Artist: Bland, Bobby
Label: MCA Records
Release: 1961
Runtime: 30.16
Rating: 5/5
Two Steps From The Blues is a modern blues gem, a stunning showcase of power, versatility, robust stance and, at the same time, sensitivity from one of the finest vocal blues performers ever. With this album in the early ’60s, Bobby Bland shocked blues-savvy audiences who still couldn’t separate playing the blues from the sound of a guitar. Bland proved those beliefs wrong with a good half hour of breathtaking vocal delivery that, seen through the lens of today’s retrospective look at the legendary musician’s work, marks some of the best moments of Bland’s long career while firmly laying down an important milestone in the history of blues music.
Two Steps From The Blues is an album packed with sensual charge. Bobby Bland takes a ferocious vocal approach to basic human emotions on it. His vocal delivery is first-rate character acting: the flawless mimicry of soul on one side, and the simple, almost instinctively primitive, uncompromising edge of raw blues on the other. Bland’s voice gives off a massive energy that spews out in, to put it mildly, countless shades of mood, some simpler, others more complex. The organic horn arrangements add their share of supernatural turbulence to the sound, boldly riding alongside the teasing vocal maneuvering. Bland has trained his voice into an expressive instrument with deadly efficiency, and his one-of-a-kind vocal performance always follows instinct when freely picking its style of expression. The creative, free-spirited hopping between moods, with no breather and no guilt, runs from the almost spiritually sincere repentance of Lead Me On, through the pitiable melancholy of I’ve Been Wrong So Long, to a sudden turn into a hard-hearted portrait of despair, loneliness and sorrow with I’ve Got To Forget You. Wherever Bland turns, his masterful interpretation hits home with unstagy conviction. Cry, Cry, Cry shows him right at home with the essence of electric blues, and just next door you’ll find the gems I Pity The Fool and I’ll Take Care Of You.
Two Steps From The Blues is the unmistakable stamp of Bobby Bland magic, a brilliant piece of vocal blues and soul in the truest sense of the words. By leaning on the various regional influences of blues music, Bland played nicely with the rules of blues performance that held at the time. As a pioneer of vocal blues, he visionarily paved the road to fame for many heroes of vocal music in later generations, already in the early ’60s, when the monopolistic dictates of the Chess and Stax corporate policies were dutifully shutting out this kind of blues, which was commercially unattractive.
Lineup
Bobby “Blue” Bland: vocals
Wayne Bennett: guitar
Hamp Simmons: bass
Teddy Reynolds: piano
Connie Mack Booker: piano
Pluma Davis: trombone
Joe Scott: trumpet
Sonny Freeman: drums
John “Jabo” Starks: drums
Production
Joe Scott
Track list
1. Two Steps From the Blues
2. Cry Cry Cry
3. I’m Not Ashamed
4. Don’t Cry No More
5. Lead Me On
6. I Pity the Fool
7. I’ve Got to Forget You
8. Little Boy Blue
9. St James Infirmary
10. I’ll Take Care of You
11. I Don’t Want No Woman
12. I’ve Been Wrong So Long
