Mose Allison – The Word From Mose

Mose Allison is probably one of the best ever examples of a “musician’s musician”. His songs have been covered by more than fifty artists over the last 50 years, with “Young Man” and “New Parchman” adopted as new standards by the rock and roll crowd.

I first heard “Young Man”, as peformed by The Who on their Live at Leeds LP (since re-issued as a double-CD). I was so inspired by the Leeds performance that I listened to it nearly every day for an entire semester of high school.

At about the same time, I was discovering several other British bands based in blues, R&B, and jazz. Two bands I quickly came to love were Ten Years After and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Mayall’s version of New Parchman (renamed Parchman Farm) followed Allison’s stylings quite closely. Mayall’s vocal style in particular bares a notable resemblance to Allison’s. Several of Mayall’s albums have yet to make it to CD format, and I have yet to see a CD copy of The Word from Mose (1964), despite several WEA/Atlantic re-issues – including one on the Rhino label.

AMG Review by Eugene Chadbourne:

This iconoclastic performer has sometimes been described as a country blues player, perhaps leading to images of a blind man standing on a corner playing a guitar with a bottleneck slide. In reality, Mose Allison is from a much more cosmopolitan tradition, and the country blues adage comes from attempts to describe the sound he gets playing light, swinging jazz with a distinctly rural, Southern influence. This album, from one of many he recorded for Atlantic, actually contains examples of him taking material from the real country blues heritage and reworking it into his own style, to brilliant effect. His “New Parchman Farm” is a fantastic piece, as he changes what was once a stark, depressing prison blues into something else again. Perhaps this version would be more suited to white-collar criminals such as the Watergate mob, basking in upper-class prisons complete with tennis courts. At any rate, this is a performance that only the most hardened individual would be able to listen to without a smile cracking their face. Like most of Allison’s releases, this one suffers from a handful of tracks that although not quite throwaway, surely lack the substance of the best songs here.