Review: B. B. King - The Great B. B. King (1960)
Tracks: 1) Sweet Sixteen; 2) I’m Gonna Quit My Baby; 3) I Was Blind; 4) Just Sing The Blues (What Can I Do); 5) Someday Baby (Some Day Somewhere); 6) Sneakin’ Around; 7) I Had A Woman (Ten Long Years); 8) Be Careful With A Fool; 9) Whole Lot Of Lovin’ (Whole Lotta’ Love); 10) Days Of Old.
REVIEW
This one may actually have been released earlier than King Of The Blues — sources are somewhat conflicting and contradictory — but arranging all those Crown releases in strict chronological order is a time-wasting affair even for the diehard B. B. King fan, because the songs on them are always taken from a messy mix of sessions, sometimes stretching across half a decade or more. If there is anything that does matter, it is the chronological sequencing of King’s singles — and understanding which of the more recent ones serve as the pivot of this or that particular LP. The rest were, in fact, so hastily selected from the backlog that Crown executives sometimes put the same song on more than one LP by mistake, and often messed up the titles as well (for instance, ‘Ten Long Years’ was titled ‘I Had A Woman’ on the original issue, and ‘What Can I Do’ was titled ‘Just Sing The Blues’ — apparently, some of the guys were just listening to the lyrics and figuring out for themselves what could be the best title for song so-and-so, just like us Soviet kids in happy innocent times when we could lay our hands on an un-annotated second-hand cassette recording of some US or UK LP and had to invent our own titles...).
Anyway, at least for The Great B. B. King the situation is clear: this LP was built up from the ground around B. B. King’s biggest R&B hit in six years — the two-part ‘Sweet Sixteen’, released in January 1960 and making it all the way to #2. This was not the first time King had split a single song across both sides of the single: the first such endeavor dates back to May 1956, with the upbeat jump-blues ‘Dark Is The Night’ — however, in that particular case the two parts were actually separate recordings, with a decisive coda to each of the two. ‘Sweet Sixteen’, on the other hand, is a slow, ponderous six-minute blues that originally faded away at the end of Side A and faded back in at the beginning of Side B — signalizing that this was indeed the first time when King thought so much of one of his songs that he insisted it would be given the full-length treatment. (Of course, there are no fade-outs on the LP itself).
Not that ‘Sweet Sixteen’ was really one of his songs; it had first been made into a hit by Big Joe Turner as early as 1952, and for many, it is Big Joe’s version on the Atlantic label that remains the definitive one. B. B. does not stray too far away from the original tempo or arrangement (although he does throw in a couple of extra verses), and, surprisingly, after the short instrumental introduction there is not a single guitar solo break during the song’s six minutes — the only lead guitar work is supplied in between B. B.’s vocal lines. Clearly, the song meant a lot to him (it would also become a regular element of his concert setlists), and he does turn in a great vocal performance, even if that line about how "my brother, he’s in Korea" probably did not resonate as deeply with audiences in 1960 as it did back in 1952. (I do wonder a little about the implications of the follow-up of "and my sister, she’s down in New Orleans" — is this supposed to be a veiled reference to the House Of The Rising Sun? because otherwise, what harm could there be in the protagonist’s sister ending up down in New Orleans?). When it gets to the grand finale of "baby I wonder, yes I wonder, baby I wonder... what in the world is gonna happen to me?", B. B. really proves his worth as a singer, almost exploding in an orgasm of delirious self-pity toward which he’d been steadily building up for all of those six minutes.
And thus, The Great B. B. King is really just ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and... all those other songs. Oh no, they’re not half bad: it’s just that the most chronologically recent of those dates back to July 1958 (‘Days Of Old’ indeed!), and the one that is the most chronologically distant is ‘Some Day Somewhere’ from July 1952. Basically, the label people just went through their archives and stuffed the album full of songs they hadn’t previously put on LPs — naturally, they made at least two mistakes, because ‘What Can I Do?’ had already been released on The Blues, and ‘Ten Long Years’ was originally included on Singin’ The Blues, but who’s gonna remember that, right? If they don’t remember it on B. B. King’s own record label, surely all those people who bought the album two years ago won’t remember it, either.
Anyway, just some brief observations on some of these numbers to boost their individuality just a little. ‘Whole Lotta’ Love’, the B-side to ‘You Upset Me Baby’ from October 1954 — funny how the song begins with the ‘Dust My Broom’ riff, as if B. B. King is telling us that he can out-Elmore James the real Elmore James like a little kid, and he doesn’t even need to come back to the ‘Dust My Broom’ riff in the mid-song instrumental break like the real Elmore James always does. Unfortunately, the difference is that B. B. King still sounds bowtie-suave, where Elmore James always sounded down-to-earth.
‘Sneakin’ Around’, the B-side to ‘Every Day I Have The Blues’ from December 1954 — it’s incredible how sleazy this guy can sound when crooning about his covert love affair with an (apparently) married woman. At the end of the song, he just melts away in a doo-woppy falsetto, with such pervy delicacy that it is highly likely all the hearts of all the married women in the audience would be his by this point. If you listen deep and hard enough to this performance, it’s difficult not to walk away feeling a little... dirty. Yet the immaculate bowtie still stays on for the entire duration of the suave blues ballad.
Finally, ‘Days Of Old’, released in July 1958, actually sounds like a very retro-oriented jump-blues number — I am not sure if it is actually an outtake from a much earlier recording session or was deliberately recorded to evoke the feeling of a late 1940s night club with Wynonie Harris at the wheel. In any case, the song’s message — "there’s no use to break the rules because every man is some woman’s fool" — is one of those classic bits of pseudo-wisdom that can have a feministic or a misogynistic interpretation depending on which side of the bed you got out of this morning, and it’s nice to have the album finish on a fast number after way too many slow blues and ballads.
(If you own the Rhino re-release of the record with all of the bonus tracks, the fastest number is actually ‘Bim Bam’, a very odd B-side from mid-’56 on which B. B. King seems to imitate a hybrid of Little Richard and LaVern Baker, singing a non-sensical kiddie rock’n’roll melody at breakneck speed. It’s technically fun, but it also makes clear that the one genre that B. B. King has absolutely no voice for is high-tempo rock’n’roll — he feels stilted and embarrassed, almost afraid to truly «let it all hang out» as if the worst thing that could happen would be for him to be taken for a «teenage idol»).
Only Solitaire reviews: B. B. King