Blues guitarist, Magic Sam Maghett got a lot of exposure on Peel’s playlists across 1993, mainly due to the release of a compilation called West Side Soul on Charly R & B, which gathered together most of Maghett’s A & B sides from the singles he released through the late 1950s/early 1960s, together with a few other tracks. Curiously, Maghett never had an original album issued under his own name in his lifetime, though he put out two albums as Magic Sam’s Blues Band in the year before he died of a heart attack on 1 December 1969. Indeed, the Charly compilation shares its name with the first Magic Sam’s Blues Band album.
Look Whatcha Done was issued as the b-side on Maghett’s 1958 single, Everything Gonna Be Alright. In keeping with many of Maghett’s b-sides, it offers a genre mashup in comparison to the pure blues sounds of his A-sides. In his home region of Grenada County, Mississippi, he grew up listening to as much bluegrass and country music as he did blues and this eclecticism distinguishes a number of his tracks such as the rockabilly blues of Love Me With a Feeling (b-side to All Your Love) or the rhythm & blues of 21 Days in Jail,** which demands a sacking if it was never dangled in front of Elvis Presley as a potential song for him to record.
Look Whatcha Done brings together blues and swing, though its centrepiece has to be the guitar solo from 1:01 to 1:26 in which Maghett picks out the notes with the precision of a sculptor cutting a piece of marble into the statue he wants to make. Willie Dixon, who worked with Maghett as a musician, producer and writer* described Magic Sam’s use of harmonies in his playing as what marked him out as different from those who came before him. It certainly sounds as though multiple guitars are chocking that solo out, even though it is the work of one man.
Video courtesy of TheBluesfan12.
No comments:
Post a Comment