Somebody Loan Me a Dime
| Somebody Loan Me a Dime | ||||
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| Studio album by Fenton Robinson | ||||
| Released | 1974 | |||
| Genre | Blues | |||
| Length | 42:37 | |||
| Label | Alligator | |||
| Producer | Bruce Iglauer | |||
| Fenton Robinson chronology | ||||
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Somebody Loan Me a Dime is a 1974 studio album by blues singer and guitarist Fenton Robinson, his debut under the Alligator Records imprint. Blending together some elements of jazz with Chicago blues and Texas blues, the album was largely critically well received and is regarded as important within his discography. Among the album's tracks is a re-recording of his 1967 signature song, "Somebody Loan Me a Dime", which has become a blues standard. It has been reissued multiple times in the United States and Japan, including with bonus tracks.
The album overall received good reception by critics and is described by the 1993 The Big Book of Blues as "essential listening."Allmusic in its review characterized the album as "one of the most subtly satisfying electric blues albums of the '70s". New York based WGMC blue radio host Jeff Harris describes the album as "one of the era’s true masterpieces", Robinson's "pinnacle". Critic Robert Christgau offers some dissent; though he graded the album a B+ overall, indicated that Robinson's voice (though well utilized) lacked power, his songs lacked hooks (aside from "Gotta Wake Up") and his music was "stylish and thoughtful" but restrained. Allmusic's Bill Dahl, by contrast, praised Robinson for the power of several composition and focused particularly on his voice, a "deep, rich baritone [that] sounds more like a magic carpet than a piece of barbed wire," indicating that Robinson "speaks in jazz-inflected tongues, full of complex surprises." Harris, too, pays particular attention to Robinson's voice, which he describes as "a thing of beauty, a deep, rich baritone that glides along and is a perfect counterpoint to his elegant guitar work."
Among the more notable tracks on the album was a new recording of the title song, which Robinson had originally released in 1967 for the Palos label (and which had become a hit for Boz Scaggs in 1969, under the title "Loan Me a Dime" without composition credit for Robinson). The song is regarded as Robinson's signature piece and went on to become a blues standard, according to 1997's Encyclopedia of Blues being "part of the repertoire of one out of every two blues artists." The title song serves as the background music during the opening scenes of the movie The Blues Brothers, a movie responsible for revitalizing Aretha Franklin's career.
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