​ Boogie Bill Webb was the epitome of down-home Blues. Born in Mississippi and making his home in New Orleans, he played a raw style of Blues that was already a throwback to an earlier era when he came along. Playing a battered old Telecaster that had once been submerged in a hurricane, he thumped bass notes with his thumb while picking at the top strings with with his first couple of fingers. Like many Country Blues artists including Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker chord changes were open to interpretation. He only released one album during his lifetime, DRINKIN’ AND STINKIN’ on Flying Fish Records in 1989, and it is our Hidden Gem this month. 

The title cut kicks off the proceedings, a lazy shuffle and a true story about three women who had been out drinking for three days without bothering to stop and bathe. “Bill’s Boogie Woogie” is an album highlight that showcases his guitar style up front. The combination of Mississippi Hill Country and New Orleans is on full display. One of the more unusual tracks is his rendition of King Curtis’ “Soul Serenade”. The raw stripped down approach with the rhythm section following wherever Bill happens to go is like wandering into an after-hours joint out in the sticks and joining the party.

“Rocky Mountain Blues” is a mid-tempo slow Blues that is about as ‘contemporary’ as he gets. The kind of mid-tempo Blues common throughout the world done Boogie Bill Webb style. “Love Me Because I Love My Baby So” is a New Orleans style ballad with Webb’s Mississippi side soaking it in chicken grease. On “Cuttin’ Out Baby” he tips his hat to the Second Line sounding like something you would expect to emanate from somewhere walking through the city at the right time of year while “Black Nights” is straight up chicken grease Blues.

In more recent years several albums worth of recordings have surface, usually live, but DRINKIN’ AND STINKIN’ remains his only studio release. For years it was the only album of his anybody had and it’s still a good album to put on when you want to strip away the excess and get back down to the real deal. 

​Much of modern Blues is centered around guitarists and screaming guitar solos with keyboards playing a support role but it wasn’t always that way. Besides the usual suspects such as Otis Spann and Pinetop Perkins the West Coast produced it’s own school of sophisticated piano Blues. The forerunner of this new school was a Texas native who migrated west, Charles Brown.

Born in Texas City, Brown was a classically trained pianist who graduated high school in Galveston then got a degree in chemistry at A&M. Settling in Los Angeles in 1943 he teamed up with guitarist Johnny Moore (brother of Nat ‘King’ Cole guitarist Oscar Moore) and bassist Eddie Williams as “Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers”. Together they laid the foundation for a new style of Blues that leaned heavily towards Jazz. Their influence would be felt by everyone from Ray Charles to Chuck Berry. Crooning was new to Blues, previously the domain of the balladeer, and nobody did it better than Charles Brown. After a few years Brown got tired of not receiving due credit on album despite being the star attraction in the group and went out on his own. DRIFTIN’ BLUES draws mainly from his early days with the Three Blazers giving a glimpse into the Central Avenue nightclubs of the post-war era.

The title track is Brown’s signature tune and his calling card. Opening with the glorious sound of Johnny Moore hitting a chord on his big box Gibson through tube amp and sliding down, Brown’s piano comes in as if said opening were a carpet laid out for him. Melancholy in its sophistication the song sets the stage. “Nite After Nite” and “Fool’s Paradise” play up the crooning while “Saving My Love For You” and “Honeysipper” provide West Coast sophistication to solid R&B numbers. “Black Nite” is the crowning moment. The usual melancholy gives way to a stark world weariness that takes the group to new heights.

While the title track and “Black Nite” are easily two of the highlights it’s at the end of the album that we get the first of two Christmas songs that would forever cement Charles Brown as a musical figure, “Merry Christmas Baby”. Although “Please Come Home For Christmas” is more widely known thanks in part to Johnny & Edgar Winter recording it “Merry Christmas Baby” is Brown at his tongue-in-cheek best. His laconic vocal delivery is coy as he delivers lines like “Merry Christmas pretty baby/You sure been good to me/You know I haven’t had a drink this morning/But I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree”. 

Charles Brown passed away in 1999, the same year he was inducted into the Rock ’n Roll Hall Of Fame.