A Delta Drifter Keeps His Southern Accent

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A Delta Drifter Keeps His Southern Accent
September 1, 2010
By MARC MYERS
The Wall Street Journal

Mose Allison may be 82, but there's a youthful feel to his voice—carefree and random in its wanderings. His twangy croon is also the sound of Southern moonshine, conjuring up images of a Robert Crumb character howling the blues at the night sky. Yet Mr. Allison has been a New Yorker since 1956, and Friday through Sunday he'll be singing and playing jazz piano at the Jazz Standard.

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Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

New Yorker Mose Allison comes to the Jazz Standard this week
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Mr. Allison is an original. Best known since the mid-1950s as a jazz pianist, he is also a blues singer, a country-music storyteller, a folk-rock subversive and the author of more than 150 songs. Earlier this year, he released "The Way of the World," an album that includes a duet with his singer-songwriter daughter Amy.

Mr. Allison's best-known song is "Young Man Blues," which he wrote in 1957 and was recorded by the Who in 1970 for "Live at Leeds." Other rockers who have dipped into the Allison songbook include Georgie Fame, the Yardbirds, the Clash, Leon Russell, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and Bonnie Raitt. Traces of his pan-fried phrasing can also be heard in the vocals of Bob Dylan, Mungo Jerry, Gregg Allman, Neil Young and Boz Scaggs.

Yet the praise-averse Mr. Allison isn't exactly a household name. "They don't know where to put me," he said recently. "The advertising world has to say someone is the best at something. I've never been the best at anything."

Born in 1927 three miles from the village of Tippo, Miss., Mr. Allison learned the value of a dollar by working his father's cotton fields—making him one of the few performing blues artists today who actually picked the fluffy stuff.

Growing up, Mr. Allison listened hard to his cousin's Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Albert Ammons records. There also were formal piano lessons from a teacher who lived "right across the creek." In high school, he played trumpet and boogie-woogie piano.

After graduation, Mr. Allison spent a few semesters at the University of Mississippi before joining the Army in 1946. Discharged in 1947, he resumed classes at Ole Miss. On breaks in the late 1940s, he traveled north to Memphis, where he played trumpet in B.B. King's band, warming up audiences before the blues guitarist came onstage.

Before long, Mr. Allison quit college, and between 1949 and 1951, he played trumpet with a Southern territory band. When he married in 1951, he enrolled at Louisiana State University, where he took courses in aesthetics. "That's what opened me up," he said. "I had a book by R.G. Collingwood called 'Principles of Art,' which told me that the music I had been listening to was actually art."

Mr. Allison went back on the road with small bands. But when his trumpet was stolen in Philadelphia, he didn't replace it, preferring instead to play piano. In 1956, he moved his family to the Upper West Side.

A year later he was a member of the Stan Getz Quartet, and also toured briefly with Gerry Mulligan and Zoot Sims. His first trio album as a leader, 1957's "Back Country Suite," included "Blues" (also known as "Young Man Blues") and won critical acclaim, launching his career as a jazz-folk artist.

"Local Color," Mr. Allison's follow-up album that same year, included the blues "Parchman Farm"—named for the penitentiary near his childhood home. "When I was 10 years old I was in a gas station in Tippo when a team of horses and bloodhounds came thundering through, looking for an escaped prisoner. It left a deep impression on me."

In 1958, Mr. Allison recorded Willie Dixon's "The Seventh Son" on his "Creek Bank" album. Critics again raved—this time referring to him as a jazz-funk player. Mr. Allison shook off that label, too, with a hard turn toward the blues.

In the mid-'60s, he embarked on a series of tours of Britain, and English rockers took notice. In 1969, the Who heard his version of Sonny Boy Williamson's "Eyesight to the Blind" and covered it on "Tommy." Then they recorded Mr. Allison's own "Young Man Blues."

"I like anything that anybody does with my material," he said. "I do what I want with other people's material, so I don't quibble when they interpret mine."

Over the past 40 years, Mr. Allison has toured extensively, routinely releasing albums featuring his rough-hewn blues, cosmopolitan jazz piano and rural-road vocals.

Today, he works about 100 nights a year and lives with his wife Audre on Long Island. Do his neighbors have trouble understanding his thick Mississippi accent? "No, most people just put up with it," he said. "Actually, I'm usually the one who has trouble understanding what they're saying."