Marvin Sease – Candy Licker: The Sex And Soul Of Marvin Sease

You’ve probably never heard of Marvin Sease, but from “Candy Licker” in 1986 until 2005, he was the only artist in the contemporary southern soul-blues genre to be on a major label (two, actually). This is doubly remarkable because he had only one R&B hit (“Tonight”, which went to #86) that whole time. Soul-blues, as typified by Malaco artists such as Z.Z. Hill, Johnny Taylor and Bobby “Blue” Bland, is the music of aging southern blacks who grew up on B.B. King and Ray Charles and made the transition to Stax before the record biz deserted them entirely.

It’s a small but stable audience that wasn’t discovered until Hill’s 1982 “Down Home Blues”, which reportedly sold gold without even charting. Sease is the genre’s darling for the offhand way he applies his tender, vulnerable voice to hilarious double-entendres (“Candy Licker”, you should realize, has nothing to do with Snickers bars), moralistic cheating songs (“Don’t Forget To Tell On You”), and heartfelt hard-luck ballads (“I’m Sinkin’ Down”).

He stays popular because as often as not the joke’s on him, and because there’s a lot of respect and dignity beneath the seemingly over-the-top sexual shenanigans. And also because his singing is so much less mechanical than most of the genre’s other stars, and unlike them he prefers old-school instrumentation to synths.

Sease is down-home in the classic sense of the phrase, and while this compilation of mainly his RCA years doesn’t quite equal his earlier work for Mercury, it’s hard to hear lampoons like “Hoochie Momma” without offering up a grin of appreciation.