The Robert Cray Collection

The Robert Cray Collection, originally released on VHS in 1991, consists of nine music videos, with the singer-guitarist offering brief, mostly banal comments between each number. Cray was one of the first in a short line of younger blues musicians, which later included such performers as She mekia Copeland and Keb' Mo', who have tried to keep alive the traditions of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Koko Taylor. While traditional blues is gritty and bawdy, full of sex, violence, and the laments of loneliness, Cray offers a much more polished approach, which some might label slick.

Cray's blues lends itself well to the music video format, especially that of the easygoing, non-threatening 1980s. The Robert Cray Collection offers a microcosm of music video styles from that era, a mixture of unadorned performances and those attempting to illustrate what Cray is singing about, as with the feeble dramatizations in "Conse quences" and "The Forecast (Calls for Pain)." Much better is the animation of Cray and his beloved in "Acting This Way," featuring primitive efforts to blend animation with live action. The enjoyable "Nothin' But a Woman" features another cliché of the period: the very attractive woman, obviously a model, prancing about to make the music seem sexier and even pretending to play a music instrument, that phallic favorite the saxophone in this instance.

Four of the videos, including "The Forecast (Calls for Pain)" were directed by Oley Sassone, who has gone on to an undistinguished career making direct-to-video movies and directing episodes of such television series as Xena: Warrior Princess. The no-frills treatment, beyond tilted camera angles, of "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" is by the more accomplished Dominic Sena, auteur of the sublime guilty pleasure Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000).

The best of the videos is Peter Care's "Smoking Gun," Cray's most widely known, song because it captures the vitality of Cray's stage performances while having him sing and play in several locations. Unfortunately, most of Cray's comments between the videos are along the lines of "If you're into it, do it" and "Young folks don't hear much blues." Why is that, Robert, and what can be done about it? He mentions his bandmates only briefly and says nothing about the musicians who influenced him. No direct connection is made between his comments about gospel and rhythm and blues and what is heard in the videos.

This forty-one-minute compilation will serve, nevertheless, as an adequate introduction to Cray's music, though it focuses on only a portion of his career. The videos may also be of interest to students of the stylistic development of the genre.