This attractive 4 cd box set holds almost 6 hours of stompin', joyous, exuberant rhythm & blues. Specialty exemplifies the post World War II independent labels which sprang up to record the hot new musical styles emanating from America's inner cities. Specialty's owner Art Rupe-- like the founders of Chess, Atlantic, Sun, Imperial, and other indies -- was a small-time white entrepreneur with a love for black music, an adventurous, pragmatic approach to recording, and a shrewd sense for finding and marketing the hot artists which ghetto audiences loved but major labels were ignoring. Building their rosters on the jumping new small band R&B sound, Rupe and the other independents ushered in a new era in the mid- '50's, when the music, shifting gears only slightly, found a huge new audience of white teenagers, and became known as rock & roll.Rupe was based in Los Angeles, and recorded primarily in L.A. and also, significantly in New Orleans. As this fact suggests, the bands and artists he found and showcased represent, not the raw, gritty, Mississippi-based styles which attracted the Chess brothers in Chicago and Sam Phillips in Memphis, but rather the more polished, swing-based, "jump" blues sound which emigrated to the West Coast from Texas, Kansas City, New Orleans. With rollicking boogie-woogie piano weaving through tight riffing horn sections, Rupe's artists represented the good-humored, upbeat new music which dominated the R&B charts in the late '40's and early '50's.
Specialty's most successful artist in this period was the veteran drummer-singer Roy Milton, and this box includes the nineteen R&B hits he charted, all displaying his hearty, straight-ahead vocal style, inventive horn arrangements, driving rhythm, and the marvelous Camille Howard's incendiary piano playing, which soars and swoops delightfully through the band, adding the magic touch to all of these sides. There are also a few numbers by Howard as a vocalist; and five wonderful sides each by the bands of brothers Joe Liggins and Jimmy Liggins, who are actually better singers and inventive writer-arrangers than Milton even though they didn't match his track record on the charts. The unique and deeply soulful blues poet Percy Mayfield makes his debut with 7 cuts here, including his original recording of "Please Send Me Someone to Love." And there are numerous individual entries, some by artists better known on other labels (Clifton Chenier, Floyd Dixon, Earl King), others the only hit by obscure talents such as Li'l Millet, Johnny Fuller, and the now-legendary Guitar Slim
