When the interviewers come, as they surely will, and ask that old question, "If you had your life to live over again what would you do differently?", my immediate response will be, "Well, I'd have gone over to New Orleans while Johnny Adams was still alive, and I'd have seen him singing, live, in person. That's what I should have done". He died in 1998, and as far as I can tell – and believe me I've looked – there are no YouTube clips of him in performance. And yet he was surely one of the greatest singers of them all.
The tan canary, they called him. But he never really hit the heights as he deserved. At the allmusic website they give him a fine write-up – an "extraordinary set of soulfully soaring pipes" – but they make his best album "Room with a View of the Blues", which I have, and really, it's good – it's very good – but for a singer as fine as Adams it should have been just one high spot among many. The problem is, I think, that his talent was too wide ever to be confined to one area, like the Blues, but he never really found the material to do himself justice.
This is one of his finest 45s from the Sixties – Reconsider Me:
The thing is, it's really not a great song, but the singing – check that incredible falsetto – lift it into the sublime (yes, let's not be shy with the adjectives here). The first verse rhymes "me" with…."me". You'd think they'd manage to come up with some suitable rhyme; it's not a hard one, after all. See or free or tree or key or pee or….well, there's thousands. But no, it's me and me. But it doesn't matter. It's still sensational.
Other recommended listens: Losing Battle; After All the Good is Gone.
By way of contrast, a man who found exactly his style early on, and never really strayed from it – Bobby Bland, one of the greatest of all the Blues singers. The excellent documentary "Two Steps from the Blues" showed last week on BBC4, and can still be viewed here.
Mick Hartley 
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