for the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in 1981.

• Bobby Bland (Robert Calvin Brooks), blues and soul singer, born 27 January 1930; died 23 June 2013

Labels: Original American Art. The Blues.

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