Frank Frost: A Sun Styled Blues

Electric blues gets stingy with its differences after a time. And it takes a truly unique performer to add any sort or personal mark on the genre. It might be a single song, a new way in which to play an instrument, some weird band set up, or something. Frank Frost doesn’t traffic in any single one of those, instead, a bit of each, but not too much.

Frost didn’t write “Big Boss Man,” but his rendition, included on the Sun Records produced Hey Boss Man!, should be seen as the proper antecedent to the Grateful Dead’s version that came later on in the ‘60s.

Again, Frost wasn’t an innovative harp player, but having done time in Sonny Boy Williamson’s group, he picked up some of the elder man’s skills. He’s no virtuoso, but Frost’s poignant bursts of playing fit perfectly into the music his backing band – the Nighthawks – crank up.

In mentioning the Nighthawks, it’d be appropriate to note that the group, which didn’t always feature a bassist pre-figured some the lo fidelity, bass-less garage rock acts that cropped up during the 80s and 90s. That might be too much conjecture, but it makes sense. I’ll give you a moment to suss it out…Ok.

This is just blues, though. There doesn’t need to be any grand proclamation as to its purpose, where it came from or why. That being said, though, August Wilson, the play-write, says through his characters that the genre is a way of figuring life and allowed its players and audiences to get from one experience to another. Appropriate, correct or not, Wilson wasn’t way off base, ‘cause this is boogie music as much as anything else. Frost laments a bit, but just as often he and the Nighthawks give listeners something to move to.

Having formed after touring with Williamson, both Frost and Sam Carr, the Nighthawks’ drummer and son of Robert Nighthawk, moved to Mississippi and began performing. Jack Johnson sat in with the duo one evening at a gig and subsequently solidified the group’s line up. Featuring two melodic players allowed for a greater exploration of each theme. Combining that with Frosts lazy, behind the beat vocals as well as his harmonica playing made Sun Record’s Sam Phillips take not.

Frost and company headed to Memphis to cut some tracks that would result in Hey Boss Man! during 1962. Culled from those sessions, the 12 tracks didn’t possess the crazed echo that Phillips would lend his other projects. But some of the cuts did sit between genres and presented an interesting take on the Sun hypothesis.

“Jack’s Jump,” assumedly named for Jack Johnson, was just short of a boogie, but possessed that unmistakable blues shuffle and enough country in that lead guitar line as to make the track a Sun classic.

There isn’t another track that comes close to “Jack’s Jump” on Hey Boss Man! Instead, the rest of the disc is just electric blues cuts utilizing different pacings. Nothing necessarily jumps out and grabs a body, but it’s all blooze ‘n boogie.