Blind Arvella Gray – The Singing Drifter

Blues — it’s what’s for breakfast. Or at least it was during the ’60s heyday of Chicago’s venerable Maxwell Street, when the city’s leading open-air flea market, just southwest of the Loop, found street musicians attracting plenty of weekend blues fans along with the early-bird bargain hunters. While the quality — and the legality — of goods for sale was open to question (though anyone looking for a particular hubcap wasn’t likely to be too picky about its source), the emotional pull of the music was undeniable. It had to be, for these musicians were playing for spare change, and if they couldn’t hold a crowd, another guitarist down the block would add heat to the competition.

For those of us who came of age during the Chicago of the 1960s (and who discovered that a Maxwell Street polish sausage made a great morning hangover remedy), the CD reissue of the only album recorded by Blind Arvella Gray does more than extend the legacy of an individual artist, it evokes an entire era. In contrast with the swaggering rhythm sections and the electric charge that rocked the Saturday night clubs and inspired the likes of the Rolling Stones, the solo Arvella had a sweet sound that went down easier on a Sunday morning.

Hearing Gray’s jubilant eclecticism a quarter-century after his death reminds that the crossover blues boom, bringing the music from ghetto clubs to Caucasian converts, was originally an offshoot of the folk revival. There were no blues purists at the time monitoring Gray’s repertoire, as it extends from the barndance playfulness of “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One” to his epic rendition of “John Henry” to the a cappella work songs not far removed from field hollers (“Arvella’s Work Song”, “Gander Dancing Song”).

About half the album (including all four previously unreleased bonus tracks) features sanctified spirituals, with Gray sustaining a metallic shimmer on his National dobro and renewing the lyrics with live-wire immediacy. (Throughout the cut credited as “When The Saints Go Marching In,” Arvella sings, “When the saints come marchin’ home.”)

What distinguishes his artistry isn’t his instrumental virtuosity, his original songwriting or even the limberness of his vocals. The ebullient Gray was mainly a great entertainer, as this 1972 recording attests. On Maxwell Street (long gone, a casualty of urban renewal), if you couldn’t connect with your listeners, you’d lose them.