LONESOME SUNDOWN, "DON'T GO" C/W "I STOOD BY"-EXCELLO 45-2145 (REL. 11/1958)

 

The sight of the bright orange and blue Excello label is a guaranteed yay moment. Though chances are high it will be another battered example of Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart” (a great recording that did well for the label), it can be an invitation to the blues that’s most welcome.

The Nashville-based label tapped into the talent pool (or swamp) of the Delta region, with artists from all over the South in the picture as well. The results are seldom dull and, at their best, capture some of the best rural blues and soul sounds of their day. Their hit artists tended towards colorful names—Harpo, Whispering Smith, Lazy Lester, Lightnin’ Slim…and Lonesome Sundown.

In real life he was Cornelius Green, born in 1928 on a plantation in Louisiana. By adulthood, he moved to New Orleans to pursue a musical career. He joined the popular Zydeco Ramblers, via an invite by leader Clifton Chenier. He toured with the band in 1955, then left, perhaps due to the demands of his recent marriage. He recorded some demos of his original songs. Those got into the hands of J. D. Miller, musical wheeler-dealer of the bayou. Impressed, Miller shared them with his cronies at Excello, who invited Green to become one of their blues artists.

He was recorded by Miller for eight years and Excello issued 16 singles from 1956 to ’65. None became major hits, but Lonesome, as he was now called, had a solid following in the Delta region and his records were on many a roadside jukebox. Today we’ll hear his fifth release for Excello—one of the records that came closest to a hit.

If the music doesn’t hold any great surprises, how it’s performed matters. “Don’t Go” has a solid mid-tempo drive, with solid guitar, distant harmonica and insistent piano on a familiar blues melody and some classic blues imagery in its pleading lyric. The guitarist may be Gabriel Perrodin, known as ‘Guitar Gable’ and another Excello artiste of note. While the record plays, it’s easy to ‘hear’ the shuffle of feet against a hardwood floor covered in sawdust in some long-gone roadhouse deep along a Louisiana backroad.

Hear it >>>>> HERE. <<<<<

Cash Box made this single one of their Pick of the Weeks on November 15, 1958.

A mesmerizing guitar riff opens the slow-drag blues “I Stood By,” a first-person account of a man who let his woman move into another’s arms. Gable and the pianist frame Sundown’s rueful voice in a master-class on how to accompany a blues singer. The lumbering tempo suggests a man who’s exhausted and sleepless but who can’t stop walking in a vain attempt to shake off his funk.

While this breaks zero musical ground, it’s a good a song, within this familiar framework, as anyone could create, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Hear it >>>>> HERE. <<<<<

A few of Lonesome’s singles are sought-after due to their themes: “I’m a Mojo Man,” “Samplin’ Man” and “Hoo Doo Woman Blues.” He left Excello in 1965. His marriage had been fraught with tension; his wife was religious and disapproved of his music and career. It inspired a classic song, “My Home is a Prison,” which Slim Harpo recorded. A long and messy divorce took Sundown out of music for a few years. He returned in the 1970s to play blues festivals; he also made some new recordings. He retired for good at the end of that decade and suffered a stroke later in life. He passed on in 1995 and his Excello sides have gained more attention in the passing years.

Tomorrow: a musical salute to one of rock ‘n’ roll’s iconic early figures, written and sung by one of the great female talents in rock ‘n’ roll on a Liberty single from 1958.