The Merced Blue Notes

The Merced Blue Notes' career lasted about a decade and a half, but it resulted in few recordings, though apparently it did supply a whole lot of fun for live crowds in central California who wanted to groove to basic, energetic blues, R&B, soul, and rock & roll. That's what the band played on its handful of rare singles, on an assortment of labels, between 1961 and 1966. The group's music was in the stock R&B/blues-influenced rock & roll style, on both vocal and instrumental material, often putting organ and bluesy guitar to the fore, sometimes punctuated with sax and harmonica. In their later days they got into funkier grooves, in the manner that big acts such as Booker T. & the MG's were updating their sound, though they didn't possess the originality to gain a national audience. The Merced Blue Notes formed in high school in Merced, CA, in January 1957, and would undergo numerous lineup changes over the course of their career, the constant element being singer/songwriter/guitarist Kenny Craig. They actually made their first contacts with the record industry back around 1958, when they auditioned for Specialty Records, with a young Sonny Bono in the control booth. Specialty only wanted to record their singer Roddy Jackson, however, Jackson making three flop 45s for the label in the late '50s. A couple of obscure singles came out on the Merced label in 1960, and they'd intermittently record over the next half dozen years for other companies, including Accent, Tri-Phi, Mammoth, and the Fantasy R&B subsidiary Galaxy. None of the singles caught on in a big way, though their 1961 Accent 45 "Rufus" got enough airplay in Detroit to get them some concert and recording work (the latter for Harvey Fuqua's Tri-Phi label) there in 1962. With little success on record and a sound...