Richard A. Allen (January 6, 1935 – May 29, 2005)'' Juke Blues'' no.59, 2005, Obituaries, p.68 was an American

blues Blues is a music genre and musical form that originated among African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues has incorporated spiritual (music), spirituals, work songs, field hollers, Ring shout, shouts, cha ...

singer from Chicago. He was born in

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, often known as Music City, is the capital and List of municipalities in Tennessee, most populous city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County in Middle Tennessee, locat ...

, and began his singing career as a member of a church choir in his home town. He relocated to Chicago in 1960, and received a recording contract one year later at Age Records. He had a local hit with "You Better Be Sure" and, in 1963, his hit "Cut You A-Loose" reached Number 20 in ''

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...

s R&B

chart A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphics, graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can repres ...

. Some of his

recordings A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, re ...

of the 1960s, such as "It's A Mess I Tell You" and "I Can't Stand No Signifying", portended the emerging soul-blues style of the 1970s. After his retirement from the

music industry The music industry are individuals and organizations that earn money by Songwriter, writing songs and musical compositions, creating and selling Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music and sheet music, presenting live music, concerts, ...

in the early 1970s, he ran a laundry and a limousine service. In 2001, he performed at the

Mönsterås Mönsterås () is a locality and the seat of Mönsterås Municipality, Kalmar County, Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders ...

Festival in Sweden, and the following year at the

Chicago Blues Festival The Chicago Blues Festival is an annual event held in June, that features three days of performances by top-tier blues musicians, both old favorites and the up-and-coming. It is hosted by the Chicago, Illinois, City of Chicago Department of Cu ...

. He died in 2005, aged 70.

References

* Komara, Edward (ed.) (2006), ''Encyclopedia of the Blues'', Routledge

External links

Obituary
''Jazz News'', 2005 American blues singers Singers from Nashville, Tennessee Chicago blues musicians 1935 births 2005 deaths 20th-century American singers USA Records artists {{US-singer-stub