If you’re going to use a superlative like “mighty” in your name, you’d better be able to back that claim up if you want to be taken seriously, especially over the course of a number of decades. We’re not sure when exactly Maurice Rodgers adopted the moniker of “Mighty Mo” Rodgers, but his own recording career since 1999 has certainly proven it to be more than just hyperbole. And that’s on top of the things he’d done earlier in his career, including playing with the likes of T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and Jimmy Reed, and producing, playing on, and contributing songs to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s Sonny & Brownie album, among them, the still powerful “The Battle is Over (But the War Goes On)” that has since also been covered by the likes of Levon Helm, Shemekia Copeland, Sean Costello (our favorite version, at least until Mo himself records it!), and Oliver Wood.
Rodgers describes his latest album, Memphis Callin’: Soul Music & the American Dream (Drinking Gourd Records), as his “‘back to the future’ musical soul journey” and, in some ways, that’s exactly what it is, featuring four songs that Rodgers recorded back in the late 1970s with Booker T. and the MGs (at the time, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn and Willie Hall) in Hollywood after Booker heard Rodgers singing one of the songs, this album’s closing “Heart Be Still”, an extremely soulful, Ray Charles-like solo number with Rodgers on piano, and insisted they go into the studio to cut a record.
As Rodgers acknowledges in the album’s notes, that record deal never came about, with the studio tapes eventually lost. If it weren’t for a cassette copy of these songs, the world might never have heard the pure magic that transpired in that studio, with the tracks that Rodgers and the MGs recorded back then still sounding great today and pairing up quite nicely next to the album’s more recent songs, collectively honoring the soul music legacy.
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