Roosevelt Sykes: Chicago Boogie

If it’s understandable that Leroy Carr isn’t in the current blues pantheon, it’s even less understandable — if not necessarily less unjust — that Roosevelt Sykes has also slipped by the wayside. If Carr was an artist ideally suited for the new medium of recording rather than stage performance, Sykes was a barrelhouse player of the old school. While Carr was subtle in vocals, playing, and lyrics, Sykes played his piano figures with flourish and backed those notes in a voice assured of its own physical power.

Moreover, Carr — especially via Skip James — also influenced the Delta players that now form the basis for the blues myths of lonely wanderers, guitars slung over their shoulders, and hellhounds on their trails. With his big sound and boisterous innuendos, Sykes in the ’30s was a commercially successful, oft-recorded middleground between citified players like Louis Jordan (check out “Green Onion Top”) and cult tastes like Skip James. He was, as one of the songs here attests, “Blues N’ Boogie”, blues with a romping, stomping piano beat. Even during the ’50s and ’60s, the dates from which these releases are culled, Sykes could still get it up: the boogie beat used in the dirty “Rock It” would be recycled in Lightnin’ Hopkins’s even dirtier “Fan It”.

That said, this album has also enhanced my appreciation for Leroy Carr. Especially given the uneven quality of the material here, the straightforward power of its enjoyable hokum can nonetheless pale pretty quickly next to an understated Carr treasure like “Midnight Hour Blues”. It’s only after hearing what sometimes isn’t in Sykes’s big sound that Carr’s quiet gains stature by comparison. Which isn’t necessarily Sykes’s fault.

Unlike Sony’s recent and comprehensive Best of Leroy Carr, this makes no attempt at comprehensiveness. This doesn’t even include Roosevelt “The Honeydripper” Sykes’s self-referencing theme song of sorts, “The Honeydropper”. Collecting rare and unreleased sessions, all of them never before available on CD, this is more exhumation than compilation. Combining the tracks from three seemingly unrelated recording sessions separated by a dozen years and different labels, this jumbles chronology for vault scraping. Which is fine in a way, as the quality (under the circumstances) surprises with both its high level and consistency and, plus, this CD isn’t that long — 45-plus minutes — even combining three sessions.

But it also shows the haphazard nature of the project. For fans only, this eschews career-spanning hits for whatever Sykes happened to record during three recording dates. Fortunately, like many of his peers, Sykes had no qualms against revisiting old hits over and over. Thus, we get a remake of one of his first, “44 Blues”, that inspired Skip James’s “22-20 Blues” that inspired Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues”. Since the one here was cut in 1963, the sound quality is crisp, with the clearly plunking ivories perfectly complementing the menace of Sykes declaring, “I’m just walkin’ in the rain with my 44 in my hand.” Singing unmistakably lower than either James or Johnson, Sykes’s threat is a rumbling growl to the poised, delicate menace of the remakes.

We also get a remake of “Drivin’ Wheel”, the funny and sweet “Monkey Face Blues” (think Morrissey’s “I’m In Love with You, Fatty”), the already mentioned “Rock It”, and the aptly named title track instrumental. But we also get filler tracks like “Soon Forgotten” or “My Resolution”, tracks that, unlike the exuberant (and funny) meaninglessness of “Green Onion Top”, don’t have enough beat for tracks that don’t say much lyrically. Sykes was a consummate careerist, so his filler tracks are better than the filler tracks of even other blues pros, but it would have been nice to get more of his hits like “Night Time Is the Right Time” or “I Wonder” instead.

If you want a formal introduction to Sykes, go with something else. The Classic Blues label has a two-disc Sykes compilation that, sound unheard, at least includes all his key pieces on its track listing. And, considering how many years and labels he recorded for and how many different versions of his big hits he recorded for said labels, I’d bet there’s also at least one good single disc Sykes compilation out there for anyone willing to look. But if you’re just curious about Sykes’s general sound and you come across this disc on sale, consider yourself lucky and go for it. Or, if you’re already into Sykes much more than I am, hey, you’ll get a kick out of this, too.