Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 17

Record label: Atlantic

Produced: Rudy Van Gelder

Recorded: Hackensack, New Jersey; March 1957

Released: 1957

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Mose Allison (p, t, v); Taylor LaFargue (b); Frank Isola (d); Rudy Van Gelder (e)

Track listing: New Ground; Train; Warm Night; Blues (Young Man); Saturday; Scamper; January; Promised Land; Spring Song; Highway 49; Blueberry Hill; You Won’t Let Me Go; I Thought About You; One Room Country Shack; In Salah

Running time: 36.00

Current CD: Not currently available

Further listening: Local Color (1958), a follow-up release that’s virtually Back Country Suite part 2, and includes his highly personalised version of Parchman Farm

Further reading: One Man’s Blues (Patti Jones, 1998); www.moseallison.com

Download: www.emusic.com

Mississippi born, Mose Allison grew up in the bebop age and assimilated influences that ranged from blues and gospel through to the cool cabaret sounds of the Nat Cole Trio. A white boy raised in a largely black neighbourhood, he claims he absorbed a lot of blues from local jukeboxes. He played trumpet at high school, was a pianist in the army and later attended Louisiana State University. The last stint was to later cause him some embarrassment when a black magazine rang for an interview and asked if he was the first black student to graduate from LSU: ‘I think there’s something you should know,’ began Mose.

He only needed one strike to make his mark and did so with Back Country Suite, an album that immediately established Mose as a musician who could be both down-home and city-hip. The main thrust of the album is a series of vignettes, mainly instrumental, that depict his southern-roots upbringing. Somehow Mose’s amalgam of influences came together to produce a record that was totally original, and that would influence white blues practitioners throughout the ’60s, The Who later pouncing on Mose’s Young Man Blues and turning it into one of the highspots of Live At Leeds.

Though he’s never made a poor record in his life, Back Country Suite remains Allison’s most potent work, a record that provided the blueprint for what would become an extensive catalogue. ‘I regard a record as an expensive calling card. You have to have one in order to work,’ Mose once observed. Back Country Suite proved the ideal calling card and he’s always found work easy to come by.