Still Mose-ying Along : The Legendary, ‘Unclassifiable’ Artist Keeps Plugging Away and Picking Up New Fans

Three decades ago, singer/pianist Mose Allison recorded a song, “Young Man Blues,” in which he fretted, “Nowadays the old man’s got all the money / And a young man ain’t got nothing in the world these days.”

By those rules, now that Allison is 63, you’d suppose he’d have all the money, and be fairly sanguine about it. But there just ain’t no justice.

“No, I have to do a new tune now,” Allison said, laughing over the phone from San Francisco this week. “I haven’t done ‘Young Man Blues’ in 20 years. The new tune is ‘Old Man Blues,’ and it’s from a completely different perspective:

‘Now an old man ain’t nothin’ in the U.S.A.

The young man knows how to wheel and deal,

The young man’s got the sex appeal.

The young man is the man of the hour,

The young man has 45 years of purchasing power.’

Aside from having had his golden years denied by shifting consumer demographics, Allison is doing fine. He still records and still performs about 160 and 200 days a year; he’ll be at Newport’s Cafe Lido Sunday at 4 and 7 p.m.--doing whatever it is that he does. Reviewers have called him “one of the great jazz unclassifiables,” a “country-style sophisticate,” “enigmatic,” “a blues/jazz hepcat,” “a proto-rocker,” “odd but engaging” and “like Maynard G. Krebs with a good job.”

“I’ve always had a category problem, that’s for sure,” Allison averred, though he himself doesn’t see any great mystery. “There’s a lot of blues in what I do. It’s still primarily jazz, but there’s a lot of influences thrown in there. Then there’s the fact that I sing too, and a lot of pure jazz people don’t take singing seriously and think that’s a detriment.”

While Allison proved himself a capable pianist in the ‘50s, backing the like of Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, it is his singing and songwriting that have made him a legendary, if unclassifiable artist.

His airy, parched-breeze singing style has influenced singers from Michael ranks to Joe Jackson, while his wry lyrics and rhythmically rolling tunes have been covered by a legion of fans in the rock world, including Van Morrison, the Who, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, the Yardbirds and even the Clash.

Though he’s lived on Long Island since 1956, his molasses-and-whiskey voice reveals his Tippo, Miss., roots. He began playing piano at age 5 , and soon, he says, “started out with blues and in the conventional jazz tradition, the Southern Afro-American tradition, of all those people like Satchmo and Lester and Bullmoose and Count and Pres and Duke and all those people. That’s my basic background, and I’ve thrown in some exterior elements that aren’t in that tradition, but the tradition is the main thing. The other things are just ways of flavoring it.”

Given his geography, it might seem odd that several of his influences--including Nat Cole, Charles Brown and Percy Mayfield--are associated with the West Coast sound.

“Well, none of those guys started on the West Coast,” Allison explained. “I first heard Percy Mayfield in Jackson, Miss., and I first heard Nat Cole in Mississippi, too. I was familiar with them long before they came out here.”

The leadoff song on his current “My Backyard” album is called “Ever Since I Stole the Blues,” a tongue-in-cheek account of what happens after a “white boy” physically absconds with the music:

“Well, down on the delta and on the south side

All of the players are digging Charlie Pride.

They’re even closing down the barbecues

Ever since I stole the blues.”

The song resulted, he said, from “an interview in London where I was telling somebody about my background and the fact that I used to hang out with black players (Allison is white) down south. And this lady said, ‘Well, when you were stealing black music, did you ever have any problems? . . .’ She just had an ax to grind, I guess--and about then I got this vision of what if I really had stolen the blues.”

In the song, Allison evades capture by shifting his blues to the British Isles, which was indeed where his blues/jazz stylings caught on with rockers in the ‘60s. Though the Who’s Pete Townshend used to pronounce Allison a genius at Who concerts, and Morrison still seeks him out to perform at his concerts, Allison maintains he was only part of a whole culture that British youth picked up on.

“It’s not only my music that caught on. They picked up on the whole blues thing, the whole African-American tradition. Americans weren’t picking it up, partly because of racism or whatever. Some of the things the English guys picked up and turned into commodities were things that the mass of people here had been ignoring for years.”

Unlike other Southern blues-based singers, Allison employs a decidedly non-emphatic singing style, with his breezy vocals only touching down lightly on his lyrics. But unlike other singers who affect his style, Allison still manages to convey a soulful feeling with his light touch.

His songs can be bits of reflective whimsy, acerbic put-downs--one is titled “Your Mind Is on Vacation (but Your Mouth is Working Overtime)”--and political or social commentary. One of the latter declares: “Everybody’s crying mercy, but they don’t know the meaning of the word.”

Such songs seem to take a not-altogether-encouraging view of the world. Allison, however, says he isn’t the brooding type.

“Whether the songs are encouraging or not is a matter of interpretation. A lot of my songs are actually very encouraging, very optimistic, and a lot of them have a joke, so if you don’t get the joke, you’ll think they’re cynical. I’m actually a pretty positive person, but I think you have to be aware of the downside before you can appreciate the upside. That’s where it is.”

In his travels across the nation, he does indeed find himself sufficiently informed of the downside.

“Anybody could tell you things are coming apart, everything is getting worse. We’ve been going backwards now for about 11 years, sociologically. You’ve got more homeless people, more helpless people, more walking wounded, more everything.”

He is dependent on his touring to make his living. Though he has recorded more than 30 albums, Allison is reasonably confident that no one ever gets to hear them.

“I’m never happy with any record company’s distribution. According to the companies I’ve recorded for, I don’t sell any records and, in fact, the people who did buy the records always take them back and get their money back,” he said, bemused.

“It’s a mystery to me, but I have people coming to me all the time saying they can’t find my new album. My son just recently went around New York City, and he couldn’t find my Blue Note (his current label) stuff in any of the big outlets. Maybe they don’t want to sell any records. Maybe it’s a secret.”

He keeps picking up new fans nonetheless. “I keep playing, and I keep getting people from new sources. Some people come in because they’ve heard about me through their rock musician heroes or other people who have done my stuff.”

Asked whether there were anything in his career he was proudest of, Allison said: “Not really. Sometimes you can be proud of something and the next week you might not be proud of it. You just go for the long run. I’m just happy to go on doing what I’m doing. I try to keep developing myself and hopefully getting better at it, which is a slow process that’s been going on for 41 years and probably will continue for as long as I’m able. It’s still a challenge, and I still enjoy it when it goes right. At my age, a good performance is its own reward.”

Mose Allison plays Sunday at 4 and 7 p.m. at Cafe Lido, 501 30th St., Newport Beach. Tickets: $12.50. Information: (714) 675-2968.