- JUSTIN FOX BURKS
- Bobby “Blue” Bland at last fall’s Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
One of the key links on the road from blues to soul, Bobby “Blue” Bland, passed away yesterday, at age 83.
A Rosemark, Tennessee native, Bland first rose to prominence in Memphis as a member of the Beale Streeters, a group that also featured such future luminaries as B.B. King, Junior Parker, Johnny Ace, and Rosco Gordon.
Bland started making his solo mark in the late ’50s for the Duke label, which had relocated from Memphis to Houston, scoring R&B hits such as “Farther Up the Road,” “Little Boy Blue,” and “I Pity the Fool.”
Lending his smooth but grave baritone to material that paved the road from blues and R&B to the emerging, gospel-fueled form known as “soul,” Bland was an artistic rival of such seminal figures as Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, if not quite a commercial one. Bland’s 1961 album Two Steps from the Blues remains one of the towering achievements in any of those forms and perhaps one of the most under-recognized classics in all of pop music. Among the highlights in “Lead Me On,” a breathtaking record that at once suggests the depths of America’s racial history and looks out to feelings more eternal and timeless.
Bland remained a traditionalist, uncrossed-over hit-maker in the ’70s, a period perhaps best remembered now for his “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” later prominently sampled on Jay-Z’s album The Blueprint.
