Guy Davis: The blues convey the truth.

“Guy Davis is an authentic and spell-binding bluesman, with an incredible voice and a great sense of humour.”

Guy Davis is a hugely talented blues artist, who delights his audiences with his snappy guitar work, gritty vocals, humorous monologues and impressive stage presence. He’s been on the road and making records for more than twenty years and is a past winner of the Blues Foundation’s “Keeping the Blues Alive Award,” which was presented to him by Robert Cray at the W.C. Handy Awards ceremony.

Guy toured the UK recently with Statesboro native, Brooks Williams, giving audiences an outstanding evening of good-humoured entertainment, as well as a master-class in acoustic blues guitar.  Down at the Crossroads caught up with Guy recently, ahead of a few gigs in the south east of England.

DATC: Guy, you’ve been touring England with Brooks Williams. Tell us a bit about it.

Guy: Well, my manager has been a friend of Brooks a long time. He got us together playing a while ago in upstate New York, and then came up with the idea of us doing a tour together. While I was getting some photos done for my last CD, Kokomo Kid (http://nodepression.com/album-review/ghost-pete-seeger), Brooks happened to be in New York, so we did a series of photos together before we even had a tour. I don’t recall having met Brooks before that. I wasn’t really familiar with his music.

DATC: Brooks is a nice guy and a terrific guitarist.

Guy: Oh yes, not only that, but what a voice! His presentation carries so well, the audience loves him!

DATC: So how has the tour gone?

Guy: It’s been going very well. We each take it in turns doing a few songs, one night I’ll open, he closes, then he’ll open the next night and I’ll close. It’s a friendly kind of tour, and at the end of the show, whoever’s on last invites the other on stage to do a few songs together.

DATC: I understand you have a new album coming out before long?

Guy: It is an album that gives a nod to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the folk-blues duo, from many years ago. The album is with a fella named Fabrizio Poggi. Fabrizio and I have worked on at least 2 of my CDs. He’s on one song on Kokomo Kid and on the album before that, Juba Dance, he’s on a lot of the songs, and produced the album. On this latest one, he’s half of the picture.

DATC: So why did you decide to focus on Sonny and Brownie?

Guy: Well, it was actually Fabrizio’s idea. Sonny Terry, the harmonica player, is a hero to both of us. I wasn’t sure Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s music really need covering, but Fabrizzio – I guess his love for the music was stronger than my ability to say no!

So I went in the studio with him, and I played guitar and some harmonica and he did all the rest of the harmonica, and we covered some of the songs.

DATC: Sounds great. There’s been a lot of the older blues artists have been covered in some recent albums by various artists, but I can’t recall something covering these two. So I’m sure it’s going to get a lot of interest. Thinking about my own interest in the blues, which goes back some 40 years, one of the first blues albums I listened to, which a friend let me borrow, was Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee, and that was one of the albums that got me hooked on blues music.

Guy: Very good. You know, I got to meet both those guys back in 1981, saw them perform. And then in the 1990s, Brownie actually came to a performance that I did, in Oakland, California. I got to shake his hand then, too.

DATC: Fantastic. Now Guy, as well as being a musician, you’ve done lots of other things –  you’re an author, you’ve been an actor – what are you primarily, a musical artist?

Guy: I think I’m all of the above. A performance artist most of all, and music is the closest thing to me. But I write for theatre, I write stories and I like to tell stories. They say I tell stories so good, I should be a politician!

DATC: You’d do pretty well just at the minute!

Guy: Yes I would! I’ve got a lot to say – they’d have to shoot me in the first week of my government!

DATC: And do you think of yourself primarily as an entertainer, or do you have something to say or convey in your music?

Guy: I do it through my music. I’m a very, very good – excellent – entertainer!

DATC: Yeah, we’d agree with that!

Guy: And modest. But yes – crafting words and a message.

DATC: And what would you say that was? A lot of what you do is blues based – what is the enduring quality of that music, why does it still resonate, what does it convey?

Guy: The blues is the kind of music that conveys the truth, even if the words you use are not factual. The blues to me is kind of like a religion. This music is my way of being in the universe, of being able to communicate the way that I feel.

The blues reflect an important part of American history – it’s not just black music. In some ways it’s a cautionary tale about some of the hurt, harm and danger that is in my own country of birth. It tells history.

DATC: The blues grew up in that period of terrible suffering and discrimination that was the experience of the black community in the Jim Crow era, but you’re suggesting that it has a broader historical resonance than that?

Convicts who violated the Black Codes

Guy: I’d risk saying yes. Jim Crow was a symptom, a small part of a greater sickness. In the time after the Civil War, there was a period when black people could be part of government, but that didn’t get the support it should have and consequently we got the Black Code laws – so, for example, if a black and white man went before a judge accused of the very same crime, the black man would do more time, because in prison, his labour could be used to build the country.

That has a lot to do with the formation of our country and even some of the difficulties that the American people are facing today. Including the divided emotions in our election. And blues continues to tell this story. It’s not all love songs.

DATC: Yes, when you look at the blues, the majority of songs are about relationships between men and women, but underlying it is this howl of protest and lament about the unjust social situation in which the back community found itself in that period.

Guy: Yes, blues is more complex than people give it credit for.

DATC: Does it have a healing force as well? It tells a story, yes, but does it have potential to do more than that?

Guy: Healing – yes, very much so. Blues can make us laugh, can make us laugh at things that are ridiculous, or refer to some things that are truly cruel, but to hear a man or a woman singing from their heart that they have been robbed, that they’re crying out for justice, I think this has the potential to heal us all.

There are a lot of voices that can stand and accuse one another of many things, but there are also voices that can bring us together, that can make healing possible, make crying possible, make belief and deep breathing possible.

DATC: Guy, you were born and raised in New York City. So why did you gravitate towards blues music? Presumably there were a lot of other influences.

Guy: I gravitated towards the blues because that was what was in me. My body was born in New York City but my soul is not from New York City. I first heard blues music and folk music and such at a summer camp when I was a young child. It was run by Pete Seeger’s brother – Pete Seeger, the great environmentalist and folk singer who knew Sonny and Brownie, Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly. So that reflects a lot more of whom I am than the fact that I was born in New York City. It’s my home, but it’s not where I’m from.

DATC: You teach as well, Guy – can you tell us a bit about that and why you do that?

Guy: Teaching music – I guess it comes as part of the territory. I enjoy that, I think it’s in my family’s DNA. Both my sisters have been educators; my grandmother studied with W.E.B Du Bois [American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, educator, author, and editor of the 1^st half of the twentieth century], who was a black revolutionary and who was partly responsible for the NAACP. He knew Frederick Douglas [the great nineteenth century African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman]. And my father also knew W.E.B Du Bois. So teaching is kind of in my blood.

DATC: And is there an urge to pass on this legacy of music to a new generation?

Guy: I can see that perhaps in the future. Right now I’m primarily an entertainer. Being in front of people and showing what I do, passing along is gonna come out of that. Right now I’m just thinking of creating fresh and new things that are inspired by the blues. But, yeah, at some point in the future, I’d like to think more about passing on the legacy.

DATC: Guy, do you find that you get in your audience people from different age ranges; do younger people find a resonance in your music, in blues music?

Guy: Yes, but I also find a lot of people who are older who want to hear some of the things they heard when they were younger – people like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee! So I get college students at my gigs; but also people bring their children with them. I always got something, you know, to delight the children. They can get interested in the same way that I found delight when I was 8 years old, sitting down the front of an auditorium looking up at someone making magic with just a guitar or a banjo.

DATC: Guy, thank you very much.

 

Best Americana Albums 2016

2016 was a bumper year for Americana and Roots music. With such variety and quality, it’s hard to grade them in any meaningful way.  So here’s the ten we’ve enjoyed most in alphabetical order by artist, followed by our next 10, and a final 5.

Birds of Chicago – Real Midnight

Luther Dickinson – Blues & Ballads  

Check out our recent interview with Luther here.

Dori Freeman – Dori Freeman

Luke Winslow King – I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always

 Here’s our take on this album.

Sean McConnell – Sean McConnell

Parker Millsap – The Very Last Day

Kenny Meeks – New Jerusalem

Van Morrison – Keep Me Singing

Various – God Don’t Never Change

Here’s what we think of this superb album.

Lucinda Williams – Ghosts of Highway

Check out our take on this album here.

And our 11 – 20 list (again in alphabetical order by artist)

Avett Brothers – True Sadness

Brandy Clark – Big Day in a Small Town

Bob Dylan – Falling Angels

John Moreland – Tulsa Heat

Margo Price – The Farmer’s Daughter

John Prine – For Better, or Worse

Mavis Staples – Livin’ On a High Note

Here’s our take on this album.

Sister Hazel – Lighter In The Dark

Various – Southern Family

Brooks Williams – Brooks’ Blues

Check out our recent interview with Brooks here.

 

And our final five:

Brent Cobb – Shine on Rainy Day

Eric Clapton – I Still Do

Here’s our comment on this album.

Eric Bibb – Happiest Man in the World

Keith Richards – Cross Eyed Heart

Check out what we have to say about this album.

Sara Watkins – Young in All the Wrong Ways

 

And check out our Best Blues Albums of 2016 here.

 

Best Blues Albums 2016

There were a lot of outstanding blues albums during 2016. Here’s Down at the Crossroads’ pick of the top 21.

First of all our top 10 –

1. Various – God Don’t Never Change

No doubt about this year’s best album. Produced by Jeffrey Gaskill, ten years in the making and as a result of a successful crowd funding campaign, it features a stellar cast including Tom Waits, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi, Lucinda Williams, Maria McKee, Luther Dickinson, the Cowboy Junkies, Sinead O’Connor and Rikki Lee Jones. Each song, with the possible exception of Jones’s version of Dark Was the Night, is outstanding, the artists’ interpretations doing full justice to the grit, passion and commitment of Blind Willie Johnson.

2. Luther Dickinson – Blues & Ballads

This latest release is a joy from start to finish, featuring twenty one songs from throughout Luther’s career­, new songs, North Mississippi Allstars songs and old favourites – all stripped down, loose and relaxed. It’s the perfect vehicle for Dickinson as carrier of the Mississippi Hill Country blues torch.

Check out our interview with Luther Dickinson here.

 

3. Luke Winslow King – I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always

Painfully honest break-up album where, as in all good blues songs, King manages to sing himself out of his blues. The music is infectious, the band in fine form and King’s guitar playing and vocals are a delight.

 

 

4. Mavis Staples – Livin’ on a High Note

Livin’ On A High Note, her 13^th solo album, is terrific, typically Mavis, and is joyous. She told her songwriters, “I want something joyful. I want to stop making people cry. I’ve been making people cry all my life. The songs I sing, the freedom songs and my gospel songs — I know I’ve been inspiring and uplifting people. But now I want to reach them in a joyful way.” Check out our take on this album here.

 

5. Tedeschi Trucks Band – Let Me Get By

With horns, grooves, and jazzy, funky, bluesy rhythms, and add in the world-class guitar chops of Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi’s outstanding soulful vocals, you have a band at the height of powers – mature, confident, utterly engaging, and hugely enjoyable.

There are 10 new original songs, and the Deluxe version includes 8-track bonus disc that features live recordings. Trucks’ sublime slide guitar has never sounded better.
6. Joanne Shaw Taylor – Wild

Taylor’s fifth studio album is, without doubt, her best yet. This is an artist brimming with talent, and boy, can she sing and play the guitar. Her guitar work, prominent throughout, is technically superb, but always musical and artistic. Her voice is superb – bluesy, smoky and full of expression. Taylor’s own song writing talents are to the fore, but there’s a quite wonderful cover of “Summertime” for added value.

 

7. Brooks Williams Blues

The album is a gem, featuring just Brooks’ voice and guitar  – acoustic, resonator and cigar box, and was recorded live in the studio. The result is a very fine album of traditional and classic blues numbers from the likes of Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Memphis Slim and the Rev. Gary Davis. Given his family background in Stateboro, Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues had to feature – eat your heart out, Allman Brothers!

Check out our interview with Brooks here

8. Janiva Magness Love Wins Again

This really is an terrific album. It’s positive, it’s upbeat, it’s a celebration of happiness from an artist that clearly has come to understand the power of love through the trials and difficulties of life. The songs are strong and the arrangements throughout are terrific, varied enough for the album to defy exact categorization, but coherent enough to gel together as a collection.

 

9. Keith Richards Cross Eyed Heart 

In his first solo album for 23 years, Richards delivers the goods. Full of cool guitar licks, his unmistakable gravelly delivery, some dry humour and, above all, some beautifully arranged old blues songs. It’s the blues, but full of fun and quite compelling.

 

 

10. Kaz Hawkins Feelin’ Good

This Belfast-based band’s third album is a spirit-lifting, joyous affair, which features a tight-knit instrumental group and the soaring vocals of Kaz Hawkins. Hawkins is also a highly talented song writer responsible for 8 of the 10 songs on offer here. The title track, a cover of Newley & Bricusse’s song, sets the tone for the rest of the album and gives you an immediate take on the immense talent of Kaz Hawkins and her band.

 

 

And here’s the next 11 –

11. Rolling Stones Blue and Lonesome

The World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band give us a covers collection that pays tribute to the post-war Chicago blues that inspired the group’s name.  It’s terrific back to basics stuff, with the band in great tight-knit form, Richards playing his characteristic guitar licks and Jagger’s vocals really hitting the spot. Eric Clapton’s guest appearance on a couple of tracks adds some cool solo licks as an added bonus.

 

12.The Rides – Pierced Arrow

Excellent second album from the Rides – the perhaps surprising combination of Stills & Nash and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. Tens solid songs mostly blues rock, with the highlight Shepherd’s top notch guitar solos. There’s good fun too with the covers, especially “My Babe,” and “Virtual World,” with its Stills and Nash harmonies and 70s vibe, and its worry about the digital world robbing us of proper, human connections is a great song. “The world is full of clutter, and it’s in the way.”

 

13. Joe Bonamassa Blues of Desperation 

Joe Bonamassa just gets better and better. His guitar work, of course, is extraordinary, and capable of stirring your very soul, but his singing on this album is very, very good. As is his song writing. Thoroughgoing blues rock, as you might expect, with great production on each of the eleven songs. “Drive” which doesn’t have the usual solo guitar pyrotechnics is for me the stand out track.

 

14. Mark Harrison – Turpentine

This is one very fine album, full of strong songs, cool arrangements, and lovely guitar work, with a joyous vibe evident throughout. This is a fresh take on the blues which should be in every blues and roots music lovers collection.

 

15. Mike Sponsa with Ian Siegal – Ego Sum

Now here’s something you don’t come across much – an album of blues music based on the work of the Latin poets Horatius, Catullus, Martialis and Juvenalis. The music and the band are terrific, driven by Mike Sponza’s cool guitar work. But it’s the vocals from Ian Siegal and Dana Gillespie which really make this album a keeper.

 

16. Michael Jerome Browne – Can’t Keep A Good Man Down

Released towards the end of the year, this is an album of sixteen acoustic blues songs. Just Browne and his delightful acoustic guitar picking. It’s a compilation of traditional blues, taken from various albums going back to 1998. There are five original songs, including one brand new recording from 2016, “Four Years, No Rain.” Blues classics from the past include songs by Tampa Red, Jesse Fuller, Frankie Lee Sims, Mississippi John Hurst, Reverend Gary Davis, and Frank Stokes.

17. Eric Bibb – Happiest Man in the World

Upbeat collaboration between Bibb and English multi-instrumentalist, Danny Thompson with Finnish trio, North Country Far. Lovely bluesy, country songs with Eric Bibb’s usual infectious warmth shining through.

Check out our interview with Eric Bibb here.

 

18. Beth Hart – Fire on the Floor 

Another fine outing from the ever-consistent Beth Hart. To be sure, this set of twelve original songs is more jazz than blues, with the first very cool track, “Jazz Man,” setting the tone. Hart’s vocals shine throughout, sultry, emotional and powerful in turns.

 

 

19. Eric Clapton – I still do 

Blues, nearly blues, Dylan and J J Cale covers and various other originals. Old Slowhand clearly still does – play and sing as well as he ever did. This is not a demanding album of the listener, but there are some fine songs here. But Clapton’s at his best with the blues – the Robert Johnson “Stones in My Passageway” is terrific. And a nice surprise is his cool version of “We Shall Overcome, here I’ll Be Alright.”

 

20. Jeff Healey – Heal My Soul

What a talent was the late Jeff Healey. And what a great collection of previously unissued Healey recordings, released to coincide with what would have been his fiftieth birthday. It’s powerful blues rock stuff, with Healey’s blistering guitar work to the fore. There are some nice more acoustic numbers as well – “Baby Blue,” “Love in Her Eyes,” and the delightful “All the Saints” – which bring Healey’s attractive vocals to the fore.

 
21. Bonnie Raitt Dig In Deep

You can’t go wrong with a Bonnie Raitt album – funky, bluesy, great band, and Bonnie’s laid back, well-phrased, vocal delivery and her electric slide – never less than satisfying. Twelve highly enjoyable, distinctive, Bonnie Raitt songs.

 

 

And worth a mention are two excellent albums from very talented young guys – Quinn Sullivan and Matty Wall.

Quinn Sullivan – Midnight Highway

17 year old Sullivan, a prodigy mentored by Buddy Guy and supporting Guy in his recent tour, has it all – unbelievable guitarist, excellent singer and talented songwriter. This highly enjoyable album of blues and American rock showcases his incredible talent.

 

 

Matty Wall – Blue Skies

Hailing from Perth, Australia, Matty Wall plays a mean blues guitar. The boy can sing too, with nice phrasing and sweet vocals throughout.