For nearly 20 years beginning in 1959, Chicago businessman
Narvel Eatmon (aka
Cadillac Baby) presided over his Bea & Baby record label, by far the most enduring of his many investments, which included a nightclub, a record store, an appliance repair service, and a confectionary. Some seven years after his demise, Wolf Records released a 24-track sampler from the Bea & Baby catalog. The lineup is very impressive, and reflects the original label's profile pretty well. It includes guitarists
Hound Dog Taylor,
Homesick James Williamson,
L.G. McKinley,
Robert Jr. Lockwood, and
Earl Zebedee Hooker; pianists
Eddie Boyd and
Sunnyland Slim; blues harpists
James Cotton,
Carey Bell, and
Little Mack Simmons; singing drummer Willie Williams; and vocalists
Bobby Saxton and
Andrew McMahon. This compilation is very similar to The Best of Cadillac: Meat & Gravy, a Bea & Baby "best-of" released by Culture Press in 1998. Unfortunately, the two simultaneously issued collections have 16 tracks in common. In 2003, Castle Music compounded the confusion by releasing a double-disc Bea & Baby collection called Meat & Gravy. Public comprehension of
Cadillac Baby's legacy was muddled even further when the misleadingly titled Cadillac Records, a film based upon the story of the Chess label, came out in 2008. By then the Bea & Baby catalog was being administered by the Earwig Music Company, Inc., and plans were afoot for more careful, comprehensive, and conscientious reissuing. ~ arwulf arwulf