Review: B. B. King - B. B. King Wails (1959)
Tracks: 1) Sweet Thing; 2) I’ve Got Papers On You, Baby; 3) Tomorrow Is Another Day; 4) Come By Here; 5) The Fool; 6) I Love You So; 7) The Woman I Love (Moonshine Woman Blues); 8) We Can’t Make It; 9) Treat Me Right; 10) Time To Say Goodbye.
REVIEW
The first of several LPs credited to «B. B. King And His Orchestra», B. B. King Wails could easily get lost in the altogether overwhelming pool of King’s interchangeable LPs released in the Crown years, but there are at least two significant nuances. One: this is his first record, not counting the made-to-be-different experiment of Sings Spirituals, to have been released as a proper album, not a mish-mash of contemporary and obsolete singles. Some of the songs were indeed released as singles at about the same time as the LP, and some, like ‘Sweet Thing’, would continue to be released as singles years later, but none of this is relevant: B. B. King Wails is the man’s first attempt to prove that he is capable of building up and releasing a 26-minute dissertation on the blues in a single sitting, after a decade of thriving on tiny singles.
Two: the «His Orchestra» thing is no joke, as this session does indeed feature B. B. King at his brassiest, with a huge big band sound — huger than ever before, for sure — supporting his playing and singing. The difference from the earlier years is, of course, mainly one of scope, since King had always favored a big mess of pianos, horns, and (to a lesser extent) strings behind his back, but this time he clearly wants to establish himself as some sort of spiritual competitor for both Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey, with both of whose orchestras he also cut several recordings that year, available as bonus tracks on the album’s expanded CD edition. What can we say? «One of the most polished Negro entertainers in the business», as he is called in Bill Parker’s original liner notes[1], really loved for his grit and jagged edges to be counterbalanced by glitz and flash, the more the merrier. The problem is, the glitzier it gets, the less convincing it becomes — for the most part, King continues to stick to the classic vibe and feel of post-war electric blues, while His Orchestra, at the very same time, tries to take him into a completely different direction.
Incindentally, the contrast begins already on the very first track, ‘Sweet Thing’, which opens as a dialog between King’s blues phrasing and a lively, blasting response from his brass section. Like most of the tracks here, it ends up sounding like «Big Joe Turner with Virtuoso Blues Guitar On Top», not necessarily a great combination. When it comes to the soloing part, you’d think the horns might step back a bit, but they actually get louder simultaneously with the guitar, muffling its sharpness and smoothing out the edges. The two approaches simply do not mesh all that well, which is altogether not surprising considering that what we’re hearing is «Mississippi Country Boy Going Vegas».
It gets even less convincing on the second track (‘I’ve Got Papers On You, Baby’), where the «Orchestra» does most of the work — this time, there’s a part of the horns responsible for rhythm work and another part responsible for lead melody — and B. B. King starts to feel like a guest star on his own recording, playing a short, nicely flowing solo that is immediately lost in the surrounding sea of brass. Maybe he just wanted it to be different; maybe he was sensing his own limitations and thought that a big band like that would be a nice way to overcome them — but I suspect that’s taking the art of positive thinking onto a level where it simply does not belong. Far more likely, he just wanted to put on a show. Which he did, but at the expense of nearly dissolving his own personality inside it.
Amusingly, there is one track on the album with a wholly different feel from the rest — you can sense some slightly inferior production quality on ‘The Woman I Love’ (the guitar almost seems like it’s coming from an adjoining room), and, indeed, this is a B-side from 1954 that somehow ended up here. There’s a brass section on it, too, but a small one, acting as modest support to the lead guitar and the rhythm section, and King’s exuberant falsetto makes a great love duet with the lead melody, as the artist bends, vibrates, and stings like a man possessed. It just feels like such a natural style for him.
Returning to the gone-glitzin’ modern era, B. B. King Wails, in addition to regular slow and mid-tempo blues, also offers a couple of overtly sentimental blues ballads, such as ‘The Fool’, and even an exercise in old-fashioned doo-wop (‘I Love You So’), as well as a crude secularization of ‘Kumbaya’, retitled ‘Come By Here’ and turned into a celebration of lust, love, and traditional family values. Considering that for B. B. King, the most traditional of all family values was playing his guitar (the second was making lots of babies), we probably have little interest in hearing him «wail» his way through the minimal vocal requirements of "come by here, baby, come by here" without once touching the strings, while His Orchestra is just pumping away monotonously for two minutes and fifteen seconds.
The later-day expanded editions of the album throw in a couple more salvageable tracks, like a relatively vicious take on a song called ‘You’ve Been An Angel’, or the original take on King’s «confessional» number ‘Why I Sing The Blues’, or, most importantly, his collaboration with the Count Basie Orchestra on a five-minute long slowed-down version of ‘Everyday I Have The Blues’ — again, King prefers to simply sing here without touching his guitar, but at least he gets to see what a truly tasteful jazz orchestra sounds like: graceful, giving ample space to individual players while never trying to drown out the singer and keeping the flash’n’glitz factor to a minimum. Perhaps if he’d recorded the entire album with Count Basie rather than his own «orchestra», things would be different. As it is, this period in B. B.’s career seems more important from a purely historical perspective than in terms of general enjoyment.
[1] On a predictably «modern» note, the latest re-release of the LP, claiming to reproduce Original Liner Notes, politely replaces ‘Negro’ with ‘African-American’. I do appreciate the sentiment, but couldn’t they at least have filed this under Not Quite Original Liner Notes?