Looking at few new ones that are well worth any blues fan's time, plus a great one you might have missed from a few years back. Here we go......
Two of my favorite blues and soul vocalists are Johnny Rawls and Dave Keller. I've been a big fan of Rawls since his Rawls & Luckett release on Rooster Blues in the early 90's (Can't Sleep at Night) and Keller since his appearance as a guest vocalist on Ronnie Earl's Living in the Light release on Stony Plain in 2009. Both men have recorded prolifically over the past 15 - 20 years and they've shared the stage many times over the years.
Thank goodness they finally decided to make an album together, and what an album it is! Tribute to Soul (Third Street Cigar Records) is an album any blues or soul music fan should have in their collection. Rawls and Keller have been friends for over 15 years and have toured together several times across the U.S,, but this is their first collaborative effort.
The song list pays tribute to many of Rawls' mentors, so there are tunes associated with Joe Tex, James Carr, Otis Clay, Eddie Floyd, Z.Z. Hill, Tommy Tate, O.V. Wright, Benny Lattimore, Little Johnny Taylor, Willie Hightower, and Jimmy Hughes. Some of the songs will be familiar to blues and soul fans, but there are several seldom-heard treasures that will become new favorite songs to many listeners. Rawls and Keller are both wonderful and Keller's band provides stellar support, with Keller on lead guitar throughout. I can't tell you how excited I was to get this CD. This is a long overdue collaboration and, hopefully, one that might reoccur from time to time in the future.
Sadly, there's no videos of the songs yet available on YouTube, but here's a Rawls/Keller combo from Keller's 2020 duet album What You Give - Duets (another great release) that will give you an idea of what to expect.
Friday Blues Fix interviewed Zac Harmon way back in 2012 and that Ten Questions With....can be seen here. He got his start in Jackson, MS on Farish Street, playing with local legends like Dorothy Moore, Sam Myers, and Z.Z. Hill before moving to Los Angeles in the 80's, where he worked as a musician, writer, and producer for the O'Jays, the Whispers, Karyn White, Alexander O'Neal, and Black Uhuru.
Despite his success, he longed to return to his roots, so he started recording the blues in the early 2000's. His band won the I.B.C.'s Best Unsigned Band award and I first caught up with him with his subsequent release, The Blues According to Zachariah, which won the 2006 Blues Music Award for Best New Artist Debut. He's been pretty prolific since that time, cutting albums for a host of labels including Blind Pig and Catfood Records.
His most recent release is Zac Harmon & The Drive Live, which was recorded at various shows in the U.S. and Europe and effectively captures Harmon and the band's energetic stage presence. Most of the songs are taken from Harmon's earlier releases, but several of them are from his earlier releases that blues fans might have missed the first time around. There are also a couple of crowd pleasers from his most recent releases as well. Harmon is in good voice and the band provides excellent support throughout the set. If you haven't experienced the superb blues and soul artistry of Zac Harmon, this is a fantastic place to get on board.
It always puts a hop in my step when I get a new album from the Sauce Boss. Also known as Bill Wharton, the Sauce Boss is a most interesting character. He's a master guitarist and his original tunes are always entertaining. His website EPK describes him as "a musician, a chef, a raconteur, and purveyor of gourmet hot sauce (Liquid Summer Datil Pepper Hot Sauce), a songwriter, and a standup comedian.
During his shows, he makes a pot of gumbo on stage during his performance (the recipe is on his website) and serves gumbo to the audience at the end of his gig. He's also the subject of the Jimmy Buffett song "I Will Play For Gumbo" and he's appeared in Living Blues, GQ, and Gourmet magazines, more than likely the only person ever to appear in all three.
The Sauce Boss' latest release is With Extra Sauce. The "extra sauce" consists of guitarist Neal Goree, bassist Kendrick Jacobs, and drummer Brett Cook, along with string arrangements that accompany a couple of the songs, eight of which are Sauce Boss originals. He plays marvelous slide guitar throughout (on one track, he plays a three-string cigar box guitar in a 9" cast iron frying pan), and his own songs are always a lot of fun. The two cover tunes are classics, but the Sauce Boss and friends put a fresh coat of paint on both. What a fun album! You can also hear more about the Sauce Boss via his memoir The Live and Times of Blind Boy Billy, which includes his story, along with songs and recipes.
Let's look back at a great release that you might have missed first time around....Johnny Heartsman'sThe Touch. Apparently, a lot of folks may have missed it. For some reason, I missed it as well. Heartsman played guitar, keyboards, and flute and played on many recordings in the San Francisco Bay area in the 50's and 60's while playing with Jimmy McCracklin, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Big Mama Thornton, Al King (check out his guitar on King's Atlantic single "Reconsider Baby"), Jimmy Wilson, Joe Simon, and Johnny Fuller. He had a hit of his own in 1957 with "Johnny's House Party (Parts 1 and 2)," on Music City Records which made it to #13 on the Billboard R&B chart.
Heartsman moved between blues and R&B in the 60's and 70's before settling into the blues groove in the late 80', when he released a solo album, Sacramento, that was well-received. In 1991, he recorded The Touch for Alligator with Dick Shurman serving as producer. When I interviewed Shurman years ago, he cited Heartsman as his favorite all-time blues musician. The album is a seamless mix of blues, soul, and jazz, probably not as much "Genuine Houserockin' Music" as normally associated with Alligator and that might have been some of the problem with it's popularity, or lack thereof.
It is a highly entertaining album that finds Heartsman on guitar, keyboards, and flute while providing solid vocals. There are some tracks that swing really well and I really like his work on the keys, which have a B3 flavor to them. While I've never really associated the flute with the blues, the tracks on which he plays flute work really well. I can remember Alligator head man Bruce Iglauer expressing his disappointment at the sales of The Touch in one of his Living Blues letters and I have to agree....it really deserved better. I wish I had picked it up back in the early 90's, but I'm glad to have it now and most blues fans will certainly enjoy it.
Several years ago, I got a Facebook friend request from a young guy in Central Mississippi named Harrell Davenport. Now I wasn't sure who he was at the time, so I checked his profile and saw that he was 15 years old and a big blues fans, which is a rarity in this day and time, at least around here. I accepted his friend request and soon, we began corresponding. He was already pretty proficient on guitar and harmonica and would share videos of him playing and singing on Facebook.
The coolest thing about this young man was that his musical tastes went beyond blues. While we discussed various blues artists like Sonny Boy Williamson I and Elmore James, he also knew quite a bit about other artists in jazz and even reggae. He was pretty well-read and willing to dig deeper into the music all the way back to the roots, which is pretty remarkable for any blues fan, much less a 15 year old blues fan.
It was really great to see blues musicians commenting on his Facebook videos, offering praise, advice, and encouragement. That's one of the great things about the blues world......all of the musicians that I've encountered have always been a pleasure to deal with. They are very nice and giving to their fans and to their fellow musicians, and it made my heart feel good to see how they worked with Harrell Davenport.
Over the past couple of years, Davenport has been playing some of the blues festivals around the country, winning acclaim for his performances and, really, he sounds like he's been doing this a whole lot longer than he's actually been around. He performs with an understated confidence, energy, and enthusiasm and the fans really respond to his music.
Over the past year, he's released several fine singles (one of which we reviewed here back in November) and they have also been well-received. June 5th will mark the release of his first full-length album, Young Rell, on Little Village Records. I will be reviewing it in depth in the June issue of Blues Bytes, but here's a capsule summary.....
The young man has learned his lessons well. The twelve tracks include ten originals that range from Chicago blues and Delta blues to southern soul. His songwriting is quite impressive, drawing from experiences in his own life and he digs deep into his own soul for some of these numbers. His harmonica playing and guitar work (he plays lead on seven tracks, Andersen on four) are also first rate and his vocals are also strong. This is a powerful debut release from a young blues artist who offers further proof that the blues are alive and well and should be for a long time.
My other review this week is a book review. Many blues fans are familiar with Robert Mugge, the filmmaker who's responsible for some of the best documentaries on blues, jazz, Louisiana music, gospel and soul in the past five decades. Among those works are Deep Blues, Last of the Mississippi Juke, Pride and Joy: The Story of Alligator Records, Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, Blues Breaks, Blues Divas, A Night at Club Ebony, Deep Sea Blues, All Jams on Deck, Big Shoes: Walking and Talking the Blues, Deep Roots, The Art and Music of Bill Steber and Friends, and Elvin Bishop's Raisin' Hell Revue. Mugge has also done films on Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, and the formidable Creole and Zydeco music scenes in Louisiana, plus the moving New Orleans Music in Exile, about the city's musicians and music scene recovering from the double whammy of Hurricane Katrina and Rita in 2005.
Mugge's latest book is Quotes from the Road: The Wit and Wisdom of American Musicians (The Sager Group), which features excerpts from 150 of the interviews that he conducted during the making of his films. Many of the discussions are items that were not heard in the films, so there's lots of new info if you've seen the films already. The book is divided into 25 chapters, each addressing a different theme, such as beginnings, family traditions, struggles with recording and touring, musical styles and techniques, favorite performances and venues, and songwriting. Other topics discussed include racism, politics, and dealing with adversity in daily life and with their careers.
All of the subjects are worth reading about, but blues fans will enjoy the interviews with Lonnie
Brooks and his son Ronnie, Lil' Ed Williams, Koko Taylor, Katie
Webster, Marcia Ball, Robert Lockwood Jr., Roy Rogers, Willie Coffee
(friend of Robert Johnson), Vasti Jackson, Chris Thomas King, Bobby
Rush, Little Milton, Willie King, Deborah Coleman, Denise LaSalle,
Odetta, Ann Peebles, Irma Thomas, Mavis Staples, Otis Clay, Tommy
Castro, Kim Wilson, Buckwheat Zydeco, Elvin Bishop, Ted Drozdowski,
R.L. Hulsman, Larry McCray, Coco Montoya, Lee Oskar, Jimmy Thackery,
Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, and other contributors. The interviews with Al Green, Willie Mitchell, Sun Ra and Sonny Rollins are also fascinating, along with artists like Boozoo Chavis, John Delafose, Beau Jocque, Nathan Williams Sr. and Jr., Corey Ledet, Rosie Ledet, Lawrence "Black" and Sean Ardoin, and Major Handy, and the entire chapter on recovering from Katrina is recommended reading.
Mugge always brings the best out of his interview subjects. They always feel so comfortable talking to him and it actually feels like these artists are talking directly to you. I have to admit that I read this book in only a few sittings. It was that interesting and compelling. If you are a fan of these styles of music, then you will probably find yourself enthralled with its contents as well.
For this week's oldie but goodie, let's check out U.P. Wilson. Many years ago on this blog, I devoted a post to the life and music of the Texas Tornado way back in 2011. However, I had not delved very deeply into his non-JSP Records catalog. I recently began listening to some of those recordings and the first one I picked up was On My Way (Fedora Records).
Fedora released some pretty good recordings over ten year-plus period from 1997 to around 2008, and this release from Wilson was issued around 1999 and was taken from an LP Wilson released on the European label Red Lightnin' Records in 1988. The first ten tracks are from the original album with the last two tracks coming from a live appearance, also from 1988.
When I first heard U.P. Wilson, I was not prepared for his intensity and his energy. I ended up picking up all of his JSP recordings....he was well represented by them with five albums, a "best of", and appearances on a few compilation discs. He passed away in 2004, but the label also released a DVD of one of his performances in the UK, which showed that he was a master showman on stage just like he was on his recordings.
On My Way is a few years before his JSP recordings and it is raw and ragged, with a mix of covers (done in the distinctive U.P. Wilson style) and lots of his fierce and fiery fretwork. I remember the cover of his first JSP release had a blurb stating that he was one of Stevie Ray Vaughan's favorite guitarists and listening to On My Way, it's easy to understand why. Any of Wilson's releases are worth a listen, but this is a good one to start with if you can find it.
Your humble correspondent is traveling the next few days, so this post will be a quick one. Please come back next week for more blues that you can use. In the meantime, here's a neat little album that slide guitar fans might dig that you might have missed some thirty years ago, like I did.
A few years back, I started listening to some albums from the Testament Records catalog. Testament was founded in 1963 by writer Pete Welding, who edited Down Beat magazine. The label released a variety of roots music.....blues, gospel, country, and jazz until it was shut down in 1977. Hightone Records acquired the catalog in the mid 90's and re-released nearly every album on CD, adding a few new compilations along the way.
There are a lot of fantastic recordings on Testament from artists like Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines, Otis Spann, J.B. Hutto, Robert Nighthawk, and several excellent compilations. One that was intended for release before Testament closed up shop was Bottleneck Blues, which consists of 22 recordings, some of them field recordings made by Welding and blues scholar David Evans, who contributes the extensive liner notes for the CD.
The album showcases a variety of bottleneck guitar styles and features a few tracks from Big Joe Williams, Nighthawk, McDowell, Hutton, Shines, John Littlejohn, Napoleon Strickland (who played a one-string "jitterbug" mounted on a wall), and Honeyboy Edwards. Some other standouts include Blind Connie Williams, and Mott Willis, who played slide with a knife, adding a bit of Hawaiian style to his slide playing.
If you want to dig deeper into traditional blues, especially slide guitar blues, Bottleneck Blues can still be easily found on Amazon or Discogs and it well worth your time. I'm glad that Hightone made the decision to release it. In fact, any of the Testament Records catalog is a pleasure to listen to and they're relatively easy to track down.
This week, I've been busy trying to finish up my reviews for the May issue of Blues Bytes, which should be out sometime next week, so in the meantime let's take a look at an older album that you might have missed the first time around.....
I've been a fan of Otis Rush almost as long as I've been listening to the blues. He was born in Neshoba County, Mississippi, around 15 - 20 miles north of where I live, so that played a role, but it was his combination of guitar and vocals really grabbed me upon hearing his Hightone Records release, Right Place, Wrong Time back in the late 80's. Later on, I picked up his live release from Blind Pig, Tops, and not long after that, I found his tracks on the Chicago! The Blues! Today! anthology from Vanguard Records and the Chess collection of early 60's Rush and Albert King recordings, Door To Door.
I also managed to round up a two volume set from Paula Records that collected Rush's early sides with Cobra Records, recorded in 1956 - 1958. As allmusic.com puts it....."If Rush had never recorded another note, his legendary status would remain intact based solely on these recordings." These tracks were later reissued as The Classic Cobra Recordings 1956 - 1958 by Varese Sarabande in 2000 and included the A- and B- sides of all of Rush's Cobra singles issued, plus alternate takes, all released with slightly improved sound from the Paula release, which was released in 1991.
Over time, I managed to fill in most of Rush's recordings that followed, including his two studio releases in 1994 and 1998, his Cotillion/Atlantic, Delmark and Evidence releases, and the controversial Alligator Records release originally released in Europe in the late 70's (Alligator overdubbed keyboards from Lucky Peterson in hopes of giving it a full, more modern sound). There were also a few live releases during the 90's and early 00's, as well, including a pair of DVDs.
However, I had difficulty tracking down his two sides recorded for Duke Records in 1962. Duke signed him and just sat on him, only recording one single for release at the time....I've always assumed that the label signed him, basically to sit on him where he wouldn't be able to cut any new records to compete with their other artists.
The A-side of that single, "Homework," appeared on a Duke Records compilation in the 90's, but that was it, until I discovered another winning CD from the UK label Jasmine a couple of years back. I Won't Be Worried No More - Otis Rush's Chicago Blues 1956 - 1962 captures 27 tracks from Rush's Cobra, Chess, and Duke recordings, and it should be required listening for anyone who digs Chicago blues.
Rush really had buzzard luck as far as recording. His sides for Cobra generated several tracks that charted on the R&B charts, and he was backed by some of the future legends of the blues, such as Willie Dixon, Lafayette Leake, Odie Payne, Jody Williams, Wayne Bennett, Little Walter, Little Brother Montgomery, Fred Below, and Ike Turner.
However, this is where the bad luck kicked in.......Cobra Records, which released Rush, Buddy Guy, and Magic Sam's first recordings, folded in 1958 due to money woes. Rush's Cobra output included several tunes that are considered blues standards today, including "Double Trouble," "My Love Will Never Die," "Three Times A Fool," "Keep On Loving Me Baby," and "All Your Love (I Miss Loving)." That's about as good a run as you can ask for in the blues world. All of those tracks are on this collection, along with most of his other Cobra output.....there are a couple missing, but they're hardly noticeable.
Rush signed with Chess Records in 1960, where that label recorded six sides, but only released two singles, one of which was a great one - "So Many Roads, So Many Trains." This collection included all six of Rush's sides, the same ones collected on the Door To Door album from 1970, plus two additional tracks that had only appeared on an LP for Blue Light Records. The Duke single, "Homework," is also included along with it's B-side, "I Have To Laugh."
Rush remained active until 2004, when he suffered a stroke. I got to see him in 2009, when the state of Mississippi dedicated a blues marker for Rush in his hometown of Philadelphia, MS. He was extremely moved by the honor as he sat with friends and family for the unveiling. He passed away in 2018 on September 29. His guitar work has inspired so many later guitarists and many of his songs have been recorded by other blues and rock artists.
Any of Otis Rush's recordings are worth a listen, but I Won't Be Worried No More - Otis Rush's Chicago Blues 1956 - 1962 captures his first eight years as a recording artist in one sitting and those tracks serve as an excellent introduction to not just Chicago blues, but to one of the genre's masters.
