Bobby "Blue" Bland

Daddy B. Nice's #1 ranked Southern Soul Forerunner

"Ain't Nothin' You Can Do"

Bobby "Blue" Bland

Composed by Joe Scott & Deadric Malone

Daddy B. Nice's Original Critique:

--Daddy B. Nice

About Bobby "Blue" Bland

Bobby "Blue" Bland was born Robert Calvin Brooks in Rosemark, Tennessee in 1930. His family moved to Memphis in 1947, where he began his career with a gospel group called the Miniatures and would compete in talent contests hosted by Rufus Thomas. His first secular group, the Beale Streeters, included such future stars as B.B. King, Johnny Ace, and Junior Parker.

He began recording in the early fifties, but it wasn't until he signed with Houston-based Duke Records that his career took off. In the next fifteen years he had some 45 R&B chart-topping singles in addition to releasing on average an album a year.

His first national chart hit, "Farther Down The Road" in 1957, was the early culmination of a series of chitlin' circuit-style blues records. Other blues-based songs such as "Cry, Cry, Cry," "I Pity The Fool," "Little Boy Blue" and "Two Steps From The Blues" followed.

In the sixties Bland entered a new--and from a Southern Soul fan's perspective, higher--plateau, thanks to his collaboration with Joe Scott, who added memorable horn charts and arrangements to showcase Bland's vocals. The hits ("Turn On Your Love Light," "Ain't Nothin' You Can Do," "Yield Not To Temptation," etc.) resonated widely, reaching an audience composed not only of soul music and blues fans but a significant segment of the pop and rock & roll community.

Bland was a Top 40 radio staple throughout the sixties, and even after his momentum slowed in the seventies and eighties, he continued to produce albums annually. In the seventies, his long parallel path with his early sidekick, B.B. King, became more obvious, not only through joint projects and albums but in his choice of material. The great Bland hits of this era integrated blues, soul and pop in the manner of King's "The Thrill Is Gone": "Ain't No Love In the Heart Of The City," "I Wouldn't Treat A Dog (The Way You Treated Me)," "These Hands (Small But Mighty)" and "I'm Too Far Gone."

The mid-eighties through the early nineties marked yet another phase in Bobby "Blue" Bland's career: introspective ballads in equal parts blues and pop. In 1985 Bland had moved to Jackson's venerable Malaco Records, where he joined Johnnie Taylor and Z. Z. Hill to form the foundation of what would become the contemporary Southern Soul genre. The title track of his first Malaco album, Members Only, was typical: a taciturn ballad marinated in themes of sadness and regret. "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," "Ain't No Love For Sale" and "I Had A Dream Last Night" recycled the potent formula. By this time, Bland's vocals had beome synonymous with passionately-felt sadness and musical execution of the highest order.

Bland's last major CD (to date), Blues At Midnight, appeared in 2003, surprising even blues-lovers with its high-caliber material. Now in his mid-seventies, with his career in a kind of twilight of low-profile performances and sparse recording, Bland nevertheless staked his claim to being the greatest vocalist of his generation by appropriating the pop standard, "What A Wonderful World" (recorded by literally hundreds of artists) and making it his own.

Bland also returned to his roots, coming full circle with a rousing blues rocker entitled "I Caught The Blues From Someone Else." And he returned again to his blues-balladeer persona in "This Man-Woman Thing."

In 1998, Bobby "Blue" Bland won the Blues Foundation's "Lifetime Achievement" award. In an interview in "Chittlin' Circuit" magazine (Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2006), the longtime master of blues and Southern Soul showed no signs of flagging, stressing the need for more "stories" in music, bemoaning the dearth of good lyrics and songwriters in contemporary R&B, and reiterating the inter-connectedness of all music, especially gospel, blues and country-western.

Song's Transcendent Moment

"When you lose your loved one,
It makes you feel so blue.

And you've got a heartache,
And there ain't nothin' you can do."

Tidbits

1. August 6, 2006. Count me among those who think the attention some music reviewers have drawn to the "snorts" Bobby "Blue" Bland only rarely emits on record (most tellingly on 2003's excellent Blues At Midnight album) have done disproportionate harm. By focusing on a minor flaw many people (including your Daddy B. Nice) wouldn't have thought merited notice, they have managed to cast a shadow over spectacular work by a performer too distinguished and advanced in age to be nitpicked in such fashion. Enough said. DBN.

2. May 5, 2007. Here are some great Bobby "Blue" Bland DVD's:
Bobby Blue Bland - Live From Beale Street ;
Blues Views, which also contains video on Johnnie Taylor, Shirley Brown, Sam Cooke and other Southern Soul artists;
and Blues Story, which chronicles Bland, R.L. Burnside, and a number of blues artists. DBN.

3. Thoughts, DBN: When Bobby "Blue" Bland was still unknown to me, I used to hear a song called "When You've Got A Heartache" on the radio occasionally. It was a great song, and it was only later, after I became acquainted with Bland's work, that I came to know it by its correct title: "Ain't Nothin' You Can Do." The full line of verse, of course, is "Ain't nothin' you can do/When you've got a heartache."

I was recently reminded of this, and all the residual fondness I had for the song called "When You've Got A Heartache," when I stumbled across a personal playlist from many years ago with that old, "no-nothing" title.

Then, as I was updating the Bobby "Blue" Bland Artist Guide you're reading, and taking note of the many references to "Ain't Nothin' You Can Do," I asked myself whether it was possible that anyone else had heard the song "When You've Got A Heartache."

I decided that if there was even one potential Southern Soul music fan who would benefit from realizing that "When You've Got A Heartache" was really "Ain't Nothin' You Can Do," I was going to write this note.

We Southern Soul "insiders" should never forget that--like the courtship of a beautiful woman (or man)--the most wonderful time in appreciating a new form of music is the first acquaintance, the first impression, the falling-in-love stage, with all the innocence, confusion and mystery that accompanies an affair.

We should always respect--and bend over backwards--to bring outsiders, perhaps hooked by a single Southern Soul song, into the "good thing" we Southern Soul fans share. DBN.

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If You Liked. . . You'll Love

If you loved Jerry Butler's "He Will Break Your Heart," you'll love Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Ain't Nothin' You Can Do."


EDITOR'S NOTE:

In the late nineties, when I first began to visualize a charting of Southern Soul music, my overriding motive was to correct what I perceived to be a grievous wrong. When I searched the Internet for information on the great musicians I heard on radio stations on my trips through the South, I could find nothing about them. I was able to find information on blues and soul artists up to about the 1980's, but anything more contemporary was still a "dark continent"--unknown, unexplored and unmemorialized. Even "southern soul" was a suspect and tentative term, used mainly as an adjective to describe older artists geographically tied to the Deep South.

To help right that wrong, I went about constructing a Top 100 chart of the best Southern Soul artists from the 90's to the present, and I profiled those performers in "artist guides." But when I had finished that chart (Daddy B. Nice's Top 100), I again found myself faced with a wrong. This time the oversight was my lack of attention to the artists whose best material had been recorded prior to the 90's and 00's, artists without whom the Southern Soul phenomenon would never have occurred. Yes, one could find information on these performers on the Internet, but not up-to-date information, and not in the context of contemporary Southern Soul.

That is what brought me to formulate the chart you are reading: "Forerunners." Rhythm & Blues as it's played, appreciated and revered in the Deep South. The Golden Oldies of the Chitlin' Circuit. The artists who "count" and the songs that "matter" to the artists, deejays and producers who understand and create the Southern Soul sound. And that's different--although not altogether different--from the soul music many of us grew up listening to outside the Deep South. Although fans may be coming to this music long after it was first recorded, I believe it will only whet their appetite for Southern Soul music all the more. DBN.

Honorary "B" Side

"Turn On Your Love Light"