362: Most Things Haven’t Worked Out, by Junior Kimbrough

Junior Kimbrough (USA)
Most Things Haven’t Worked Out (1997)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I first heard of Junior Kimbrough through the Fat Possum Records’ sampler I wrote about in September, Not the Same Old Blues Crap. It actually turns out that the highlight of that compilation is also the highlight of the album it came from: Most Things Haven’t Worked Out by Junior Kimbrough.

It’s the very first track, ‘Lonesome Road’. The thing that immediately strikes me is that this track is modern American blues at its most African. It’s just Kimbrough and his electric guitar playing a lanky, plodding drone blues. It has a feeling of Lightnin’ Hopkins slowed way down, or Ali Farka Touré if he’d taken an extended stay in the Mississippi Delta. That drone feels so irresistible that I’m sure it could go on for hours, Kimbrough’s fingers picking out understated licks from the deepest wells of the blues all the while. His vocals offer an appropriately mournful cry that bends down to the notes that give the most emotional resonance, even if those notes would be considered horrendously flat by any classical music scholar. The way he moves his voice is with a melisma that could have come direct from the Sahara desert, echoing the muezzin’s call and uniting the dusty roads of Mississippi and Mali. It’s a real shiver-down-the-spine piece, and opening the album with it is Kimbrough’s way of setting the scene. This is what the neighbourhood looks like. With the rest of the album, he beckons you into his jukejoint.

Really. The album was recorded in Kimbrough’s own venue, and after the first track, the mood picks up. His guitar playing and moaning vocals retain their earthy hues that trace a path half-way across the Atlantic to the blues’ first home, but he is joined by drums, bass and lead guitar that push things in a rockier direction. It doesn’t lose its way: this is rock in the direct lineage of the old Mississippi jukejoint players anyway, sometimes literally – the drummer is his own son Kenny Malone, and the bass player is Gary Burnside, son of R.L. The result is a meeting across generations that reaches back even further, with simple punkish blues rock finding a comfortable place to play alongside tones that stretch back to the oldest ancestors, to the enjoyment of all.

Although he’d been playing the blues since he was a child and had recorded his music starting in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the 90s, and the last years of his life, that Junior Kimbrough began to get the level of attention he deserved. By the end he could count Iggy Pop and Keith Richards among his friends, and in the years since he passed (just a year after this record came out), at least two tribute albums have been released of Kimbrough’s songs, one by rock duo the Black Keys whose sound is deeply indebted to the great man. Kimbrough’s music isn’t quite like anyone else’s, in the Mississippi Delta or elsewhere, and to listen to it is to hear links back and forward through the whole of the history of the blues – and it’s all summed up in that one unfaltering drone.

358: The White Stripes, by The White Stripes

The White Stripes (USA)
The White Stripes (1999)
17 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I first became aware of the White Stripes – probably when I was a young teenager – I didn’t really pay any attention. I knew their biggest hit ‘Seven Nation Army’, but other than that I just thought they were another guitar-based rock group – a format that has never overly excited me in and of itself. There was the slightly interesting fact that they were a duo, but meh.

Then somehow I fell into an internet research hole and ended up finding the tracklist to the band’s debut album…and found out that it contained a cover of St James Infirmary (my favourite song at the time), as well as tracks by Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan and an extended quote from ‘John the Revelator’. Were the White Stripes a blues band and no-one told me?!

I found someone in school who could burn me off an incredibly low-quality copy of the CD (no streaming in those days kids!) and…yeah! It was blues all the way. Heavy, punk blues, but still definitely blues. While a bit of me was annoyed that I hadn’t given them a chance in the first place, but I was stoked to be able to ‘get’ what everyone else got a long time before me.

The group’s first album is made in the time-honoured punk tradition of having a million songs on one album, with only a handful of tracks breaching the three-minute mark. It means that the ideas come thick and fast; it’s musically hyperactive but the intensity of it all sweeps you up like a whirlwind – it never feels as if the album’s frenetic pace is outstripping the White Stripes’ abilities to create great things. Jack White’s vocals and guitars are simply superb, crazy wild, introspective, simple and brash, it’s got everything while all being indisputably bluesy.

And that’s a quick thing: it’s become basically a standard music joke that Meg White can’t drum, but I think that’s clearly bollocks, probably misogyny-fuelled bollocks at that. Her drumming as part of the White Stripes, and especially on this debut album, is very simply played, yes, but only because it needs to be. If the album was full of flashy or deeply intricate drumwork, it would have sounded out-of-place, not to mention that it would have completely overshadowed the whole meaning of the sound the two were creating. And what she does play – simple or otherwise – is perfectly in-keeping with that sound, and she executes it exactly right. Besides, Jack White also plays as simply as each song needs, and he’s the one hailed as a genius. Weird that.

It’s one of the reasons it all works so well. The fact they’re a duo is actually incredible. Aside from one or two overdubs on the whole album, it’s obvious to the ear that only two people are creating the music, but the sheer noise of it, and the emotional force with which it hits makes it resonate as if it were a band of many more.

So yes, I ended up loving the White Stripes, especially their first couple of albums. The bluesiness of their music became less obvious after that, although it was obviously never far away from Jack White’s antique record player, as evidenced by his subsequent musical adventures proved. The moral of the story is: teenagers can be hella snooty, never trust their opinions. Or maybe, trust every teenager’s opinions except mine, because the White Stripes are great.

353: Amerika, by Dimitris Mystakidis

Dimitris Mystakidis (Greece)
Amerika (2017)
14 tracks, 57 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Rembetiko music is often referred to as the blues of urban Greece for its lyrical focus on the stories of lives hard lived as well as that general vibe that it gives off. Stylistically, though, there’s no real connection to blues, or even any particular resemblance there either – it has much more in common with Turkish and Arabic music, to which it can trace many of its melodic scales, and Balkan music that comes through occasionally in the rhythms. Above all, it’s just really obviously Greek music.

But actually, rembetiko does have its links to the blues, if you know where to look. Dimitris Myskatidis is one of the foremost guitarists in rembetiko music, in both traditional and innovative styles, and is also a historian for the style, exploring the various pasts and paths of the style and incorporating that into his music. For Amerika, he looked (unsurprisingly) to the United States and to the fingerpicking guitar style of tsibiti that developed among Greek musicians there in the early 20th century.

The unique way that the guitar is used in the tsibiti style was directly influenced by the way delta blues players created their own tapestries of sound, even down to the way they tuned their strings in ways unheard of in Greece. Add on top of that lyrics that told an immigrant’s tale of oppression, poverty and longing, tsibiti rembetiko is a style that only could have come from the US.

Amerika is a set of 14 such tsibiti songs from that style’s heyday. He plays it all solo, just his expert guitar and deep, silky voice – although with a few guest singers on a couple of the songs – and it’s incredibly evocative. And amazing how clear the blues is in there, too. The melodies and rhythms and unexpected chord changes are all totally Greek, and then you get a blue note thrown in there, or an errant bending or pulling-off of a string and it all falls into place, and you’re struck just by how bluesy the whole thing is. It’s quite uncanny how little and yet how much that influence is there. As if to ram things home at the beginning of the album, Mystakidis makes the connections even more obvious by starting ‘To West’, the second track on the album, playing deep delta blues riffs that seamlessly transform into the Hellenic lament.

Dimitris Mystakidis’ music is a great example of applied musical history. The music of the early Greek immigrants to the US is important to understanding their experiences and an important area of American history, but it is so little known. With Amerika, Mystakidis not only lets the voices of these people be heard once again, but explores the music’s stylistic origins and originality with the most subtle but startling ways. By looking at the tsibiti style, Mystakidis makes sure that this obscure shared branch of Greek folk music and African American blues gets some of the recognition it deserves.

339: King Hokum, by C.W. Stoneking

C.W. Stoneking (Australia)
King Hokum (2006)
11 tracks, 37 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Between covering C.W. Stoneking’s Jungle Blues on this blog and writing a review of his latest, Gon’ Boogaloo, for fRoots Magazine, with today’s entry I’ll have ended up writing about all his (official) releases in one form or another. I even wrote an article for fRoots that now serves as the biography on Stoneking’s own website, which I’m particularly proud of. All of which is to say, I obviously can’t stop going on about him. For good reason, too.

Seriously, I would struggle to think of an artist with a more perfect discography. Across those three albums, there is barely a song that is anything short of fantastic. He doesn’t stay in the same place, either. Today’s album, King Hokum, was released first and has a very pre-war country blues feel; Jungle Blues is more of a vaudevillian set with a few calypsos thrown in, and then Gon’ Boogaloo changes it up even more, switching the acoustic guitar and banjo for an entirely electric guitar-based album of gospel, jump blues and rock’n’roll of the rootsiest flavours.

Like I said in my entry on Jungle Blues back in June, I feel like I could write at length about every song that man’s made, and King Hokum is no exception. Well, I’m not going to write at length. But here’s a run-down of each, because god knows I have other work to be doing today and I will not miss this opportunity to procrastinate in the name of productivity:

C.W. Stoneking’s King Hokum Track-by-Track Commentary by Your Host, Jim Hickson

• ‘Way Out In the World’ – A great opener with a chunky-sounding National Resonator guitar plonking out a moan that feels like it could be 100 years old. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Don't Go Dancin' Down the Darktown Strutter's Ball’ – One of my favourites from Stoneking. Brilliantly simple tenor banjo work and some of the most beautifully subtle blue note bends in his old man’s voice make my neck-hair stand on end. Slightly menacing but sadly imparted words of advice. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘She's a Bread Baker’ – An upbeat one! The first of the album, and a typical jelly-roll blues with all of the word play, metaphor and witty couplets that you’d expect. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Dodo Blues’ – Probably the most well-known song on the album. Actually quite a touching song of heartbreak, wrapped up in a sketch about a ‘singing’ dodo at a market – the last one in existence. In that context, the lyrics are even given an additional layer of poignancy, ridiculous as it sounds. Fair play. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘On a Christmas Day’ – A guest appearance from Kirsty Fraser, who joins Stoneking for some over-the-top festive horniness. Filled with groansome innuendo (in the best way) and brazen smut. ‘I’m so glad, I’ve waited ‘round the clock / I’ve been wantin’ all year for a suck of that – yeah!’ indeed. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Charley Bostock’s Blues’ – A really moving piece. Based on the true story of the death of Stoneking’s old bandmate. Really emotional, and really well-written. Watching him perform it live is always a special, heartfelt moment. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Goin' the Country’ – In which the artist embodies two separate personalities in one song. A great and light-hearted take on the romantic rail-hopping story archetype. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Bad Luck Everywhere You Go’ – A real chugging-along blues that sounds like it’s been curdled at the bottom of a swamp and slowly risen to the surface like a sluggish bubble. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Rich Man's Blues’ – A Tory’s anthem. Tongue firmly in cheek. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘You Took My Thing and Put It In Your Place’ – Fraser’s back for another round of innuendo blatant enough to make a herpetologist blush. Recommended.
  
  
• ‘Handyman Blues’ – Another great song, and with a wonderful performance from the horn section too. More sly innuendo, but in a darker musical tone this time. Stoneking’s delivery of the word ‘handyman’ in the chorus is spine-tingling and even more so when joined by the horns in harmony when it’s performed live. That little innovation was added after the album recording though. Still, it’s recommended all the same.

Well there you have it. 11 brilliant tracks from a brilliant musician. I think that’s probably enough procrastination for me to be getting on with for now. And for you to be getting on with: listen to everything of C.W. Stoneking’s work you can get your hands on. And whenever he gets around to releasing his next album, you can be sure that I’ll be writing about it in some form, somewhere or other. I can’t wait!

335: Harpin’ on a Riff: The Best of Charlie Musselwhite, by Charlie Musselwhite

Charlie Musselwhite (USA)
Harpin’ on a Riff: The Best of Charlie Musselwhite (1999)
20 tracks, 78 minutes
Spotify playlist

Being well into blues music during my teens, I naturally listened to a lot of harmonica players, whether they were solo performers or sidemen. Little Walter, James Cotton, Sonny Terry, Junior Wells, the Sonny Boys Williamson…but it was Charlie Musselwhite that really captured my imagination and led me to pick up the harmonica for myself. Specifically, it was this album, a cheap’n’cheerful compilation that shows off some of his wildest cuts from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In presenting such a wide time-frame of Musselwhite’s music, it also shows how wide his output has been too. There are the straight-ahead blues pieces (‘Finger Lickin’ Good’, ‘Hear Me Talkin’’, ‘Taylor’s, Arkansas’, the acoustic ‘Fast Life Blues’), swaggering balls-out blues-rocks (‘It’s Getting Warm in Here’, ‘Crazy for My Baby’, ‘Harpin’ on a Riff’) and laid-back, cheesily jazzy soul (‘Revelation’, ‘Yesterdays’); there are even hints at his interest in Latin music with the track ‘Azul Para Amparo’, which he eventually explored further with a collaboration with Buena Vista Social Club’s tres player Eliades Ochoa.

While it is interesting to hear the directions that Musselwhite takes the harmonica and how he adapts his playing to the different scenarios, I actually do prefer it when he’s sticking with the most on-message blues styles. It’s in these that he gets to stretch his legs and really show off the acrobatics that he’s capable of. His playing feels so much more natural and free on those tracks – ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’ is a great example because it’s just a simple repeating 12-bar groove that he spends four minutes improvising over and holds the ear rapt with the playfulness and lyricism of his phrases.

This compilation may not be as cohesive as his albums proper – especially the two that he released on Real World Records, Sanctuary (2004) and Delta Hardware (2006), which I love – and maybe that’s why I feel that some of the pieces here are a little weak in comparison to others. Nevertheless, I include this album primarily because it shows just how well Musselwhite has expanded the range of the harmonica into previously inaccessible territories while always remaining a figurehead for the blues style of which he is a master. And, y’know, for helping me to develop a handy, pocket-sized skill that I can annoy people at parties with, too.


Tenuously-related footnote

I mention this here because I wouldn’t have an appropriate place to do so otherwise. I basically just wanted an excuse to post this video and rave about it. It’s a clip from the film Blues Brothers 2000. As a whole, that is one dire piece of cinema from start to finish, a rubbish sequel to a classic film that didn’t seem to understand where any of the original’s charm came from and instead ramping everything up to stupidly bombastic degrees that flop harder than a beer-bellied Brexiter when presented with a swimming pool at a Spanish all-inclusive resort. All except for this one five-minute scene, where that bombast comes up trumps. The set-up is that the Blues Brothers Band is taking part in a battle of the bands, and their unknown competitors, the Louisiana Gator Boys, go first. This is what happens:

The first time I watched that, my jaw was on the floor. In fact, every time I watch that, my reaction is exactly the same. That is quite probably the best blues supergroup ever to have existed. Every few bars, the camera cuts to another blues legend doing their bit. So much so that every time I watch it, I’m amazed that I forgot that so-and-so was in it. I mean, just check that line-up: B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, Charlie Musselwhite (see, there was a connection!), Koko Taylor, Jack DeJohnette, Stevie Winwood, Billy Preston. Dr John popping in right at the end! Jimmy Vaughan and Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter just chilling out in the groove; Isaac Hayes as a backing vocalist! The face-melting four-way horn solo by Grover Washington Jr, Clarence Clemons, Joshua Redmond and Jon Faddis, which ends in them all improvising wildly over the top of each other in a noise from heaven itself. My word. That audience is real, by the way. A few hundred people actually got to witness that crazy performance live. If I were there, I don’t think I’d ever be able to talk about anything else.

And that’s literally it, that’s all I wanted to show you. Bloody good though innit? Now you don’t have to see the rest of the film, you’re welcome.

330: The Spotlight Kid, by Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart (USA)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We’ve skipped ahead a bit since the last time we met Captain Beefheart. Then, we listened to Strictly Personal from 1968; although Spotlight Kid came out less than four years later, much had happened. Specifically, three more albums including the eternal masterpiece of Trout Mask Replica, an album that was so ahead of its time that we’re still trying to catch up to it*, and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, a more refined album but with a darker edge. So when The Spotlight Kid came around, I’m not surprised that it was met with confusion. Even those that performed on the album are quoted as being disgusted by its ‘boring’ and ‘simple’ content.

It makes sense. This isn’t the manic but tightly-reined chaos of Trout Mask Replica, and I’d even say it’s less starkly intelligent than Lick My Decals Off, Baby. But this is no bad album by any stretch: for me, this one is all about the feel. And that feel is boogie. Right from the beginning, too, with the track ‘I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby’ – no mistaking the intent there, as a lexical or musical statement. It starts with choppy, funky and effected guitar riffs layered on top of each other before the deep, rumbling growl of the Captain comes gurgling from some primordial depths with his barely logical lyrics, only occasionally reaching up into the octave to offer a pained blues moan, while the evermoving boogie carries on underneath it all.

It carries on like that. It is much more simple than the previous few years’ material, it’s a little straighter on the rhythms here, a little more predictable in the melody there, but nothing about it can leave you in any doubt that this is the one and only Captain. It’s stamped in every sound and every word; it just shows that accessible Beefheart is still as innovative and still as…well, Beefheart.

Near the end of the album there is a basically perfect run of three tracks that keep the boogie rolling all the way through. It starts with the train song ‘Click Clack’, where the introduction doesn’t give you a clue as to where the beat is actually going to go when it finally comes in; then ‘Grow Fins’, another intensely blues-riddled tale, one of exploring the depths to get away from the banalities of solid ground, shored up by some fantastic slide guitar and blues harp interplay; and finishing up with – who’da thunk it? – a Captain Beefheart Christmas song, ‘There Ain’t No Santa Claus on the Evenin’ Stage’, replete with jingle bells and with a typically perverse spin on things, sung right at the bottom of Beefheart’s vocal register. Listen to those three and you’ll know you’ve been booglarized.

In some ways, ‘Grow Fins’ sums up Beefheart for me. Not that it is his most representative track or anything, but that the blues harp that he blows on that one is just so, so good. The Captain’s skills at the harmonica are such that if he wasn’t known for his thoroughly considered batshit compositions and poetry, if his career had taken the slightest kink along the way, I have no doubt that he would still have been known as one of the greatest blues harpists ever. And when you consider that even disregarding his music, he’s known as a legitimate fine artist and that, by all accounts, if he’d have gotten his way as a teenager, probably would have gone on to be a great sculptor instead, it becomes obvious that Captain Beefheart was an artist to the core, and would shine from the pack no matter what media he chose, be it paint or marble or words or blues harp. All that mattered was that it was him. And whatever you think about his work, you can’t deny that, if nothing else, it was him.


* To shamelessly steal words from How to Speak Hip, Captain Beefheart was such an out genius that the thing he was a genius at hadn’t been invented yet.

324: The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection, by Robert Johnson

Robert Johnson (USA)
The Complete Recordings: The Centennial Collection (2011)
42 tracks, 111 minutes (2 CDs)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve named this specific album because it seems to be the ‘canonical’ one, but the name of the compilation itself doesn’t really matter – by now there are plenty of releases that give you exactly the same 42 tracks, maybe just in different orders. That’s because 42 is all there is. For us living in the now-times, Robert Johnson’s work consists of just 29 songs and 13 alternative takes – and one of those was only found in 1998. And yet there is a good argument to be made that he is the most influential single musician ever to have lived.

Robert Johnson is known as the ‘King of the Delta Blues.’ His sound is, by now, almost archetypical of the style, such is his impact. The well-known story is that when he first started out, playing his guitar in the Mississippi jukejoints, he was notoriously terrible, to the degree of being chased out of the door. He went away for a while and came back with a prodigious talent that seemed for many to be unaccountable. People say he ‘sold his soul to the devil.’ More likely he just went away and actually learnt how to play. Either way, he’d developed his own style and a way of playing that was exciting and engaging. In his own time – in the 1930s before he was, in all probability, murdered by a jealous husband at age 27 – Johnson was a pop star. We know him for his delta blues, which is where he excelled and what he recorded, but he played all sorts of styles and popular songs of the day, even including show tunes, touring all over the US and even Canada. Only months after his death, he would have performed at Carnegie Hall.

But those short years have turned into almost a century of music. The stuff we listen to today simply would not be the same if it weren’t for Robert Johnson. His playing and singing have struck musicians from every generation, from his contemporaries and protégés to those just hitting the scene now. Even a list of artists who have directly covered Johnson’s songs is a roll-call of genre defining musicians: Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Dylan, Cassandra Wilson, Gil Scott-Heron, the White Stripes, Red Hot Chili Peppers…and that doesn’t include all of those that have cited him as an important influence on their work.

With all of the talk and acknowledgement over how influential and important Robert Johnson’s music has been within blues, rock and everything that followed, it’s easy to lose sight of just how good he really was. I know I forgot sometimes, taking his legendary status for granted until whim takes me and my ears are astounded all over again So take a listen, and try to bring fresh ears if they aren’t already. You can take your pick of the tracks: ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, ‘When You Got a Good Friend’, ‘They’re Red Hot’, ‘If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day’, ‘Last Fair Deal Gone Down’, ‘Come On in My Kitchen’…or literally any other of his songs – ‘Me and the Devil’ how could I forget!; ‘Love in Vain’ – and be taken back to the Mississippi Delta of the mid-30s. His high-pitched voice is spellbinding and his guitar has that deliciously (and deceptively) simple sound. There is something incredibly special about these recordings that is difficult to explain. It’s haunting, which makes sense for the most low-down and heartfelt blueses, but even when he’s doing his dancier, wittier party pieces, there’s still that strange essence that floats through the speakers, carried on the graininess of the recording and across the ages. The superstitious would say that’s the devil, of course, and indeed some of it may just be the baggage of mystique that Johnson’s music carries with it. But I think part of it must also be the brain’s innate sense of a unique, overwhelming talent.

Robert Johnson’s life and music are – occasionally quite literally – legendary. Even this collection, ironically named The Complete Recordings can’t tell the whole story of Johnson’s recording career. He actually made over 50 recording, but all the rest have been lost to history. I don’t even think we know what those recordings were. They might have been different songs entirely. We will probably never know, although considering the last ‘lost recording’ was found in 1998, maybe there’s still a little hope to be had. But that slight unknowableness, of his life, of his skills, of his music and of just how all helps to make Johnson that bit more, that bit mythical and that bit magical. This is special stuff.

310: 12 bit Blues, by Kid Koala

Kid Koala (Canada)
12 bit Blues (2012)
12 tracks, 41 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The first time I’d heard of Kid Koala was through his remix of Yusef Lateef’s ‘Bamboo Flute Blues’ (you can hear that on YouTube here). It wasn’t your usual remix of changing bits of the song around, repeating bits and adding a new beat and synth-line to it. He’d turned the piece into an almost musique concrete. The original piece was sparse, led by the eponymous instrument with just small and subtle interjections by the double bass, piano and drums; Kid Koala’s remix kept it that way. The sounds used in the remix only come from the original track. They’re manipulated with some light delay or tremolo now and then, and he introduces his own personality to the piece by using the instruments as samples for his turntablism, but the mood and the feeling of the piece remained exactly the same as the 1965 recording. Not many DJs would approach that piece in that way. I knew there was something different about Kid Koala.

Then he released a blues album and I knew it was going to be special. 12 bit Blues is like that Yusef Lateef remix but on a much bigger scale: the sounds you hear on this album are from a shop's worth of vintage blues records, all chopped and changed and looped and stretched and morphed in various ways to create an album that is as much blues as it is instrumental hip-hop.

The whole album is made in the spirit of getting back to essentials. Just as he looks to early blues as a way to look back to the roots of American music, his music making process also goes back to the roots of modern hip-hop production. No computer software was used in the creation of the album; instead, every one of the hundreds of samples were painstakingly loaded up into an E-mu SP-1200 sampler so beloved of early hip-hop producers (and which works in 12 bit, hence the album’s title), and played back those samples live, building up multitrack layers of music. After these tracks were solidified, he added his own turntable scratches and cuts onto the top for extra flair. In this process, Kid Koala managed to find the middle-ground between the ultra-analogue world of the blues and heavily computerised world of contemporary hip-hop by ‘playing’ the samples as if they were a classic instrument of the blues.

The range of sounds and samples on display is astounding, and shows the passion and knowledge that Kid Koala holds for the blues. The album starts with a growling monologue from Son House and goes on to encompass so many different blues frames of reference: from pre-war country blues to Chicago boogie, from jump-blues to piano blues to early soul to full-on, balls-out, horn-led R’n’B. Consequently, the album’s mood is similarly broad, with some tracks being a riot of sound, and some more contemplative, but all made with care, joy and a tricksy spirit. With 12 bit Blues, Kid Koala succeeds in something that generations of people who tried to combine blues and hip-hop failed at – he managed to combine not just the music in an authentic and pleasing way, but also the personalities of the scenes in a way that would make total sense to both a hip-hop fan and a blues nut. It’s really impressive from a technical and emotional standpoint, and totally immersive from a musical one.

300: First Recordings, by R.L. Burnside

R.L. Burnside (USA)
First Recordings (2003)
14 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

R.L. Burnside was one of the big names in the 90s/00s blues revival and punk blues scenes. He was the real deal. He grew up in rural Mississippi, learning all of the roots blues styles along the way –fife and drum, gospel and country blues, which he learnt from Mississippi Fred McDowell; spent some time in Chicago playing with Muddy Waters before returning to the Delta as an itinerant worker and bluesman on the side. He even did a spell in Parchman Farm for killing a guy with a bullet to the face. He was one bad motherfucker – and his story also happened to tick all the boxes for what a ‘real’ delta blues musician should be. On top of that, he’d also developed a penchant for loud, noisy blues that 90s punks, desperate for an ‘authentic’ sound, latched on to. He became the poster-bluesman for Fat Possum Records and worked with everyone from the Jon Spenser Blues Explosion to the Beastie Boys.

That material is still super interesting, if occasionally dated at the points where his music gets the hip-hop remix treatment, but it’s his First Recordings that I always come back to. As you’d expect, these 14 tracks were the first time Burnside had had his work put on tape, by George Mitchell in 1968. By that time Burnside’s playing technique and compositions were recognisably those he continued with in his later work, but here he’s in all-acoustic country blues mode. Recorded in an easy setting – at home in his living room and with a few crates of beer and some whiskey – gone is the bombast and in-yer-face masculinity. What remains is Burnside’s subtle and soulful vocals and nimble guitarwork.

I love the sound of that acoustic guitar here. When he gets a groove going, it’s as solid and unstoppable as a freight train, but when he picks out melodies, they’re incredibly evocative. To my ears, it sounds as if his guitar is really loosely strung, allowing him to get some mad bends going on as well as giving those low bass-notes a chunky, buzzy percussive element when they’re struck, almost acting like an exclamation point at the end of each riff. The first track, ‘Just Like a Bird Without a Feather’, is a great way to kick off the album and sets up the rest perfectly: heartfelt vocals that take in the whole of his range and some simple but elegant guitar that bends around so much you’d almost think he was using a slide.

First Recordings is a very different album from those that brought him fame in his late-60s and 70s. Those are very fun for a rollicking, headbanging time, but in many ways I think these raw, down-home recordings show off his musical talent even more. But no need to pit them against each other – both of his styles work in complement to each other, so let’s just enjoy more good music!

295: The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, by Ray Charles

Ray Charles (USA)
The Rough Guide to Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years (2017)
23 tracks, 69 minutes
Spotify playlist

During his time signed for Atlantic Records – from 1952 to 1959 – Ray Charles blossomed from a promising jazz and blues singer and pianist to a hero of R’n’B and arguably the inventor of soul music.

As with so many releases in the Rough Guide series (as we’ve covered here and here), this is just a stellar collection. Full marks to compiler (and top-tier music journalist) Nigel Williamson for putting it together, but one has to imagine that this was one of the easier Rough Guides to put together – by focussing on Charles’ eight-year stint at Atlantic, there’s not too much you can do to go astray. It was an incredibly exciting and fertile time for Charles’ music.

In fact, considering his long career, this compilation still manages to feature almost all of his biggest hits. The only two that would be missing would be ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and ‘Unchain My Heart’, which were both made slightly later, for different labels. That this is a Rough Guide and not a ‘best of’ actually works in its favour, featuring tracks that would not usually get a look in otherwise. Although it only looks at a relatively short period, we get to hear how Charles explored his musical influences, maturing them into his own style and ultimately starting whole movements. We hear him experimenting with his sound, too: in small-band mode with tracks such as ‘What’d I Say?’, ‘Mess Around’ and ‘I Got a Woman’; with a big band for ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ and ‘Let the Good Times Roll’; and eventually playing with a full-scale string and wind orchestra like ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’. Nor are these ensembles used ‘just because’; instead, they serve only to heighten whatever emotion is being put across, from the rocking and rollicking piano-based small band stuff to the sentimental orchestral repertoire.

This compilation is so enjoyable and encompasses such a range of styles and approaches despite covering only a few years of Charles’ career that it is hard to argue the assertation that these ‘Atlantic Years’ were also Charles’ musical golden years. If you’re looking for an all-purpose, one-disc set of Ray Charles, you could do a lot worse than this album.

275: Careless Love, by Madeleine Peyroux

Madeleine Peyroux (USA)
Careless Love (2004)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Listening to Madeleine Peyroux creates a particularly calm sense of enjoyment. The songs on this album don’t get you up and dancing or get you pondering politics or your own mortality. The songs themselves are full of feeling, but don’t manipulate your emotions to uncomfortable extremes. This is the music of a particularly elegant, lowly lit but still friendly and welcoming cocktail bar – perfect for lounging with a slight buzz and letting your mind drift away through the music like lazy coils of smoke.

Careless Love is a set of covers of old jazz songs, country music and American folk (plus one original song), all conducted in a mellow, jazzy manner that suits Peyroux’s equally mellow voice. In fact, the pervading thought that I have when I listen to this album is that she sounds almost exactly like Billie Holiday. Her tones are warm and gentle, and her phrasing has enough of a swing to it to get your foot tapping without raising your heartbeat above a pleasant resting rate. The resemblance is at times uncanny, but aside from one or two Holiday favourites, the songs here usually help the album steer clear of feeling like a tribute act.

And the song choices are inspired. They bring a new slant onto classic songs but retain enough of the originals’ edge as to stop it descending into ‘a bunch of songs covered in a wacky, unusual way’ territory. Peyroux’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go’ are both given different atmospheres but allow the lyrics their original weight, whereas ‘Lonesome Road’, ‘Careless Love’, and ‘No More’ capture the charm of the originals while updating their sound. Most impressive for me is ‘Weary Blues’, a cover of Hank Williams’ ‘Weary Blues From Waitin’’. The song is a heartbroken call into the empty night from an abandoned lover. Peyroux’s rendition is a slow and mournful blues, and the pain in her voice gives you the idea that this is a song of bereavement. So you go to listen to Williams’ 1951 original to hear how it sounded in its fully countrified manner…and in comparison, it sounds as if he got the complete wrong end of the stick – and he wrote it! The original seems bizarrely frivolous, as if he’s having too much fun for the upsetting lyrics. It’s fairly quick, it’s in a major key…it even has yodelling in it! Somehow, it feels that Peyroux did the song much more justice on this album than Williams did in the first place.

As much as I dislike the term, Careless Love is a great ‘easy listening’ album. It’s one that you can stick on and enjoy in the simplest way – these are sweet sounds that can balm the ears. And if you want to extend your listening experience, her previous album, 1996’s Dreamland, is also a very nice recommendation: listen out especially for similarly chilled versions of ‘Walking After Midnight’ and ‘La Vie En Rose’.

264: Released, by Nina Simone

Nina Simone (USA)
Released (1996)
21 tracks, 70 minutes
Spotify playlist

It’s hard to really call this compilation a ‘greatest hits’ disc, if even just for the fact that it doesn’t contain some of her greatest hits. Its lack of ‘Feeling Good’, ‘Sinnerman’, ‘Mississippi Goddam’, ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’, and the original studio versions of ‘I Ain’t Got No (I Got Life)’ and ‘I Loves You Porgy’ basically disqualify it from such a label. Which just goes to show the profundity of Nina Simone’s performing and composing genius that this collection of not-even-greatest hits is so deeply soul-touching on many different levels.

Released is quite a focussed compilation, with 16 out of the 21 tracks being taken from three album between 1967 and 1968, Nina Simone Sings the Blues, Silk & Soul and ’Nuff Said!, and it works as proof to just how fruitful that period of Simone’s career was. As well as passing through a number of different styles in these tracks – primarily blues, soul and showtunes with elements of gospel, jazz and folk too – they also show the width of her emotional range. Just in the space of these 21 tracks in this collection, Simone comes across as feisty, funny, deadly angry, bitter, soft, seductive, bereft, joyful, pensive and heavily political. She takes you across the spectrum of human emotion and every one of them is delivered in an entirely sincere manner.

For me, there’s none that captures this more than the song ‘Why (The King of Love is Dead)’. It’s a lament for Martin Luther King, powerful, despairing and agonised yet celebratory of this great man. This recording was made live, during a performance at Westbury Music Fair on 7th April 1968 – just three days after Dr King was assassinated. The song was written by bassist Gene Taylor and then taught to the band in just one day, and it’s one of the rawest, saddest songs I know. Truly heart-wrenching. It’s such a simple piece too, a slow, gospel blues with all the instruments just quietly doing their thing, no flashiness, but it is so intense. Whenever I hear it, I have to stop – this is not background music – and it makes me teary every single time without fail. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be there on the day. I am sure that the audience must have been in floods. Although Simone would play it at future shows, the group never gave it a studio recording, because it simply didn’t need one. This performance was its perfect rendition, and must surely be close to a perfect song.

⁂

Can we also just take a small moment to acknowledge what a mean piano player Nina Simone was?! People focus on her voice, and rightfully so, but what she created with her fingers contained as much mastery as her vocal cords. She was classically-trained but was just as comfortable playing dirty, barrelhouse blues or righteous gospel too, and each in such an effortless manner to make it seem completely natural, as if the music was radiating from her, and manifesting in the vibration of the piano strings. The one that stood out particularly in this listen through was ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, her rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s holy blues. It’s just Simone on voice and piano, and those keys are so forthright. This is the blues, and she ain’t here to mess around. Her fingers introduce the subtlest little ornaments to the piano’s accompaniment and her classical background seems to inform the shape it takes, but at the same time it is 100% blues. Listening to this particular recording, I am sure it must have been a huge influence on Diamanda Galás; her playing has exactly the same darkly beautiful but no-nonsense feel.

Even though Released is a compilation album, I listen to it like I read a favourite book: maybe I’ll dip in occasionally, picking out the best bits and feeling their various feels, but listening to it all the way through provides its own joy, and I find something else to fall in love with on every go around. What an amazing musician Nina Simone was. And this isn’t even her greatest hits…

246: Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap, by Various Artists

Various Artists (USA)
Fat Possum: Not the Same Old Blues Crap (1997)
11 tracks, 44 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We heard from Fat Possum Records right at the beginning of this big mad project, back in the third week with Takes One to Know One by Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early. The awesome power of that record was not a one-off – today’s album gives the proof.

This compilation is a label sampler – usually quite dull affairs that come free with magazines and give you a pleasant tour around the catalogue whatever record label coughed up the price. Not this one. Not the Same Old Blues Crap, aside from just being a simply glorious title, says it all: it’s three-quarters-of-an-hour of messy, noisy and impolite blues.

The front cover advertises it as ‘cheap price sampler,’ but I reckon they’re playing a delicious irony with that one. Samplers are usually inexpensive and a bit rubbish, but this one sounds cheap – it’s lo-fi to the extreme, the instruments are old, the performances are imprecise and the amplifiers sound like they’re just about to give up, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to sound. This ain’t no haute couture, it’s dirty, covered in grit and tastes like smoke and moonshine.

Not the Same Old Blues Crap is still a representative distillation of Fat Possum’s early output, when they shone a spotlight on the new music of the old musicians of Mississippi. So Williams and Early are there, and the label’s most successful names of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough and T-Model Ford and others such as the Jelly Roll Kings and Hasil Adkins, who all play that modern-day delta sound that leans very close to punk through some sort of convergent evolution. Also featured are a couple of younger-generation punk-blues bands such as 20 Miles and The Neckbones to complete the circle; they fit in perfectly.

Nowadays, Fat Possum’s output is less exciting (to me at least), focussing on more standard rock and indie stuff. But their early releases, as so brilliantly illustrated here, really exploded notions of what down-home Mississippi blues was and could be – and that the old bluesmen were still, and always had been) edgier than any blues-cock-rocker could hope to be. This wasn’t the same old blues crap, and it’s still an exciting, powerful listen today.

238: Strictly Personal, by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (USA)
Strictly Personal (1968)
8 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify

My dad is as mad about Captain Beefheart as the Captain was just mad. He always wanted me to get into the Captain’s music, but I just couldn’t. It was just weird, abstract and unpleasant noise, and no number of times being played Trout Mask Replica could persuade me otherwise. It’s rubbish! I was half-convinced he was doing it just to annoy me. You know, standard dad thing.

Then, one time – I remember it so clearly, it was when we were on our way back from Crewe station, having just picked someone up I think – the music came on, and it was a ‘What is this?!’ moment. Not only did I like it, it blew me away, I loved it straight away. I asked what it was, and I thought my dad was having me on when he said it was Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. But there it was – the album Strictly Personal. And I ‘got’ it in a way I never had before. It all made sense now, for whatever reason, and I got what all the fuss was about. The music had all of those esoteric, angular and out-there aspects of its clashing melodies, unkempt harmonies and rhythms that made no sense on any natural level, but it all worked in complementing the music rather than breaking it apart.

For me, this album worked as sort of like a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for Beefheart’s music. Because I discovered that it wasn’t just Strictly Personal that I understood, but his other albums too. I listened to his first, Safe as Milk, and the strangely controversial Lick My Decals Off, Baby, and loved them just as much. And then, after a while and with some trepidation, I tried Trout Mask Replica…and it worked! While I could still hear all of the same madness that had always put me off when I was younger, it somehow took on a different shape, like one’s tastebuds get used to complex, bitter flavours with age and perseverance, and you learn to appreciate it for exactly that complexity. It was as if Strictly Personal was the key that was necessary to understand the cipher that was Captain Beefheart.

I’ve often wondered what about this album finally struck me in the correct way that Beefheart’s other work hadn’t. I’m still not really sure. The fact that I was at the height of my blues obsession when it hit me probably helped, I think. The first line of the whole album is ‘I got a letter this morning, what do you reckon it read?,’ which would make any bluesnut prick up their ears: it’s the same line that Son House’s ‘Death Letter’ and Skip James’ ‘Special Rider’ both revolve around. But after that one line, it dissolves into vintage Beefheart – lyrics that verge on nonsense (picked mostly for their aesthetic value than any particular underlying meaning), an electrifying blues harp boogie over the top of jaunty rhythms and confusing musical tinkerings. It eases you in. In the same vein later in the album is the track ‘Gimme Dat Harp, Boy’, which, despite its off-kilter angle, should be a blues rock staple. Maybe it was also the production of the album, a self-consciously psychedelic job that was hated by Beefheart and many of his fans, but undoubtedly made the soundworld a little more familiar to those already used to hippy freak-out music. Maybe it was just a maturing of my ears and this album just happened to strike them first. I don’t know.

The music of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band is still divisive after all this time. I definitely understand people who don’t understand it. But if you are genuinely interested in learning the joy held within, I beg you not to start on Trout Mask Replica. I know many do, and get scared off by it. That album is rightly held as a masterpiece but it is difficult, often unpleasant listening. You don’t start drinking by going straight to obscure scotch. Teach your ears to love Beefheart first, and the rest will come. Strictly Personal might just be the perfect place for you to start. It was for me.

226: Dog House Music, by Seasick Steve

Seasick Steve (USA)
Dog House Music (2006)
13 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was a teenager, blues was my thing. I listened widely, but blues was always my go-to. I loved the electric stuff like Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, and the older acoustic stuff of Robert Johnson, Lonnie Johnson and Blind Willie McTell. I was even into the early periods of blues revival – like Led Zeppelin’s early stuff that we heard yesterday. But anything after that left me cold. When I thought of blues from the 70s onwards, it was all blues-rock guitar wankers such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Bonamassa, Johnny Winter and the like. Extremely technically proficient all, but (for me) completely anodyne. It was really disappointing to me that all of the ‘good’ blues was gone, put out of my reach by time. And then, at the Big Chill Festival in 2006, that changed with Seasick Steve.

On a stage just about big enough for a chair, a couple of guitars, an amp and a stomp box, a man with a big beard, denim dungarees, tattoos and a farmer’s tan came on stage and played the blues. Not in a soulless, boring way like the blues-rock dudes, and not even copying the old masters. He had his own style, heavily influenced by players such as Mississippi Fred McDowell and Son House, but also with small elements from country music and even shades of punk. Everything was rough around the edges, from his homemade stomp box to his tattered trucker’s cap and especially his electric guitar, a cheap Japanese original in red, decorated in Sharpie and glitterpen and – crucially – with only three strings, tuned wrongly and in the wrong place and played with a slide. His songs and stories all told of a life hopping freight trains and living the hobo life across the great American continent. After a while, he abandoned the tiny stage altogether, taking his acoustic guitar and jumping into the modestly-sized crowd (I took that picture!). I was hooked.

It’s been a long time since I last listened to this album, and it’s still as great as it always was. Just like that first time I saw him live, Dog House Music is completely solo (well, almost) and incredibly intimate. It was recorded in his kitchen on an old four-track recorder, and it feels like you’re right there. You can hear the squeaking of his rocking-chair and the patting of his foot on the ground; he even addresses the listener with story fragments and quips, and it all adds to the real down-home atmosphere. And the songs are to die for. He covers a surprising range: he does right barn-stomping plugged-in pieces with his three-string trance wonder, such as ‘Dog House Boogie’, ‘Cut My Wings’ and even the second half of ‘Fallen Off a Rock’, where he’s even joined by his son on crashing drum kit, but he also has surprisingly poignant and touching moments, such as ‘The Dead Song’ and the beautiful ‘Salem Blues’.

His guitar technique is exciting, his songs and stories are fun and hey – I’d finally found blues music in the 21st century that didn’t make me cringe. This was great! Of course, no-one would ever hear of him…so it was a (pleasant!) shock to see his rise to unexpected fame over the next few years. Future albums would peak at #4 on the UK album charts, he played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, performed and recorded with everyone from KT Tunstall and Ruby Turner to Nick Cave, Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones and Jack White, and even appeared on Top Gear. So weird. And for me personally, he also opened up a whole world of not-shit modern day blues, from the old-style musicians like C.W. Stoneking to the punk of the White Stripes, Dogbreath and Bob Log III, and to whatever it is that Son of Dave does.

Yes, a lot of Seasick Steve is an act. Whether he ever hopped trains or not is probably impossible to know, but his 20 years living as a hobo is far exaggerated at best – instead he pursued a moderately successful musical career as a session musician and producer (he even played with Zakir Hussain and Aashish Khan in the shortlived project Shanti – look, there he is on bass!). Maybe those rocking-chair squeaks were added afterwards for effect, who knows. But while those revelations maybe took something away from his mystique, nothing takes away from his music. Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter that Seasick Steve is a character. He is lovable, has funny, interesting and gripping stories and, with Dog House Music, a truly superb album of blues.

225: Led Zeppelin, by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin (United Kingdom)
Led Zeppelin (1969)
9 tracks, 45 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I never cease to be amazed at the fruitfulness of the 1960s. To think there was a time when the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, Dr John, the Stooges, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Can, and, and, and… were all creating scene-defining music in their own fields all at the same time is just mind blowing. And that’s just in the vague field of rock, without mentioning all the jazz cats, the blues revivalists, the folkies on both sides of the Atlantic. And all of those intersected at important junctions too, of course. I’d hope that someday we’d look back on any era with the same awe in hindsight, but you have to admit that the line-up the 1960s had going on is kinda hard to beat.

I guess that’s a bit of a non-sequitur (can something start with a non-sequitur? Who knows), but considering the shape of popular music at the beginning of the decade, to end it with Led Zeppelin – the eponymous group’s debut album – it really shows what a transformative period this was. In this album are the inklings of what was soon to be heavy metal. In fact, when I listen to this album, I cannot help but hear it as the birth of the whole wide-ranging musical movement that metal became. Although every song has a heavy imprint of blues or British or American folk overlaid with all the trappings of 60s psychedelia, there’s something else in there. Whereas psychedelia usually revels in mellowness or trippiness, Led Zeppelin took it to a different place: in their hands, it was harder, heavier and more aggressive – and more exciting.

Even as a blues band, Led Zeppelin excel on this record. Their versions of ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘How Many More Times’ (the former made famous by Muddy Waters, the latter a development of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘How Many More Years’) show a group that were capable of doing the blues rock thing without abandoning their own sound of burgeoning heavy metal to do it, making them stand out as more interesting and innovative than the other British blooze boom bands such as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac and even the Rolling Stones.

Throughout this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I have a thing for in-between points in music, whether that’s music that highlights geographical-cultural-historical connections between different traditions or that marks the mid-stage of a musical evolution. Led Zeppelin is definitely one of those in-between stages, with psychedelic rock, blues and British folk as its ancestors, and all sorts of metal as its descendants. The 1960s had so many of those albums or musical moments that spun whole genres on their head, or conjured them from some genius realm, and nothing could be the same since. I wonder when the next such upheaval will happen, and what will come of it…

221: Split, by Groundhogs

Groundhogs (United Kingdom)
Split (1971)
8 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For me, this album is like a distillation of British hippy rock of the late 60s-early 70s. All the way through there are elements alike with artists such as Jethro Tull, Blodwyn Pig, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and a million psychedelic bands of the time, all refined into one sound. There’s an extravagant looseness to the music that skews it to a slightly odd angle and adds to its trippy atmosphere, but it’s saved from sounding sloppy by the tightness of the compositions – the eight songs on this album all have a direction that they are headed towards, and even if they take some detours here and there, there’s no rambling. It’s like if garage-band jamming had a very clear purpose in mind. That at-once looseness and tightness of atmosphere is also helped by the tightness of the group itself, with Tony McPhee on guitars and vocals (and very much the leading man of the band), Peter Cruikshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums, there’s no extraneous sonic elements that need to be built into textures that simply work perfectly as a trio.

The fuzz of the guitars, the crunchiness of the vocals, the chugging rhythms and the clashing cymbals show Groundhogs’ place in the evolution of heavy metal, but the structure of the compositions and their slightly mystical and conceptual airs also foreshadow the prog rock of the latter part of the decade. But me being me, the track that always stands out as a highlight is the last one, ‘Groundhog’, the song from which the group took their name. Interestingly, it’s a song written by the artist featured yesterday, John Lee Hooker. It’s clearly his too: his trademark style is left intact, and the cover is a very faithful one, stripped back as it is from the rest of the album. It’s an almost-solo by McPhee (with just Pustelnik’s kick drum keeping beat), shredding up the electric slide guitar alongside his relaxed but weighty vocals. One of the things I like most about this track is its placement as the album closer. There are blues bits all the way through the album, but ‘Groundhog’ coming at the end is like a proper full stop, as if to say ‘that’s what we are and what we can be, but where we came from is just as important.’ After some strange directions in the rest of the album, the simple, raw Hooker groove brings it all back down to earth with as much grit as any other track.

Split is a great album to get your fix of psychedelic rock with a bluesy tinge without having to stray into acid trips and badly-played sitar territory – Groundhogs keep their feet on the ground even when their brains and voices and fingers maybe travelling a little outside our usual astral plane.

220: Live at Café au Go-Go, by John Lee Hooker

John Lee Hooker (USA)
Live at Café au Go-Go (1967)
8 tracks, 35 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Unlike Skip James, another blues artist who featured here a couple of weeks ago, there’s no shortage of recordings by John Lee Hooker, from any stage of his career as a musician. From cutting sides while working as a janitor in a Detroit steel mill in the 40s to recording with Carlos Santana, Miles Davis and Van Morrison in the 1990s, his career was as varied as his sound was unique.

But instead of going for some of his perhaps more recognisable albums – or even those that feature his most famous singles of ‘Boom Boom’ or ‘Boogie Chillun’, as good as they are – I’ve gone for this rather low-key live recording from 1966. I think it’s so easy to remember John Lee Hooker as the popstar bluesman that he became, with ultra-polished recordings, cheesy production and guests for days, but it’s what he did before that that sets him apart. There’s a grit inherent in his work – in his voice, in his lyrics, in the tone of his guitar and the way he played it. It all sounds like a dirt road in the middle of a desert.

For this album, it’s not even like his solo recordings that you could very easily imagine being played in some lonesome town somewhere in the middle of the American nowhere. He’s already a big deal by this point, and you can tell that just by looking at the credits: engineered by the legendary Rudy Van Gelder of Blue Note fame, accompanied by Otis Spann on piano, and also with Muddy Waters adding his guitar to John Lee’s now and then, entirely without fanfare. The important thing is that it sounds raw. This is the real deal: a group of musicians that learnt their trade in the Mississippi delta, who plugged in, moved to Chicago and took the blues to the future while never forgetting the roots.

Everything is so simple. The songs are either in a 12-bar-blues or just stay on one chord all the way through, the licks are short and modest and the timing is very loose, but it’s clear that every one of these musicians are experts in what they do, because every note is in exactly the right place. There’s nothing too much or too little, and it all allows John Lee’s rough but subtle voice to cast its spell over the whole thing. Just listen to ‘Heartaches and Misery’, a lesson on the meanings of the blues and a rumination of why he does what he does; everything lines up so perfectly that you will believe every single word he says and understand it to your core.

John Lee Hooker, for all his music is recognisable, went through many different phases in his recording career, but I think none are as potent as when he just relaxed, kept things on the down-low and didn’t just play Blues Music, but really played the blues. At the Café Au-Go-Go in 1966, John Lee Hooker and his band were definitely channelling the real blues.

214: In Trance, by JuJu

JuJu (United Kingdom/Gambia)
In Trance (2011)
7 tracks, 69 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Juldeh’s nyanyero was the first one-string fiddle I’d (consciously) heard, and it sounded crazy to me. I thought it was a flute at first, and sometimes it sounds like a natural trumpet, sometimes it sounds like a fiddle in the American or Irish traditions. But its sound is literally just horsehair on horsehair, one set stretched over a goat-skin covered calabash, the other into a bow. Yet out of that fairly simple instrument (there is only one string, after all), you get all these sounds, and a surprising range too. He uses his nyanyero as a solo instrument, and also to accompany his vocals in the traditional style of the Fula gawlo (griot).

And then you’ve got Justin Adams on electric guitar. Justin has been a staple on the world music scene for decades. He’s played with and produced everyone from Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, Natacha Atlas and Sinéad O’Connor to Tinariwen, Lo’Jo, Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino and even the Emirati band Takht al Emarat. His own style is one of electric blues spiced up with sounds from across north-west Africa, such as the musics of the Tuareg, Songhai, Berber, Gnawa and Arab people.

Get these two musicians together and the music they make is immense. Their playing slots so well together: Juldeh bends his slightly more into the bluesy frame, Justin crafts his whole thing around Juldeh’s own tradition. The end result is something that is a rocking mid-point between the two, but with neither musician being overly precious about changing and evolving their own sound, either. Together, the duo had already had a couple of albums: their first, 2007’s Soul Science, was very organic and rootsy, an artefact of the musicians’ first meetings with all the excitement that comes along with it; the follow-up, 2009’s Tell No Lies, was a much more polished record that even strikes me as a little poppy in places and showed a progression in their collaborative songwriting. For In Trance, they took it to a different place.

In Trance is harder and heavier than their first two albums, and that’s also reflected by them taking on the name JuJu – signifying their new-found bandification alongside drummer Dave Smith (later of Fofoulah), percussionist Martyn Barker and bassist Billy Fuller. But as the name also implies, there is more a focus on trance for this album. Unlike the previous two, the pieces included here aren’t a neat four minutes – three even stretch out near the 15 minute mark. Instead, the tracks are much more open-ended, the music based on endless loops over which mutual improvisation takes centre stage. The pieces evolve in their performance in a way a little reminiscent of jazz fusion, although there is little jazz in the music itself, save maybe for a few rhythmic conceptions. At its core it is still really – totally – bluesy, and Juldeh’s Fula sound permeates it all in the best way.

The track ‘Deep Sahara’ is probably my favourite of this set of great tracks, and it really shows how the album works so well. It’s actually based on the track ‘Sahara’ from Tell No Lies, but its treatment here turns it into something from another realm. Starting with an Arabic taqsim-like opening where Justin and Juldeh take turns exploring the scales and flexing their muscles in anticipation of what’s to come, the song itself starts after about two minutes. It’s rocky with a slightly loping, Moroccan-like rhythm and, of course, as much blues as you could hope for. But then the ‘song’ portion only lasts for another two minutes. After that, it’s all groove. Juldeh takes extended solos on his nyanyero, occasionally sings around and in-between the melody left implied by the song, which comes around every so often but with no regularity. Throughout, Justin’s guitar, mostly playing rhythm, is slowly getting more and more distorted and psychedelic…and then towards the end, so slowly as you won’t even notice it until it’s on top of you, there’s no vocals, or guitar, or nyanyero, it’s just all drums: drum kit, bendir, tama, bringing the track to a banging end at almost 15 mnutes. What a great way to end a piece. It’s all appropriately hypnotic, and although its structure is unusual, nothing at all sounds out-of-place. And that’s the case for this whole album.

In Trance turned out to be the only album that they’d release as JuJu – not too long after it came out, the band were snapped up wholesale by Robert Plant to become his Sensational Space Shifters. The band’s original set-up was literally JuJu but with Plant on vocals and occasional harmonica – not a bad mix to be honest. And that’s the way the band continued: they toured around the world, released an album, members came and went. Juldeh eventually moved back to Gambia in 2017 and was replaced by English folk fiddler Seth Lakeman, taking with him most of the last remnants of the JuJu sound.

208: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues, by Skip James

Skip James (USA)
Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (2003)
12 tracks, 51 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Recorded in 1964, the session that this album collects was the first time Skip James had recorded in 33 years. After only very mild success pre-war, James had become basically unknown until the big blues revival of the 60s, when young fans were eagerly digging through old record collections, tracking down the names the found there and persuading them out of retirement.

For me, of all the old guard of pre-war delta blues, Skip James is among the very top of them. He’s not as recognised outside blues circles as others such as Robert Johnson or even Son House, but his songs really touch the soul. The song that names this album, ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’ is a low-down rumination on despair and a hard life lived, real stereotypical blues stuff, but delivered with such voice-cracking emotion that every word is gut-wrenching, and the worksong-like hummed chorus is utterly transcendent.

Considering that James was 62, very ill and (presumably) a little out-of-practice at the time of this recording, his quality is simply stunning. His voice, high-pitched in his earlier recordings, is lower but just as sweet. His fingers are slightly less nimble on his guitar but still capture the same magic. His age also lends another aspect to his music, particularly in the songs ‘Washington DC Hospital Blues’ and ‘Sickbed Blues’, which are sad and subdued blueses written of his illness that would eventually get the better of him five years later.

I can’t really be drawn as to which are the better recordings for music fans – besides, the correct answer is obviously ‘go listen to both’! Being recorded so far apart, they really are different listening prospects, even though much of the repertoire is the same. The older recordings are very noisy due to their age and recording methods, which may not suit everyone’s ears, but you do get to hear James’ piano playing, giving an interesting twist on the delta blues. So really, whether you decide to come at Skip James as his 29-year-old self or his 62-year-old self, you will be approaching the work of a true master not just of finger-picked guitar or of blues songwriting, but also of emotional evocation.