Chicago label Bea & Baby Records and its subsidiaries may never have achieved the same recognition as others like Chess, Alligator, Delmark and Vee-Jay, but listening to the new four-CD set Cadillac Baby’s Bea & Baby Records: The Definitive Collection from Chicago’s Earwig Music Company, you certainly get the sense they should have, with recordings from such blues greats as James Cotton, Sunnyland Slim, Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, Earl Hooker, Eddie Boyd and Hound Dog Taylor, as well as more than two dozen other artists, several of whom, like the label itself, should be much better known than they are.
Included in that latter group would be singer and harmonica player Little Mack Simmons, whose shuffling “Times Are Getting Tougher”, grooving “Don’t Come Back” and slow, passionate blues “You Mistreated Me” (as St. Louis Mac), the last co-written by Bea & Baby Records chief Narvel “Cadillac Baby” Eatmon and a “Sil” — presumably the famous Chicago bluesman Syl — Johnson, are among the album’s finest cuts, in addition to playing harmonica on childhood pal James Cotton‘s tough, slow-burning “One More Mile” and swinging “There Must Be a Panic On” (with Cotton returning the favor on Simmons’ jaunty “I’m Your Fool”) and delivering respectable covers of blues classics such as “Mother-in-Law Blues”, “Help Me”, “The Sky is Crying”, “Hoochie Coochie Man”, “Tore Down” and “Trouble No More”, several of which were previously unreleased on the Bea & Baby label and find Simmons backed by musicians with much more familiar names to blues fans, including Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Taylor, Homesick James, Sunnyland Slim, and Carey Bell.
Longtime Howlin’ Wolf bassist Andrew “Blueblood” McMahon also makes quite an impression, backed by Simmons and some of these same players on songs like the creeping “Lost in the Jungle” and shuffling “Special Agent” and “Worried All the Time”, with notable tracks from other sidemen taking a turn in the spotlight including a T-Bone Walker-ish “Sharpest Man in Town” and “Nit Wit” (later covered by Canned Heat and others) from L.C. McKinley, who nearly a decade earlier played guitar on Eddie Boyd’s “Five Long Years”, and gruff, dragging “38 Woman Blues” from drummer Willie Williams, who backs many other artists throughout the compilation but is supported here by Bobby King and Eddie Taylor on guitar, Carey Bell on harmonica, and Sunnyland Slim on piano, among others.
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