[Today: The real deal...]
Mose Allison has spent a long career in the shadows of the bridge that connects Jazz and the Blues. Not fully either, but a whole lot of both, he plays piano and sings in a distinctly jazzy style, but his music is built from the raw materials of the blues. His songs include prison sentences, tragic love, country shacks and mystical signifiers, but they’re always leavened with a wry, detached delivery. Because he’s a white man singing the Blues, Allison has often been suspected of musical tourism – one interviewer actually accused him of stealing the blues, an encounter that inspired his 1990 song ‘Ever Since I Stole The Blues’.
Born in 1927 on his grandfather’s farm near the small town of Tippo in the Mississippi Delta, Allison grew up absorbing the music of blues artists like Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red and Lightning Hopkins, as well as jazz pianists Nat King Cole, Fats Waller and Earl Hines. Regardless of his credentials, he has created a singular style that hasn’t changed much through the decades. “You have to suffer a little to do anything well,” he told the Phoenix New Times in 1992. “It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with singing the blues. If blues had to do with suffering, believe me, we’d have a lot more blues singers.”
On his 1963 album Mose Allison Sings, he covers a wide variety of artists (including Jimmy Rogers, Willie Dixon and Duke Ellington), but every song is tailored so well to his style that each feels like an original. The few true originals here are keepers, including ‘Parchman Farm’ and ‘Young Man’, which was later covered by The Who as ‘Young Man Blues’ on Live At Leeds. But Allison’s influence extends well beyond The ‘Oo – The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, J.J. Cale, Tom Waits, The Clash and Frank Black are just a few of the artists that have been swayed by his style. Black has even claimed that the Pixies’ song ‘Allison’ is about Mose. He’s frequently been cited as a primary influence on the blues-based British Invasion artists of the late-60s, and he’s still going strong – after a 12-year recording hiatus, he just released his 27th studio album, The Way Of The World.
Listen: Lost Mind
Listen: Parchman Farm
Listen: The Seventh Son
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Tags: Duke Ellington, Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Frank Black, J.J. Cale, Jimmy Rogers, Lightnin' Hopkins, Memphis Minnie, Mose Allison, Mose Allison Sings, Nat King Cole, Pixies, Rolling Stones, Tampa Red, The Clash, The Who, Tom Waits, Willie Dixon
