For a shorthand description, let’s call Bea & Baby a Triple-A farm club for Chess Records. Artists went back and forth between the labels on the way up and on the way down; Leonard Chess owned the pressing plant where B&B’s singles were manufactured. According to the extensive essays included in this box set, Chess snatched ideas from B&B and held up their releases to give his records time to hit the charts.
Bea & Baby saw little chart action, but as heard in the tracks compiled for The Definitive Collection, their discs were mostly crafted on a level that matches the bigger labels. When B&B began in 1959, many of the recordings were Chicago blues at the cusp of R&B—the urban honk of tenor sax added fuel to the potent rhythms of the hard-to-the-beat drumming and electric bass. Electric guitar parts were occasionally innovative and inevitably drenched in the blues. Many of the recordings were filled out—like Chess’—by astute use of reverb.
Blues was B&B’s mainstay, and their roster included such familiar names as Hound Dog Taylor, Sunnyland Slim and a guitarist with Milwaukee ties, Hubert Sumlin. But the label also released several doo-wop discs and dabbled in jazz-influenced vocalists and Elvis-esque rock ’n’ roll.
The Baby in Bea & Baby, Narvel “Cadillac Baby” Eatmon, was a Mississippi-born hustler who migrated to Chicago and set himself up as a bar owner. The live bands he booked led to the recording business. In later years, he ran a record shop where a generation of (mostly white) blues aficionados gathered to hear his stories, some of them recorded and included on The Definitive Collection.
