Great Blues Albums: Gary Moore, Still Got the Blues

Gary Moore’s 1990 album, Still Got the Blues is next up in our series of classic blues albums. It was the most successful album of Moore’s career, selling over three million copies worldwide and heralded a change in direction for the guitarist and a return to his blues roots. It featured collaborations with Albert King, Albert Collins and George Harrison and reached No. 83 on the Billboard 200 in February 1991, and then was certified gold by the RIAA on November 1995.

Moore was from my home town, Belfast, but I only saw him perform once, on June 26, 2004, in the Belfast Odyssey Arena. His was the stand-out performance of seven in support of Bob Dylan, in a production that began around 2 pm and lasted until about 10:30. I really couldn’t be bothered with the other performances, to tell the truth, but Gary Moore was outstanding. (Dylan was on form that evening as well, in fine voice, with an excellent band and a fan-pleasing set that included an acoustic version of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright, Like A Rolling Stone, and All Along The Watchtower.)

Moore straddled the stage, legs apart, guitar slung low, hair cascading to his shoulders, like the guitar-god he was and gave us nine of his greatest hits, including Oh Pretty Woman, Still Got the Blues and his signature tune, Parisienne Walkways. The guitar playing was sublime and his facial contortions all we hoped for. “People make fun of me for doing that,” he said, “but it’s not contrived. When I’m playing, I get completely lost in it and I’m not even aware of what I’m doing with my face – I’m just playing.”

Reputedly, Moore was a modest man with few pretensions, who kept a low public profile and was happiest at home in Sussex. Typical is what he said of his gigs with Dylan on that tour: “At the Odyssey in Belfast, I tried to walk up the steps at the side of the stage to see who was in Dylan’s band. The bouncer said ‘You’re not allowed up there!’ and that was the end of that. The stage was quite high and I couldn’t really see, so I spent the next 20 minutes jumping up and down to get glimpses of what was going on!”

But he was an incredible guitar player – voted one of the greatest guitarists of all time by Total Guitar, but egregiously absent from Rolling Stone’s flawed list of 100 Greatest Guitar Players.

Gary Moore was born in Belfast in 1952, but left just before Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” started in 1969, going to Dublin to become a musician. His dad had bought him his first guitar, a second-hand Framus acoustic, when Moore was 10 years old. Though left-handed, he learned to play the instrument right-handed and by 15, he was the best guitarist in his home town. After stints with Skid Row and Thin Lizzy, he began his solo career in the 1970s, playing hard rock and heavy metal before returning to the blues with Still Got the Blues as the 90s began. The idea for the album had come when it had been jokingly suggested to Moore than he do a whole blues album after being heard noodling the blues in his dressing room on a previous tour.

Moore playing Peter Green’s Les Paul

The album got made and the rest, as they say, is history. Still Got the Blues was extremely successful and re-launched Moore’s career as a blues rock artist. Moore followed it up with After Hours in 1992 which went platinum in Sweden and gold in the UK, and then three years after that with Blues for Greeny, a tribute album to his friend and mentor Peter Green. A slew of other blues albums appeared in the 2000s – Back to the Blues (2001),  Power of the Blues (2004), Old New Ballads Blues (2006), Close as You Get (2007), and finally Bad for You Baby (2008). Sadly we lost Gary Moore in 2011 when he died with a heart attack.

The original release of Still Got the Blues consisted of nine songs, but the CD version added three more, including that That Kind of Woman, unmistakably a George Harrison song, with Harrison, a friend of Moore’s playing on it. There was a further augmenting of the album in 2002 with five more songs, including Elmore James’s The Sky is Crying, a tribute by Moore to Stevie Ray Vaughan, who died in 1990, which Moore attacks with some incendiary playing.

The album kicks off with a toe-tapping, rock’n’roll number, Moving On, featuring some tasty slide guitar. This is followed by Albert King’s Oh Pretty Woman, written by A.C. Williams, from King’s acclaimed 1969 album, Born Under A Bad Sign, Moore giving the song much more attack and edge. The interplay of his guitar and the horns is brilliant and the guitar solo, with its huge string bends and fast runs, is guaranteed to have the hair on the back of your neck sit up.

King played on the track and reputedly told Moore off for playing too many notes – “Think ten notes but play five.” Seemingly Moore was prepared to take the advice on board, recognising he’d come from a heavy rock scene where the more notes played the better. King, however, was impressed with Gary Moore – “I didn’t think he could play. I thought he was just another kid trying to get off into the blues guitar world… but listening to that kid play the wildest things… Golly Moses, where did he come from?”

A couple of songs later we get Moore’s own Still Got the Blues, with that sweet, searing and transcendent guitar introduction. It’s a beautiful song, well-constructed musically and intelligent lyrically but, of course it’s the extended guitar solo two-thirds the way through that stays in the memory – utterly transfixing and heart-wrenching. The song was released as a single and reached No. 97 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1991.

 

Moore pays homage to B.B. King in King of the Blues, “born in Indianola, Mississippi 1924,” (though King was born in 1925) with “Lucy by his side.” As well as the big guitar sounds, full of energy and emotion, there are the quieter, night-time blues of As the Years Go Passing By and Midnight Blues, with Moore’s guitar work restrained and tasteful, but still utterly soul-searching.

Throughout the album, Moore seems to play as if his life depended on it, each note utterly crucial. The combination of the strong songs, the collaborators, the associations, Moore’s incredible guitar work, the horns at time giving it a big band vibe, and Moore’s excellent vocal performance make it something of a masterpiece of blues rock.

Gary Moore proved himself to be a masterful exponent of the blues, and his extraordinary talent and devotion to his craft is sorely missed. We look forward to Provogue’s release of a new album, featuring previously unreleased material, How Blue Can You Get on 30 April, to mark the ten years since Gary Moore passed away.

 

Elizabeth King’s Living in the Last Days is a gift for us all.

“Her words have a clear message, but her deep feeling could move anyone.”
VICE Magazine

Photo: Houston Cofield

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She was the female lead of a successful, previously all-male gospel group, The Gospel Souls, in the 1960s and 70s, which had a significant gospel hit on the D-Vine Spirituals label, I Heard the Voice.

She quit singing professionally to raise her children, and now, after a hiatus of nearly 50 years, she has gone into the studio to record a fabulous new blues-tinged gospel album, Living in the Last Days, on Bruce Watson’s new Bible and Tire label. [check out our interview with Bruce here]

Her powerful vocal performance on the record, reminiscent at times of Mavis Staples, is supported by a top-class band assembled by Watson (Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang (guitars), George Sluppick (drums), Mark Edgar Stuart (bass), and Al Gamble (organ)) and features the excellent harmonies of Christopher and Courtney Barnes from The Sensational Barnes Brothers. It’s a funky, blues, soul-filled pot of rich gospel fare.

Down at the Crossroads called Ms. King at her Memphis home, and asked her about making the album. She said first of all that this album was her debut solo album and it’s been forty-seven years since she stopped singing professionally. She told me that she was “just sitting at home one day,” when Pastor Shipp, the founder of the 1970s D-Vine Spirituals label, who had recently started collaborating with Bruce Watson, called her up. “And he asked me, did I want to record again? I told him, yeah. That’s how it came to be.”

From initial call to getting into the studio was very quick – “Yeah, no time for rehearsal or nothing,” said Elizabeth.

I asked her about the songs on the album, all terrific, positive songs. She told me that there are some that she has been singing for many years, and some that Bruce Watson brought to her. “And then there are a couple of songs on there I did myself that I have been singing from when I was, you know, a child growing up. The song Walk with Me, my mom used to sing that to me. And then, I got a song, Blessed Be the Name, I kinda got most of that out of the Bible.”

She sings this song unaccompanied on the album, a quite spine-tingling performance. The song tells the story of Job, perhaps a story that not a lot of people are familiar with these days. Job is a character in the Old Testament book of the same name, who suffers tremendous loss, including his family and all his possessions, but somehow is able to say, “God gives and takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

“To me,” she told me, the story “means that we can be blessed, in that God gives us a thing, and he has a right to take it away. And, I take the role of Job to just be patient. And when things are going good, or going bad, you just have to be patient.”

That’s a lesson that Elizabeth King has learned through the ups and downs of life. “Well, I kind of learned it mostly through my lifetime. And when I was a child – because my mom, you know, would tell me she gonna give us something, but you got to wait for it. So, as I got older. I found out that if you really want something, just wait, it’ll come.”

Elizabeth King was born in 1944 and grew up in Charleston, in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Life wasn’t easy, with the young Elizabeth having to help the family pick cotton before going to school each day. Positive person that she is, she had nothing negative to say about that.

“Well, to me it was fun, I guess, because that was all I knew. And we had to walk a long way to school and I would get tired walking, so my brothers would carry me because I was younger than they were. But it was a lot of picking cotton and chopping cotton. I loved to chop cotton. It really wasn’t so hard for me because I guess I was the only girl in the family and my brothers kinda spoiled me a little bit.”

I mentioned one of the songs on the album to her, Testify, which is a rocking, upbeat number. I wondered if, looking back over the years, this song of a testimony to God’s goodness and God’s guiding hand, reflects her own experience?

She told me that she had recorded a version of this song back in 1970, but was keen to have it on this new album, though rearranged somewhat. “It’s been a part of my life, because I’ve gone through quite a bit. I got fifteen children, and I’ve gone through three accidents. So, I do have a testimony.”

Elizabeth King quit recording music in the mid-seventies to concentrate on family life. She told me she has fifteen children, 57 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. And she is proud of every one of them, including some of her grandchildren who are now recording artists in their own right.

“When my children were small, I stopped. Let’s see, what year was that? It’d be around, 1970, maybe 1972, and an opportunity for travel overseas came. But my children, my older two, were small and I didn’t want to leave them. So, I stayed at home to raise my children. Everybody said ‘you won’t get a chance to do your dream if you have to wait until your kids get grown.’ But I still have an opportunity. I just still believe I would have an opportunity to sing, you know?”

And here she is, all these years later, having just made this wonderful album. Not that she had quit singing entirely – for many years she has been singing in her church choir and singing solos. But “the only music and singing I know is a spiritual song and they call it a gospel song.” She was never interested in sing the blues or R&B.

“I guess because my heart just wasn’t in it. I didn’t like going to parties and stuff like that when I was young, I just didn’t like it because I always was afraid of drunk people.”

I asked Ms. King why music is important to her, and in particular, why gospel music is so important to her. She told me that it was her way of communicating with God and the source of God’s power in her life – to help her “be a better person. That’s what inspires me.”

And what does she think is at the heart of gospel music? The music, the feeling, the words?

“The words mostly would count for me. The music is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the words that carry the message for me. Because you know, you got some songs that they call gospel songs but they really don’t have too much of a meaning. But when you sing songs like Precious Lord or Amazing Grace, when you sing songs like that, it touches people’s heart. If you do it from your heart it’s going to reach the heart of any man, whether he’s saved or unsaved, and you can connect to that spirit.”

She had mentioned the accidents that had affected her life and I asked in particular about the one back in 1969, that was very serious.

“That one was a serious accident. I worked for a florist at the time, and a man hit me head on. I stayed in the hospital, I think, around 17 days. I really couldn’t remember anybody coming to visit me, but there was this one priest in the hospital that would come in every morning and ask me, ‘My child. Can I pray with you today?’ I would say, Yes. And so, when I came to myself, I was asking the staff, you know, the nurses about him. And they said that they didn’t have anybody on their staff like that. So, I said, who was this? Now I never could see his face, so I just described his body and what he had on and all of that. And they said, ‘we don’t have anybody like this on the staff.’ So, I just started praying and I just knew it was God. I knew I was in bad shape. I really was; I had to learn to walk all over again.”

With her remarkable recovery, Elizabeth King said she “dedicated my life to God, to my singing and to try to encourage people. My job now is just try to encourage people…when you’re going through something, just turn to God. If you don’t know him, get to know him.”

I wondered how Ms. King had got on with the musicians when she’d gone into the studio to make this record, and how had she learned the songs so quickly.

“Oh, they had the music all lined up for me and I don’t know, I just sing to the music! I used to be real fast learner when I was young, but the process of learning now is quite a bit slower, as I get older. But it wasn’t hard for me to adapt to the music because, you know, I never stopped singing. I’ve been singing all the time. I just hadn’t recorded.”

The album finishes with a very cool, bluesy version of one of my favourite songs, You Got to Move, famously recorded by Mississippi Fred McDowell and then, of course, the Rolling Stones on their Sticky Fingers album. I’ve always thought of that song as a resurrection song. When the Lord gets ready, you gotta move – it always reminds me of Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Elizabeth agreed and said, “I would say no matter what nobody tried to do to keep you here, when it’s time for God to say you got to move, you got to move. I just love it.”

I asked her about another song on the album, A Long Journey, another one about Christian hope which talks about going home to get your crown. Elizabeth said, “My mom used to sing that to me when I was a child. Now that was a long time ago because I’m 76 years old! And that song has been with me all these years, but she used to tell me that I’m gonna leave you one day. I’m going on a long journey and I won’t be back. And I tell you, that song, it has stayed with me in the heart, and anytime I record an album, A Long Journey going to be on there.”

We finished up our conversation by talking about Elizabeth’s faith, which is clearly central to her life and being. She told me, “It’s been important to me because of the things that I suffered, things that happened to me, a lot of things that I had to go through. My faith made me strong about suffering, that’s what made me strong.” Life has not been easy for her, but she is certain that it was God that kept her going in the hard times and it was her faith that sustained her. “I believe in God, God gives me strength. And that would keep me going.”

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She is positive, upbeat, ready to take on the next challenge and opportunity in life. She is a breath of fresh air. Here’s what she finished our chat with:

“Every day I get up, I thank God. Just let me be able to just take care of myself you know, and I just thank him. And I’m going to keep on trusting him until the time comes when he says that you gotta move!”

Living in the Last Days is testimony to Elizabeth King’s remarkable spirit and faith. Not only that, it’s a top-notch album, full of great songs, music that touches you, and Ms. King’s powerful vocal performance. It’s a gift for us all.

Rev Gary Davis – A Great Change

Bob Dylan called him “one of the wizards of modern music.” His biographer, Ian Zack, called him “one of the world’s greatest, if not the greatest, of all traditional and ragtime guitarists” And for Alan Lomax, the folklorist, he was “one of the great geniuses of American instrumental music.”

We’re talking about Rev. Gary Davis, the blind son of dirt-poor sharecroppers in South Carolina, who went on to exert a major influence on the folk scene of the 1960s and the early rock scene of the 70s. Yet for most of his career, he refused to perform blues music publicly until the latter years of his life.

He was remarkably musically gifted and his guitar virtuosity was an inspiration to people like Jorma Kaukonen, Bob Weir, Stefan Grossman and many others. Davis was born in 1896 in the Jim Crow South Carolina, became blind as a small child, and was abandoned by his mother. Raised in poverty by his grandmother, it was a thoroughly unpromising start. But she made sure young Gary went to church where he sang in the choir. He took up the guitar early, playing spirituals in earshot of his grandmother and other songs learned from traveling minstrel shows when she wasn’t listening,

He began to have real success as a musician in his late teens at picnics and in string bands, then playing on street corners for nickels and dimes, eventually adopting the rambling lifestyle of the wandering bluesman. But, at the age of 38, when his mother was dying, Davis experienced a vision, where an angel, appearing as a child, called him to God. Right there, he says, he “surrendered and gave up. Gave up entirely.” He soon was ordained as a Baptist minister.

He now harnessed all the musical skill he had amassed in playing ragtime, jazz, blues, and minstrel music and his considerable creative energies in composing and playing spiritual songs in pursuit of his new calling in life. There had been a great change.

One of Gary Davis’s song which reflects this is simply called Great Change Since I Been Born, and I got to thinking about it, when a good friend of mine, Gary Bradley, an Irish musician, sent me a recording he had made of the song for use in the book launch of my new book.

The reason I wanted the song is because my book, Paul Distilled is about the thinking of the apostle Paul, whose letters form part of our New Testaments. He, too, experienced a great change – from a man of violence to a man promoting love and peace, because of his own encounter with God. Specifically, meeting the resurrected Jesus on the famous Damascus Road. In his letters, it’s clear that he thought the epoch-shattering event of Jesus’s resurrection meant the possibility of transformation – both personally and for the world. A transformation based on love. These short thirteen letters of Paul dropped a depth charge of thought into the ancient world, whose effects are still being felt in the world. Can love really change the world? According to Jesus, and the greatest exponent of the meaning of his life, Paul – a resounding Yes!

Gary Davis eventually made has way to New York City, where his incredible skill and talent became appreciated and where he was eventually persuaded to perform more than just spiritual songs in the 1960s Though his faith was still intact, the good Reverend clearly struggled with alcohol and was known to be pretty foul-mouthed and angry at times. As Bob Dylan observed in Solid Rock,

“It’s the ways of the flesh to war against the spirit
Twenty-four hours a day, you can feel it and you can hear it”

He was reflecting, of course, St Paul’s letter to the Romans, where he talks about doing the things he doesn’t want to do and not doing what he knows he ought to do. We’ve all been there. The good news, is that a great change is possible. A life empowered by the Spirit of Jesus “is life and peace.” The secret is, in Gary Davis’s words, to “surrender and give up. Give up entirely.”

Check out Ian Zack’s excellent biography on Davis here.

 

 

 

 

Meet the Music Podcast: Down at the Crossroads’ 7 recommendations for getting started with the blues

Check out this episode of Meet the Music: A Capella to Zydeco.

If you happen to be new to the blues, then here’s your way in. Seven classic songs to get you started on what will be a life-ling appreciation!

“Dr. Burnett shares a little history of the Blues and his deep love for the Blues.  In our conversation, we discussed the impact of women blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Memphis Minnie.  Listen as Dr. Burnett lists his suggested artists and songs for new listeners.”

Click for podcast

And here are my seven recommendations for getting started in listening to the blues:

Robert Johnson: Kind Hearted Woman, recorded in 1936, just a couple of years before he died as a young man of 27, poisoned, it seems by a jealous husband. Johnson was a jaw-droppingly good guitarist and a fine singer. He only recorded 29 songs, but Johnson has probably been the most influential blues artist on the whole of rock and roll. Eric Clapton says Johnson was his most formative influence and he has a great version of Kind Hearted Woman on his Me and Mr Johnson album from 1996. Keb’ Mo’ who is one of today’s great blues artist also has a fine version on his 1994 Keb’ Mo’ album.

Blind Willie Johnson: The Soul of A Man recorded in 1930. Willie Johnson was an exponent of gospel blues, and his slide playing, which he did with a penknife, was just outstanding. He’s a remarkable singer, at times a sweet tenor, at other time utterly raw. His music is making its way around the universe on the Voyager space probe launched in 1977 on a golden disk containing a sample of earth’s music. Quite what aliens might make of Johnson’s eerie slide playing and moaning on his song Dark Was the Night, is anyone’s guess! (Check out Tom Waits’ version of Soul of a Man on the 2016 tribute album, God Don’t Never Change, with various artists including Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Lucinda Williams, and Luther Dickinson.)

Mississippi John Hurt: Louis Collins John Hurt was a sharecropper who recorded some songs in 1928, which were not terribly successful. He was then rediscovered in 1963 and recorded a number of albums and performed on the university and coffeehouse concert circuit before he passed away. By all accounts he was a lovely man, and his guitar playing is just delightful. (The version here is Lucinda Williams with Colin Linden on guitar on a tribute album called Avalon Blues. Check out also Rory Block’s tribute album – just her and her guitar, also Avalon Blues)

Memphis Minnie: In My Girlish Days. Before the men began playing the blues, it was the women who were the big stars – women like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Victoria Spivey. Memphis Minnie was a performer, a guitar player and singer, mostly in the 1930s and 40s. The poet Langston Hughes described her electric guitar as “a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill” – but she was quite a talent. I’ve gone for her In My Girlish Days. You can hear a great version of this on Rory Block’s 2020 album, Prove it on Me, where she plays tribute to the women of the blues. Rory Block is an outstanding acoustic guitar player, and check out also her tribute to these women in her 2018 album, A woman’s Soul: a Tribute to Bessie Smith.

B.B. King: The Thrill Has Gone. This is B.B. King’s signature tune. King was a great singer, but an outstanding guitarist – one of those guitar players where you can tell who it is from just hearing a single note. The song is on a number of albums, but you can find it on a 2006 album of the same name, along with other great B.B. King numbers.

Muddy Waters: Hootchie Cootchie Man. Recorded in 1954. Muddy Waters is known as the father of Chicago blues. He was a Mississippi sharecropper who moved to Chicago in the 1940s and popularized electric blues. He has been a hugely influential figure on rock’n’roll, and the insistent riff that drives Hootchie Chootchi Man is one of the most famous in all blues music. Eric Clapton has a great version on his 1994 From the Cradle album.

Allman Brothers Band: Statesboro Blues on At Fillmore East from 1971 is an old Blind Willie McTell song. Bob Dylan has a famous song which says, nobody sings the blues like Blind Willie McTell. The Allman Brothers’ version has become a classic version of the song and rightly so, featuring Duane Allman’s fabulous slide guitar playing.

Larkin Poe: God Moves on the Water, on  2020’s Self-Made Man. Larkin Poe are two exceptionally talented sisters, Rebecca and Megan Lovell, both amazing guitarists and wonderful singers. They really bring the blues up to date with their own compositions and the way they cover old blues songs. And they are one of the most exciting bands you’d see live. God Moves on the Water is an amended version of an old Blind Willie Johnson song.