Pop Music Review : R&B; Foundation Honorees Let Music Do the Boasting

If either Mariah Carey or Joan Osborne was feeling that she didn’t get due Grammy Award recognition, she would have done well to have stopped in at the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday to see some musicians who really haven’t gotten their due.

But that’s just what the Rhythm & Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Awards show is designed to rectify--at least in small and belated measure. Given by the organization started by music industry veterans (Bonnie Raitt is the most famous of a roster of tireless crusaders), the program provides honors and cash awards to deserving, and often overlooked, musicians.

“We have to remember that when these records were made, America was a very different place,” said rock guitarist Vernon Reid, presenting to blues-funk veteran Johnny “Guitar” Watson, one of the 13 honorees. “It’s amazing how gracious and how humble a lot of these artists are today, in light of the fact of what we know they all remember.”

Watson wasn’t exactly the picture of humility as he accepted the honor in his trademark flashy style. Nor was Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Bo Diddley, talking in his show-closing segment at length about never receiving adequate kudos--or cash--for his part in inventing rock ‘n’ roll.

But even Diddley left most of the boasting Thursday to the music. It was the kind of evening that brought shivers through the audience several times, especially with Arlene Smith’s soaring vocals on the ballad “Maybe” and when the Flamingos did their first “sh-bob-sh-bop” on the silky “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Each honoree in the brief performances provided ample evidence of worthiness: pianist Jay McShann’s nimble big-band blues, Dave Bartholomew’s trailblazing New Orleans style, the Cadillacs’ campy “Speedo,” still-rousing classic soul in Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” Johnnie Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love” and Bobby Womack’s stylish performance, and vocal showcases by Doris Troy (“Just One Look”) and Betty Everett (“It’s in His Kiss”). Ronald and Rudolph Isley, the two surviving founders of the Isley Brothers, appeared but did not perform.

Hosted by past inductees Darlene Love and Mavis Staples, the show’s loose structure got even looser as the evening progressed. (“They’re doing this in alphabetical order,” said Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, introducing McShann. “I was sober when the Cadillacs were on.”)

But that just heightened the family feel of an event that would have been stifled by formality.