This week's
#TuneTuesday theme is
#waitingsongs. There was a similar
#JukeboxFridayNight theme (
#waiting) a few weeks ago, but of course, there's no shortage of suitable songs:
Big Maybelle: I Can't Wait Any Longer (1967)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-CxuabfF1Q
I recently read an old article written by the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus in the 1980s. In the article he shares some of his recollections from Cookie's Caravan, a Newark club that was popular the 1950s:
"The best female singer and entertainer who ever appeared at the club was Big Maybelle. She was huge and ungainly and ebony black. Most of her broken-hearted love songs were directed at mean young girls who usually got off turning Maybelle inside out. It was only on rare occasions that she decided to change her luck and let a man do her in. She was a classic victim and this was convoluted by a heavy occupation with drugs. She could sing any kind of song from the most complicated modern jazz ballad to the funkiest low-down, nasty blues. She could take a note and bend it and torture it any which way. She could sing from the highest top to the lowest bottom with most powerful set of chops you ever heard. They were surrounded by constant sob in her voice and the result was a rare soul food musical gumbo.
She only used mike for effect or a pause. Most of the time, she walked up and down the room real slow, singing and signifying all the time. Once in a while, she'd stop for a minute at a table. Then she would carry on some more and move on again, never quitting for a moment.
Maybelle's voice was so powerful that you never missed the lack of speaker amplification. If she saw a woman she knew romantically or wanted to know romantically, she'd get real close, stare deep in her eyes and sing to her till you swore that if the little girl was the Rock of Gibraltar, she would still be moved."
(Doc Pomus: Cookie's Caravan. "Whiskey, Women, and...", Number 16, Spring 1987.)
#BigMaybelle #DocPomus #Rojac #rhythmandblues #soulmusic
