29 July 2008
Blues Crooners
Smooth, laid-back blues singers forge a blues crooner style
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
If jump bands represented the hot end of the R&B spectrum, the cool end was dominated by a blend of blues and pop singing sometimes called the blues crooner style. The roots of this urbane approach to the blues reached back to a series of race recordings (records made by and for African Americans, including especially those who had joined the “Great Migration” to northern cities but wished to enjoy the Southern-flavored African-American music they had grown up with) made in the late 1920s and 1930s by pianist Leroy Carr and guitarist Scrapper Blackwell. Carr developed a smooth, laid-back approach to blues singing that contrasted sharply with the rough-edged rural blues recordings of Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and he attracted a national black audience. The late 1930s jazz recordings of the King Cole Trio, with its instrumentation of piano, bass, and guitar, were a more immediate influence on postwar blues crooners, although Cole’s later recordings took him well into the pop mainstream.
The most successful blues crooner of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a soft-spoken Texas-born pianist and singer named Charles Brown. Brown, who studied classical piano as a child, moved to Los Angeles in 1943 and joined Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, a small combo that played pop songs for all-white parties in Hollywood and a more blues-oriented repertoire in the black nightclubs along L.A.’s Central Avenue. His smooth, sensitive, somewhat forlorn vocal style attracted attention, and he began to develop a national reputation with the release of “Drifting Blues.” In 1948 Brown left to form his own quartet and had a Number One R&B hit the following year with “Trouble Blues.” Over the next three years he recorded 10 Top 10 hits for Aladdin Records and became one of the most popular R&B singers nationwide. A handsome, dapper, gracious man, Brown projected an image of ease and sophistication. His repertoire – which included blues, pop songs, and semiclassical numbers such as the Warsaw Concerto – suggested a man in touch with his roots but not constrained by them. Brown was never able to break through to the pop charts – Columbia Records offered him a solo contract in 1947, but he turned it down out of loyalty to his bandmates. But he was rediscovered by a new generation of R&B fans in the 1980s and went on to develop a successful international touring career, culminating in a Grammy nomination.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
