Bobby Bland Greatest Hits Vol. 2: The ABC-Dunhill/MCA Recordings

The first-ever compilation from a great era in Bobby's career. It's packed with R&B hits from the '70s and early '80s-and half the tracks are making their CD debut! Includes Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City; I Wouldn't Treat a Dog (the Way You Treated Me); This Time I'm Gone For Good; Today I Started Loving You Again; Let the Good Times Roll (live with B.B. King!), and 11 more silky smooth blues.

Bobby Bland's uptown, brass-and-strings-drenched blues kept him on the charts long after gut-bucket kings such as Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters had dropped from black-radio airwaves. The artistic successes chronicled on this second volume of his greatest hits shouldn't come as a surprise, then, despite the frequent input of ultracommercial producer Steve Barri, who'd crafted AM hits for acts as diverse as the Grass Roots and the post-Motown Four Tops. Even with some accommodations to trends (the disco beat of "The Soul of a Man," chicken-scratching guitars here, there, and everywhere), Bland kept on being Bland, cutting country songs ("Today I Started Loving You Again") and blues standards ("Goin' Down Slow") and investing Dan Penn's "I Hate You" with a unique pungency. This disc performs a valuable service in lifting the veil from an often-overlooked period in the career of one of American music's most important interpretive singers. --Rickey Wright