Robert Cray's Soul Surprise

Ten seconds into his phone conversation, it becomes painfully obvious that Robert Cray is what the Seinfeld troupe would call a "soft talker." His speaking voice is unguarded and friendly, but prone to sudden dives from a hush to a whisper.| Straining to hear it over a transcontinental phone line, one could easily assume it to be the voice of a musician accustomed to speaking his strongest persuasions through his guitar.

Spend some time listening to Take Your Shoes Off, Cray's latest and arguably greatest album (and first for Rykodisc), however, and that assumption falls apart. Forget everything you ever heard about Cray the guitarist, the hot young gun who, along with Stevie Ray Vaughan, led the blues revival charge in the early Eighties and has traded licks on stage with everyone from Muddy Waters to B.B. King to Eric Clapton. The Cray at center stage on Take Your Shoes Off is first and foremost a singer par excellence, a master craftsman who shapes that soft talking voice into a powerfully expressive instrument that evokes soul and R&B greats from Otis Redding to Al Green.

As for Cray the guitarist, he's still slinking around the grooves, keeping things in order and sticking his neck out now and then for a quick peek -- but don't hold your breath waiting for stinging solos.

"There's not that many guitar solos on this record," Cray says, largely crediting producer Steve Jordan for the album's spotlight on his voice. "Steve wanted to bring that out. But I also think the songs lent themselves more towards vocals."

Indeed, standout cuts from the new album like "That Wasn't Me," "There's Nothing Wrong" and "What About Me" would sound remarkably at home alongside many a vocal nugget pulled from a stack of Stax or Hi singles, and Cray sounds as comfortable singing them as the title suggests. Of course, Take Your Shoes Off is hardly Cray's first sojourn into R&B territory. From the very beginning, when the Robert Cray Band made its debut with 1980's Who's Been Talking on the Tomato label shortly before its collapse, his style owed as much to vocalists like O.V. Wright and Bobby Bland as it did to guitarist Albert Collins. The debt to soul increased with the introduction of the Memphis Horns during the band's long stint on Mercury (highlighted by 1986's commercial breakthrough Strong Persuader), and by 1997's Sweet Potato Pie he was diving in head first. But Cray readily places Take Your Shoes Off apart from all of these past efforts as his first album so heavily flavored by soul.

"On previous albums, we'd have maybe two or three songs that had a little R&B or soul feel," says Cray. "But we got to the studio this time, and went a little nuts."

Although Cray self-produced his last three albums for Mercury, this time he ceded the boards to Jordan, a veteran of sessions with R&B legends like Aretha Franklin and the Neville Brothers. He freely acknowledges Jordan's instrumental role in bringing soul to the forefront.

"He had great ideas for some R&B things," Cray says. "He came up with the idea of doing the Willie Dixon song 'Tollin' Bells.' But he also was given two songs: the first song, 'Love Gone to Waste' by Willie Mitchell and '24-7 Man' by Sir Mac Rice. The Willie Mitchell song was the first song that we recorded on these sessions. And when we recorded this, he really wanted to get the Willie Mitchell sound and, having worked with Willie, he knew how to do that. That set the tempo of the whole record, so everything else that came in -- no matter if I wrote it, or Jim [Pugh, keyboardist] wrote it, it was going to have that flavor."

Cray admits that it'd be nice if the unabashed R&B of Take Your Shoes Off tapped into a new audience. But having often taken lumps from hard-core "bluenatics" for his impeccably smooth, cognac-over-bourbon style -- and never cared or strayed from his course -- he is little concerned over how his soul jones will go down with blues purists.

"I never do worry about things being bluesy enough," he says, though he dismisses any notion that he left his blues at the crossroads of R&B for good. "I just have this thing with R&B that I love just as much as the blues thing. It's not like an escape or anything like that. If I come up with good blues song, I'll do that too."

RICHARD SKANSE(April 28, 1999)