Nightless Lovers performing Percy Mayfield’s blues from the 1950s

HOW IT ALL STARTED .... When I first heard some of Percy Mayfield’s Specialty Records cuts from the early 1950s, I thought they made more sense to me than anything I’d ever heard. Bolt of lightning kind of stuff. So my fascination with Percy Mayfield began.

Lots of liner notes later (long live liner notes), I understood that Maxwell Davis’s brilliant horn arrangements (the guy was a genius) and Willard McDaniel’s piano lines were homing in on me as much as Percy’s beautiful singing and painful poetry.

I thought that this music needed to be aired and heard again by new audiences just the way it was written, but in a new era. Not quite the same as the usual approach to doing a cover version, but it doesn’t mean you can’t bring something new to it. Are you with me?

Nightless Lover was a great song and struck me as a fine name for a band too, so NIGHTLESS LOVERS it had to be. With Mighty Mitch in charge of the rhythms, brushes, sticks and skins, Phil on those killer bass lines, Tony singing so beautifully and the horn section digging it and getting behind it wholeheartedly, and me trying to copy Willard McDaniel’s piano lines, I hope you’ll enjoy our take on Percy Mayfield's blues.                     

Leo Joseph