Mourning In the Morning

Otis Rush already had more than a decade of success as a recording artist behind him by the time he cut his first full-length album, Mourning in the Morning, but up until then his catalog had been confined to singles. Seemingly out of a desire to reach beyond his core blues audience, he made a stylistic shift, recording at the renowned FAME Studio in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and incorporating contemporary soul and rock 'n' roll influences. This was accomplished with the help of FAME session men, including a young Duane Allman, and members of the blues-rock band The Electric Flag (EF's Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites were the album's producers). On tunes like B.B. King's "Gambler's Blues" and Rush's own "My Love Will Never Die," the Muscle Shoals crew have no trouble laying into the kind of sinuous Chicago blues groove that made Rush famous. But the soul-pop bounce of such Bloomfield/Gravenites-penned tunes as "Can't Wait No Longer" and "My Old Lady" pushes things further.