Barrence Whitfield: It takes a savage man to lead a savage band

Perhaps it would be overly generous to remark that every generation has its Soul-shouting spectacle who tears up stages and reminds audiences how damn good it is to be alive, aware, and partaking of the hipness known only by the clever.

Golden eras of yore had Solomon Burke, the 'Wicked Pickett,' and Little Richard. The Hep-smart presently inhaling have Barrence.

He looms atop a recordings-stash (which dates back to 1984), and from that acme looses volleys of borderline unhingedness that is very much of old-school R&B manner, were said revered genre to stick a finger in a wall socket. 

In each ringing note, chunkablock chord architecture, and snapped-tight downbeat, thrives the bold truth that Barrence and the free-for-all roustabouts with whom he makes common wildside cause are so intimately proficient in and just plain in love with Rock'n'Soul's capacity for uplift that it would be an injustice of brobdingnagian proportion for them to be doing anything other than this right here.

Glory, his and the Savages' most recent wax, was issued in 2023 by Folc Records. Its 12 engravings make my above argument with staggering aplomb. "Bad Situation" commences bacchanalian matters with knees-high brass and percussive determination that wise folks shuffling in aisles expect from Barrence and gathered gang.

With trademark insistence (vented via yowling and gleeful whoops), the man whose name adorns the marquee cuts up without filter and at towerblock volume. In fact -- thankfully -- such is his way through and through.

The band that few others would even try to follow includes founding members and guest horns. Mere adjectives would surely falter in the task of conveying members' assorted front-of-class qualities. Listen for your own edification.

"Right Hand Man" and "I Do My Best to Survive" scatter audacious eminence across airspace, variously asserting sax blats, pumped-to-maximum rhythms, and wise-to-ways-of-nightlife guitar authoritativeness.

That's all in addition to Barrence's howling from the mountaintop. He's our season's Soul-shouting spectacle.

Videos: "Bad Situation"   "Right Hand Man"   "I Do My Best to Survive"   "I'll Be Gone"

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Just reissued by Cupcakes and Muffins is 2003's Strange Adventures, a collaboration between Barrence and former Radio King fret-massager Mike Dinallo. The two are billed as the Mercy Brothers. They are further enabled by Norwegian Blues guitar nobleman Vidar Busk. Material and performances here are much closer to orthodox Soul than Barrence and the Savages' boisterous ferality.

Steve Hooker's guitar is on fire - again

England's Steve Hooker is every bit the genuine specimen. No pretender could boast his resume. In addition to producing a decades-spanning body of vibrant, sprawling solo endeavors boasting imperial bearing, he's gigged and recorded with pegged personages like Robert Gordon, Wilko Johnson, Boz Boorer, Johnny Thunders, and Levi Dexter.

It's not difficult to dissect the many-sired Rock'n'Roll roar that inspires earthy abandon and nocturnal, hip grinding hours. Blues, Country, and Rhythm and Blues each play prominently. Easier still to throw oneself into their combined mesmeric grasp. 

But wrenching such storms from six strings, with the blood familiarity Steve so obviously possesses, is hardly on common offer. And only the emphatically cubish would turn from opportunities to savor.

Last year, Steve remastered 2013's Smokin' Guitar. It's what those hip to the tip anticipated from the RockabillyBluesSoulMan, and his Stripped-Down Stompin' Band: gut punches from rugged Rock'n'Roll territory. A corrupting beat-trove of slide-guitared dirty fun, the way taboo Rock'n'Roll (in its varied and thorny/horny countenances) sounded in its early years. And the way that it can still come over.

"I can't play in any other way than what's true to me," Steve once confessed.

Bracing and hard-lashed, "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)," "Gospel Ground," "Steel Sedan," and "Wicked Blues" are but half of the disc's stouthearted examples of what ensues when someone with true, roots-music heart and soul plugs in.

All songs bounce and drive, crazily cool, sliding and swaying wonderfully in coarsely-grained rudeness. The rollicking blast is packed out by harmonica swipes bespeaking real-world experience. 

Think of basic, guitared-juggernauts of the sort the Rolling Stones gave up, back in the day. Or early Faces.

Steve agreed with that assessment, in years-ago conversation. "I think we all drink from the same well. Obviously the Stones draw on the whole history of American music and growing up in the fifties with the development of television. I was influenced by the same things."

"I guess this type of Rhythm 'n' Blues hybrid music became 'Mid Atlantic' when I was a kid - I can't and don't want to play or sing anything except what is deep inside of me.

"For instance I don't often refer to cars, automobiles or motorcycles except in passing because I don't have a drivers license. I wouldn't sing that I was born Mississippi - but I might write about a girl in Tennessee or Las Vegas because I just spoke to her by email. It's all around us."

Steve digs that it isn't only the raucous sound but the brash attitude, the way our music makes you live and love and yell and dance and feel -- inside and out -- that won't ever go away. Can't ever go away.

He won't let it.

Videos: "Wolf Farm (Grange Aux Loops)"    "Gospel Ground"   "Steel Sedan"   "Wicked Blues (Non-Filter)"

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Back in the Day, 1969

Steve Cropper

With a Little Help from My Friends

(Volt - US, Stax -UK)

In Jimmy Vaughn's phrasing: Six Strings Down. 

Wednesday the third brought news that Steve Cropper had expired, departing in his 84th solar orbit.

Steve's deft stylings took him from the 1960s' Stax house band (Booker T and the MGs) - with whom he gilded way too numerous Soul/R&B gems for succinct enumeration - to recording and filming with Blues Brothers John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, to further global pinnacles unglimpsed by most.

A city cat and his country cousin slapped hands, threw their respective uptown blues and backroad bends into high-stepping frolic, and left for lucky us a plate piled high with tuneful savoriness.

By adding his writing faculty to the crafting of "Knock on Wood," "Soul Man," "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay," "Green Onions," "In the Midnight Hour" and more, he ensured his shadow would forever hover above American popular music.

Here is where the legend began its journey. A wholly instrumental work, it trained the spotlight on the man's plectrum prowess - as was only proper. Steve's manner was both judicious and adventurous; he steadily intuited how best to traverse ambitious avenues, digging the soulful capacity alurk in every meaty passage. 

A host of delights abounds. As ears are filled by sounds too cool for rules and too funky for button-down strictures, muscle memory may well answer the call, producing good-time limb gesticulations not viewed since Don Cornelius commenced the Soul Train Line. And Steve's own "The Way I Feel Tonight" is textbook belly rub stuff.

2023 witnessed an Omnivore Recordings vinyl rerelease. A digital, remastered and expanded version saw daylight in 2024.

If there be any sunshine piercing the dark cloud of a string master's sad demise, besides mourners enjoying works left behind, it is this: up-and-coming pickers can avail themselves of the inspirational example. The pick is passed. Such is the way.

Recommended: "Crop Dustin' "Land of 1000 Dances," "99 1/2," "Boo-Ga-Loo Down Broadway," "Funky Broadway," "With a Little Help from My Friends," "Oh Pretty Woman," "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water," "The Way I Feel Tonight," "In the Midnight Hour," "Rattlesnake"

Videos: "Crop Dustin'"   "99 1/2"  "Boo-Ga-Loo Down Broadway"    "I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water"   "The Way I Feel Tonight"

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Facebook (Tributes and condolences may be posted here)

Discogs

GoGoBuy

Concord

Ace

Bear Family

bandcamp (digital, expanded)

Amazon (Omnivore vinyl)

Apple

Spotify

Back in the Day, 1963

Etta James

...Rocks the House

(Argo Records)

The drabness of interchangeable corporate cut-outs like Nikki Minaj and Cardi B is forced into sharp relief by R&B/Soul paragon Miss Etta. This was her first live vinyl, recorded in Nashville, and her gifts were at full capacity. When she belted out, when she reared back and let fly her characteristic back-of-throat growl, every table shook. She required neither auto-tune nor recorded vocal track to which she could lip-sync whilst cavorting. No robotic dance troupe or costume changes, either; her real-world music was sufficient. 

At the board with Chess Records founder Leonard Chess, she ensured her sound was portrayed with every ounce of its natural splendor. 

Providing Etta with the stout platform she merited were David T. Walker (guitar), Marion Wright (bass), drummers Richard Water and Freeman Brown, Vonzell Cooper (organ), and tenor sax-man Garnell Cooper.

Re-releases have been marketed by numerous labels, in the U.S. and abroad.

Recommended: "Something's Got a Hold on Me," "Baby, What You Want Me To Do," "What'd I Say," "Money (That's What I Want)," "Seven Day Fool," "Sweet Little Angel," "Ooh Poo Pah Doo," "Woke Up This Morning," "Ain't That Loving You Baby," "All I Could Do Was Cry," "I Just Want to Make Love to You"

Videos: "Something's Got a Hold on Me"   "Sweet Little Angel"   

Facebook (fan page)

Bear Family

Andover Audio

Acoustic Sounds

Discogs

Country Hall of Fame Museum store

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Back in the Day, 1959

King Curtis

Have Tenor Sax, Will Blow

(ATCO)

It mattered not upon which stylistic avenue the man's shadow fell, he proved himself the hip-dipping master of each. Numbers divergent shared melodic blood. King Curtis jammed with marquee names on nightspot stages and in more formal studio circumstances. But, as impactful as those efforts were, some of his finest hot-and-cold moves can be located on his own waxings. This is his first. And in passages invigorating and understatedly eloquent, King Curtis unveiled talent due celebration.

Recommended: "Midnight Ramble," "Linda," "The Shake," "Jay Walk," "Lil Brother," "Peter Gunn," "The Groove," "Snake Eyes," "Cuban Twilight," "Birth of the Blues," "Chill"

Videos: "Midnight Ramble"   "Lil Brother"   "The Groove"   "Cuban Twilight"

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With the Shirelles.

Roy Head feat. Deniz Tek

Last Time Around

(Wild Honey Records)

Lore holds that Soul/R&B/Pop belter Roy - who could slip from full-bodied exhortation into creamy crooning as eminent as any we're likely to hear in this life - was once kicked off a James Brown tour for untethered onstage exuberance. We owe gratitude to Wild Honey and Radio Birdman guitarist Deniz Tek for now restoring Roy to deserved approbation.

The re-recording of Roy's 1965 hit "Treat Her Right" paired him with Deniz, and is featured here. Deniz also lent his fret faculties to two additional cuts. His articulations flabbergast. Unreleased 2020 tracks feature the singer's guitarist son, Sundance; Head the younger exhibits serious chops and substantial flash worthy of the moment.

Accompanists all meet the task admirably. Brass alternately swells, descends, and flows in sterling service to each passionate passage. And the dynamism furnished by the agile-yet-stalwart rhythm section maintains vitality.

Tragically, Roy's passing occured as he was recording this collection. His gritty oeuvre puts the lie to the racist fancy that white men can't grab up Soul and R&B pulsations, twist them mightily, and wring out every possible drop of sweetness. (Identical salute is also merited by Wayne Cochran.)

"'Living legend' is a word used too carelessly, these days," Deniz once said to Detroit Rock'n'Roll magazine. "This is one time that it fits."

Recommended: "Feels Like Rain," "Slow Down (But Don't Stop)," "Lean and Hungry," "Ice Cream Man," "Still Married," "Undercover Agent for the Blues," "Earthquake," "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby," "Daddy Oh," "Treat Her Right"

Videos: "Ice Cream Man" (feat. Deniz Tek)   "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby"   "Treat Her Right" (Hollywood A Go Go TV show, mid-1960s)

Wild Honey (Bandcamp)

Facebook (Deniz)

Green Noise Records

Sounds of Subterrania

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Amazon

Spotify

Deniz Tek