BUDDY MOSS: COMPLETE RECORDED WORKS VOL. 1 (1933)
1) Bye Bye Mama; 2) Daddy
Don't Care; 3) Red River Blues; 4) Cold Country Blues; 5) Prowling Woman; 6)
TB's Killing Me; 7) When I'm Dead And Gone; 8) Hard Time Blues; 9) Prowlin'
Gambler Blues; 10) Hard Road Blues; 11) Jealous Hearted Man; 12) Midnight
Rambler; 13) Best Gal; 14) Restless Night Blues; 15) Married Man Blues; 16)
Somebody Keeps Calling Me; 17) Back To My Used To Be; 18) Back To My Used To Be
No. 2; 19) Can't Use You No More; 20) Can't Use You No More No. 2; 21)
Travelin' Blues; 22) Bachelor's Blues; 23) Broke Down Engine.
Wherever Buddy Moss is not falling through the
cracks of history, sources tend to present him as a sort of «missing link»
between Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller — the inelegant part of this view
being that Buddy Moss wasn't blind, and the elegant part of it being that his
peak career period did fall on those
exact years when Blind Blake was already gone, and Blind Boy Fuller did not yet
start recording, namely, 1933-34. On the other hand, Buddy himself vehemently
denied being influenced by anybody (liar liar), and his own influence on Fuller
is debatable. Best strategy would simply be to take the man on his own terms.
Actually, judging at least by Buddy's earliest
recordings, his playing style, temperament, and musical attitude were quite
different from both of these visually challenged gentlemen. In particular, he
played very little of that «Piedmont», ragtime-oriented blues — Blind Blake's
style was fast, jerky, entertaining, bodily-provocative, but Buddy strictly
sticks to the slow 12-bar form, very canonical, very clean, mostly devoid of
individualistic twists, yet with an extremely professional and dexterously
flowing sound. Modern listeners will find nothing particularly revealing about
this form, but it seems to have been relatively rare on the streets of Atlanta
in 1933, dominated as they were by Blind Willie McTell's ʽGeorgia Ragʼ and
stuff.
On the whole, Buddy's sound should probably be
considered as one of the closest predecessors of Chicago blues — even more so
than Robert Johnson, who usually worked alone, whereas Buddy, on many, if not
most, of his recordings is accompanied by a second guitarist (usually Curley
Weaver), giving them a fuller, «band-like» sound: if you just added some
electricity, you'd have yourself a 1953 as early as 1933. On the technical
side, Buddy is a much more skilled lead player than Johnson: be it straight or
slide, the best part of all these blues is invariably the solo, where he plays
varied, fluent, expressive runs, very precise, very well put together, less
imaginative and unpredictable than, say, Blind Lemon Jefferson's, but pretty
much unmatched by any other formalistic 12-bar guru in the business at the
time. And if there was one guitarist from whom Elmore James was likely to cop
his famous ʽDust My Broomʼ lick, Buddy is as good a candidate as any (ʽTB's
Killing Meʼ, ʽWhen I'm Dead And Goneʼ).
The downside is obvious, too: of the 23 tracks
on this first volume of his legacy that captures most of the 1933 experience,
just about every single one is completely interchangeable with every other one.
Occasionally, he switches from regular acoustic to slide, and from one backing
guitarist to another, but the tempos and basic structures stay consistently
the same, and unless you are a maniacal 12-bar fanatic, there is no reason whatsoever
why you should listen to more than two or three songs at a time (sound quality,
by the way, shifts quite significantly from tune to tune, but about half of the
songs have a very tolerable level of crackling — which is nice to know, considering
Columbia's typically less-than-royal quality treatment of its country blues
artists).
On a trivia note, it is funny that one of the
tracks here is called ʽMidnight Ramblerʼ — nothing to do with the Stones
classic, but giving a rather precise indication as to how the bad boys came up
with that title; Buddy's tune, in comparison, is quite harmless and
inoffensive, infused with the regular blues yearning and moaning, but without
any traces of psychopathology. In fact, as far as we know, Buddy himself was a
fairly easy-going, friendly fellow, thoroughly uninterested in cultivating any
mystical or «spiritually driven» image of himself — his singing is pleasant, but
perfunctory, his antics / gimmicks / special sonic tricks are non-existent, and
his only real love / interest lies in making that guitar sing the blues. A
completely one-trick pony here, but give the pony a break — it takes a little
genius to perform that trick so well.
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