The Song of the Day is:
Z.Z. Hill – “Someone Else is Steppin’ In”
From the album The Rhythm & the Blues (1982)
I came home this morning
And oh what a shock
When I found out my key
No longer fit my lock
She said oh baby
You can go back where you’ve been (Oh Lord)
See you’ve been steppin out
Now someone else is steppin in
Denise LaSalle
Yesterday, when I introduced ZZ Top’s music to this blog, I mentioned how their name is derived from this blues man. To be thorough, they modeled their name on fellow Texan blues man Z.Z. Hill and also B.B. King, with that letter-letter-single syllable word cadence. They obviously took the “ZZ” from Hill and figured that a “King” would be on “Top”, or would be the “Tops” as in the best. It’s also a coincidence that ZZ Top also has someone with the last name Hill, bassist Dusty Hill, but there’s no relation. I do take some silly pride in now having profiled everybody from Aaliyah to ZZ Top now, but as I was thinking of turning to a more traditional blues artist, I figured I should get a bit more acquainted with Z.Z. Hill’s music while he’s on my mind. I had previous passing knowledge of Hill, but I’m glad that I dug a bit deeper. I can definitely find a link from his music to that of ZZ Top’s, especially in the bass playing of Dusty Hill and the slicker guitar sounds of Billy Gibbons. It’s especially evident in this song, though this is not an early-era song from Hill and ZZ Top was at their commercial peak here, so it is difficult to say who is the influencer and who is the follower at this point. Interestingly, Z.Z. Hill is a bluesman who plays a style that is very closely associated with R&B. It’s often taken for granted that R&B stands for Rhythm and Blues because it has evolved into its own separate genre. Hill is one of those artists that really blends the soul with the blues, and there aren’t a whole lot of artists that blur the lines like that. Along with Hill, B.B. King and Bobby Blue Bland would probably be the most cited examples of soul-blues artists, with artists like Don Covay, Clarence Carter and Johnnie Taylor being the flip side of that coin: soul men deeply vested in the blues. In fact this song “Someone Else is Steppin’ In”, shares a clear thematic style with Taylor’s “Who’s Making Love (To Your Your Old Lady, While You Were Out Making Love)”, and Taylor did cover this later in his career. Arzel “Z.Z.” Hill had a 20 year career, from 1964 to his sudden death in 1984. He was just 48 when he died of a heart attack that was possibly the effect of blood clotting from a car accident two months earlier. It’s a shame that he passed when he did as slicker blues music in the vein of Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan was just beginning to reinvigorate the blues. Hill could have really enjoyed the heightened profile and greater production. Alas it wasn’t so. This song is written by Denise LaSalle, who was considered to be one of the Queens of the Blues until her 2018 death. Unfortunately, Hill’s recorded legacy has not been treated as a priority, and it is not well anthologized and one of the albums I streamed had horrible low-bit rate distortion. He deserves better.
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