Mighty has risen

Sam McClain soars up on Sledgehammer

by Bill Kisliuk

Singer Mighty Sam McClain seems to have fallen and risen as regularly as the tides of Massachusetts Bay, with his grainy, honey-coated voice carrying him from the heyday of the legendary Muscle Shoals recording studio to the streets of Nashville and New Orleans where he sold his plasma for cash. But now, with Sledgehammer Soul & Down Home Blues (AudioQuest), the stirring 53-year-old singer's third new recording in the last four years, he's on a sustained high that has the down-and-out years fading away.

"I would do it all over again," says McClain. "just to get here and see what it feels like." "Here" is Epping, New Hampshire, and a new chapter in a lengthy recording career. And doing it all over again would require setting back the clock on a classic script from the Southern soul belt.

Born in Monroe, Louisiana, McClain was still a teenager when he fell under the spell of Bobby "Blue" Bland, whose decades-long string of gospel-tinged hits has become the blueprint for generations of great soul singers. Mighty Sam sang gospel at home and Bland's smoldering '50s hit "Little Boy Blue" while working the cotton fields, and he first peeked in on a Bland performance from outside a Monroe auditorium. Before he turned 14, he was out of the house and on the road as a valet to chitlin-circuit singer Little Melvin Underwood. Then it was off for extended stays in Pensacola, Nashville, New Orleans, and Houston, before he decided, in 1992, to settle in New England.

In Pensacola back in 1966, he caught the ear of a local disc jockey who hauled him 150 miles to the Fame recording studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the same place where soul shouters Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex were recording their hits. A young Aretha Franklin would soon make her mark at the legendary studio. McClain's biggest number from those early recordings was a take on country songwriter Don Gibson's "Sweet Dreams," a tune made immortal by Patsy Cline. His supple growl wrapped around that tune; in a come-and-go recording career he has proved that he can shout out the blues, massage a love ballad, or -- on his latest CD -- give powerful voice to some personal, searching, secular sermons.

McClain credits Bland with influencing everything from his smoky style to the smooth material he likes the best. And he cites one other crucial ingredient in the Bland recipe: outstanding guitarist Wayne Bennett, who worked with McClain in the late 1980s. "Wayne was almost as much of an idol as Bobby was. I was playing New Orleans somewhere and a disc-jockey friend came up and said, `Man, I got Wayne Bennett out here and he wanna sit in with you.' I said, `Wayne Bennett? And he wanna sit in with me? Why ain't he up here already?' " Bennett and McClain performed together in the late '80s, and it was a 1990 tour through New England (with two other golden-throated R&B vets, Johnny Adams and Nappy Brown) that prompted McClain to set up house in Boston's Fenway, where he lived for two years before moving north. In 1992 he hooked up with the eclectic AudioQuest Music label, leaning on 40 years of singing experience to crank out polished but intense recordings punctuated by versatile Boston rhythm-and-horn sections.

Sledgehammer Soul is the third in the series. McClain brings funky grooves like his own "Things Ain't What They Used To Be" and "Where You Been So Long" to a rolling boil; the anticipation and understated emotion of "When the Hurt Is Over" derives directly from the Book of Bobby. Throughout the CD, keyboardists George PapaGeorge and Bruce Katz -- a busy man who is a member of guitar star Ronnie Earl's band -- finesse the piano and Hammond B-3 organ. A four-piece brass section glides and then guns it behind McClain, who seems absolutely possessed by the spirit of the music. "I sing like this could be the last time," he says. "With every muscle -- every hair on my body. I want to do it like the last time you ever do it."