Mighty Mo Rodgers

Maurice Rodgers, "Mighty Mo", was born in 1942 in Chicago, Indiana but actually studied classical piano as a lad. Of course growing up in the 60s meant you had to be affected by the brilliant soul music coming out of Memphis and soon Mighty Mo started his own soul band the Rocketeers while in high school but by college started the Maurice Rodgers Combo. He quit college and headed to Los Angeles and started performing, recording as a session player where he gigged with T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Jimmy Reed, and many others. He played Farfasa organ on Brenton Wood's 1967 hit "Gimme Little Sign". He also served as a producer, most notably on Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee's classic 1973 A & M record "Sonny And Brownie".He selected the material, which featured three of his own compositions, rounded up John Mayall, Arlo Guthrie, John Hammond, Michael Franks, Sugarcane Harris and others as backing musicians. He gave up music for awhile heading to Cal State Northridge where he earned a degree in philosophy while simultaneously working as a staff songwriter for Chappell Publishing and Motown. He’s completing a Masters degree in Humanities with an astonishing thesis, "Blues as Metaphysical Music (Its Musicality and Ontological Underpinnings)", and this can be felt on his first album released under his own name in 1999, "Blues Is My Wailin' Wall" on Blue Thumb.

Album Discography

"Blues Is My Wailin' Wall" (Blue Thumb 1999)

***** The blues world is full of great artists who never get their due. Meanwhile, lesser talents with fleeting sex appeal and histrionic guitar solos get the press. Mighty Mo Rodgers is one of the under-appreciated kings of contemporary blues. He's simply passionate about the art form. "Blues comes from a place so deep that even madness cannot penetrate there" Rodgers says in his liner notes. "Blues is free there, and it makes sense of the madness by changing what was disfigured into something wonderfully transfigured. Blues is my story and my glory. Blues is my wailin' wall". The album is 11 terrific songs of blues, folk, soul and African-influences that, lyrically, is a philosophical dissertation of the what the blues is about. The midtempo title track with it's chanted vocals on the refrain, "Blues Is A Wailin' Wall", is about the wall of shame, where the evils of slavery came to die. As any bluesologist knows, this is the roots of the blues. Track two, the laconic "Took Away The Drum", hits the nail on the head. "Take a man from his nation/Put him in total isolation/Only thing to rescue/Is the blues/Took away the drum/That's how the blues did come". In other words when slave owners took away the skins slaves sang the blues instead because it was the only thing they couldn't take away. The snaky, slow blues "Heaven's Got The Blues" shows Mo's primal, earthy vocals. With a menacing backdrop Mo says heaven ain't happy with what's going on down here. I'm sure he's right about that. Some of the best lyrics come via the humorous but sobering "Kennedy Song" where Rodgers knows what's on the "eighteen minutes of the Nixon tape" and says the death of JFK was "the ultimate drive-by" but same goes for all of us "cause everybody dies". "Shame!" is a pumping dancer with a wicked bass hook that decries what the human race has become. No, the album is not all dire and damning. The comical blues shuffle "No Regrets" has Mo explaining that even though he's broke he's got no regrets about being a blues man. His woman says he needs to get a real job 'cuz "I need a BMW" and Mo says she's got one- he's a "Black Man Workin' I play the blues". On the rolling-boogie "Gone Fishin'" he's "fishin for some sweet sweet armour". Plenty of cheeky double entendres here. There's even a vintage 60s-styled tribute to soul music called "(Bring Back) Sweet Soul Music" Amen Mo! One of the best blues albums of the decade.

"Red, White And Blues" (Verve 2003)

*** 1/2 It took four years, party due to record company red tape, for Mo to follow up his masterful "Blues Is My Wailin' Wall". That album is a hard act to follow but "Red, White & Blues" is no sophomore slump for sure. This funky blues record has it's serious side but the mood and material is more loose. The thumping "The Holy Howl" sounds like an outtake from "Wailin Wall". He calls blues a "holy howl". "It's the wails, the moans and groans/This is the music that is the markers of buried bones" perhaps a reference to the graves of slaves. To Mo blues is his soul music- that innermost gut source of emotion. The potentially controversial "The Boy Who Stole The Blues" basically says white boy Elvis robbed the blues from black folk, got rich and the blues made him pay for it. "Some say Jim Crow made him the king of rock & Roll/And if there had to be a king/It would have been a black boy that's for sure". But this isn't really a diatribe against Elvis (or Caucasians) and in some ways he gives him credit. "Just like Jackie (Robinson) broke the color line too/Freein' America to the blues/Talking about the boy (Elvis) who stole the blues". Mo knows that white people get the blues too as he explains on "Blue Collar Blues". That urban wit comes out on "DNA" where it used to be: "Mama's baby/Daddy's maybe/.That's what they used to say/But now DNA gave you away". One of the more uncharacteristic cuts is the pop/soul/reggae "Prisoners Of War" with some great sax by Ernie Watts- this has serious radio potential on Adult Alternative or Urban Contemporary radio stations. "Welcome To The Faultline" is a modern day "Go west young man" tale of young people with stars in their eyes coming to California and ending up with the "West Coast Blues". I can't wait to hear what Mo comes up with next.

"Black Paris Blues" (Isabel 2004)

*** Paris, France seems to appreciate Mo more than his home country. His records sell there, he gets press and there's a demand for his live show. This disc is a low-key live album featuring a host of songs not on his studio albums ("Deja Blues", "Money Can't Buy You Class", the title track) and a few favorites like "Blues is My Wailin' Wall", "Prisoners Of War" and "The Boy Who Stole The Blues". It doesn't live up to his previous two albums but it's an entertaining diversion until he gets back in the studio.

Mighty Mo Rodgers "Redneck Blues" (Dixiefrog) LISTEN

***** Willie Dixon may have claimed it first but these days Mighty Mo Rodgers is the Blues. Perhaps nobody digs as deep into the art form to elucidate what it means for Black Americans and all humanity in general.  Back in 1999 Mo Rodgers made one of the most outstanding  Blues albums since the pre-Disco years. That LP, "Blues Is My Wailin' Wall", was in many ways a soundtrack to an unmade documentary called "The History Of The Blues" . Rodgers digs even deeper here, immersing himself in the South to the point he finds that "rednecks", aka, "poor whites" and "children of the slaves" share the same reason to sing the Blues. Sound too ponderous and heavy-handed? Perhaps it would be in less talented hands but Rodgers has wrapped his message within tightly packed arrangements full of that "holy howl" and sledgehammer Rhythm & Blues. Forget KRS-One this is truly "edutainment".

Of the many highlights is the reggae-fied "John Brown Blues". In the liner notes Rodgers refers to the controversial anti-slavery legend as "a champion of the abolitionist cause, and maybe the first Bluesman in history". While there's no evidence Brown was a musician the "Blues" mean something more than just music to Mo. It serves to "deny the lie of the nothingness of our (African American) existence". He goes to define Blues in "Blues Ain't Devil Music", a strident shuffle where he sums it up in one stanza: "Now you didn't ask me/But I'm gonna say/Blues was born from slavery/But some folks went lookin'/To feel good and alive/Like being Black on a Saturday night/So we gonna have some fun". It's to Mo's credit that he doesn't sacrifice song structure for seriousness. The disc is as tuneful as any "party Blues" album. That muscular, rhythmic Soul Blues sound- almost hypnotically tribal- graces "Death Of The Middle Class" and "Gangs Guns And Testosterone". The latter Rodgers calls the "Unholy Trinity of any nation trying to hide it's impotence behind it's passion for firearms". Hurricane Katrina gets two references, once in the Delta Blues "No Second Line (This Time)" and the Soulful "There But For The Grace Of God". This is what "contemporary" Blues is suppose to be about. "Redneck Blues" is uncompromising, defiant, and Southern American to the core. Mo helps each and every one of us be 'afrocentric" if only for an hour. One could never "get" the Blues without such an experience. A triumph.