Review: Ruth Brown - Miss Rhythm (1959)
Tracks: 1) This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’; 2) Just Too Much; 3) I Hope We Meet (On The Road Some Day); 4) Why Me; 5) Somebody Touched Me; 6) When I Get You Baby; 7) Jack O’ Diamonds; 8) I Can’t Hear A Word You Say; 9) One More Time; 10) Book Of Lies; 11) I Can See Everybody’s Baby; 12) Show Me.
REVIEW
By the time Atlantic Records decided to reward Ruth with a second LP, she was no longer a certified cash cow for the label — in fact, not a single song from this LP, even if it does include a couple of hit singles, was later included on the label’s representative Atlantic Rhythm & Blues box set, which kind of engineers history in such a way as if Ruth Brown had vanished off the earth right after ‘Lucky Lips’. Actually, she stayed with the label for about four more years, and while the quality of her material over that period did degrade — nothing like the crazy mind-blowing run of R&B classics from her pre-1955 period — there are still plenty of goodies here to satisfy those who love their «classic» Ruth Brown and would like her to stay as she was, not trying to evolve and adapt too much to the changing times.
Because, just like about every other 1950s artist (with but a tiny handful of exceptions), having cozily settled in her groove of jazzy, loungy, brass-heavy R&B, Ruth Brown soon became unable, or unwilling, or both, to try and scale any potentially new heights. Most of the songs on Miss Rhythm, taken off various A- and B-sides recorded from 1957 to 1959, could just as well have been cut in 1951–52 — their tempos, arrangements, moods all feel rather quaint and old-fashioned even compared to the changing patterns of the late Fifties, never mind today. Long story short, after ‘Lucky Lips’ Ruth Brown ceased to be on the cutting edge of the music business — something that was immediately reflected in her commercial performance. Still respected as the chief architect of «The House That Ruth Built», she had first-rate professional songwriters continue to write stuff for her, like Leiber & Stoller and even the newly emerged star Bobby Darin (who actually began his career as a songwriter for other artists); but what they did write was usually quaint, dinky, old-fashioned R&B numbers that would suit the star of ‘Teardrops From My Eyes’ rather than a truly contemporary artist.
That said, decades later, when 1960, 1962, and even 1964 are just about as «old-fashioned» in our eyes as 1950, 1952, or 1954, we can look back at some of these titles without any anachronistic biases — and, perhaps, see that quite a few of them are moderately lovely, catchy, and spirited, offering us subtle variations on the «Ruth Brown Formula» that are nearly always listenable, and occasionally inspiring. Sometimes we’ll have to lower our expectations, or at least reframe them, but there shall still be a genuine fun vibe that’d be a shame to miss.
Thus, the album opens with one of Miss Brown’s biggest R&B chart hits post-1957: ‘This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’, written for her by Bobby Darin and Mann Curtis and very tellingly contrasting with earlier material such as ‘Hello Little Boy’ and ‘Wild Wild Young Men’ — this is what might be called «toothless-rebellion» pop rock, a song whose melody and lyrics both offer a faint vision of teenage ruckus, but with all the hormones strictly kept in check. Musically, the «shock» is confined to the opening bars, when the song goes from a slow, serenade-ish intro ("I wrote my mom a letter, and this is what I said...") to a fast, rocking romp which is nevertheless generally smooth and polished; and lyrically, the song really goes on a limb trying to teach us an important moral lesson — namely, that it’s only okay for a lady to "go rockin’" and "meet that special one" after washing the dishes, buying dinner at the grocery store, and putting fresh water in the puppy’s cup. Moreover, "I’ll be home about twelve tonight and not a minute, minute, minute later" — odd, isn’t it, to hear this from the mouth of a performer who allegedly ran away from home at the age of 17? Definitely a far cry from: "Wild wild young men like to have a good time / Wild men dig me, but I love a cool one"...
That said, the song is still pretty catchy, and the Atlantic groove is still pretty hot, and the twangy guitar flourishes are still tasty, and the sentiment is still relatable — after all, not all the young girls who liked to go out rocking in 1959 were flaming rebels at heart; many, if not most, simply wanted to have a bit of a good time, without necessarily antagonizing their parents or intentionally defying conservative social standards. ‘This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’ kind of speaks out for all those happy middle-of-the-road souls, and Ruth makes a great impersonation of this little exuberant personality; check out especially her excited wows! and yeays! during the fadeout. If you want to hear a not-particularly impressive version of the song, there’s always the old British cover from Glenda Collins, who somehow seems to miss the song’s entire point — she sings the whole thing in a strong, confident, «manly» tone as if she were the rock’n’roll reincarnation of Marlene Dietrich or something, when in reality what is needed here is a much lighter, frailer approach; and chalk it up to Ruth’s versatility that she is able to get into this other character so well.
Unfortunately, the album does not include Ruth’s biggest chart success of 1959, the slow lounge-blues ballad ‘I Don’t Know’; it’s not particularly great, but it could have added an extra mood angle to the collection, which gives us very little of Ruth’s «vulnerable» side (only the B-side ‘Book Of Lies’ from 1958 can probably qualify, but it’s an overwrought torch ballad with too much loungey pathos in place of actual feeling, and I really don’t like it very much; ‘I Don’t Know’ establishes a much more adequate balance between vocals and music). It does, however, include ‘Jack O’ Diamonds’, one of Brown’s very last hit singles and also the only instance of her collaboration with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — who, it must be said, did not waste a lot of their time on Atlantic’s fading star: ‘Jack O’ Diamonds’ is a simple pop ballad about an unlucky gambler whose melody is rather generic and whose words are neither too funny nor too serious, while the B-side, ‘I Can’t Hear A Word You Say’, is much more interesting lyrically (Ruth delightfully gets into character as she is playing a self-confident lady putting down an obnoxiously loaded «talent scout») but musically is more or less a rewrite of Leiber and Stoller’s already famous ‘Framed’, so no big surprises here.
Other songs worth hearing at least once include: ‘Just Too Much’, a fast-paced ‘Mack The Knife’ variation with an unusually prominent organ part (the instrumental break in the middle is technically simple, but totally kick-ass! wish I knew who exactly was rocking the keys with such verve); ‘Somebody Touched Me’, an unearthed B-side way back from 1954 with one of Ruth’s sexiest deliveries ever — the melody is a very standard ‘My Babe’-type blues pattern, but the way she swoons over those "somebody touched me, in the dark last night" lines really makes the tune into one of the naughtiest sex songs of the decade (it’s up to the defendant to prove they’re not narrating the details of a blind orgy!); and the slow, old-fashioned doo-wop ballad ‘I Can See Everybody’s Baby’, also way back from 1955, with Ruth’s powerful, ecstatic voice rising dramatically over the accompanying backing vocalists, as if she were really singing this from within a crowd of people, frantically looking for her one and only in a faceless crowd.
On the other hand, there is quite a bit of filler, particularly a bunch of vaudeville pop numbers (like ‘When I Get You Baby’ and ‘Show Me’) released in the wake of the success of ‘Lucky Lips’ — and all of them were flops, because they may have used similar musical formulae but they carried over none of the seductive sassiness of ‘Lucky Lips’. Honestly, they should have thrown all those away and replaced them with some of the more qualified oldies — in addition to ‘Somebody Touched Me’, for instance, a couple editions of this album also throw on ‘Love Contest’ from 1954, which, honestly, might be the single most «indecent» number on the R&B market of the 1950s that I’ve ever heard: "Well, me and my baby / Had a love contest / ’Cause we just had to find out / Who could love the best". Now this little girl’s really gone rockin’...
Overall, it is hard to get rid of the impression that Ruth Brown symbolizes «The Rise» of Atlantic’s R&B queen, whereas Miss Rhythm reflects «The Fall» of a star who was outliving her own epoch; but there are very different kinds of falls, and this one was not particularly embarrassing — for a lady like Ruth Brown to soothen and smoothen her formerly «wild» sound was nowhere near as disheartening as for somebody like, say, Gene Vincent, who was never versatile and whose idea of «subtlety» and «nuance» was so Neanderthal in essence that when he found himself in an epoch calling for subtlety and rejecting brutal wildness, he lost most of his commercial and critical appeal in a flash. For Ruth, it seems, stuff like ‘Wild Wild Young Men’ and ‘Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean’ was more like just a phase — arguably, the most heavily demanded and the most artistically relevant phase in her musical life — yet she could wield and convincingly present multiple personalities, and even if you get bored with much of this material, it is hard to deny that in her prime years, the lady was capable of just about anything. That her musical career did not really survive into the next decade is more a result of the general «Fifties’ Curse» than her personal shortcomings.