Review: LaVern Baker - Blues Ballads (1959)
Tracks: 1) I Cried A Tear; 2) If You Love Me; 3) You’re Teasing Me; 4) Love Me Right; 5) Dix-A-Billy; 6) So High So Low; 7) I Waited Too Long; 8) Why Baby Why; 9) Humpty Dumpty Heart; 10) It’s So Fine; 11) Whipper Snapper; 12) St. Louis Blues.
REVIEW
After the daring, but questionable experiment of luring the spirit of Bessie Smith into the body of LaVern Baker, Atlantic Records went back to the tried and true formula of packaging the artist’s next LP as a collection of her most promising singles from recent years. For some reason, this time around they slapped the title Blues Ballads on the cover, even if there is hardly a single song here that I could honestly describe as a «blues ballad». B. B. King sang «blues ballads»; LaVern Baker, at least in the late Fifties, mostly sang pop songs. Maybe some creative person at Atlantic was inspired by a title like Odetta’s Sings Ballads And Blues and thought along the lines of "if Odetta can define herself as something like this, why can’t our own Little Miss Sharecropper get the same honors?" And not even the inclusion of lightweight pop jingles such as ‘Humpty Dumpty Heart’ made any difference. Then again, who really cares?
Instead of poking the usual fun at record executives (especially now that we have already poked the usual fun at record executives), let us simply continue to trace the singles history of Ms. Baker, picking up from where we last left it with ‘Jim Dandy’ and ‘Jim Dandy Got Married’. LaVern’s very next release, from August 1957, was the above-mentioned ‘Humpty Dumpty Heart’ — arguably the nadir of her «novelty phase», catchy enough for a quick laugh but completely lacking that little bit of nitty-gritty toughness that made ‘Tweedlee Dee’ and ‘Jim Dandy’ pack a real punch together with their comedy spirit. Honestly, it’s a bit of an embarrassment (even if it gives you a rare chance to see the real LaVern Baker in a bit of lip-sync action, from Alan Freed’s Mr. Rock And Roll programme). The B-side, ‘Love Me Right’, is far superior — a dramatic rather than comic performance, on which Baker’s voice commands actual respect; it’s still very much «pop» rather than «blues», but it’s really the spirit that matters, and she’s in truly fine form here.
At least the record-buying public seemed to share the same opinion; the flop of ‘Humpty Dumpty Heart’ thankfully heralded a return to more sensible musical territory for LaVern’s subsequent releases. Her oddly upbeat take on ‘St. Louis Blues’ (November ’57) did not chart either, and I am not entirely sure if setting the drama of the song to a galloping ‘Jim Dandy’-style beat really made much sense, but at least it was a novel thing to do, and quite likely inspired the idea of the entire Sings Bessie Smith album as a consequence. Next came her own take on the old chestnut of ‘Harbor Lights’ (not included on the LP) — decent if you’re into this kind of material, but I far prefer the fast-tempo blues-rock of ‘Whipper Snapper’ on the B-side (included on the LP). At least it’s credited to Leiber & Stoller, has classy interplay between piano, regular brass, and sax, and has LaVern acting tough rather than trying to «seduce» you as she did on ‘Humpty Dumpty Heart’. What’s up with all those B-sides ending up better than the «money sides», anyway?
Next up (September ’58) is another misfire — a cover of ‘It’s So Fine’, which was one of the highlights on Jackie Wilson’s recent He’s So Fine album. What works for Jackie, who has the same way with sounds as a natural-born juggler has with oranges, does not in the least work for LaVern Baker, whose painfully labored "it’s so fi-ayee-ayye-ayye-aiine" hiccups in the chorus make her sound like she’s hopping around on hot coals. Again, the B-side, ‘Why Baby Why’, is a comparatively superior, if not outstanding, piece of mid-tempo R&B, too seriously derivative of Leiber & Stoller’s ‘Young Blood’, perhaps, to be remembered, but at least not containing any cringeworthy moments.
Finally, the gods smiled on the poor artist in November ’58, with the release of ‘I Cried A Tear’, which became LaVern’s biggest ever chart hit and her signature ballad. Musically, to be honest, it is nothing but a re-write of Chuck Willis’ ‘What Am I Living For’ from earlier the same year — but sonically, it is much more polished, with a sophisticated, multi-layered arrangement, a great King Curtis sax solo, and a nuanced vocal performance, in which LaVern juggles soft, dreamy vocals with powerful operatic rocket launches on an almost entirely new level of expertise. The novelty tune ‘Dix-A-Billy’ was this time happily relegated to the B-side, where nobody has bothered to remember it and for a very good reason.
The huge success of ‘I Cried A Tear’ obviously predicted that the next song, too, would be a slow-waltzing ballad; this time, the writers were Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, but what they wrote was ‘I Waited Too Long’, yet another variation on the same formula, albeit with a couple of different key changes in the middle to avoid accusations of plagiarism. It plays out like a little brother to ‘I Cried A Tear’, similar to it but just a trifle inferior in every single respect, so it’s certainly no surprise that it was unable to repeat the success of its predecessor. The B-side was ‘You’re Teasing Me’, a mambo-influenced bit of lightweight dance fun whose little bit of interplay between a curiously distorted electric guitar and King Curtis’ wobbly «up-and-down-the-ladder» sax runs is frankly more interesting than LaVern’s singing.
Finally, we pause our journey around June ’59, with ‘So High, So Low’, the best thing about which is that it breaks LaVern out of the formula, only to put her back into the pure upbeat pop mode — not too bad, not too good. More impressive is the B-side, ‘If You Love Me’, which begins as inauspicious doo-wop but quickly begins to rise to gospel heights, showcasing Ms. Baker’s talent in the sphere of «heavy belting». In its own way, it sets out the path to a more prominent gospel career that would soon follow, culminating in hits like ‘Saved’ and an entire gospel album later in the year (Precious Memories) which was, not coincidentally, recorded at around the same time as ‘If You Love Me’.
All in all, it’s a fun journey even if it contains more relative lows than highs — fun to see an artist surfing atop all those different genres, perhaps not really understanding whether she loves silly novelty songs more than gritty R&B or if she prefers sophisticated pop ballads to Latin dance pastiches; or maybe she just preferred to see herself as some sort of «R&B-naissance Woman» who could be equally good at all those things. In any case, examples like these clearly show just how progressive the Atlantic label was in those days — while those guys obviously knew (and often abused) the power of stable commercial formula, they were also flexible enough to twist and vary the formula at the exact moment when its commercial stability was no longer guaranteed.
I cannot comment on anything except "I Cried A Tear." I never noticed until you pointed it out that it is the exact same melody as "What Am I Living For," but while LaVern Baker undoubtedly was a better performer than Chuck Willis (kind of goes without saying), I sort of still prefer the humble sadness and longingness of the original. I think the original was already an ideal creation as is, smooth and slick with an undercurrent of melancholy, and probably had Chuck's most sincere performance. I find Chuck's straining of notes towards the end a bit more resonant than LaVern's "operatic rocket blasts" as you put it. I think making the song more pompous makes it a tad inadequate. Still, I enjoy both songs anyways, so I'm just nitpicking. And anyways, her best interpretation of a Chuck Willis cover/original was later with See See Rider anyways. Good review George!