Mighty Sam McClain

Sweet Dreams (Telarc)

Performs Sept. 22 at the

Elliston Place Street Festival

When Mighty Sam McClain takes the stage at the Elliston Place Street Festival on Saturday, he’ll be arriving in town as one of today’s foremost purveyors of bluesy, down-home soul—a fire-and-ice stylist in the Bobby “Blue” Bland mold. Hundreds, perhaps even a thousand people, will be on hand for his set, much of which will likely consist of material from Sweet Dreams, his shuffle-rich new album for Telarc. McClain’s gig certainly won’t be anything like the last one he played in Nashville, when in 1982, trying to jump-start his then-stalled career, he threw a party and no one showed.

“I was working at 325 Union Club; that was a little restaurant downtown just off Printers Alley,” recalls McClain, 58, speaking by phone from his home in rural New Hampshire. “I was busing tables, and I put on a showcase down there, my wife and I. We invited all the bigwigs on Music Row and nobody came. I was so embarrassed. I had my $400 pink suit on, and I spent a couple thousand bucks on invitations and stuff. I was so hurt. Soon after that, I left Nashville. I told myself, ‘I’m never coming back here again.’ ”

McClain, who had moved to Music City in 1975, first made his mark while living in Pensacola, Fla., in 1966. He’d gone over to Rick Hall’s Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., to cut a couple sides for Amy Records when songwriter Dan Penn, the session’s engineer, urged him to take a crack at Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams.” Gibson, Faron Young, and Patsy Cline each had already recorded and scored Top 10 country hits with the song.

Mighty Sam’s country-soul remake of “Sweet Dreams”—his debut single—went on to chart on R&B reports throughout the Southeast, eventually selling in the neighborhood of 100,000 copies. It’s no wonder: Aggravated by the salty fatback of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section, McClain’s ravaged rendition of the song throbbed like a wound. It also landed him on a bill at Harlem’s Apollo Theater with Gladys Knight and the Pips.

“Papa Don” Schroeder, a popular Pensacola DJ, produced the session, as well as those that yielded such soulful wonders as “Georgia Pines” and “Papa True Love.” Schroeder was also in the producer’s chair at Muscle Shoals later that year when another of his acts, James and Bobby Purify, recorded their breakthrough, “I’m Your Puppet.” But while “Puppet” proved to be the Purifys’ first in a series of decent-sized hits, including “Shake a Tail Feather,” none of Mighty Sam’s subsequent singles, regional hits released on the Amy and Atlantic labels, so much as dented the national charts. It was hardly surprising when Papa Don shifted most of his promotional muscle to the Purifys.

Disillusioned, Sam soon started supplementing his income by dealing grass; after getting busted and nearly going to prison, he left Florida, looking to make a new start in Music City. Yet instead of open doors, he found himself washing dishes at Muhlenbrink’s, a restaurant/club near Vanderbilt, and later, at the IHOP across the street. He also sold blood and plasma to make ends meet.

“I was certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time,” explains McClain, who hoped his country-steeped soul might strike a chord with R&B-influenced Nashville producers like Billy Sherrill and Jerry Kennedy. “I beat the bushes I don’t know how long on Music Row. My wife would go up one side of the street, I would go down the other, and we’d meet in the middle and just cry, cry, cry.

“Eventually, I had to start looking for a job, but, at the time, I didn’t want to have to look for no job. I hadn’t really done much day labor. You see, I come from the country, where I picked cotton and I plowed mules and tractors, things like that. So looking for a day job, and having to go get a Social Security card, was totally new for me. I mean, I’d been working in music and getting paid under the table my whole life.”

After seven years of striking out and being down-and-out in Nashville, McClain and his wife went to live with Sam’s people in Monroe, La., the place where he was born and raised. But that didn’t work out either, so they signed up for Food Stamps, turned ’em for cash on the street, and used the money to buy two bus tickets to New Orleans. After that the bottom dropped out. The couple not only split up, but Sam, disgusted with himself and the rest of the world, hit the bottle; it wasn’t long before he was eating out of Dumpsters and toughing it out on the streets.

Nevertheless, he clung to his faith in God—he was baptized in the pool on top of the Americana Apartments off Music Row after he moved to Nashville—and continued to sing whenever he could, mostly in clubs on and around Bourbon Street. McClain’s not sure, but Bourbon Street is likely where he was befriended by Cyril Neville; their kinship led the Neville Brothers to invite Sam to open for them on their 1985 tour of Japan. A live album under McClain’s name featuring Bobby “Blue” Bland guitarist Wayne Bennett surfaced on Dead Ball Records the following year and, having sobered up, Sam never looked back.

Producer Hammond Scott then invited McClain to sing on former Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin’s Blues Party, a record released by the Black Top label. By the early ’90s, Sam was living in the Boston area (the home of Black Top’s parent company, Rounder Records), and had signed with AudioQuest Music, for which he released a handful of critically acclaimed CDs.

Grammy and W.C. Handy award nominations, along with induction into the Louisiana Blues Hall of Fame, followed, but Sam’s biggest coup came when producer David E. Kelley contacted him about using his recording of “New Man in Town” in an episode of Ally McBeal. The song has since appeared on the show 11 times.

“When [Kelley’s] office called, I couldn’t even pick up the phone,” McClain says. “I just sat there and listened to the message thinking, ‘God is good. God surely does provide.’ ”

Much the same sense of gratitude pervades the punchy, horn-charged material, virtually all of it written by McClain, on Sweet Dreams, a record that’s rich in spirituality but never stoops to preachiness. It’s also loaded with Sam’s deeply emotive, red-clay crying and pleading, as well as Kevin Belz’s dirty, “Hog for You” guitar work and the funky twin-keyboard attack of Bruce Katz (piano) and Barry Seelen (B-3 organ).

McClain’s cover of “Respect Yourself”—recorded, Sam later learned, the day Pop Staples died—won’t make any of us forget the Staples’ hit version, but it burns with righteous ire. The album even includes some fairly straight-ahead country, albeit minus the twang (“Learn How to Love You Again”), as well as its centerpiece, a smoldering remake of “Sweet Dreams.” It’s a performance that takes on added freight when heard in light of Mighty Sam’s nightmarish years in Music City. “Why can’t I forget you,” he sings hauntingly, “and start my life anew?”

Today McClain sings that his dreams have become reality. He’s got a wife, kids, grandkids, a house, a farm, and “a powerhouse band.” “I’m surrounded by love, I’ve got God directing me,” he testifiesto the crisp shuffle-beat of “Living inMy Dreams.”

Sweet dreams, indeed.