By all rights, Luther Allison should have been in the upper echelon of blues royalty, alongside such luminaries as B.B. King, Koko Taylor and Buddy Guy. His soulful singing and guitar playing earned him fame in Europe, where he was achieving significant success in the late \u201970s and throughout the \u201980s. But his choice to relocate to Paris cost him stateside, where he had been likewise building a name for himself.<\/p>\n
By 1994, he was ready to reconquer his home territory. His first outing in that regard, 1994\u2019s Soul Fixin\u2019 Man<\/i>, was a triumphant (if slightly uneven) declaration that he was back and was going to be taken on his own terms. Fortunately for the listener, those terms are beneficial to all.<\/p>\n
From the opening track \u201cBad Love,\u201d Allison sets the tone for the listener: not only is this his show, but he\u2019s going to make it an enjoyable one for everyone to experience. More an amalgam of Chicago blues and classic soul, he pours his being into these efforts; songs like the title track, \u201cI Want To Know\u201d and \u201cYou Been Teasin\u2019 Me\u201d all serve as ample evidence that Allison was more than ready to reclaim what could have been his for the taking, had he not focused his efforts overseas.<\/p>\n
Missteps? There were, to my ears, only two. The vocal and organ performance of \u201cThe Things I Used To Do\u201d doesn\u2019t play on Allison\u2019s true strength of guitar-based blues, and falls flat. Similarly, the follow-up track \u201cLove String\u201d feels like Allison and his band are in recovery mode, trying to win the listener back into their camp, but it just doesn\u2019t have the same power as earlier songs on the disc. Fortunately, by the time one gets to \u201cFreedom,\u201d the album\u2019s closer, balance has been restored, and it finishes on a solid note.<\/p>\n
Soul Fixin\u2019 Man<\/i> was to be the opening salvo for Allison\u2019s eventual staking of a claim to one of the many thrones of blues, but his campaign would sadly be cut short a few years later when cancer claimed his life. And even if this had been the only disc released in Allison\u2019s return to prominence in the States, it would have been a powerful enough statement to say he deserved to be recognized as one of the genre\u2019s greats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34536,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6128],"rating":[5617],"class_list":["post-46381","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-luther-allison","rating-rating-b-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46381"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46381"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}