Midnite Blues Party
(Bullseye)
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Artists like this weren’t consciously trying to broaden their demographic or keep an endangered genre alive. They were just responding to what was going on. Occasionally one of these forward-looking blues guys would manage to crack the pop charts, like Slim Harpo with “Baby Scratch My Back” in 1966. Some of the ones that wouldn’t wound up on Midnite Blues Party, a collection (released last year by the Toronto blues label Electro-Fi) that documents a time when R & B really was a combination of rhythm and blues–and the combination kept on changing.
Sides like these seem to get short shrift on blues reissue albums, although they’ve had an underground rep for years with rockabilly, surf, and garage freaks. When they do turn up it’s on odd comps like the multivolume “Stompin’” and “Black Rock & Roll” (later retitled “Savage Kick”) series, which play up the rock ‘n’ roll angle. Earlier this year, after the blues community’s warm reception of Midnite Blues Party, Electro-Fi put out a second volume that doesn’t really have much to do with the first–it goes all the way back to the jump-blues performers of the 40s and 50s. Although there’d be no rock or soul without the jump-blues crowd, the new music was still a foggy notion when they were recording. There wasn’t yet a sense of this newfangled style that would have to be dealt with, whether you got into it or got around it.
While this musical cross-fertilization was going on, the young man then known as Guitar Eddy Harrington was taking it all in. Originally from Birmingham, by the mid-50s he was playing around Chicago’s south side and listening to country-style R & B like Chuck Berry’s “Oh Baby Doll.” Renamed Clear Waters (as opposed to Muddy; he’d take his current name within a few years), he cut a rocking series of Berry-flavored tracks for Atomic-H, a label run by his uncle, the Reverend Houston H. Harrington. (You can hear some of them on the Delmark compilation Chicago Ain’t Nothin’ but a Blues Band.) Even after he recast himself as a straight bluesman in the 70s, just about every one of his albums had a token rockabilly song on it. But on the new Rock ‘n’ Roll City, recorded with masked surf rockers Los Straitjackets, he flips the formula around: it’s basically a rockabilly album with a token blues song.
However, as a local musician told me once, looking for good music in these situations is akin to looking for fine art at a shooting gallery. It’s not hard to find better examples of opening up the blues to new ideas. Working soul-blues bands are doing it every night in clubs on the south and west sides. Eddy Clearwater’s been doing it for 45 years or so. And all those relative unknowns on Midnite Blues Party–they may have done it only once, but you know what? They did it.
