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79 6 Dreamer 1958–1960 encouraged by the reception of the big band sound on “Farther Up the Road,” Don Robey and Joe Scott bolstered Bobby’s recording band with three trumpets (played by Scott and newcomers Melvin Jackson and Floyd Arceneaux), two tenor saxophones (played by Bobby Forte and Jimmy Beck), the usual Pluma Davis on trombone, Hamp Simmons on bass, Teddy Reynolds on piano, Sonny Freeman on drums, and, for the first time, Wayne Bennett on guitar. On January 9, 1958, this exceptional group of musicians entered the Houston studio to record four new songs. The first was a pretty ballad called “Last Night” which was backed by the classic “Little Boy Blue,” both featuring Wayne Bennett’s guitar. Next was an up-tempo “You Did Me Wrong,” which should have been a hit, if not because of Bobby’s maturing style, then because of Wayne Bennett’s acrobatic guitar work, and the slow blues with a real big band bang, “I Lost Sight of the World,” which someone inexplicably overdubbed with a flute for the single version (Duke 300), but not for the LP version (Duke LP 86). It was at about this time that Bobby says he was really starting to create the sound that he liked. “I had this falsetto that I did for a long time, like the time when I did ‘I Smell Trouble’ and things. I was trying to be another B.B. King with it,” he recalled.1 “In fact, he put me on the right road. I was explaining to him some years back, I said, ‘You know, B., I can sound just like you.’ He said, ‘That’s very good, Bob. But you’ll never get anything unless you get some kind of originality; the people identify you for who you are, not sounding like somebody.’”2 The advice was not forgotten and was repeated one night years later when Bobby heard a young Tyrone Davis mimicking him. “Bobby said,” according to Davis, “‘Be you. Don’t be me.’” That advice, said Davis, was “the best thing that ever happened to me.”3 Dreamer: 1958–1960 80 So, Bobby, adhering to B.B.’s counsel, started working on his own style. He explains: “It was ’57 before I got a style of my own. Well, I was listening to Franklin a lot at the time—that’s Reverend C. L. Franklin, Aretha’s daddy— and my favorite at the time B.B. King, of course, that had the high falsetto. Well, actually I was listening to a whole lot of different things, whoever had the hottest record on the jukebox, really. See, I developed the softness by listening to different singers like Nat ‘King’ Cole or Perry Como or Tony Bennett. Man, they have a lot of feeling in their voices, they have a lot of what I call soul. I wouldn’t say they would be able to sing blues, but they do a helluva job on ballads and such. But the thing is, I’d been listening to Reverend Franklin a lot—‘The Eagle Stirreth His Nest’—and that’s where I got my squall from. After I had lost the high falsetto. You see, I had to get some other kind of gimmick , you know, to be identified with. So I thought that was a good thing. And the first thing I tried it was in ’56, I think it was, when I tried ‘Little Boy Blue.’ And I think it paid off.”4 But it wasn’t just a gimmick, the so-called “squall”—or the “chicken-bone sound,” “what they call in London the ‘love throat,’”5 or more precisely a sharp, growlng-like clearing of the throat noise—it was also a unique pop blues style that Bobby was carefully crafting. He explains: Like, I try to do it in a ballad type say, where it won’t be a strictly blues type, where they classify you as a blues singer and nothing else. But I don’t want this. So I do a variety of things. But now basically what I have to rely on is blues, because this is what I know, and like, I grew up with this. And I educate myself through records and people that I think that has something to offer now. Like, take for instance, I’ve always admired Tony Bennett, Perry Como, Andy Williams. It’s a thing that like, voice-wise that I listen...

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