Born on January 27, 1930, in the nearby town of Rosemark, Bobby
“Blue” Bland had moved to Memphis by age seventeen. He worked in a
garage during the week and sang spirituals on weekends. At various
times, he also served as a chauffeur for B.B. King and Roscoe Gordon
and a valet for Junior Parker. In the beginning, he styled himself
after the likes of Roy Brown. After serving a stint in the army,
however, Bland spent the latter half of the Fifties maturing into a
masterful singer and assured entertainer. His hallmark was his supple,
confidential soul-blues delivery. As a singer, Bland projected a
grainy, down-to-earth quality, punctuated with guttural growls and
snorts that would come to be known as the “chicken-bone sound.” Yet his
voice was simultaneously smooth as velvet, allowing Bland to bring
audiences under his hypnotic spell as he walked a fine line between
passionate expression and exquisite self-control.
Working with bandleader and producer Joe Scott, Bland recorded straight
blues such as “Farther On Up the Road” but subsequently evolved into
more of an intimate soul-blues stylist. Bland’s painstakingly crafted
records featured his deliberate, resolute vocals set over a backdrop of
dazzling horn fanfares, supple rhythm parts and Wayne Bennett’s T-Bone Walker
-style guitar. Beginning with “I’ll Take Care of You” in early 1960,
Bland released a dozen huge R&B hits in a row, eleven of which made
the Top Ten. They included “I Pity the Fool,” “That’s the Way Love Is”
and “Turn On Your Love Light,” a song that went on to become an R&B
standard. As a measure of his considerable appeal to black audiences,
Bland placed an amazing 51 singles on the R&B Top Forty. However,
he crossed over into the pop-oriented Top Forty singles chart only four
times and never got higher than Number 20 (with “Ain’t Nothing You Can
Do,” in 1964). To this day, Bland remains a fixture on the concert
circuit, a hard-working professional who purveys a definitive union of
Southern blues and soul.”