Blues with a wink

“We’d like to bring out at this time one of the great musical heroes of this century. …”

The date was Nov. 30, 1989, the venue New York’s Beacon Theatre, and the speaker Van Morrison, who was taping a performance that would soon be released as The Concert. The “great musical hero” who strolled out was Mose Allison.

Allison died in November four days after his 89th birthday. He occupied a unique place among pianists and singer-songwriters, mixing the jazz and blues that he absorbed as a Mississippi youth with a homespun wisdom and wit that belied his having majored in English and minored in philosophy at Louisiana State University.

Morrison wasn’t the only rocker who regarded Allison with awe. The Who made his “Back Country Suite: Blues” (aka “Young Man Blues”) a staple of its Tommy-era shows. Blue Cheer transformed his prison-yard classic “Parchman Farm” into lumbering heavy metal. And Bonnie Raitt and Morrison recorded definitive versions of “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy” and “If You Only Knew” respectively.

Yet Allison remained something of a cult artist. On that long-ago night at the Beacon, he cut a diminutive figure, not least because the song he performed was a wryly ironic, low-energy send-up of gospel-music optimism called “Thank God for Self-Love” (aka “Benediction”). Less than three minutes after he’d emerged, the song ended, and he walked off into the wings.

Wry irony and the deadpan cool with which he delivered it were Allison’s trademarks. From his beginnings as a solo artist in the late 1950s, both the songs that he covered (Percy Mayfield’s “Lost Mind,” Willie Dixon’s “I Love the Life I Live,” and John D. Loudermilk’s “You Call It Joggin’” remained in his repertoire for years) and the songs that he wrote himself often contained bittersweet twists. If they sometimes veered into misanthropy, it was misanthropy with a smile.

Examples of Allison’s quotability abound, and every Allison fan will have his favorites. But the following would surely be found across the board: “I’m so easy going, / don’t even keep the score. / All I want is plenty, but I will take more” (“I Don’t Want Much”); “I’m a certified senior citizen, / and I don’t have to pay full fare. / You might ignore me, but doctors adore me …” (“Certified Senior Citizen”); and “Ever since the world ended, / I face the future / with a smile” (“Ever Since the World Ended”).

Allison had a tender side too. His song titled “Was” (“When I become was and we become were, / will there be any sign or a trace / of th’ lovely contour of your face?”) is worthy of E.E. Cummings. And the frisky love song “Your Molecular Structure” (“Your molecular structure / is really somethin’ fine, / a first-rate example of functional design”) wouldn’t come off as half so charming if it didn’t inadvertently toss a monkey wrench into the gears of evolution.

Allison recorded over 30 albums, both studio and live. And while most reflect his fondness for the traditional jazz setup of piano, bass, and drums, the ones on which he expanded his instrumental horizons—1969’s Hello There, Universe, for instance, or 1976’s Your Mind Is on Vacation—remain the freshest.

Then there’s Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison, the album that Van Morrison spearheaded seven years after declaring Allison a great musical hero. Recorded in a day, it captures Morrison, Georgie Fame, Ben Sidran, and Allison taking freshness to another level.

The good time they were all clearly having feels almost poignant now that Allison is gone.