Since I Met You Baby in Bloomington, MN

A skilled songwriter and nimble pianist, and possessing an emotive, velvet voice that prefigured
Nat King Cole
and other such crooners,
Ivory Joe Hunter
was instrumental in bringing
R&B
to an uptown audience in the late '40s. He almost repeated the trick in the mid-'50s for the then-emerging
rock & roll
style (although it took uptown audiences a good long while to catch on) when he signed with
Atlantic Records
and released a series of
-leaning sides for the label between 1954 and 1957, including the majestic
"Since I Met You Baby"
in 1956. A year later,
Hunter
's
"Empty Arms"
neatly welded
and straight
country
together, complete with a bed of soulful
gospel
organ.
was so skilled at combining strains of
blues
,
jazz
, and nascent
into smooth and elegant packages that few at the time realized how innovative he was actually being. This set of his
Atlantic
sides is extremely brief (it struggles to top 25 minutes in length), but even at such a short running time, it still manages to be amazingly varied. Both
and
are included, along with the kinetic sax and handclap-led
"Shooty Booty"
and the amazingly wise and prescient
"You Can't Stop This Rocking and Rolling,"
which contains lines like "It's been here for years and years/It's just history repeating." There are lengthier and more complete collections of
's work available, but this one, even as short as it is, provides an elegant introduction (but only that -- there's really so much more) to this wonderful musician. ~ Steve Leggett