Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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Leroy Carr

  • Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I Crave: The Best of Leroy Carr [Columbia/Legacy, 2004] A

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Whiskey Is My Habit, Good Women Is All I Crave: The Best of Leroy Carr [Columbia/Legacy, 2004]
Columbia sent me this 40-track double-CD back in the day, but though I certainly A-shelfed it, in a banner year for best-ofs I never wrote it up. Now it's harder to find as such, though readily downloadable as The Essential Leroy Carr, and while there are certainly competing physicals that sound good enough, they just as certainly lack Tom Piazza's terrific notes and most likely the must-hear novelty "Papa's on the House Top." One likely-looking candidate doesn't even include Carr's seminal 1928 "How Long, How Long Blues," which in tandem with Tampa Red's 1928 "It's Tight Like That" initiated and pretty much defined an enduring pop-blues tradition summed up by Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta as "hip, urbane soloists or duos who sang clever twelve- and eight-bar compositions in a casually assured barroom manner." Carr grew up in Indianapolis's Bronzetown, as did his essential recording partner, guitar picker Scrapper Blackwell. A flat-out alcoholic who died of nephritis at 30 in 1935, he sang about the twin necessities of life adduced in the title in a lean, conversational high baritone. From "Hard Heated Papa" to "You Left Me Crying," from "I've got so many women that I don't care when one dies" to "I would not quit my black woman baby if I could" in the self-same song, he articulated a seesawing pattern of erotic engagement and ennui we've come to know too well. And Robert Johnson was definitely a fan. One way you can tell is that he converted the casual Carr hit "I Believe I'll Make a Change" into an earthshaking classic called, you know this one, "Dust My Broom." A