Audio 
Charles A. Robertson : October, 1957

Memories of a boyhood spent among the byways of the Delta are distilled in ten pithy sketches, all carrying the essence of the blues, which form the long Back Country Suite. Mose Allison was born in Tippo, Mississippi, in 1927, and reached maturity with recollections of a generation of down-home blues artists. After graduating with a B.A. in English from the University of Louisiana, and service in the Army, he returned to music. This February, he became pianist in the Stan Getz Quartet, whose auditors may have been fortunate enough to hear parts of the suite. His is a lean, economical style, at its most revelatory reminiscent of the flashes of light found in the solos of Eurreal “Little Brother” Montgomery, and he moves knowingly through many aspects of blues piano. Though some of the sketches might benefit from further development and it is possible the suite would be strengthened by fewer of them, it is a most astonishing and rewarding composition to come from a young pianist. That his first LP should please both traditionalists and modernists makes it all the more encouraging.

Taylor La Fargue, bass with the Getz group, and drummer Frank Isola give him secure support. Allison shows a more contemporary style on Blueberry Hill, I Thought About You, You Won’t Let Me Go, and his original In Salah. On One Room Country Shack, and one number in the suite, he sings in a southern version of the Hoagy Carmichael twang.

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Billboard : 07/29/1957
New Jazz Talent

Deeply rooted in the blues and country music, pianist-composer Allison has come up with a strong blend of both on Back Country Suite, the prime attraction of this collection. Salient features are the descriptive nature of the music, and the piano work of its composer-interpreter. An auspicious debut for a musician whose work is a little different, and therefore deserving of dealer attention.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 09/22/1957

Back Country Suite by the Mose Allison trio is an album that answers the question “Why can’t we have something new.” Taylor LaFargue is on bass and Frank Isola drums for the young pianist as he writes of his early years on the Mississippi Delta. Often moody, often skipping and light, it is an imaginative piece of writing.

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San Bernardino County Sun
Jim Angelo : 09/14/1957

Musical thought and feeling from Jelly Roll Morton to Thelonious Monk is represented in Back Country Suite by the Mose Allison trio. Allison, a modern titan of the keyboard, still reflects his country blues background and the influence of many pianists, traditional as well as contemporary.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 09/08/1957

A blues suite by a pianist who couples a modern conception in his right hand with a Cripple Clarence Lofton and Cow Cow Davenport bass, if you can imagine such a thing. It’s quite interesting and he sings the blues in a couple of tracks with a reasonable facsimile of guys like Tampa Red. Prestige thinks it has the find of the decade in this, and they may be right commercially. Personally, I like the originals better.

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Saturday Review 
Nat Hentoff : 08/31/1957

It’s uncommon to find a white Mississippian, not yet thirty, who is a modern pianist influenced by Al Haig and Thelonious Monk with a B.A. in English from Louisiana State University and who is not abashed to sing the blues. Mose Allison‘s blues singing is sparely arresting, more so to this listener than his composing or playing as yet. One half his first album, Back Country Suite is concerned with the ten-part “suite.” He terms the work a “fiction of the back country” and adds fairly evocative titles for the various sections like New Ground and Promised Land. There are areas of naiveté in the writing, but several sections are touching and deserve further development. The overquick descriptiveness of this too-crowded set of memories lessens the earthy potential of some of the parts. Allison sings one blues in the “Suite” and another on the other side. The second half, for the rest, is filled with competent modern jazz piano with not nearly as much pungency of personality as the Allison blues singing and the idea of the suite promise. He is, however, worth encouraging.

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Virginian-Pilot : 12/08/1957

There are signs of more good to come of the earthiness and blues orientation (without sacrifice of modern thinking) which Monk represents. Mose Allison, 30, is an exciting newcomer whose playing and writing should draw attention. His Back Country Suite for Prestige is thoughtful, well played, and carries the emotional message of jazz.

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Down Beat : 09/05/1957
Dom Cerulli : 5 stars

At 29, Mose in his suite looks back on his boyhood in Tippo, Miss., and recreates the dusty, mid-August feel of the land and its people. The 10-part suite, collected over the years since 1945, is bound together by a thread of nervous, jarring figures in the lively movements, and what comes through as an almost weary pastoral quality in the slower movements. There’s a cold grayness in January, for instance, that is more pictorial than a painting or photograph.

Part of the happy wedding of material and execution here is in in Mose’s style of playing, which is bluesy and often as abrupt as the tight little melodies and figures of the suite. This comes through on the five tunes on Side 2.

The suite itself is melodic and blues-edged, with each part edited down to a spare frame. It is this leanness which makes it seem even more tightly bound into a unit.

Each of the parts has something valid to contribute. Mose sings Blues in a rather plaintive voice, phrased as tartly as his piano style. One movement which is particularly vivid is Scamper, during which you can see a yard full of kids racing around and cramming in every minute of activity they can before summer heat or darkness sets in.

The feel of the suite carries into One-Room Country Shack and even into In Salah. The binding force of his playing style is always present.

La Fargue and Isola are excellent companions throughout. La Fargue’s bass is heard singing in Salah; and the couple of tracks in which Isola emerges from the group to swap fours show his taste and technique.

This is an important record. Not so much because of the suite, which in itself is charming, fresh, and rooted in the blues, but also because Allison is a talent which bears watching. If his subsequent writing has the individuality of approach and the same earth quality as in this excursion, jazz will have added another exciting voice to its roster of spokesmen. This deserves hearing.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

The slight, sandy-haired kid walked out of the general store and sauntered past the weathered buildings postered with reminders to drink Dr. Pepper and Jax Beer. When he reached the junction where the filling station was, he stopped, it was Saturday and everyone had come into town to stock up on supplies for the week, maybe get a haircut and certainly let loose a little.

Young Mose walked past the gas pump and stopped in front of the metal tub where the “pop” and beer lay, side by side, in the ice that was slowly disappearing into its own water. Mose worked for his daddy in the general store and after the Saturday rush was over, it had become a ritual for him to hurry down to the filling station and its juke box.

As be lifted a coke out and and uncapped it, he could hear the sound of the blues, being sung and played on guitar, coming through the screen door into the humid Mississippi afternoon. Mose knew who it was… Tampa Red. He knew and loved them all; Memphis Slim, Sonny Boy Williamson and all of them.

This is just a semi-fictional glimpse at the early years of the life of Mose John Allison Jr. of Tippo, Mississippi. Mose was brought into the world in this small, typical Delta community on November 11, 1927. His father, the general store owner, had been a ragtime piano player in his younger days and Mose began to follow him at the keyboard through five years of piano lessons in grammar school. It was the only formal training he ever had but, as you saw in the vignette, the first music to make an impression on him was the country blues that he drank up every Saturday at the filling station. Later they were joined in the scope of his appreciation by another facet of the blues form, the eight to the bar variety as played by Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson.

When Mose was in high school, he became friendly with a cousin who collected jazz records. Here he discovered the world of Louis Armstrong, the Basie band and Nat Cole (his first strong piano influence.) During the same period he also bought himself a trumpet and soon had taught himself to play. “I was digging Buck Clayton at the time,” remembers Mose.

As the years moved on, so did Mose. He left Tippo behind and enrolled at the University of Mississippi. It was there in 1945 and 1946 that he heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie play on the recording of Congo Blues and through subsequent records listened to Al Haig and Bud Powell. Later, Erroll Garner found his ear although if Erroll effected his style then, you don’t hear it now.

In 1946, Mose went into the Army and remained through 1947. He was stationed in Colorado Springs, Colorado and one of his fellow musicians in the Army band was Pittsburgh trombonist Tommy Turk.

After his service was completed in 1948, Mose returned to the University and remained until 1949 when he left to form his own trio. He worked with his group and then toured the southern territory as a member of the Burt Massengale band.

Mose had had enough of the road for a while when he decided to finish college in 1951. This time he attended Louisiana State University, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1952. Music was not neglected either and he managed to play around the Baton Rouge campus. In 1951 he did three months at the local Flamingo Club with tenorman Brew Moore.

Alter graduation in 1952, Mose plunged wholeheartedly into music again. This time it was in Texas with his own trio which included Taylor La Fargue on bass.

The scene changed to Denver in 1953. Mose had liked the country from his Army days and had promised himself a return trip in civvies. He worked with the local band of drummer Shelly Rym of whom Mose says, “All musicians passing through town would make it their business to sit in with him.”

From 1954 until he arrived in New York in the fall of 1956, Mose gigged throughout the Southeast, usually with his own groups.

Actually, he had been to New York once before in 1951 for a two month period Mose recalls, “I didn’t know anyone here as Brew had gone back to Mississippi. I wrote a couple of arrangements for Buddy DeFranco‘s big band but I doubt if they ever were played because the band broke up soon after.”

The second trip has not been so arid. Mose broke in at The Pad with Al Cohn’s group and, until the time he joined Stan Getz as a regular in February of 1957, was active in private sessions around town and also recorded with Cohn.

When I asked him to name his favorite pianists, Mose declined to name them all because the list would be too long. He did name Al Haig and Thelonious Monk as being “among my favorites”.

By his personal preferences and his own playing, Mose Allison shows himself to be a modernist but his roots are also in view at all times. All of his previous playing and listening experience is evident in the synthesis that is his present style, The country blues of his youth have never left him (an extremely valid form of expression which more people should explore. Ask Dr. Hayakawa.) and the experiences connected with that period of his life are vividly etched in his memory. It is a group of musical sketches based on these recollections of childhood experiences that comprises the Back Country Suite. Mose who also likes to write short stories calls the Suite “a fiction of the back country.” It is a fiction based on fact.

The Suite opens with the clearing of an area before cultivation in New Ground and moves along on a Train that runs through the Delta between Greenwood and Charleston, Mississippi.

Warm Night describes the serenity of such an evening.

Although most of the Suite is ether blues-based or blues-infused, Blues is the only one that is sung. Mose bewails the plight of the young man and the precedence of money over youth. To me, it is the cry of a fellow who has just lost his girl to a man twenty years his senior. The influence of John Lee Hooker and Lightning Hopkins is present here.

Saturday has all the bustle and activity of people in town to get their “furnish” and tie one on.

The impression of children playing on a farm around cotton gins and on trucks is transmitted in Scamper. Frank Isola is heard in exchanges with Mose.

January is a bleak, damp cold, gray, melancholy kind of day in the time of the year when there is a complete change from the usual green of the Southland.

Promised Land is a spiritual, “kind of ‘goin’ to the river’ music,” Mose says. It was written in 1956, the last of the Suite to be finished.

Spring Song was written in 1945 at the University of Mississippi and in its tender strains shows that young Mose, not yet 18, had a gift for melody even then.

The Suite rides away down Highway 49 which traverses the Delta fairly near to Tippo.

In both the Back Country Suite and the other pieces presented here, Mose is accompanied by bassist Taylor La Fargue and drummer Frank Isola.

La Fargue, from DeWitt, Arkansas attended college at Delta State and played in Louisiana with Brew Moore and Tommy Allison (no relation to Mose). Mose met Taylor on a summer gig in Rockaway Beach, Missouri. Taylor played briefly with Buddy Morrow in the fall of 1956 and is presently with Stan Getz.

Isola, from Detroit, Michigan has been with Getz several times and also with Gerry Mulligan in the Fifties. His light but strongly pulsing style fits the trio well.

I Thought About You is an old ballad which Mose revives here.

In Salah, an Allison original, is a minor key, medium swinger which derives its name from a town in North Africa. It seems that Mose was reading Paul Bowles at the time.

A blues ballad which Mose remembers Josh White singing in some movie is You Won’t Let Me Go. Here it is an instrumental.

Blueberry Hill, which Mose has played for a long time, receives a medium treatment here.

The twang of the Allison voice is heard in the philosophical One Room Country Shack. Mose says the original record is by a blues singer named Mercy Dee.

With the Back Country Suite its most salient feature, I think this album is an important one because it presents a new, individual talent who sincerely echoes his culture in an articulate and moving manner. Mose says, “the blues is like a religion.”

l agree with him completely. This takes in an area from B.B, King to Sonny Rollins and beyond. Any sincere performance will find me in the first pew.