Bobby Blue Bland, 1930–2013

Bobby Bland didn’t make it as a blues singer right off the bat, but he was steeped in all the right influences from the very beginning. Soon after he moved to Memphis as a teenager, he joined a group called the Beale Streeters, named after the city’s legendary entertainment strip. There he sang alongside guitar legend B.B. King, even becoming his valet and chauffeur for a time, before launching a long, hit-making career that established his reputation as “the Sinatra of the blues.”

Bland was born in the small town of Millington, Tenn., and abandoned by his father while still very young, said The New York Times. He quit school “in the third grade to work in the cotton fields,” but soon heard a higher calling in the records of blues guitarist T-Bone Walker. In the early 1950s, Bland recorded a series of songs with Memphis producer Sam Phillips, who later made a star of Elvis Presley, but they went nowhere. After he returned from service in the Army, however, he released a number of “hard-blues classics” like “Farther On Up the Road” that became hits. Bland really came into his own in 1958 with “Little Boy Blue,” where he unveiled his trademark “squalling shout” and earned his alliterative sobriquet, “Blue.”

It was an apt nickname for the satin-voiced singer, said the Associated Press, “because his repertoire focused so closely on lovelorn subject matter.” Beginning in 1960, Bland released “a dozen R&B hits in a row,” including “I’ll Take Care of You” and “Turn On Your Love Light.” His success continued well into the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with black audiences. In 1992, Bland was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which cited his “amazing 51 singles in the R&B Top 40.”

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Bland “was equally comfortable as a smooth balladeer and a propulsive house-rocker, and often decorated his crushed-velvet performances with a distinctive snort,” said Variety. He never achieved the crossover success that his early bandmate B.B. King enjoyed, landing only four times in the Top 40 pop charts, most prominently with “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do” in 1964. But many of Bland’s songs were beloved by rock musicians and recorded by the likes of Eric Clapton, the Grateful Dead, David Bowie, The Band, and Van Morrison. They saw Bland as one of the last survivors of the great Southern blues generation that spawned rock ’n’ roll.