Review: Jackie Wilson - Jackie Sings The Blues (1960)
Tracks: 1) Please Tell Me Why; 2) Doggin’ Around; 3) New Girl In Town; 4) Nothin’ But The Blues; 5) Passin’ Through; 6) Excuse Me For Lovin’; 7) She Done Me Wrong; 8) Sazzle Dazzle; 9) Please Stick Around; 10) Come On And Love Me Baby; 11) Comin’ To Your House; 12) It’s Been A Long Time.
REVIEW
Contrary to the blanket statement on the cover of the album, Jackie does not really sing the blues. It’s somewhat impressive that they got him to put together a «bluesy» facial expression on the album cover — the closest to a «damn girl, why ya breakin’ my heart?» attitude he ever got on one of those — but in 1960, for most people who knew anything about anything «blues» meant the likes of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, and I can no more imagine a Jackie Wilson successfully interpeting ‘Smokestack Lightning’ or ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ than Ozzy Osbourne trying out for Rigoletto. But it is interesting to note how music industry executives actually respected the word «blues» — just slap it on the cover of your local pop idol’s next LP, and there’s your aura of critical respectability. Mr. Smith goes to Washington, Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter Song Book, and Jackie? Jackie sings the blues. Like, uh, Perry Como.
Naturally, my first gut reaction to the album was gut level rejection — and boredom. It’s bad enough to get yourself accustomed to B. B. King’s «Vegasy» take on the blues and slowly, meticulously convince yourself that just because a man hires himself a big brass band and takes to wearing bowties and sparkle jackets, this does not necessarily mean the lack of a genuine bluesy heart to go along with the glitzy paraphernalia. But Jackie Wilson? Not only does he not even play a mean blues guitar, but his voice, so perfect for doo-wop and light-hearted R&B, does not have even an ounce of that earthy grit, required to make any decent blues material come alive. It’s got plenty of operatic melodrama, for sure, but the blues calls for roughness, not smoothness. Such a ridiculous genre mismatch.
Then, of course, you begin to remember that «blues» is rather a many-splendored thing, and is — or, at least, used to be, particularly in the pre-Eric Clapton era — just as often applied to sad and broken-hearted music in general, regardless of how accurately it follows the classic 12-bar pattern. And from that point of view, it is definitely true that there is rather an abundance of «broken-hearted» material on this particular album — so the title doesn’t really flat-out lie to you — and then you might also notice that almost none of it here actually follows the classic 12-bar pattern at all. Technically speaking, Jackie Sings The Blues is a mix of doo-wop, «standards-oriented» pop, classic R&B, and gospel-tinged soul — in other words, more or less the kind of stuff that Jackie had been doing from the get-go, the only difference being the conspicuous lack of boppy, catchy, uptempo fun songs like ‘Reet Petite’ or ‘So Much’... and even those are also represented by at least one specimen (the appropriately called ‘Sazzle Dazzle’), which even the (new) liner notes to the album rather embarrassingly admit to having nothing to do with the blues at all.
One other important technical note to make is that the material is all brand new — unlike, for instance, Sam Cooke, who actually covered true blues songs like ‘Little Red Rooster’ for his Night Beat album, none of these songs are covers of classic blues standards. Even more, they’re sort of mystery songs, credited to people with names like «Lena Agree», «Joyce Lee», «Scot Steam» and even, get this, «Paul Hack». A little bit of digging around led to the information that Lena Agree might have been the aunt of Jackie’s manager, Nat Tarnopol, but I’m not even going to bother about «Paul Hack» or any of the others; I can only shed a tear of compassion for all those unknown people who have been swindled out of their well-earned royalties for the financial benefit of Nat and other members of the music business conspiracy. The bottomline for us here is they didn’t exactly go to people like Willie Dixon to provide material for Jackie’s «blues album»; rather, they were commissioning songs from the usual roster of pop, doo-wop, and R&B songwriters, masking them with aliases as if to convince the listener of the arrival of a new breed of expert bluesy tunesmiths.
Not that the entire strategy had any sound purpose. Like any other Jackie Wilson LP, this one failed to chart just as well, and because of its intentional lack of bouncy-hooky, uplifting, danceable material, neither did it yield any important chart singles for the man. The only title vaguely remembered from it was ‘Doggin’ Around’, for being selected as the B-side to the much more successful ‘Night’ a few months later, and, perhaps, also for being unexpectedly resurrected more than a decade later by the young Michael Jackson for his Music & Me album. Interestingly, it is one of the slowest titles on the album — more doo-wop than blues, and much more intent on showing how many overtones and undertones the man can go through in one syllable than on how many different vocal hoops he can jump through over the course of one verse. It’s quite old-fashioned, really, a good choice for a dedicated doo-wop fan who wants to get a solid early Fifties’ vibe with sparkling clean Sixties’ production, but it doesn’t do all that much for me, unfortunately.
I mean, I’m just a simple guy, really: I see a Jackie Wilson album — I spy a title like ‘Sazzle Dazzle’ first and foremost, because it’s probably going to be the best song on it. The trick here is to start the song off in slow and solemn gospel mode, then pick up and turn it into a worthy successor to ‘It’s So Fine’ and ‘So Much’, with the expected blitzkrieg attack of screams, falsettos, rolled r’s, and whatever else the Wilsonmacht has placed at its disposal. A little second-hand, for sure, but the formula had not yet completely lost its excitement at the time.
It’s also amusing to note that the slow-moving pieces, for all the added depth of feeling, still cannot help but occupy a minority of the album: besides ‘Doggin’ Around’, there’s also the opening ‘Please Tell Me Why’ (a very pathetically overblown piece with one of the least believable "black dirt under my feet, storm clouds over my head" lines I’ve ever heard in my life, really); ‘Nothin’ But The Blues’, a rare straightforward 12-bar number on the album that simply begs for a B. B. King guest spot; and the closing ‘It’s Been A Long Time’, which nicks its "daa-doo-day" backing vocals (and the word ‘time’ as well, for that matter) from Ray Charles’ ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’ but cannot hope to nick the same level of energy and excitement. That’s 4 out of 12 — and you can freely hop, bop, and twist the night away to most of the rest.
Except the rest is just not too memorable, either. Whether it is because all the «Lena Agrees» and «Paul Hacks» were hired from the local pool of Decca’s cleaning services, or because there was some magical mystical belief that using the word ‘blues’ automatically injects blue blood into your songs, all those boppy numbers boast little more than their boppy tempos and predictably professional, but hardly inventive vocalizations from Jackie. It’s all listenable, but nothing will probably stick around by the time the album’s over, despite Jackie’s invocations for y’all to ‘Please Stick Around’. The backing band sets up solid grooves, the backing vocalists serve as reliably resilient pillows for Jackie to launch himself from them into the stratosphere, but in the end it’s just show business as usual.
Coincidentally, April 1960, when the album was released, also saw the appearance of the Elvis Is Back! LP, comparable to this one to a certain extent — it also featured a couple of «authentic» blues numbers, such as ‘Reconsider Baby’, yet it was just as unable to establish Elvis as a credible blues singer. Actually, the reason for this is pretty simple: the one thing that the «black Elvis» (Jackie) and the «white Elvis» (umm... Elvis?) had in common was the desire — and ability — to sing perfectly, bringing the achievements of ideal pitch, phrasing, and breath control to the worlds of rock and pop music. Blues music, on the contrary, loathes the very idea of «smooth perfection» and «Apollonic beauty»; even B. B. King, who was probably the single most successful blues musician to push his musical world close to those ideals, still had a slight whiff of the cotton fields in his voice and a sharp sting of the rattlesnake bite in his guitar playing. And even if this album, as we have established, is not really trying to push that bluesy vibe on you wholesale, it still feels a bit... malfunctional, I’d say, from the very start. Definitely not the most stellar of Jackie’s early efforts.
Only Solitaire Reviews: Jackie Wilson