I'm Leavin' You

“Frank Bey had been standing in the shadows of stardom far too
long. He has finally stepped out of the shadows.”
– Lee Hildebrand, Living Blues Magazine
“In a time when American Idol-type vocal gymnastics too often pass for soul, Frank Bey is a perfect reminder of what soul singing is really all about: Communication, warmth, and emotional sincerity.”
– Rick Estrin, Rick Estrin and the Nightcats
“Frank Bey is a name to watch, an act to catch…”
– Norman Darwen, Blues & Rhythm Magazine, England

Frank Bey had been standing in the shadows of stardom far too long. As a kid, he shared bills with the Soul Stirrers featuring Sam Cooke, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and other greats when singing gospel music with his mother. As a teenager, he opened shows for his friend Otis Redding. Years later, after he’d fully committed himself to singing the blues and began making CDs of his own, his career progress was undercut by a failing kidney. Yet, even during nearly five years of dialysis, he never stopped singing. It was a God-given gift, and he felt compelled to continue down the path providence had dictated.
“Music is a vehicle for me to try to share love, to uplift people, to inspire people, to let them know that whatever your situation is, it’s not the end,” the Philadelphia-based singer explains. “That’s what I learned during my illness. A lot of people thought I would never make it through, but I never accepted that it was the end. There was always something that was leading me upwards, something that was giving me a challenge to try to do better. Music was the thing that brought joy.”
In 2006, less than two years after receiving a kidney transplant, Bey made the first of what would become twice-annual appearances with guitarist Anthony Paule’s band at Biscuits & Blues, San Francisco’s premiere blues club. Paule, whose extensive resume includes work with Johnny Adams, Earl King, Brownie McGhee, Maria Muldaur, Charlie Musselwhite, and Boz Scaggs, initially put a basic rhythm section behind the singer, but he gradually added saxophone, trumpet, and trombone to create the powerhouse ensemble that is heard on You Don’t Know Nothing, a live album released in February 2013. It met with enthusiastic response from blues radio programmers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Critics in the U.S. and UK raved. One magazine even nominated the CD as the best “new artist” debut of the year. Frank Bey had finally stepped out of the shadows.
Bey has called the empathy between himself and Paule’s band “magical,” and that magic is in further evidence on their new studio collaboration, Blues for Your Soul. “When he sings a lyric,” Paule says of his friend, “he means it from every fiber of his being.”
– Lee Hildebrand

Soul For Your Blues is very near and dear to my heart. Getting to know Frank Bey over the last seven years and assembling this band to back him has been an extraordinary experience. Our live CD, You Don’t Know Nothing, met with overwhelming positive response and we knew right away we’d have to do a follow-up studio recording. I also knew the recording would need to be predominantly original material. Starting in the summer of 2012, my wife Christine Vitale and I got to work writing new material and making plans for this project. Once the original songs were written, the cover songs chosen, the studio and the musicians booked, I was still not prepared for what took place while recording on the 9th and 10th of December, 2012.
Dealing with all the logistics had left me somewhat frazzled, but once we got the eight-piece band playing live in the studio, a sort of divine magic took over. The recording immediately took on a life of its own as the tracks were laid down with uncanny ease. It was all as it was meant to be: The right songs with the right singer with the right musicians in the right studio with the right engineer at the right time. The universe was working for us and through us to create beautiful and meaningful music. Although I had laid the ground work by arranging the sessions, I was overwhelmed with the sense that I was simply a conduit for the universe to express this music. There were many synchronistic things that happened around the recording of this CD: From a friend coming forward with a much needed loan at the last minute, to waking up on two separate mornings with original songs in my head that I put on paper as fast as I could write, to a baritone saxophone which just happened to be lying around the studio when we needed one.
There are other examples, but perhaps the most remarkable of these seemingly serendipitous events involves “I Just Can’t Go On”, which is written as an Otis Redding-style soul ballad. Just days before the recording session, Christine Vitale who wrote the song, had returned from Madison, WI where Otis’ plane went down in 1967. After the session was over, we came to the realization that we had recorded the song 45 years to the day after that fateful plane crash. As a teenager Frank spent a number of years traveling with Redding, occasionally opening the show for him. There is a lot more I could write, but I’ll close by saying a lot of heart and soul from all the people involved went into these 13 tracks, and I hope you will hear and feel some part of it.
– Anthony Paule