Soul of the Man: Bobby "Blue" Bland

16. Funny How Time Slips Away: 2000–2007

239 16 Funny how time Slips Away 2000–2007 240 Bobby and the band joined Van Morrison, another longtime Bobby Bland fan, in Birmingham, England, on March 14, 2000, to begin another UK tour. Their first performance, at the Birmingham Academy, was followed by shows in Cardiff on March 16, Manchester on March 17, Glasgow on March 18, Brighton on March 19, concluding on March 21 and 22 with performances at London’s Royal Albert Hall. There Bobby sailed through a few of his hits, “I Pity the Fool,” “That’s the Way Love Is,” “Everyday I Have the Blues,” “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and “If You’re Gonna Walk on My Love,” before giving way to Morrison with these words to the audience, “Don’t forget who I am. When you hear the name again, say ‘Oh yeah, I caught him once. He’s that blues singer.’”1 Bobby later joined Morrison for duets on “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” and “Tupelo Honey,” and, according to the Evening Standard in an article called “The Van Has Been Overtaken,” “If this was Morrison’s show, he allowed Bland to steal it.”2 Prompted by the publicity and success of the tour, England’s Dressed To Kill label rereleased the live recording of Bobby’s 1983 Long Beach Blues Festival performance, for some inexplicable reason renamed Mercy Mercy Me, and, as noted earlier, Ace Records released a compilation called The Original Memphis Blues Brothers, which contains four of Bobby’s earliest recordings for Modern. Meanwhile, at the dawn of a new century, MCA was in the midst of issuing a group of “best” albums by some of its historically hottest acts, called appropriately the Millennium Collections, including CDs by the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, Rod Stewart, James Brown, and others, including , of course, The Best of Bobby Bland—The Millennium Collection, with twelve of Bobby’s biggest hits. The new century also brought the deaths of many of Bobby’s old friends and associates. On July 21, 2000, David James Mattis died at the age of eightyfive in Wheeling, West Virginia. Soon after signing Bobby to his first record Funny how time Slips Away: 2000–2007 241 contract with Mattis’s fledgling Duke label in 1952, Mattis sold the company to Don Robey in 1953 and moved back into radio broadcasting for good, working with several stations before his retirement in 1980.3 By August 19, Bobby and the band were in cooler climes, playing the 15th Annual Portsmouth Blues Festival in New Hampshire, where Bobby was presented with a Life-Time Achievement Award from the Blues Bank Collective, sponsor of the event.4 On September 23, 2000, Bobby was back in Memphis to be honored with the 2000 Blues Ball Pyramid Award. Performing at the benefit tribute were Jerry Lee Lewis, Isaac Hayes, Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, and Little Jimmy King.5 Later, on November 26, Bobby and the band performed at a Sunday night early show at the New Era in Nashville. The one person who had encouraged Bobby’s singing from the beginning , when Bobby was a boy back in the cotton fields, who had taken him to Memphis at the age of fifteen to provide him with more opportunity, who had encouraged and supported him throughout his life and career, the one and only constant, Mary Lee Bland, Bobby’s mother, died in Memphis, on January 2, 2001, at the age of eighty-nine.6 After his mother’s funeral and burial at Memorial Park in Memphis, Bobby, drained and bereaved, took some time off from touring and recording, not returning to the recording studios for nearly two years. MCA, however, filled the gap with The Anthology, an excellent two-disc collection of 50 of Bobby’s best Duke, Dunhill/ABC, and MCA tracks, in chronological order, including a previously unreleased eight-minute 1973 live recording of “This Time I’m Gone for Good.” What is missing are his earliest recordings for Chess and Modern and his later recordings for Malaco, of which only “Members Only” was a charting hit single. If the previous three-volume, six-disc, complete compilation by MCA is too much of a good thing, then this collection is about right. If not, Universal-MCA Music, MCA’s United Kingdom distributor, also released in 2001 a single-disc, twenty-two-song collection called Ask Me ’Bout Nothing (But...