Similarly, Price’s cousin and former valet, Larry Williams, pushes R&B toward rock and roll on cuts such as “Bony Maronie,” propelling corny rhymes and grade-school lines with inspired singing, electric guitars, squawking saxes, and snares that snap. The punchy arrangements sound fresh next to today’s synthesized beeps and bleats, but after a while one starts to hear the assembly line at work on these discs a bit more clearly than on Specialty’s other recordings, such as those by Roy Milton or John Lee Hooker, which showcase seasoned performers improvising their way through their staple repertories.
Milton, an LA-based drummer-vocalist and bandleader and one of the first to record for Rupe, was known for big brassy blues numbers, connecting the dots between Count Basie and Louis Jordan and showing how swing jazz plays into the rock and roll gumbo. The Hooker collection shows the unique bluesman playing his signature minimal, droning blues, usually to a beat all his own, foot stomping steady while his hands and voice roam. You can’t count it 1-2-3-4, and you can’t count it 1-2-3; you just gotta count 1-1-1-1. Hooker plays like a one-man Ornette Coleman band, riffing harmolodic as he shrugs the weight of the world off his shoulders — and usually onto some woman.
It is another anonymous woman, however, who may turn in the most stirring performance of the series. Singing on a haunting demo version of Percy Mayfield’s “Hit the Road Jack” (a song the composer would later re-shape for Ray Charles’s smash), Mayfield’s unnamed female partner holds a darker-than-blue tri-tone on the chorus’s “moooooooore” in a way Ray Charles wouldn’t dare. It’s an odd little ditty that stands as a ghastly skeleton of the fleshed-out pop favorite it would become. Mayfield’s own recordings were not all huge hits, but his collection offers fine performances of well-crafted songs, including “Please Send Me Someone To Love” and “Louisiana,” showing his to be a unique voice — in the sense of his vocal “grain” as well as his compositional style. (And as if his own musical legacy were not substantial enough, he’s also the father of Curtis.)
Although these collections — especially taken as a whole — may strike the casual listener as presenting a familiar, if not downright repetitive, profile of mid-century pop, a closer listen to the range and depth of the Specialty catalog reveals some wonderfully original attempts at crafting a popular sound that could both sway the grass roots and crossover to the mainstream.
