Bland’s Strangled Blues Secure Musical Fame

Bobby Bland is probably entitled to brag a little. Forty years after he started as a Memphis street singer, Bland’s voice is still impressive and his role as a bridge between the blues and soul music assures him of a secure place in pop history.

But over the phone recently from his home near Memphis, Bland--who will be 59 in January--sounded like a man with his ego well under control. When Bland did speak in superlatives, it was to credit others who helped him move his career farther up the road. Bland’s biggest superlatives are reserved for B.B. King, his mentor and occasional performing partner. (Along with Millie Jackson, Bland and King will form a blues-soul triple bill to ring in the new year Saturday night at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim).

“He’s perfect in my sight,” Bland said in a deep, soft speaking voice. “He’s a good gentleman, a good person.”

(Actually, Bland does find some imperfection in King’s guest-star turn on “When Love Comes To Town,” a song from U2’s hit album, “Rattle And Hum.” He thinks the song should have featured King’s singing and guitar playing even more than it does: “Make it fit around him, not have him fit into (U2’s) arrangement.”)

Less famous than King, but no less significant to Bland’s development, was the late Joe Scott, his bandleader and arranger for 18 years. In a world full of singers who will deny on their ancestors’ graves that they were anything but untutored geniuses, Bland speaks of Scott in the way Plato spoke of Socrates.

“I credit him, period--100%,” Bland said. “I had the voice, but I didn’t know what to do with it. He taught me about phrasing, a certain way to say, ‘baby,’ or ‘oh Lord,’ to make it meaningful, to sound soulful.”

At least, one would assume, Bland would take full credit for developing his signature vocal gesture: the distinctive, husky half-roar, half-gargle that he throws into songs for emotive or humorous emphasis. Rarely has the sound of strangulation been used to better musical effect.

In fact, Bland readily acknowledged that he cribbed it straight off a gospel record by the Rev. C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s father. That happened in the early 1960s, when Bland was losing his falsetto range and casting about for another source of vocal fireworks.

The C.L. Franklin gargle “would take the place of the little gimmick thing I had with the falsetto. God bless it, I can’t do without it now. The people are looking forward to hearing it.”

In short, Bland likes to look at himself as a pupil rather than a guru of rhythm and blues. That, he explains, is why he can summon without a pause such minutiae as the location of the Memphis intersection where he used to work as a gas station attendant or the Houston street address of Duke Records, where he cut the songs that brought him his first fame (and where label boss Don Robey gave Bland his alliterative nickname, “Blue”).

“I learned how to listen and watch instead of thinking that I knew a lot about a lot of things,” Bland said. “You end up knowing nothing. It’s best to lay back and observe.”

Bland observed traditional blues firsthand as a boy in the farming community of Rosemark, Tenn. His family moved to Memphis when he was in his teens, then he gravitated toward the music scene that had grown up around Beale Street.

King, who is 5 years older than Bland, heard the young singer in local clubs, liked his voice and invited him to sing on the show for which he was host on a Memphis black radio station, WDIA. Bland became King’s chauffeur and valet for shows in the Memphis area and got to sing a little during breaks between sets.

Besides an education in the blues, King gave his chauffeur some tips on safe driving.

“The first big car B had was a ’49 fishtail Cadillac,” Bland recalled. “That was real exciting for me and him. It had the big fins, the tail. I was a good driver, a speed demon during that time. He kind of cautioned me to go slower.”

After Bland started his own recording career in 1952, King also had cautionary words about following too closely in a mentor’s footsteps.

“He was the one who told me I needed my own style. I used to think there was nobody in the world but B, and I tried to be just like him. He said, ‘Bob, you’ll never have any originality until you get a style of your own.’ I didn’t get it until ‘57, with ‘Farther Up the Road.’ Before that, people said I sounded just like B.B. King.”

Bland said his development into a distinctive soul singer in the late ‘50s was due largely to “Joe Scott bringing in the material that wouldn’t have the flavor of the earlier stuff I’d been doing. He brought in material where I’d have to be taught a different way of singing.”

Since then, Bland’s style has been good for more than 60 hits on the R&B; charts, including such standards as “I Pity the Fool,” “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do,” and “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City.” Bland’s three ‘80s albums for Malaco Records, an independent R&B; label based in Jackson, Miss., offer solid evidence that he remains a master of the classic, understated soul-blues style that Robert Cray, among others, has cited as an influence.

Although he doesn’t write his own material, Bland said he tries to inject personal experiences into his performances, which revolve around songs about the joys and heartaches of romance.

“I don’t think you can deliver unless you’ve had the pain, the experience,” said Bland, who has been married four times and fathered five children. “With a blues singer, to be a good one you have to go through times of disappointment and mishaps. I base mine especially on being in love and having these things crumble. A better way than being violent is to tell a story. I use all that frustration in a song.”

His current 7-year marriage to Willie Mae Bland, a registered nurse, has brought stability and maturity that eluded him in past relationships, Bland said. His youngest son, Roderick, 12, recently made his performing debut alongside his father, sitting in on drums during Bland’s recent tour of Japan.

While his name has never been a watchword with the huge pop audience reached by such soul music pioneers as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and James Brown--and by B.B. King--Bland said he has no complaints about a career that still keeps him recording and touring steadily.

“You work as much as you want, as long as you can. I’m happy to be in that category,” he said. “But I’m never really pleased. I’m through if I’m pleased. Once you get comfortable, you might as well get on the lake and fish.”

B.B. King, Bobby Bland and Millie Jackson will perform at 7 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday at the Celebrity Theatre, 201 E. Broadway, Anaheim. Tickets: $40. Information: (714) 999-9536.