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Lou Rawls
| Article
# : |
19780 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
2,499 Words |
| Author
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Heather B. Hayes
Heather B. Hayes is a freelance writer living in the
Washington, D.C., area. |
Shortly after his fifty-ninth album was released, Lou Rawls walks, onto the tiny stage at Anton's 1201 club, a swank, intimate jazz club in Washington, D.C. For Rawls, the evening is hardly memorable, another night in a career that has spanned forty years, a time that has seen the birth and evolution of rock music and the changing of a culture. That Rawls' singing style has been affected by trends over that time is evident as he courses through hits like "Tobacco Road," "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing," and "You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine."
The performance seems to move the crowd back in time, however. Rawls himself is a true hipster, using phrases like "you dig," "hip to that jive," and "rappin'." And when he speaks to his audience, there is little doubt that he yearns for a simpler, more carefree time.
Rawls introduces an upcoming song. "Now, this is one of those songs you heard when you were growing up, like I was on the Southside of Chicago," he says, smiling. "And you'd go to a house party on Friday or Saturday night, and it'd be cold outside, and you'd go inside. You didn't want to take off that coat, you didn't want to lose that coat so you'd go stand in the corner and sweat like a dog. Yeah, you know what I mean. But when this record would come on, you'd come out of the corner and grab a little lady and start trying to dance and stuff. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about."
Then he launches into "At Last," a blues standard and the title track of his fifty-eighth album, which earned him a Grammy nomination last year. It is because of that album and his latest, It's Supposed to Be Fun, that Rawls can now be found playing in jazz clubs around the country. The two albums, recorded on the revitalized jazz label Blue Note, are diversions from his pop-playing days of the '70s and '80s. They are, in fact, reminiscent of the kind of music he first sang after making the switch from gospel to secular music in the early 1960s.
That he is tired of today's music, Rawls tells the crowd, is one reason he decided to go back to blues and jazz. "You know, right now, the new generation is going through what they call the rap craze. Now, I'm not putting it down because when rock 'n' roll singers first came out, they said 'Oh yeah, that's that crazy stuff.' Then in the '60s, we had acid rock. And in the '70s, we had disco. And in the '80s ..." He stops for a beat to let it all soak in. "And in the '80s, we had a mess."
The statement
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