The Soul of B.B. King

AMG Review of The Soul of B.B. King

Richie Unterberger
All Music Guide

In a jaw-gnashing exercise of discographical loggerheads, The Soul of B.B. King was just a retitled version of a King album previously released on the Crown label, B.B. King. Further muddling the record-keeping, The Soul of B.B. King would appear on both the United and Custom labels (both of which were, like Crown, budget imprints of the Modern Records company). And then, when the album came out on CD with eight bonus tracks in 2003, it would bear the title The Soul of B.B. King. Basically, the story's this: when B.B. King left the Modern Records stable in the early '60s, Modern scrambled to put out King material on their own label on numerous compilations. The unimaginatively titled B.B. King was one such exercise, appearing on the budget Crown imprint in 1963. The ten tracks were a mishmash of sessions spanning the early '50s to the early '60s, none of the songs among King's more familiar. However, despite its exploitative nature (and brevity), it's not at all a bad listen. The selections include some real tough, swinging numbers with organ and horns, even if some of the tracks (like "You Won't Listen" and "Shake Yours") suffer from harsh upper-end distortion that should have been avoided in the original recording. In a different style, "Boogie Rock (aka House Rocker)" (an alternate take of a 1955 single) is a smoking instrumental. This is the album was later reissued under the different title The Soul of B.B. King on both the United and Custom labels. In 2003, the Ace CD release The Soul of B.B. King took the ten tracks that had been on B.B. King aka The Soul of B.B. King, and added eight bonus cuts from multiple sources, including Kent singles that hadn't been anthologized on CD; a few tracks that only appeared on scattered King compilations; and two Modern label recordings that hadn't been issued anywhere, "Green and Lucky Blues" and "Don't Let It Shock You." Topped off with historical liner notes explaining what originally appeared where, that's the best way to experience the material that showed up on The Soul of B.B. King aka B.B. King, packaged with the respect the lues great deserves.