Ray Agee - Vol 1, Love Is A Gamble

The fun stuff in this blogging are the 'discoveries' that you manage to pull on yourself and your readers. Over the months here Unkie Cliff and I have both offered up some of these - Billy Wright, Eldridge Holmes, Charles Brimmer, and Shine Robinson are a few examples. The other day Cliff mentioned Ray Agee as someone he had read about and sought for years and he put a 12 track album on one of the flash drives that we pass back and forth. As it turned out, I already had that album and some 25 more tracks that I'd never listened to. Once I got started listening, it became clear this guy was special and I'd soon found even more tracks and so had Cliff. Our current count is 59 tracks but that doesn't mean they are all killer. I've distilled them to a two part compilation of 36 tracks, the two volumes are my own selections from those 59. I've used these covers and album titles because they suited my purpose and the title track was included on each, not because the groupings correspond to any published album. This first volume contains 18 tracks recorded between 1956 and 1965.

In the realm of California blues, Ray Agee isn't mentioned in the same sentence with Charles Brown, Percy Mayfield and T-Bone Walker, but he probably should be. Agee was a fine, and distinctive singer as well as a prolific songwriter nearly the caliber of Mayfield! Between 1952 and 1975 Agee managed more than 100 singles on more than 15 different labels! One might expect him to be at least a little bit better known, but it just never happened.

Born Raymond Clinton Agee - April 10, 1930 in Dixons Mills, AL, Agee was crippled by polio at age 4 and spent his life using a pair of canes (thus the album cover). The Agee family was something of an anomaly in that they migrated to Los Angeles from Alabama: most black families from Alabama would have migrated north rather than west following the shortest railroad lines, the majority of the black war time migration to California came from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

A family gospel quartet was young Agee's first music, but he was recording blues by '52 so it is likely he had begun singing secular music at least a couple years prior. Agee first recorded at Aladdin in 1952, but he rarely managed more than a couple singles at any label over the first decade of his career. In the 60's he had a couple larger blocks of recordings at Celeste Records and later Krafton Records. It does not appear that he recorded beyond 1975: he is reported to have died around 1992, but according to our resident genealogist Cliff, there is no death record filed and he could easily still be alive.

This volume begins with with Agee in a relatively traditional blues groove typical of much of his earliest material, these were the songs where he seems to have found his personal vocal groove after sounding fairly unremarkable on most of those earlier sides. He quickly takes on more depth and variety as he moves into the 60's with a variety of original songs; the duet 'The Monkey On My Back' is particularly brilliant. While he has little actual similarity to Percy Mayfield, I am still somehow reminded of him in that Agee's sound and songs are so personal and unique. There is very little information in the Blues Discography as to who the sidemen are on any given track aside from Johnny Heartsman being definitely identified as the guitarist on Tin Pan Alley and Maxwell Davis' sax being evident on a few of the others. I really wish we had more information on those sessions; Agee seems to have had an affinity for strong guitarists and Agee himself is likely the piano player present on many of these tracks.

Both Cliff and I will be particularly interested to hear if this is as unique and impressive to you all as both of us find it... i.e. Please Report Back after putting ears on it! I'll hold Vol 2 for a day or two while you listen.