Mighty Mo Rodgers – Memphis Callin’: Soul Music & the American Dream | Album Review

Mighty Mo Rodgers – Memphis Callin’: Soul Music & the American Dream

Drinking Gourd Records

www.mightymorodgers.com

11 songs – 36 minutes

A classically trained pianist who grew up surrounded by world-class blues and R&B artists in his father’s nightclub in East Chicago, Ind., Mighty Mo Rodgers may be in his 80s, but there’s a mighty fire still burning inside him, something he displays in this silky-smooth statement of love for the sounds emanating from Memphis.

Mo has been hooked on the music since his early teens, when he and a friend and regularly sneaked into the Chicken Shack, once a notorious club in nearby Gary, where Willie Dixon, Eddie Boyd, Jimmy Reed and other top talents played for an audience that worked hard in the steel mills by day and partied just as hard – or harder – at night and by the sounds of Stax and Muscle Shoals that dominated the airwaves in the mid-‘60s.

One of the deepest thinkers in the blues world, Rodgers started playing professionally while still in high school and began a lifelong exploration of songwriting while a student at Indiana State University, subsequently trading his school books for a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, where he gigged with Reed, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, Bobby “Blue” Bland and others, including Brenton Wood, playing Farfisa organ on his 1967 hit, “Gimme Some Kind of Sign,” and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s Sonny & Brownie LP, which he co-produced.

A polished tunesmith who earned a philosophy degree from California State University-Northridge, Mo wrote songs for Motown and Chappel & Company for decades before recording the first of his eight albums, Blues Is My Wailing Wall, in 1999. But his debut could have come much earlier, as this CD shows, because four of the tracks here are long-lost treasures captured for a planned LP in L.A. in the ‘70s with the backing of the full lineup of Booker T. & the MGs – Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Willie Hall.

A truly international, deeply funky effort, the majority of this set was recorded in France, Italy and the U.S. Rodgers is on vocals and piano with Luca Giordano on guitar, Abramo Riti on organ, Walter Monini on bass, and Alessandro Svampa on drums. Sax Gordon Beadle led and arranged the horn section, which includes Alessandro Di Bonaventura on trumpet and Maurice Gainen on tenor sax. And harp player Darryl Dunmore and percussionist Eric Cisbani sit in, too.

The golden era of blues-infused soul lives again from the opener, “Memphis Callin’,” which pays tribute to the magical allure of the music of Otis Redding and others that once emanated from Sun Studios, Stax and more. It’s propelled by a driving beat and steady horn accents. The stop-time pleaser, “Sing for Your Supper,” picks up intensity slightly as Mighty Mo recounts a life lesson he learned from his father – that you’re only as good as the last tune you’ve sung. Giordano shines on the mid-tune break.

“Love, Love, Love” opens with a tried-and-true horn flourish before becoming a slow-and-steady ballad about getting a bad case of the blues when a relationship go south before the tempo picks up again for “Bad, Bad Luck,” which bemoans a life full of trouble, which appears to be a matter of fate. A swinging tip of the hat to “The Chitlin Circuit” follows before things slow down for “If Reincarnation Is True,” a ballad that expresses the desire to return in an afterlife to a woman once lost, found again and a soulmate for all eternity. A plea for equality and understanding follows in “The March,” which states that Rev. Martin Luther King’s dream is still alive.

Despite sitting in the can for almost 50 years, the remaining four tracks featuring the MGs follows effortlessly from what’s come before and is just as vital. Rodgers expresses homesickness for Indiana in “San Francisco (You’re a Holiday),” but states that the city always makes him feel like a little boy with a brand new toy. But as he admits in the sweeping number that follows, “Indiana (Calls My Name)” no matter where he might be.

Two more treasures — “Woman of the Rain,” a driving shuffle that describes driving down the highway and picking up a lady walking in a downpour, and “Heart Be Still,” a burner that pleads that the organ not reveal his deep love for the lady – bring the album to a close.

If you’re a child of the ‘60s or ‘70s, you’ll lo-o-ove this one, and if you’re not, well, you’ll love it, too!

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