Various Artists – Atlantic Blues, 1949-1970
In 1949, Granville “Stick” McGhee (And His Buddies) saved Atlantic Records from Shakespeare. Stick had recorded a song called “Drinkin’ Wine”, and one of Atlantic’s distributors needed a bunch of copies but couldn’t find it. Atlantic did them one better: They found Stick and his older brother Brownie and re-recorded the tune. It became an R&B and pop smash, thereby plunging the infant label into the world of hitmaking and rescuing it from the Ertegun brothers’ announced intention to record the Bard’s complete works on 78.
Given the brothers’ penchant for jazz, though, Atlantic was never the player in the blues world that King, Chess, Modern and others were. Eschewing the more rough-and-tumble varieties, they always went for people like Big Joe Turner, who was connected to the Kansas City world of Count Basie, or Jimmy Yancey and Professor Longhair, whose roots were in New Orleans. Atlantic’s blues, in other words, always had a healthy dose of “rhythm &” to it; indeed, Jerry Wexler, who joined the label shortly after it was founded, had coined the term while at Billboard.
This doesn’t mean there was any lack of soulfulness in the stuff they considered blues, as Ray Charles, another early signing, proved on such magnificent records as “Losing Hand”. Nor does their quest for hits mean that they gave up on blues after it had become old hat to black record-buyers, as Aretha Franklin’s astonishing 1969 recording of “Today I Sing The Blues” makes crystal clear. Jazzbos that they were, they always saw to it that, especially on the recordings they made in New York, their artists had some of the finest musicians in America to back them up.
So news that Rhino Handmade has prepared a four-disc collection of the best of Atlantic’s blues recordings should be an occasion of great celebration, and indeed, the 80 tracks collected here have been chosen with exquisite care and remastered with great skill, given that many of the master tapes perished in the fire which leveled Atlantic’s storage warehouse in the 1970s.
However…this collection sells for $80. That it’s only available as a mail-order item instead of being shipped to record stores where impulse shoppers would find it and snap it up is bad enough, but aside from the actual music contained in it, it’s a mess. It’s packaged in a flimsy cardboard box with the discs, in thin cardboard sleeves, set into a frame from which it’s hard to pry them out. There’s a nicely art-directed booklet, all in sepia tones, with liner notes by Billy Vera that were apparently written in his sleep, for all the information they actually impart, and the track listings don’t bother with such niceties as session personnel, so that I had to haul down my Queen Of Soul box set from 1992 to find out if it really was Duane Allman playing the tasty blues-rock guitar on the 1969 Aretha tracks. (No, it was either Tommy Cogbill or Jimmy Johnston.) That’s just not fair, to the consumer or to Atlantic’s legacy.
The liner notes, particularly, disturb me. There’s so much color, so many great stories (Professor Longhair, confronted with Ahmet Ertegun, who’d just slogged out to a honky-tonk in the middle of a field in Louisiana, telling him that this sure was his lucky day: That morning he’d been signed to Mercury, and now he was signed to Atlantic, too!), so much opportunity to place these recordings in the context of other blues recordings of this period so that younger fans just discovering this for the first time will understand what they’re hearing…but it’s not here.
Maybe that’s just my hangup as a writer and historian, but this material deserves much better. Especially considering how incredible the music here is.