The white southern blues singer isn't quite the paradox one might think. After all, pop history tells us that white performers were all in the habit of "crossing the tracks" to hear, and be inspired, by the music of their black neighbours. Not so Mose Allison, however. According to him, if you were to cross the tracks in a small town like Tippo, Mississippi you wouldn't find much of anything at all except maybe more Delta. And it was here, in that very small town, in 1927 that Mose Allison was born Mose John Allison jnr. "That's the only name I've ever had/Don't call me Moses, don't call me Moe/You're just gonna make my momma mad."
From his first album, Back Country Suite in 1957, Mose Allison has become one of the most influential songwriters in jazz and blues. His distinctive delivery, at times almost a rare rhythmic hybrid of singing and speaking, sets the perfect tone for those incisive and deeply ironic lyrics that made him such a hero to everyone from Van Morrison to The Who. Usually heard within the context of a jazz trio, Allison's piano playing is equally distinctive - swinging yet understated and heavily influenced by the black music he first heard back in Tippo, Mississippi, tracks or no tracks.
"There was piano in my home as far back as I can remember and my dad played a sort of Fats Waller or Ragtime. He was self-taught - he learned how to play from watching piano rolls and he always liked to play at parties. When I was a little older, one of my cousins had a wind-up gramophone and she had some records - Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and people like that. So I started real young listening to blues and jazz and I got it all simultaneously.
I wrote my first song when I was 13. It was about radio commercials and it was called The Fourteen Day Palmolive Plan. When they finally got electricity in Tippo, when I was about 13, they got a couple of Nickelodeons, one in the filling station and one in the general store - and they had Louis Jordan there. I think he was the inspiration for the Fourteen Day Palmolive Plan. I might revive it one of these days." For Mose Allison, it was the Nickelodeon that really opened up the world of music. This was the Mississippi Delta, and so the music which filled the gas station and the general store was a mixture of the big pop tunes of the day and the records recorded by the local favourites. The music of these southern artists in particular might seem rather specialist today, but even so, it was the actual pop music of the time and was hugely influential on the more mainstream national trends that periodically swept the country in a succession of crazes.
"Yes, I heard the big bands like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller but also in the same Nickelodeons there would be country blues singers like Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie. And boogiewoogie was the popular form of jazz. Even the Andrews Sisters were doing it. All the hits at that time were boogie-woogie and swing. But the people that really inspired me the most were singers who were like singing instrumentalists: Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Jack Teagarden, and Harry the Hipster. I was always attracted to the exuberance of it and the good feeling. In my high-school yearbook, the prediction for me was that I was going to be the world's greatest boogie-woogie piano player."
In 1956, after a spell playing all over the south, Allison headed for New York. For the next number of years he played piano with Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz and Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Around this time he also formed his own trio and here he developed further his very particular playing style - sparse and swingin' and clearly informed by his familiarity with both the old styles of boogie-woogie and swing and the more modern stylings of pianists such as Thelonious Monk.
Allison's secret weapon, however, was his singing and it immediately set him apart as one of the hippest cats in New York where he was playing regularly as places such as The Village Vanguard. Unlike most singers in the jazz world, Allison didn't have a spectacular voice and while he certainly didn't go in for vocal gymnastics, he always managed to be direct, natural and somehow both hip and downhomey at the same time.
"I just sing in as unaffected a style as I can. I tried to find my own sound. I never studied but picked up a few things about the technique of singing that have helped me with breathing and stuff like that. It's just been a process of just trying to sing in tune and get my best sound. But the phrasing has always been the blues phrasing. I used to play trumpet and I just sang pretty much the way I played trumpet. I never really copied anybody - by the time I started recording anyway. Early on I went through a stage where I was real affected by Nat King Cole and also by Charles Brown - but by the time I got to New York, I'd gotten over all my real influences and started trying to develop my own thing."
By the 1960s Mose Allison was having a huge influence on the r'n'b/jazz scene in Britain. Georgie Fame, who recorded Parchman Farm on his first album, was to become one of his biggest champions, having been alerted to Allison by US soldiers hanging out at Soho's Flamingo Club. Other mods were also drawn to Allison, especially his Young Man's Blues, a song recorded by The Who. Van Morrison is another to regularly cite Allison as an influence, regularly performing with him and, on more than one occasion, covering a Mose Allison song.
The big attraction has always been that while Allison songs are usually witty meditations on any subject under the sun, they nevertheless remain blues songs. No question here of the stereotype - the "woke up this morning and found my baby gone" blues.
"Willie Dixon always said that the blues is the truth. I always cite the example of Louis Armstrong. In the early 1920s when the main tune was My Blue Heaven, Louis Armstrong came out with I'm with You Sweet Mama, As Long As You Got the Bucks and the contrast was pretty astounding. But then the blues has always dealt with the nitty-gritty, and I don't see it as limiting at all. I see it as a launching pad. You can always add a little here and take a little away there and still maintain the quality of the blues. I look at it as a sort of a base to base. Percy Mayfield was one of the early composers that I liked because he was doing things that weren't just 12-bar blues, and his subject matter was a little wider.
"And in the country blues people like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters did things that I really like. Some of their blues was done in a very imaginative way." And Willie Dixon . . . he had the knack too."
On his 1987 Blue Note album Ever Since The World Ended, Allison sings: "When I make my top forty, bigbeat, rock 'n' roll record/ everything is gonna be just fine./ When I make my top forty, bigbeat, rock 'n' roll disc, I'll be the record company's valentine./ No more philosophic melancholia./ Eight hundred pounds of electric genitalia./ When I make my top forty, bigbeat, rock 'n'roll record, every- thing is gonna be just fine." This is typical Mose Allison. Wise, knowing, funny, and self-mocking.
"My thing has always been playing nightclubs. My first ambition was always just to be able to play someplace where anybody could get in. All I wanted to do was make a living and be able to play with anybody I wanted to. That was a pretty limited aspiration but I haven't gone much further than that now. I feel like I can do my thing in that context as a nightclub performer with a few concerts thrown in. I'm just trying to make it interesting to myself and others. I've managed to be pretty independent.
"I've never had a big agency so I've never had anybody to tell me what to do, I've never had a manager, I've never had a publicity director, none of that. I've never had a hit. So I accept the parameters of what I'm doing. I've maintained my career with the help of other musicians mostly. The people who have kept me going are other musicians who have recorded my stuff and have talked about me."
Van Morrison, one of those musicians for whom he has great regard, has often described Mose Allison as a philosopher, and certainly the songs reflect an approach to life that is both informed and illuminating. These are songs full of irony and bite which regularly tackle those subjects which particularly seem to bug him: the music business, hypocrisy, ego, and celebrity. That said, Mose Allison is much too wise and settled a Southern gentleman to ever be anything even close to bitter or twisted. All he ever wanted to do was swing.