from: "Soul for Lost Love and Crises of Faith" (Vibe.com, 2008)
Not enough people talk about the Bobby “Blue” Bland these days, though his signature hiccup (if you could call it that) is one of the more classic idiosyncrasies in the history of American popular music. Give Kanye West and Shawn Carter some credit for recovering “Ain’t No Love In the Heart of the City”—a great Bland track no doubt—but not representative of the classic sides he laid down for Duke in the late 1950s and 1960s like “Turn on Your Lovelight” (see the opening montage in Eve’s Bayou), “That’s the Way Love Is” or “Cry, Cry, Cry.” As the latter songs displays, didn’t nobody beg better than Bobby “Blue” Bland in his day and “Chains of Love” is a classic example. In the song Bland laments the power of a love that he can’t extricate himself from (“now I’m a prisoner”), as he begs for his lover to stop holding him hostage if she’s not gonna love him back (“if you gonna leave me, please set me free”). But it is the last verse that gets at the sense of despair as Bland sings, “well it’s 3 O’ Clock in the morning, lawd and the moon is shining bright…and I was just sitting here wondering, lawd (hiccup) where can you be tonight?” and you can just imagine this man sitting on his porch rocking his body back and forth recalling the classic “Trouble in Mind” (“I’m going down to the river…if the blues don’t get me, I might have to rock on away from here.”
--Mark Anthony Neal
Title: Soul for Lost Love and Crises of Faith—Bobby 'Blue' Bland's "Chains of Love'
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6:16 AM
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
6:16 AM
