Johnnie Taylor - Raw Blues / Little Bluebird (1992)

Pinning Johnnie Taylor down stylistically can be difficult. During the singer's 35-year recording career, he's been a doo-wopper, gospel quartet lead, blues belter, soul shouter, and disco superstar. His music has changed with the times, yet his distinctive low-tenor vocal style, influenced early on by such legendary gospel quartet leads as R Ή Harris and Sam Cooke of the Soul Stirrers and Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, has remained constant.
During the mid-1960s, Taylor was known to many as "the Blues Waiter". The blues records he made during that period, at first for Sam Cooke and J W Alexander's Sar label in Los Angeles, then for Stax Records in Memphis, have come to epitomize a genre some call "soul blues".

While gospel music had long informed the blues, its influence became even more pronounced in the work of such pioneering soul-blues stylists of the mid-to- late-50s as Little Willie John, Ted Taylor, and Bobby Bland, as well as in the later recordings of Sam Cooke (on his "Night Beat" album), Johnnie Taylor, Little Johnny Taylor, Little Milton, and Robert Cray. None of these men sang blues exclusively, but when they did, they brought to the 12-bar form an elasticity of phrasing, rich in the use of melismaS, that was derived directly from gospel music, especially the quartets.