The Cincinnati Blues Sound
Featured Album
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever made a good case for a Cincinnati blues sound, but the Queen City was no stranger to the blues. A rough-hewn, urban backwater on the banks of the Ohio River (which is also the Kentucky state line), Cincinnati is arguably the most southern city to find itself misplaced north of the Mason-Dixon line, and as home to King Records played occasional host to a variety of blues artists, from jumpers and shouters like Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Little Willie Littlefield and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson to more down-home (urban and rural) types like Albert and Freddie King, Smokey Smothers and John Lee Hooker, as well as sophisticates like Lonnie Johnson.
If there is a Cincy Sound, its leading practitioners have been Albert Washington and Lonnie Mack, both of whom combined soul, r&b, gospel rock and country with blues while recording for local Fraternity Records in the 60s. They embodied urban and rural, northern and southern sensibilities, in a way that few other artists outside Memphis and Muscle Shoals did at that time. And they were both as masterful singing as playing guitar.
Washington, who died of diabetes in 1998 at age 59, was born in Georgia and was ten years old when his family moved to Newport KY, across the river from Cincy; when his dad died five years later, he and his mom moved into the city. Though his boyhood was in gospel music, he went into secular music when she died shortly after the move, starting as a B.B. King-style bluesman but moving into soul to keep up with the times. Of his 1967-70 Fraternity sides gathered on Blues & Soul Man, his greatest moment remains the 1969 “Turn on the Bright Lights,” a bristling slow blues with fractured guitar work by Lonnie Mack that Jerry Garcia revived (albeit quite feebly) on his 1974 solo album Compliments of Garcia. Mack also provides the berserk, screaming guitar outro on “Hold Me Baby.” But whether he’s caressing a ballad like “Tellin’All Your Friends,” pumping blues like “I’m Gonna Pour Me a Drink” (more Mack on guitar), preaching “You Got to Pay Your Dues” or churning out the Sam Cooke-clone “A Woman Is a Funny Thing,” the deep soul “Hour of Power,” or the dance novelty “Crazy Legs, Parts 1 and 2,” Washington is the undeniable star here. His own guitar is succinct and explosive (he has a great foil in second guitarist Big Ed Thompson, a flat-picker with saxophone-like phrasing), and his high, pinched, nasal voice slices through the biggest horn arrangements.
Mack’s own tenure at Fraternity is summarized on The Wham of That Memphis Man and Still On the Move. The former features his only Top 10 hit, a roadhouse instrumental version of Chuck Berry‘s “Memphis” from 1963 that invariably makes me think of Bob Dylan’s mid-60s description of Robbie Robertson as a “mathematical guitar genius” (sorry, Lonnie had already been there/done that). Spread across these two albums are a bevy of other rocking guitar instrumentals, from “Wham” (the followup single that was a lesser success in its own right, with Lonnie’s ax doing battle against a hard-charging horn section) through the rolling, pastoral take on “Wildwood Flower,” the titanic jolt of “Sa-Ba-Hoola,” the warmth of “I Found a Love” and the buoyant strut of “Soul Serenade.” Taking a cue from Robert Ward of Dayton’s Ohio Untouchables (who eventually mutated into the Ohio Players), Mack played his Flying V through a Magnatone amp about the size of a thick dictionary to create a fat, deep tone as he tossed off flurries of notes, eventually building casually to the high, screaming cries. He made it all sound so easy.
He also sang like a choirboy and made that seem just as effortless; among white boys, only swamp-pop star Tommy McLain, on songs like “Sweet Dreams,” can rival the richness and purity of Lonnie’s voice. Consider “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way,” his secularization of Archie Brownlee and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. “Often times, so discouraged/I don’t know, what to do,” Lonnie begins in one of the weariest voices you’ve ever heard. Slowly, the song builds and builds; it doesn’t speed up in tempo, but Lonnie starts inserting vibrato, then a little hoarseness, until by the end he’s shouting the title phrase, employing it simultaneously as a prayer and a credo. “Why” is even better, its ominous guitar and horns intro leading into fervent, gospel-like vocals that quickly turn to screams; his guitar solo is terrifying, and the screaming/singing at the end signifies a man clearly at the end of his rope. Lonnie Mack cut even less straight-up blues than Albert Washington, but his music would have been unthinkable without the blues.
