Next up in the Underrated Blues Guitar series: Mickey Baker and his solo from his 1956 hit with Sylvia Robinson, “Love Is Strange”!
You may not know Mickey Baker, but you definitely know the people he played on sessions for. Ray Charles, Little Willie John, Ruth Brown, Big Maybelle, The Drifters, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner just to name a few. He was a very popular session guitarist and rightly so. He was one of the baddest guitar players in the 50s and 60s. He also wrote the Complete Course in Jazz Guitar book series that is still popular to this day. But amid all of this, this isn’t what made him most notable.
In the mid-50s, he teamed up with one of his students, Sylvia Robinson, to become Mickey and Sylvia. In 1956, they recorded “Love is Strange”, a song written by Bo Diddley. The original Bo Diddley version, featuring Jody Williams on lead guitar, was recorded in 1955 and went unreleased until 2007. The Mickey and Sylvia version also incorporated a riff from Jody Williams’ playing on Billy Stewart’s debut record, “Billy’s Blues”. It became a hit and has been featured in movies and commercials ever since.
Baker’s playing on this record is of course inspired by T-Bone Walker but shows some deviation. For instance, guitarists would usually do the Walker bend up to the dominant note from the subdominant note. Mickey Baker decided to use that but also use the half step from the dominant to reach the same note (I hope that made sense. 😂)
This is one of my favorite solos and is honestly one of the dopest solos of the era. And to take a quote from the title of Baker’s debut album, it’s some of the Wildest Guitar I’ve ever heard. GET HIP TO MICKEY BAKER!!!!
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