Poet of the Blues (1950-1954)

Poet, huh? "Existentialist" might be the better word. Look up Percy Mayfield in any Internet source and the first thing you're likely to learn is that the singer and songwriter wrote the 1961 Ray Charles hit, "Hit the Road Jack." That's fine and good, I suppose, if you like that. Me, I think it's one of Ray Charles's lesser accomplishments (for the best, see here) and, certainly in the context of the riches on display here, not really among Mayfield's greatest either. Underneath the smooth proto-cool R&B of these songs Mayfield's baritone warble solemnly intones all kinds of dark nights of the soul. At first that seems likely because, as the second thing you'll learn from those Internet sources, in 1952 he suffered a horrific auto accident that left him seriously injured and with his face "disfigured," which sounds like something straight out of some Douglas Sirk movie. But chalking the sensibility up to that, of course, is way too easy and doesn't nearly cover it, as the accident happened approximately halfway through the recordings you'll find here—and don't miss that his earliest success as a recording artist came in 1947 with a song called "Two Years of Torture." Maybe he always was oriented this way? But the accomplishment is that he manages to avoid any taint of self-pity, first by his careful, studied phrasing, the way he gently seeks and touches and caresses the notes (the kind of thing that Merle Haggard, in an entirely different style, also excels at), and then by the delicately wrought lyrics, which I suppose is where the "poet" notion comes from. I will leave you to ponder these words from the above-named "The River's Invitation"; Emily Dickinson might have given us "I heard a fly buzz when I died" but this is not so far behind: "I spoke to the river / And the river spoke back to me / It said man you look so lonely / You look full of misery / And if you can't find your baby / Come and make your home with me."