J.J. Cale
's debut album,
Naturally
, was recorded after
Eric Clapton
made
"After Midnight"
a huge success. Instead of following Slowhand's cue and constructing a slick
blues-rock
album,
Cale
recruited a number of his Oklahoma friends and made a laid-back
country-rock
record that firmly established his distinctive, relaxed style.
included a new version of
on the album, but the true meat of the record lay in songs like
"Crazy Mama,"
which became a hit single, and
"Call Me the Breeze,"
which
Lynyrd Skynyrd
later covered. On these songs and many others on
,
effortlessly captured a lazy, rolling
boogie
that contradicted all the commercial styles of
blues
, and
at the time. Where his contemporaries concentrated on solos,
worked the song and its rhythm, and the result was a pleasant, engaging album that was in no danger of raising anybody's temperature. ~ Thom Owens