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Singing the blues
Bobby Bland and others will be doing just that
If you look at the performers listed for Saturday’s Buffalo Blues Festival, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is not your typical blues show. It most manifestly isn’t.
Granted, blues singing legend Bobby “Blue” Bland will be headlining the Shea’s Performing Arts Center gig (the lineup has changed a bit since the show was moved from its originally scheduled date at HSBC Arena in March). Bland deserves top billing by virtue of his long and illustrious service to the genre, with the balance of the program split between veteran performers Clarence Carter, Latimore, Marvin Sease, Mel Waiters and Floyd Taylor.
Although Bland has the deepest connection to the blues, using his signature growl to create hits like “Further Up the Road,” “Little Boy Blue,” “Two Steps From the Blues” and “Road of Brokenhearted Men,” his style runs close to the soulful singing at the root of modern day soul music. The rest of the lineup features singers with a soulful, rhythm and blues flair that lines up well with Bland’s importance as a musical fountainhead but one that gives wide berth to the hip-hop and rap stylings prevalent on today’s pop charts.
When Waiters and Taylor, the junior members on this tour, are asked about the festival’s blues content, they both use the term “Southern Soul” to describe the music.
Waiters, a singer who claims Teddy Pendergrass as his biggest vocal influence, traced the use of the phrase back to Rich Cason, the pioneering rhythm and blues/soul and rap music record producer, claiming that Cason said “we needed to create an identity for our new style [since] what we were doing wasn’t really ‘walking the backstreets crying’ blues, [although] we are on the same [touring] circuit that those guys are on.”
Taylor, the son of legendary soul singer Johnny Taylor, more or less echoed those feelings.
“I guess they had to hang something on it, because hip-hop was taking over, so they had to find some way to [compete,]” he said. “Every time you look around, there’s a new genre of music that they’ve got to hang a tag on.”
So think of this as a blues concert with a difference, one with roots in the form that stretches back to Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown and Charles Brown, artists who took the basic feeling at the heart of the blues and injected it with urban sentiments. These ground-breaking rhythm and blues stars of the 1940s and 1950s eventually gave way to a sound that manifested itself (with regional variations) in the studios of Motown, Memphis and Muscle Shoals.
For the most part, the singers on this tour have held true to that musical line, in some cases for decades.
Carter’s biggest records date to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when “Patches,” “Slip Away” and the classically risque “Strokin’” hit the charts; Sease’s heyday was in the late 1980s with “Candy Licker” and “Ghetto Man,” while Latimore has made a living using a strategy geared toward the lower end of the Mason-Dixon Line, creating tunes like “Let’s Straighten It Out” and “Somethin’ ’Bout ’Cha” that received more airplay on Southern radio stations than they did up North.•
PREVIEW
WHAT: Buffalo Blues Festival
WHEN: 8 p. m. Saturday WHERE: Shea’s Performing
Arts Center, 646 Main St. TICKETS: $39.50 to $49.50
