I pulled out Sunnyland Slim's "Be Careful How You Vote" because it's election season; it's also one of my favorite blues albums. I smile every time I hear the great blues pianist's short opening monologue for the title track: "Chilluns, tell you right now. You better watch and think about this song. Be careful how you vote, y'all." Then he launches into a fiery indictment of politicians who are likely to let us down. The music's fierce, too — Sam Burkhardt's saxophone solos are particularly biting.
Sunnyland Slim also skewers politicians on "You Can't Have It All," this time for ignoring the poor, but it's the instrumentals that make the song special. The interplay between Sunnyland Slim on piano and Eddie Lusk on the organ sounds almost like someone turned a church into a juke joint.
The album also features four of the greatest blues guitarists of all time — Hubert Sumlin, Magic Sam, Eddie Taylor and Lurrie Bell. They help make the album hop. As a result, songs such as "Workin' Two Jobs," "Chicago Jump," "Midnight Jump," "Past Life" and "I Had It So Hard" are some of the finest Chicago blues tunes I know.
Sunnyland Slim pored almost 80 years of living into the tunes on "Be Careful How You Vote" when he recorded them in the early '80s. If he were alive now, he'd be 101. Still, as I listen to this album, I can't help but wonder how cool the songs he would have written about Barack Obama's bid for the presidency might have been.
Be careful how you vote.
