Listening to Prestige 521: Smoky Babe

LISTEN TO ONE: Hottest Brand Goin'

 Smoky Babe (Robert Brown) made his brief but real imprint onto the consciousness of blues cognoscenti when Harry Oster dropped into a party at the home of Robert Pete Williams's sister Mable Lee in Scotlandville, Louisiana, a community just outside of Baton Rouge. Brown showed up a little later, with a "big glittering gay smile and a hat sat rakishly on the side of his head," in Oster's recollection. 

And no guitar. His was in the pawnshop. He borrowed one from Oster, and proceeded to wow the veteran folklorist. Oster came back to Scotlandville with a tape recorder and recorded Smoky Babe over several sessions in 1960 and 1961. The songs were released on two albums, one on Oster's Folk Lyric label and one on Bluesville. After that the singer faded back into obscurity. He may have died in Scotlandville in 1973.

He was probably born in 1927, in Mississippi which would make him of Chuck Berry's generation. So his blues are not the blues of the preceding generation's rural sharecropper life like the early Muddy Waters, nor are they the blues of the sophisticated urban cat like Berry. Smoky Babe was more the small town kid who worked at the gas station, and as such he filled a niche that no one else really did, and that makes him a valuable addition to the blues canon. One of his most striking songs, "Hottest Brand Goin'," is one of the few blues to give voice to that sort of life:

    Well, I say I work at the Conoco Station, 1668 Plank Road
I work for Mr. Dumaine, I say now
Conoco, oil station, happy motor, super service,
You know they got the hottest brand goin'.

On these recordings, he is backed up by two local harmonica players, Henry Thomas (not the early blues singer who influenced Bob Dylan and Taj Mahal) and Clyde Causey. Hottest Brand Goin' was also the title of the Bluesville LP.