LISTEN TO ONE: Goin' by the River
This album, recorded in Chicago has Chess Records written all over it, yet the Chess brothers and their label had nothing to do with it. It was originally issued by Bellaphon Records, a German label that partnered with a number of American labels including Chess/Checker/Cadet, but not generally Prestige. Nonetheless, Prestige licensed the American rights, and released it on the Prestige label, although the 45 RPM single off the album was put out on Bluesville, which released very few 45s, and which was pretty much on its last legs.
Leonard and Phil Chess, as 1963 rolled over into 1964, had seen the handwriting on a couple of different walls, as the market for their urban rhythm and
blues was shrinking. One was the folk music craze, of coffee shops, festivals and college campuses. The other was the British Invasion, spearheaded by the Beatles, but also made up of a number of young groups--chief among them the Rolling Stones--who had been profoundly influenced by the electric blues of the Chess recording artists. They were retrenching, deciding what to do with their existing roster of artists. They would soon repackage Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson as The Real Folk Blues, starting a trend that would culminate in those performers being recognized as major American artists. They weren't much interested in a new urban blues artist just trying to get a start.
Samuel Charters was. Charters, one of the most important pioneers in bringing the blues to mainstream (that is to say, white) America, had produced a number of sessions for Prestige, generally in tandem with Kenneth L. Goldstein, blues scholar and executive with Bluesville Records. Charters' association with Prestige/Bluesville began in 1961 with Memphis Willie B., and included Furry Lewis, Pink Anderson, Blind Willie McTell, and Tampa Red. Charters was an old school believer in the blues, and the sort to champion the career of a newcomer who had that old feeling.
Arnold, a protégé of Sonny Boy Williamson at a youthful age--Williamson gave harmonica lessons and
encouragement to the 12-year-old Billy Boy just before his death-- had seen his career start and sputter in the mid-1950s. He had actually been featured on an important Chess recording--he had played the harmonica on Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man," released on the Checker subsidiary. On the same day, he recorded one tune of his own, but it languished in the Chess vaults until included on an anthology CD in the 1990s. He made a couple of recordings for Chicago's Vee-Jay records, an attempt subjected to blistering scorn by jazz historian Pete Welding, in his liner notes for the Bellaphon/Prestige album:
...A series of undistinguished efforts that scarcely permitted the gifted young performer to indicate what he was capable of doing. The recordings, at best, were mediocre examples of modern Chicago blues...
Most of the blame...must be laid at the feet of the record label. Irrespective of their suitability to his talents, the tunes were selected for him by the label's A&R director, as were the supporting musicians. All the ingredients came together for the first time in the cold, intimidating atmosphere of the recording studio (alas, all too often the case in commercial rhythm and blues recordings), and it is hardly surprising that the results were the slight, inconsequential records they were.
Welding and Charters were, it must be said, caught up in the turf wars of the time, blues purists vs. commercial exploiters. Vee-Jay records, one of the first African American-owned record labels, recorded John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed and Memphis Slim, as well as Chicago's best doowop groups. In the 1960s, its roster included Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler, Dee Clark, and Betty Everett, and it was the first American label to take a chance on a group of white kids from England, the Beatles. And in fact, Arnold's sides for Vee-Jay are not bad at all (they would later be covered by another group of white boys from England: the Yardbirds).
Be that as it may, they didn't do much for Billy Boy Arnold, though that may more have been due to distribution and marketing (and payola?) than the quality of the music. And be that as it may, when Charters and Welding brought Arnold into the studio, they surrounded him with musicians who had been the backbone of that giant of commercial rhythm and blues recordings, Chess Records.
Lafayette Leake provided the piano accompaniment for Chess rhythm and blues artists Sonny Boy Williamson, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, and Little Walter, but his greatest prominence came in what many folk and blues purists regarded as the ultimate commercial betrayal--what Welding referred to as "the cheap, empty banalities of the popular rock and roll form," with an artist now regarded as one of America's greatest. He was the pianist on most of Chuck Berry's early hits (Johnny Johnson being Berry's other piano mainstay).
Jerome Arnold, Billy Boy's younger brother, was Howlin' Wolf's bass player, and later became a mainstay of a newer generation of Chicago blues players, the Paul Butterfield blues band. He was part of the group that backed up Bob Dylan in the wildly controversial "Dylan goes electric" set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Junior Blackman recorded with Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Magic Sam. Mighty Joe Young never recorded for Chess, but worked with Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Jimmy Rogers, Willie Dixon and other Chicago blues stars, before establishing himself as a solo performer in the 1970s.
The musicians, and Arnold on harmonica and vocals, deliver some solid, old-school (for 1963) Chicago blues. Most of the cuts are Arnold originals, with nods to Jimmy Reed ("Goin' by the River"). B. B. King ("Get Out of Here") and Junior Parker ("I'll Forget About You"). There's one smokin' instrumental, "Billy Boy's Blues."
Arnold has continued to tour and record well into the 21st century, and in 2021 his memoir, The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold, was published by University of Chicago Press.
The album was called More Blues on the South Side. "You're My Girl" and "School Time" were the single on Bluesville.
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