Review: B. B. King - My Kind Of Blues (1960)
Tracks: 1) You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now; 2) Mr. Pawn Broker; 3) Understand; 4) Someday Baby; 5) Driving Wheel; 6) Walking Dr. Bill; 7) My Own Fault, Baby; 8) Cat Fish Blues; 9) Hold That Train; 10) Please Set The Date.
REVIEW
I think that this was, chronologically, the last of B. B. King’s three LPs for Crown Records in 1960; at least, the release date on the CD reissue says «c. August 1960», and the singles that were either incorporated into the album or culled from it are mostly dated to the fall of 1960 or early 1961. Not that the precise date makes a lot of difference, of course. What does make a bit of difference is that the material is mostly new and cohesive; the new liner notes state that the songs were mainly recorded around March 3, 1960, with a small blues combo heavily featuring Lloyd Glenn on piano, as opposed to the brass-heavy «B. B. King Orchestra» on previous releases from the same year. (The old liner notes, written by a guy called John Marlo, are, in comparison, completely uninformative — for some reason, the guy spends half of the allocated space on a description of what is jazz, including a folk etymology for the word. Hello? Maybe he thought he was writing a blurb for the Kings of Dixieland, then decided it would be a waste to scrap whatever he’d just concocted).
Anyway, if you had been pining all this time for a 30 minute-long set of just B. B. King and his blues guitar — no strings, no horns, no mushy ballads, no spirituals, just raw blues — this record is certainly for you. And given its title, we must suppose that it must have been for B. B. as well, although this immediately begs the question — are all those strings and horns on all those other records supposed to be mere commercial bait for B. B. King’s polite middle-class audiences, then? Probably not. My guess is that B. B. just likes to play the king-of-the-mountain game, and the more people you can get into the studio or onto the stage with him, the more impressive of an impression he can give. It’s one thing when your mountain is just you and a small rhythm section, and an entirely different one when there’s a trumpet or a violin player standing on each slope; then, when you crank up the volume on Lucille, you can truly feel like the head of the Pantheon.
The downside is that there is very little to be said about the individual tracks on the album. It’s just ten cuts of solid, decent 12-bar blues, well played, well sung, and mostly interchangeable. Like The Great B. B. King, this record also kicks off with an extended cut — the five minute-long ‘You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now’ — but it fails to produce the same effect of a serious personal confession that ‘Sweet Sixteen’ did, and although the guitar-piano duet in the middle section is pleasant to the ear, there is nothing in King’s tone or phrasing here that we have not already heard dozens of times.
That much of the record passes by in the same way — as tasteful, but forgettable background music — is all the more sad to realize, given a certain conceptual angle to the album: most of the songs are covers by a variety of King’s predecessors and contemporaries, all the way from Roosevelt Sykes (‘Driving Wheel’), Sleepy John Estes (‘Someday Baby’), and Memphis Minnie (‘Please Set A Date’, misspelled here with the definite rather than indefinite article) to Muddy Waters (‘My Own Fault’) and lesser known figures like Peter Joe Clayton (‘Walking Dr. Bill’). With most of these covers originally recorded in the 1930s and 1940s, My Kind Of Blues is sort of an early predecessor to Eric Clapton’s From The Cradle — but where Eric would at least ensure a certain degree of variety in his styles and moods, B. B. King here just puts everything through the same B. B. King grinder. Most of those songs were set to the same two or three melodies anyway, and the only thing that made them distinct was their relative performer’s personality — but no matter whether it is the legacy of Memphis Minnie or Peter Joe Clayton that is being processed, the end result is always predictable.
Some of these numbers would end up firmly wedged in King’s live sets (both ‘My Own Fault’ and ‘You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now’ ended up on Live At The Regal), but that’s more because they are decent landing pads from where he could lift off into the realm of musical improvisation and verbal ad-libbing. As it is, the only song from here I could perhaps recommend as a song is ‘Understand’ — which is not really ‘Understand’ (again, some Crown executive probably thought it a waste of his time to ask the artist for a proper name), but Cecil Gant’s ‘I’m A Good Man But A Poor Man’, which King performs with minimal emphasis on the guitar and maximum on the piano, as per the original; his natural charisma helps him make the line "I’m a good man, but a poor man, understand" quite believable, even if there is hardly any doubt in my mind that it is only in a most relative way that B. B. King could call himself «poor» back in 1960.
The bonus tracks on the CD re-issue, selected by Ace Records executives in 2003, prolong the experience but do not really enhance it — just a few more (mostly previously unissued) generic blues performances from the same sessions, including well-known titles like ‘Blues At Sunrise’ and ‘Drifting Blues’ that all follow the same musical formula. Only a deep, nuanced aficionado of electric blues could be wooed by the challenge of differentiating between all these interchangeable solos; to me, it’s just B. B. King in generic workaholic mode, and the most impressive thing about it is to realize that he would eventually rise to the challenge of making his Lucille speak with a whole new voice in the coming decades. Had he forever remained at this stuck-in-the-Fifties level, what would be the chances of B. B. King Blues Club & Grill opening in Times Square? (Sure it closed down in 2018, but eighteen years of first-rate catfish and jambalaya are nothing to shake a stick at!)
Only Solitaire reviews: B. B. King