Fabrizio Poggi’s Got Blues in his Basement

Fabrizio Poggi is one of Europe’s premier blues musicians. An accomplished harmonica player, Fabrizio is a Grammy Awards nominee, has been twice nominated for Blues Music Awards, and has received the Hohner Lifetime Award. During a long career he has recorded twenty-two albums and has performed in the US and Europe with a who’s who of blues royalty, including the likes of the Blind Boys of Alabama, Mavis Staples, Charlie Musselwhite, Ronnie Earl, John P. Hammond, Marcia Ball, Guy Davis, and Eric Bibb, 

He has a new album out called Basement Blues, which culls thirteen songs from his recent archives, including originals and covers of classic blues and gospel songs. It’s a real treat and I was glad to get chatting to Fabrizio recently from his home in Lombardy in the north of Italy.

Gary
Congratulations, Fabrizio, on the new album. It sounds great. Can you tell us a little bit about it because I think a lot of the songs have been recorded some time ago, but you’ve put them together in this great album?

Fabrizio
It all started with my wife Angelina. Last year on Valentine’s Day, she gave me a copy of the The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan and the band. And she said to me, why don’t you do something like the Basement Tapes? Now of course I can’t do the Basement Tapes! But something started to work. inside my mind and I thought, maybe I have got something in the archives, in my own basement that can be useful <laughs>.

You know, Gary, I don’t like to listen to myself very much, but I listened to some of these older recordings and thought, oh, hey, that isn’t too bad! And I was asking myself why I didn’t put these songs onto a record.

So I discovered that I have a lot of songs that people might like to listen to. And these songs go back 15 years. I have a lot of studio recordings from America. Maybe we were just warming up – we weren’t focused – okay, this is just a warm up, but don’t throw it away. But it’s not for the official record, you know?

So little by little, I had collected a lot of songs and when I went into the studio to put everything together, they sounded OK! I discovered that I’ve got a pretty good record! And my friends, other musicians, people told me these songs aren’t just outtakes. These are songs that deserve to be heard by people that love your music.

Gary
Yeah, they’re all great. I mean, it hangs together as an album really well, actually. And, there are no songs that you wanna skip over and think, no, that’s a bit of a filler. They’re all strong performances.

And you have some excellent collaborators on the album. Obviously, Guy Davis is there, and he always sounds great. But you’ve got Garth Hudson, who played with The Band?

Fabrizio
He was one of the five guys from Canada. This album of mine came from thinking about Bob Dylan and The Band in the woods. And Garth recorded with me on two albums. So I listened to one of the outtakes and it’s interesting because here Garth seems to be playing very freely. So, maybe it’s time to let people listen to it. He is always a genius and all the stuff that he plays on John the Revelator – unbelievable and unexpected!

Gary
You’re right, it does sound fresh. And another musician whose work I enjoyed on the album is your guitarist Enrico Polverari.

Fabrizio
Enrico a very good guitarist, who has been playing with me for 12 years. And he is growing all the time as a musician. On this album he’s playing much more acoustic guitar than before. But speaking of guitarists, we also have Ronnie Earl on electric on two of the songs.

Gary
When you mention Ronnie Earl, Fabrizio, you have played with a great number of other top musicians throughout your career, haven’t you? I mean if you listed them all out, I think anybody’s jaws would drop. They would be going, wow! You’ve had that opportunity, haven’t you?

Fabrizio
Yes. I feel very blessed. You know, a lot of these great musicians I ended up playing with were real heroes for me. So it was really a double treat to me, because the beautiful thing is not only to play with this great musician, but when you play with someone like that, you improve. Sometimes a lot. Just to be in the same room and be jamming together. Something happens inside you and you improve a lot. You grow.

And the other beautiful thing about these experiences is that with most of them, we became friends, like, brothers. Maybe we don’t see each other very often. But in some way, when we reach out to each other it’s like if we’ve just seen each other yesterday.

Gary
Of course, a lot of that is down to your musical expertise. But there’s a lot of that I guess, Fabrizio, is down to your warmth as a person.

Fabrizio
Well, I don’t know. But thank you for the compliment. I always think that the best way to approach other people is always to be honest and transparent. And very respectful.

Especially in the beginning. So, if you act like that, if you don’t pretend to be something else, they can feel it. We maybe were born in different countries, have different languages, different culture, but we have the same emotion. And sometimes these things are easy to share because music really is an international language. So, I don’t know if I have a special talent but everything has come in a very natural way. And don’t forget that, I have to be honest. I have my secret weapon, Angelina!

[Angelina, Fabrizio’s wife, is a very talented photographer and author. Her recently published book, Volevo Fare La Deejay, traces her life from a childhood in rural Italy with very restricted expectations of her, to her life in music along with Fabrizio and her art.]

Gary
Let me ask you this. Of all these musical heroes that you’ve had an opportunity to play with, are there any that stand out for perhaps their warmth in the interaction that you’ve had with them. Are there one or two that are particularly memorable for you?

Fabrizio
It’s easy for me to say people like Guy Davis. I had a good feeling also with Eric Bibb. And, I remember when I met Mavis Staples some twenty years ago, it was so easy and she was so approachable. I remember the two or three times that I met her we chatted about everything for maybe 30 minutes just waiting for the sound check. One time in Lucerne, me and Guy were opening for her. And Guy would always tease me – he said that his soundcheck had to wait because Fabrizio is busy chatting with his Aunt Mavis! <laughs>.

Gary
That’s wonderful. Obviously the album is essentially a blues album, but you started off with a gospel song, Tommy Dorsey’s Precious Lord, Take My Hand. Is that a special song for you, Fabrizio?

Fabrizio
Yes. Very special. And, you know, it’s a very moving story. I read many years ago, how Tommy Dossey came to write Precious Lord. [In 1938, while Dorsey was out of town, his wife died in childbirth and then tragically, their son died hours later. Wracked with grief, Dorsey sat at a piano and wrote the song.]

So, the other night, I dedicated Precious Lord, Take My Hand to my sister. [Fabrizio’s sister passed away very recently at a relatively young age.] We weren’t really thinking of opening the CD with this song, but everyone in the studio, said no, this song has to open the album. And Enrico said our version sounds as if Thomas Dorsey wrote the song in Mississippi!

Gary
Yes, it’s a very bluesy version that you’ve done. And I love the vocals that you have on it. It actually works very well. It’s a really nice arrangement.

Fabrizio
Thank you. In fact, I asked Enrico – don’t play minor chords. Just a few notes to support my harmonica and my talking vocals. Just play as if Son House one day woke up and said, I want to play and sing Precious Lord, Take My Hand. And it seems that people that don’t listen much to gospel or spiritual music like it very much. So I’m very happy.

Gary
I thought it was really interesting that the next song you have is Little Red Rooster, which is with Guy Davis singing and it’s great. But I thought it was really interesting because, in the southern states, they talk about, you know, Saturday night and Sunday morning – singing the Blues on Saturday night, and then singing a hymn on Sunday morning. Well, you’ve kind of reversed it on, on your album. You’ve got Sunday Morning first!

Fabrizio
Oh, yeah! <laughs> That’s perfect, man.

Gary
Now let me ask you about this. There’s one song which is Blues for Charlie. And that’s an instrumental, isn’t it? So, what is that about?

Fabrizio
Charlie is Charlie Musselwhite whom I imitate a little bit. I had two songs that I had given to the Blues Foundation where royalties or sales could be given to poor musicians that live in bad situations. But I had a couple of versions very similar to the ones that were on that CD, where I mixed them a little differently and changed the title and they were perfect. That’s Blues for Charlie and Boogie for John Lee Hooker.

Gary
Fabrizio, obviously these are blues songs. It’s the blues that you mostly play. But you play some gospel as well. But on the last song on the album, there’s a great line that says, if you don’t love the blues, you’ve got a hole in your soul. So why is that? What is it about the blues that is so important to you?

Fabrizio
Well, the blues, to quote Charlie Musselwhite, overtook me when I was a teenager. It’s hard to explain but it was love at the first time. The blues had arrived with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. But what impacted me was when I went to this little movie theater here in the south of Lombardi, and I saw Muddy Waters and listened to Paul Butterfield on harmonica.

Wow! It was really something, and I said, this is what I want to play. I wanna be like them. “If you don’t like the blues, you have a hole in your soul” was something that I saw written in an old record store in Arkansas. I thought it was a beautiful phrase. Of course, it is a sort of joke, if you don’t like the blues your soul is okay!

So I saw Muddy Water all those years ago playing in the film, The Last Waltz. I had seen the poster which mentioned Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Eric Clapton. Van Morrison. But there were other people I didn’t know at all, like The Band. At a certain point in the concert, Robbie Robertson says, ladies and gentlemen…Muddy Waters. And I saw this old black guy coming on the stage. And all the musicians who are much younger are treating him like the emperor of the world.

And I was wondering, who’s that black man that everyone is treating like a king? And when he started to sing, I said, Oh, now I know, now I understand why they treated him like that!

Photo: John Bull

And then the next day, I went to a record store to buy a harmonica to play the blues. And the man at the store said, I don’t know anything about playing the blues with harmonica! So, I began a journey to find the right instrument. All my friends teased me: You wanna play harmonic, why don’t you play drums or guitar like everyone else? In and around my town, no one played the harmonica. It took me probably six months to figure out which was the right instrument.

And then there’s the question of technique. Of course, nowadays, on Google, you can find tutorials in one second, or less. At that time, I was working as a labourer in a factory. I worked a lot, I ate a lot. I had a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. And when I was listening to a Muddy Waters song, or a John Lee Hooker song, I didn’t understand a word, not even the title of the song. But there was something that in some way seemed connected to my own dissatisfaction.

I felt lonely. All my friends had gone to the university. And I was in a factory working shifts. I was very frustrated. But that’s the magic of the blues. That was 35 or 40 years ago, but it was really another world. So when I started to listen to the blues, I didn’t understand the words. But when I listened to B.B. King or John the Revelator, it didn’t matter. It was something that touched my aching soul. It was enough.

You can have your own lyrics in your mind. The music, the way that the singer sings the song, it’s enough. Of course, if you understand the lyrics it is much better. So at one point I said to myself, okay, Fabrizio, if you like American music, you have to improve your English, because I hadn’t studied English at school. And so I started to translate songs and I started to travel. And of course, the more you travel the more you need to speak English. But that’s how you improve.

Gary
You mentioned getting started with the harmonica, and as you say, you didn’t have YouTube tutorials. You didn’t have Adam Gussow. So how did you learn, how did you learn about sucking and blowing and cross harp and so on? How did you learn all that?

Fabrizio
Well, for six months, I tried to follow the records. Trying to sound bluesy, but it doesn’t work – because I was playing in first position. Then one time I went to a club to listen a local band, and at the end of the show, I got talking to the guitar player. And I told him I had this harmonica, and I said to this guy, I’m quitting. And he told me it doesn’t sound like the blues because you have to play in second position. So, he explained, if the key of the blues song is E you have to use a harmonica in A. So the next day I tried, and although it took me years and years, in some way, I had seen the light.

Gary
Well, are there a couple of harmonica players of the past, or indeed the present, that are your heroes, whose style of playing that you particularly enjoy?

Fabrizio
Well, Charlie Musselwhite has been a great influence. He taught me to experiment, to find my own voice. He was the man. And of course, one month I was listening to James Cotton, the next month Sonny Boy Williamson. And James Cotton has been a big influence on me, and I saw him play live may maybe twelve times.

Gary:
I saw that Basement Blues is in loving memory of Claudio Noseda, who died last year. Tell me about Claudio.

Fabrizio
He was in the band with us for three or four years during the time we recorded Spaghetti Juke Joint. He was a keyboard player, piano player. Very good. And last summer, he left this world. Sadly, he doesn’t appear in any song on the album, but I wanted to pay tribute to him.

Gary
So finally, as you look forward to 2023, Fabrizio, do you have any major tours or festivals or things lined up?

Fabrizio
I would like to go back to the US maybe next fall, and tour with an American musician or maybe just me and Enrico. In April, I have a short tour in Belgium and Holland. This past year was pretty tough because in February I lost my mother and then I lost my sister. But I’m very happy Basement Blues has reached a lot of people and I’ve had a lot of compliments – which I’ve really needed. I’m very happy because a lot of people have contacted me on WhatsApp or Facebook, saying I bought the record and I’m really enjoying it.

Gary
It’s a great achievement. You should be very proud. Thank you, Fabrizio.

Basement Blues is on the Appaloosa Records label and is available to stream on Amazon, Apple and the other streaming services. The CD version can be obtained from the shop at Appaloosa Records at https://www.appaloosarecords.it/shop/Fabrizio-Poggi-Basement-Blues-p510970164

Happy Birthday W.C. Handy (and me)

Acclaimed “father of the blues,” song-writer and band-leader W.C. Handy was born this day 149 years ago. He’s an important figure in the history of the blues – the first real superstar, through his sheet music compositions, his 1914 St. Louis Blues, and his claim to recognizing the “world famous blues note.”

And, whatdayaknow, I share a birthday with W.C. Handy! Handy, of course, is credited with recognizing the blues for the first time in the plaintive slide playing by a man on his guitar at a station in Tutweiler, has a statue in a park named after him in Memphis, and his compositions are played to this day.

Me, I was a member of the winning sprint relay team in the Belfast primary schools’ interschool competition at Dunmore dog-racing stadium in the late ‘60s and am the proud author of this blog.

But, of course, I’ve one thing going for me over Mr. Handy. I’m still here! Though with each passing birthday, you’re painfully aware of the passing of time. You’ll never be in the sprint relay team again, your hair gets thinner and just about every muscle group in your body heads south. As Jackson Browne says,

Time may heal all wounds
But time will steal you blind
Time the wheel, time the conqueror.

But, there’s no point is dwelling on that too much, I reckon. I like the attitude of acoustic blues master, Rory Block, who’s now over 70 and who told me when I spoke to her a while back:

“Getting older or passing years is only what you make it. You know, you may make a disadvantage of it, but honestly, I don’t go there. I see it as an advantage. Now maybe I’m crazy, but I see it as a real opportunity to know more, to do more with what you know, to feel more…your fruit ripens! And to me it’s like I don’t feel old. What are you talking about? I’m more clear that this is what I was put here to do. You know, really, I see it that way. And man, I’m just getting started! I don’t feel a limitation at all and I don’t feel old – my goodness, not at all!”

So, as I celebrate my something-somethingth birthday, I’m with Rory. There are books to be written (a couple of new one in production; oh you might like to check out my recent one); albums to be reviewed (though I’ll never keep up with the prolific and quite wonderful Rocking Magpie); guitars to be played; family and friends to cherish; grandchildren to play with and a big old hurting world in which to try and make a small difference (with God’s help).

Bob Dylan’s Forever Young from his Planet Waves album in 1974 – which, incidentally, someone gave me as a birthday present – hits the right note, I think:

May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

And now, to help W.C. and me celebrate, here are a few songs.

Louis Jordan and his Tympany 5’s big band Happy Birthday Boogie gets the party started. “Happy birthday to you, and I hope you have many more”

Sammy Mayfield gives us a more bluesy version of the song.

And B.B. King has his Happy Birthday Blues, with a bit more blues feeling

And check out this bit of fun from Chris Kramer and the Beatbox, who hopes all our dreams come true.

Taking it down a notch, here’s Don McLean with his Birthday Song. “You see I love the way you love me, Love the way you smile at me.” And that’s a dedication to my wonderful wife of over 40 years.

And finally, it’s a celebration, and it’s Bruce. Written for his wife Patti, but now dedicated to everybody who’s having a birthday today:

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (Psalm 90:12)

The Remarkable Blues Art of Kreg Yingst

Kreg Yingst is an artist, originally from Chicago, but now living in the warmer climes of Pensacola in Florida. He specializes in unusual and rather fabulous portraits of musicians, mostly from the blues, but also from jazz, rock and country. On the wall facing my desk, I have a wonderful wood-based print of Rev. Robert Wilkins, complete with some lyrics from his famous Prodigal Son song.

In his catalogue, blues fans will find work representing Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon…the list goes on. They are all superb and every blues fan ought to have one of Kreg’s pieces on display.

With art degrees from the Trinity University,Texas, and Eastern Illinois University, Kreg was originally a painter, but has come to specialize in printing carved wooden blocks. He describes himself as a narrative artist, where the story of the person he is dealing with becomes represented in the finished art-piece. Along the way, Kreg ruminates at length on the story, and then produces a sketch which gets transferred to a block of wood or linoleum, which he then will carve, before ink-printing.

As well as his music range of art, Kreg also has a body of work which focuses on sacred themes, ranging from illustrations of the Psalms to Celtic saints to the Passion of Christ. During the pandemic, when he could not exhibit as usual in the art festivals and fairs where he normally sells his work, he was surprised to find that, when his online sales spiked, it was the sacred art that was being sought.

His hand-coloured woodcuts of the parables illustrate Kreg’s concern that faith be grounded in real life. So, in Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan, an African-American man rescues a Ku Klux Klansman, while in his Lazarus and the Rich Man, a beggar grabs for the cigarette butts tossed by a limo rider.

In similar vein, Kreg has published a book called Glory among the Ruins: The Homeless Project, a portfolio of 15-linocut portraits of homeless men, a portion of the proceeds of which go toward feeding programs in the Florida panhandle. He says, “I joined a group of like-minded men and women from various churches to provide food, clothing, and spiritual nourishment for the homeless of our city. Over time, as I heard their stories, I began to know them individually, and not just as a people group. They had names and faces, hopes and dreams, and a past that would play into the situation they currently found themselves in.”

Kreg is soon to publish a new book entitled Black Light. I’m honoured to have been asked to write a forward, and I’ve seen an early copy of it. I can tell you that it is a stunning piece of work. It’s 28 portraits of black gospel blues artists, with a Kreg Yingst image of the each one along with a short introduction/reflection on each. The book celebrates Black History Month, which occurs in February in the US and Canada, hence the 28 portraits.

I got the opportunity to talk to Kreg and ask him about his work and the new book.

First off, I had to ask him about his name – there aren’t a lot of Kregs or Yingsts in my part of the world, nor, I’m guessing in North America. Kreg told me it came from his German ancestors who came to America in the 1700s and got a bit changed along the way from Juenst to Yingst. That settled, we talked about Kreg’s approach to his art.

“Well, I’ve been working with printmaking probably since the mid-1990s. I was always somewhat interested in narrative or storytelling arts and so I connected initially with the magic realists. I just loved their work from the 1940s, 50s, in America – people like George Tooker and Paul Cadmus. I liked the quirkiness about it. It felt inquisitive, there was something very magical to the work.

“In terms of the narrative aspect of my work, I’d go to libraries and fiddle through different books and try to find artists. And I came across two artists who were working with wood cuts at the time, Lynd Ward, an American, and Frans Masereel from Belgium. They had done what were called wood cut novels. You could read these visually no matter where you lived in the world. And I found that really fascinating. The graphics really appealed to me. And so I started moving into doing wood cuts and lino cuts and relief prints.

“Now the musicians, the subject matter – I think part of that was I had struggled with creating people in my art, so I started doing figurative art just because it was more of a challenge. I used to do more cityscapes and I was very good at it, but I felt it was somewhat of a dead end. So I started doing people, which I wasn’t very good at. To be honest, I still struggle with it!

“At some point I might like to get back to my painting, but at this time I enjoy the printmaking for a number of reasons. It’s more affordable art – that appeals to me. I’ve always liked, say, the Mexican socialist artists for making art so accessible for people. I don’t like painting that is only for the ultra-rich or museums. I like this aspect of art in our daily life.”

And what, I asked him, about the music aspect of his art?

“I remember the first piece I did was a Robert Johnson piece and it was just because the story appealed to me, the myth, the legend. So I did it and I thought it worked well. It was on aged paper, it had particles of the bark or the plant still in it, and to me, it seemed like a tobacco paper and it just represented Johnson’s time. I did it very scratchy with my cutting and I liked the outcome. I then started digging into the blues guys – not that I knew many of these people. So, my art became more of a journey into people I didn’t know, areas I don’t know. And something from it evolved into a work of art on my part.”

Kreg has a wonderful gallery of art covering blues artists, but he also has covered jazz, rock and country artists as well.

“The rock came a little bit later and doing that allowed me to bring in colour. And again, I was trying to represent the time period. On a technical level, it was more difficult because now you’re using multiple blocks, you’re using multiple colors. I also dabbled a little bit with jazz but with jazz, I started doing backgrounds with multiple blocks that I would piece together in different ways and I’d use different colors. And then I would bring the face as the last block on top. So, in a sense, I was able to improvise. I was trying to do visually what I was hearing audibly. So, you got the scratchy blues, you got the high key powered colors of rock and you got the improvisation of jazz.”

All of Kreg’s art has a spiritual element to it, sometimes explicitly, often just in the way that he creates, as an artist. But as well as the extensive music-related catalogue, he has a range of specifically sacred art.

“There’s a spiritual line that runs throughout the entire body of my work and I’m looking for that same element, I guess, that John Coltrane would’ve talked about with the audio.

 “I’m looking for that with the visual, but that’s, I guess, part of my faith and my faith journey that has been embedded in my work. I did a whole series on the parables quite a while back. At the time I was looking at the German expressionists and they were very loose, and I tried to translate the parables to a modern-day context.

“And then eventually I went to do the Psalms in the same manner, but the Psalms were not narrative, so that proved difficult. And to be honest, I thought I was gonna knock out this project in about a year. But it transitioned into more of my own spiritual journey, where I was reading the desert fathers and a lot of monastic literature.

“And I started to incorporate these visual blocks into my own prayer life. Where I would read through a Psalm and I would take something with me, maybe just a sentence. That’s the sort of thing the desert fathers would do, they’d sit around, they’d listen to the speaker, they would take this line and then they would kind of ruminate on it throughout the day. That’s what I would do. And then I’d find the visual within that. And that whole project took me eight years. So, it became kind of my daily practice, taking the Psalm, embedding it, saying it, speaking it, and then doing it visually.

“And then I did another thing too, after the school shooting at Sandy hook, which kind of devastated me. I had young children at the time and I couldn’t understand how these people could live with that. It happened in December, and I decided the following year that I was going to find a prayer and I was going carve one piece per week until that whole year had gone. My output then became an opportunity to change this darkness into light for me. In my work, you start with a black block, basically, and every mark you make, you’re making white into the block. You’re literally carving light out of darkness. If this evil’s gonna happen, I wanted to have something good come out of it.

“And I like the idea that these prayers that are carved, they continue on in life, in somebody else’s reading. And then I started using these books I’d produced of my work as fundraisers so the profits would go to an orphanage. To support the children that don’t have parents, that did survive somewhere in the world. So, I didn’t want the darkness to win out in this. Like some light’s gonna come out of this.”

As Kreg talked about his approach to his art, it made me think of iconography, the icons that have been done in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, where the painting of those is a spiritual exercise in and of itself.

“The icons are very interesting. I’ve recently finished a series on Mary, in conjunction with a book that’s coming out by an American author who now lives in Ireland, Christine Valters Paintner. Whereas with the Psalms, I was taking a word, this project, with the Mary series, I was taking an image – I would take the image through the day and see then how that was going to be interpreted through my concept of what was going on.

“But I have a couple of icons of my own and it’s a calming thing. I like the idea of it – it isn’t really a cognitive thing. We take in art, we take in music, we take in smells, our senses, directly. And so it is with our experience of God or our communication with God. By doing art this way, you’re making a deliberate act and saying, use this time, and this time is going to be with God. And this is going to be prayer.”

As I look through Kreg’s catalogue of art, it seems to me to have a potentially wide appeal. What sort of people, I asked Kreg, buy his art?

“A real mix. It’s kind of fun to be in the booth selling because you have this interaction with the people that are actually buying. It may be people covered with tattoos that love it for the black and white graphics. Or maybe a little grandmother buying one of the icons – so you get a real mix. And sometimes people will unload on me. I’ve had people come in and buy a piece, say like my Clapton’s Tears in Heaven. And the person’s about to walk out the booth but they turn around and say, this means so much to me, my son just died last week. You get that kind thing.

“Sometimes it has a lot of meaning to them. I’ve seen people laugh. I’ve seen people cry. I’ve heard miracle stories.”

My ears pricked up at that – let’s hear about the miracle stories, Kreg!

“I was doing a show in Texas and one person was buying a piece based on Here Comes the Sun, you know, the George Harrison song. And she goes, ‘Oh, I gotta tell you about this. This piece means so much to me.’ She said her son had been diagnosed with a rare disease and she was supposed to meet with the specialist after the weekend. She’d gone home and was really distraught and she’s praying, just pleading with God. It looked like her son had been given a death sentence basically.

“Monday, she gets in her car ready to leave. And she goes, ‘God, if this is gonna work out well, let Here Comes the Sun come on the radio’! So, she turned on the radio and after a moment of dead air time, the first notes of George’s guitar come in. So, she got to the hospital specialist, and he says, ‘I don’t understand this, we’ve taken the test again, and it’s has come back negative.’ And the doctor said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ And she’s like, ‘I do now!’

“Another lady on that same weekend came in and she’s got two of my Psalm prints in her hands and doesn’t know which one to take. So, I said, get the one which speaks to you more. She asked me if I believed in God and I said yes, I do. She told me, ‘You know, I used to. But my brother got sick and I prayed and prayed but he died.’ I replied, ‘Listen, I don’t have the answers, I don’t know why this happens, but I do know God loves him. And he loves you and he’s always there.

“On my iPad, I had all the psalms and I was going back through them and I was trying to find what prompted the image from the Psalm. I had something highlighted and it said something like, ‘I’ve never left you,’ that kind of thing. And I said to her, ‘I don’t know what this means, but I think maybe this is for you.’ And I turned the iPad round and she read the two highlighted lines, ‘I’ve always been there, I’m not gonna leave you’ whatever the Psalm had said. And she goes, ‘I think that’s for me.’ So, I found it very fascinating that, that weekend there were two diverse but related things. One was a miraculous healing, the other not, and yet both in their own individual way, there was a miraculous encounter with God.”

I was very interested to hear about Kreg’s new forthcoming book, Black Light, the one that celebrates Black History Month with the portraits of the gospel blues artists. What’s the story behind it?

“It kind of developed on the spur of the moment and it was my wife that suggested I do this project. I’d done a lot of black musicians and gospel blues is my real interest. So, I thought, I could do something to take us through black history month. So, I started going back through all the people that I’ve done and, sure enough, I had more than enough images. I like the concept of ‘black light.’ I’m living over here in the thick of it. It’s been some crazy times, these last couple of years over here.

“So, I want to get out the history and what this group of people came through and what their faith did and supported them to get through this. And is still having to get through. And I’ve seen how, even as artists or whatever, people misunderstand black and white. I do graphics of black and white, and we’ve always associated black with evil and white with goodness. I want people to know this is incorrect. So that’s why I call it black light. It’s light, but it’s coming from blackness.

“I like the gospel blues. It’s deals with hard times. It deals with reality. It’s the good and the bad, it’s, you know, on the one hand, why is this happening to me, but on the other, praise God for that. I like how it kind of merges these two things. I mean, your book touches on all of that. [here Kreg refers to my The Gospel According to the Blues.]

“So, you get the highs and you get the lows, whereas sometimes, gospel music is just one extreme and full out blues might go to the other. But the gospel blues deals with both of these issues. And that always intrigues me. Most of the people in the book are gospel blues artists who are fairly obscure to most people, but I’ve also included some people like Marvin Gay and Aretha Franklin who are more well known.”

Take it from me – the book is quite wonderful, and you’re going to want to get yourself a copy. It’ll be printed quite lavishly on heavier, coated paper and will be around 8” by 6”. It’ll be a book you’ll be proud to have in your home, and Kreg tells me it will be available from Juneteenth this year – that is June 19^th – and you can order it from his website. Proceeds from the book will go to orphanages that Kreg knows.

While you’re waiting for Juneteenth to come around, head over to Kreg’s site and browse through his catalogue of wonderful and remarkable art. But don’t just browse – find a piece that speaks to you and buy a copy.

Check out Kreg’s gallery at http://www.kregyingst.com/

Celebrating Mississippi John Hurt

A Baker’s Dozen of Great Mississippi John Hurt Songs

Photo: Joe Alper

Mississippi John Hurt has been one of the most influential of the Delta bluesmen, influencing generation after generation of blues guitar pickers and his songs covered by a who’s who of artists since he re-emerged in the 1960s after years of quiet obscurity as a farmer in Mississippi.

By all accounts he was a delightful man, soft spoken and polite, exuding a quiet wisdom and loved by everyone who met him. His faith was important to him, which became apparent to those who knew him during the years of his rediscovery. Holly Ochs, who hosted John during his early days in New York, said, “The depth and quality of that faith was so powerful that it would touch thousands of people in the few remaining years of his life.”

His biographer, Philip R. Ratcliffe notes that Hurt “was always aware of the presence of his God and would always say his prayers at night.”

Born the son of former slaves in 1892, John Hurt started playing guitar when he was nine and by his late teens had developed his own particular style. After hearing John play in 1928, The OKeh Records’ recording director invited him to Memphis where he recorded half a dozen songs and then to New York for another recording session. Songs recorded at these first sessions included many of Hurt’s best loved songs, like Louis Collins, Avalon Blues, Stack O’Lee Blues, Got the Blues Can’t Be Satisfied and Blessed Be the Name.

The Great Depression and the subsequent collapse of record sales, however, ensured that John Hurt’s musical career never took off and he returned to life as a farmer in Avalon, playing occasionally at country dances and parties.

When he was 70, still tending another man’s cows and keeping a few hogs and chickens, and he and his wife Jesse dirt poor, Dick Spottiswood happened upon some of Hurt’s 1928 Okeh recordings and went searching for him. John, though he had no guitar and hadn’t played for at least two years, agreed to go to Washington D.C. with Spottiswood and his friends. Seemingly he assumed he was in some sort of trouble with the government and thought he’d better go!

John Hurt ended up recording again and performed to appreciative audiences in festivals, coffee houses and concert halls until his death in 1966.

John Hurt’s guitar picking style has become a template and springboard for, probably, all acoustic blues guitarists. That solid, rhythmic, alternating base with a syncopated melody on the upper strings is the basis of the guitar work of Chris Smither, Rory Block, Eric Bibb and a host of others. Stefan Grossman played a big part in introducing aspiring musicians to John Hurt’s guitar style through his Guitar Workshop and instructional videos.

Happy Traum, who also met Hurt in the 1960s, has also done his part with his instructional videos. Whatever limited skill I have in playing finger-style blues guitar was set in motion by painstakingly working my way through The Fingerpicking Blues of Mississippi John Hurt, Happy Traum & John Sebastian, on Homespun.

So, in celebration of the great Mississippi John Hurt, here are 13 of his most famous songs covered by other artists. Of course, you ought to go and check out John Hurt himself, and before we get to the covers, here he is with Make Me Down a Pallet on Your Floor.

For a completely different take on it, check out Gillian Welch’s version from her 2003 Soul Journey. But here’s Happy Traum’s version.

Maria Muldaur, Richland Woman Blues

First recorded by John Hurt in 1963, Maria Muldaur’s version appears on her 2001 Richland Woman Blues album, where she is accompanied by John Sebastian, who had named his 1960’s band The Lovin’ Spoonful after a lyric in Hurt’s Coffee Blues. [check out our interview with Maria Muldaur here]

Eric Bibb, Stagalee

Stack O’Lee, Stackalee or as Bibb has it, Stagalee, references a murder in a barroom in St Louis. John Hurt, who first recorded the song in December 1928 in New York, insisted the two men involved were white men and the fight took place in a mine where Stackolee was trying to rob the miners who were gambling. Bibb’s version appears on his 2011 Blues, Ballads and Work Songs, after a live version in 2009 on Live à FIP, 2009). [Our recent interview with Eric Bibb is here]

Chris Smither, Candy Man

Chris Smither has played Mississippi John Hurt songs throughout his long career and his Candy Man appears on his excellent Train Home album from 2003. Candy Man Blues was first recorded in 1928 by Hurt and was a staple of his performances in the 1960s. It’s a bawdy song, rather at odds with the spirituals Hurt would often play, although apparently he was always reluctant to play ribald songs to people he didn’t know, especially ladies. [You can find our interview with Chris here]

Rory Block, Frankie and Albert

This very old song was first recorded by The Leighton Brothers in 1916, and is about an event said to have taken place in a St. Louis barroom where Frankie shot a ragtime pianist for his infidelity with his lover. The song was recorded by John Hurt in his very first recording session in Memphis in 1928 and then in 1966 for his second studio album of the 60s, Today! Rory Block was influenced by John Hurt as a young guitarist in the early 1960s in New York. She recorded a terrific tribute album to Hurt, Avalon Blues in 2013, with ten favourite John Hurt songs. [check out our interview with Rory Block here.]

Mary Flower, Monday Morning Blues

Mary Flower is an amazing acoustic guitarist who specializes in Piedmont-style finger picking with dashes of Delta, ragtime and jazz and jazz. Her Monday Morning Blues is on her 2007 Ragtime Gal album. John Hurt first recorded it in Memphis in February 1928. [You’ll find our interview with Mary here]

Brooks Williams, Louis Collins

John Hurt said that “He [Collins] was a great man, I know that, and he was killed by two men named Bob and Louis. I got enough of the story to write the song.” Hurt’s is the only version of the song and is almost certainly about a real event. He first recorded it in 1928 in New York. (Check out Patrick Blackman’s take on the song here). Brooks Williams is a sensational acoustic guitarist and singer and his version of Louis Collins on his 2010 Baby O! album is masterful.

Also of note is English-bluesman-in-France Paul Cowley’s wonderful interpretation of the song on his 2021 Long Time Comin’ [You’ll find our terrific interview with Paul here]

Taj Mahal, My Creole Belle

Taj Mahal sounds remarkably like John Hurt on his recording of the song on his 2016 Labor of Love. John Hurt recorded the song in 1963 on Folk Songs and Blues, his first recording on the Piedmont label after being rediscovered. Creole Belles was a song by Lampe and Sidney, first recorded in 1901.

Lonesome String Band, Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me

Originally written by William Myer, and set by John Hurt to the tune of Jimmie Rodgers’s Waiting for a Train, this is one of the lesser known Mississippi John Hurt songs, which he recorded in 1966. The Lonesome String Band on their When the Sun Comes Up album in 2018, give it a quite different feel, with the banjo and fiddle to the fore.

Catfish Keith, Satisfied and Tickled Too

Catfish Keith is a quite remarkable exponent of acoustic blues and his Satisfied and Tickled Too, which also features his wife, Penny, on his 2007 If I Could Holler album, features everything you expect from Catfish’s outstanding guitar work – slides, bends, rock solid rhythm and complex picking. [Here’s our interview with Catfish]

Hans Theessink with Big Daddy Wilson, Pay Day

Danish blues guitarist Hans Theessink has been one of Europe’s top blues artists for decades and his version of Pay Day, with his warm baritone voice melding with Wilson’s sweet tenor on their 2021 Pay Day album, is delightful.

Bruce Cockburn, Avalon Blues

Avalon in Mississippi was, of course, John Hurt’s home town, and the song records Hurt’s preference for the rural scene he was used to over the big city: “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine, Goin’ back to Avalon, near where I have a pretty mama all the time”.  Bruce Cockburn, a hugely skilled finger-style guitarist, performs his version of the song on Avalon Blues: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hurt from 2001. This is a wonderful album of John Hurt songs by a top-class field of roots musicians. Avalon Blues is the second song.

Gillian Welch, Beulah Land

Hurt’s faith was important to him and he recorded a number of gospel songs, including Beulah Land, an old spiritual, in 1966 on his Today! album. Gillian Welch’s version on the 2001 Avalon Blues tribute album is very different from Hurt’s – more O Brother Where Art Thou, but a very fine version, nonetheless.

And it’s worth including this short video of John Oates telling the story of John Hurt’s guitar, which also features a version of Spike Driver’s Blues.

Finally, don’t miss this Mississippi John Hurt Documentary (20 mins)

Jimmy Carter and his Blind Faith is a ray of hope

“I have always wanted to help people. I hope this project will energize people and change lives. Where there is light, there is hope; and where there is hope, there is a chance.” Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter is the last original member of The Blind Boys of Alabama and, remarkably, at 87 has released his first solo album, Blind Faith. He told me he wants this album to be “a ray of hope and encouragement.”

And that it certainly is. In nine songs which encompass gospel, blues, country and roots music and yet cohere wonderfully, Jimmy Carter’s positive outlook on life and faith shine through. The music is great, the lyrics and inspirational and it’s one of the albums I’ve enjoyed listening to most this year.

The album was produced by Ron Pullman – multi-talented guitarist, songwriter, music business manager, writer and wood craftsman – who wrote most of the songs on the album, and who says, “I spent a lot time trying to understand what Jimmy wanted; the feel and message, and the overall sound.”

Guests on Blind Faith include Charlie Musselwhite, Alan Parsons, The Mendelson Choir of Pittsburgh and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. They all provide a suitable backdrop to Jimmy Carter’s distinctive and still-strong voice, which is the highlight of the album.

Jimmy Carter has been a member of The Blind Boys of Alabama for forty years and has sung for three presidents, won five Grammy Awards, been inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, and collaborated with a who’s who of the music industry, including Willie Nelson, Marc Cohn, Ben Harper, Peter Gabriel, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph…the list goes on.

Carter was there in 1939, one of the boys at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind, when the Blind Boys started out and began to play church engagements, but he was too young to join them on the road. He began singing with them in 1982 and has seen them become the world’s premier gospel group, legendary musicians and hugely respected far beyond the gospel genre.

I had the great pleasure of chatting to Jimmy Carter while ago (check it out), but was pleased to get the opportunity to speak to him again, specifically about this excellent album, along with Ron Pullman.

Jimmy was in fine form, having weathered the storm of the pandemic. “I’ve stayed well. I have all of my shots and I’m doing good.”

From the kick-off I knew this was going to be an enjoyable chat. Before long, Jimmy was joking that “it’s my first solo album and, I mean, I’m beginning to like it!” It helps, of course, that there’s been so much positive feedback for all sorts of quarters, especially ordinary listeners who are finding inspiration and encouragement in it.

Taking over the interview, Jimmy asked me, “what’s your favourite song?”

That’s a hard one, actually, given the quality to choose from. I mentioned Lord Take Me, a gently rocking Americana track, with some rootsy violin by Ryan Joseph and an oh-so-cool guitar solo. The song morphs beautifully into Swing Low Sweet Chariot with the added harmonies of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh. Then again, there’s I Love to Pray, written by Joey Williams, band leader of the Blind Boys of Alabama, which Carter puts across in a very personal way. Jimmy declares, “my faith is strong” and “if it gets rough, I start to pray.”

Jimmy Carter is a man who believes that God answers prayer, and he told me that “prayer is very important to me. When I pray, I think of the verse that says, the fervent prayer of a righteous man does much [James 5 v16]. If someone is connected with God, you can call him and he’ll hear you. That’s what I’ve been doing. I know what prayer will do. I know what God will do, and I know what Jimmy Carter’s going to do. He is going to stay right there with him.”

Talking of favourite songs on the album I wondered if Jimmy had one? “Yeah, I have one. I Am With You Still.”

This is a quite beautiful song, a tribute to Jimmy Carter’s old friend and fellow original Blind Boy, Clarence Fountain, whom we lost in 2018. The song features a choir of young people from the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and the Blind, the school which Jimmy attended when he was a boy.

There’s a great video for the song which shows the young people singing. Said Ron Pullman, “They got to go down and record in a real studio. They got the experience of going to the Sound of Birmingham Studio and it was just amazing.”

Ron went on to tell me that he and Jimmy had gone recently to visit the school again and brought signed CDs for all the students who had performed on the record.

“And it was most touching when Mr. Carter addressed these kids about how you have to stay fast to your faith. And, you know, the things that happened early in his life didn’t dissuade him – ‘I didn’t deviate from my faith!’ I could hear Jimmy calling out in the background – and he ended up performing for several white house presidential administrations and then on every major TV show. And of course, you’ve seen him perform many times around the world. So, it was a most inspiring speech Mr. Carter gave to the students yesterday. It was amazing. I got to tell you, it made me cry, Gary, because Mr. Carter was so inspiring.”

I Am With You Still is an incredibly powerful song about God’s presence with us. Jimmy told me that this is something that is very important to him.

“I was brought up in a Christian environment in my early life. My parents were Christian people, and they told me about God. They told me about Jesus and all of that. And then I had a personal experience with God – I have – and that built my faith. My faith is strong. That’s all I can say.”

The very personal nature of the record comes to a head in the final song, written by Joey Williams, Why Me. It’s a nice bluesy piece where we get some honest reflections on the fact of Jimmy Carter’s blindness.

Ron Pullman said, “In Why Me Jimmy starts out asking God, ‘Why me? Why was I blind? Because all my brothers were all healthy sighted individuals.’ But then at the end of the song, he’s saying to God, how could I have known that you would select me to do God’s work and would give me so many blessings.”

Jimmy added, in a remarkable testimony of faith, “Yeah. That’s what I felt. I felt that I was called to do what I’m doing. You know when I found out that all my brothers could see, except me, I felt all alone. I was blind, but God saw further down the road, he knew what he was going to do. He knew what he wanted me to do. Because I think if I had gotten my sight back, I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing now. He knew that that’s what I needed.”

Ron provided some detail about the recording of the song. “When we got into the studio with that song, we realized the third verse wasn’t written. And so we were trying to come up with writing a quick verse, and finally Jimmy says, how about I just go in there at the chorus and speak? And that’s what he did – we all got chills! And what you hear on the record is the very first take when Mr. Carter sat down in front of the mike and did it. I mean, we all got chills and it was a blessing right off the bat.

And the great Charlie Musselwhite plays on the song. And Peter Levin on Hammond B-3. Just so many people came together on that song to keep that bluesy, gospel feel. But I used to always say. blues is the cousin of the gospel. So we kept that real, real traditional.”

Photo: Charlie Hussey

There’s a great song on the album called Dream On, on which the Blind Boys provide the backing vocals. As I listened to it, I love the fact that Jimmy Carter is still talking about having dreams, even though he’s reached a ripe old age. It kind of follows up a line in the title track, Blind Faith, where Carter sings about following the light that God shined for him when he was a boy. He’s followed his dream all these years, despite the difficulties along the way, including his blindness. “Well, you know,” he told me, “I still have a dream and I’m still following it.”

To add to that, however, Ron Pullman said that “Mr. Carter has an amazing dream still, and that is for this album to bring peace and serenity to the world.” Most people at 87 have already kicked back and forgotten about the ills of the world, but Jimmy Carter’s not finished yet.

In addition, there’s one particular dream Jimmy mentioned to me, that he and Ron are currently working on. “There’s one special thing I want to do before I retire, I want to go and perform in Jerusalem on a Christmas Day. That’s my dream right now.”

It’s one thing to dream your dreams when life is easy. But as you look at Jimmy Carter’s life, for sure there’ve been hard times – not least growing up in the Jim Crow South and, of course, his blindness. He remains resolutely positive:

“Well, you know, that’s when my faith comes in. Like I told you before, I have had a personal experience with God. I know what he will do. I know what he has done and know what he will do. All he’s asking me is to keep the faith and I’m going to do that. My faith is very strong.”

This positivity shines through every song in the album. But it’s not positivity for the sake of it, some attempt to make the most of things. There’s an authenticity here, a sincerity and a joy which is just part of Jimmy Carter. He’s a man who has learned, like St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians, “to be content, no matter what happens to me” because of the “great joy of the Lord.”

Ron Pullman spoke movingly of the great blessing it has been for him “to be able to work with an icon like Mr. Carter. It’s just been a life changing experience.”

Blind Faith finds Jimmy Carter in strong voice and ever-hopeful spirit. Ron Pullman has done a fine job of arranging the songs and assembling the perfect set of musical contributors for each song. It’s an album that will appeal to a wide range of listeners and one which will inspire and speak to each one.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter, for your message of peace and encouragement in these dark times.

Great Blues Albums: Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues

“Mississippi John Hurt’s music is as fresh today as when he first recorded it in 1928”
Philip Ratcliffe, biographer.

Photo: Joe Alper

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings (Columbia/Legacy)

Mississippi John Hurt was known only to a small group of music aficionados outside the State where he lived for most of his life, until he was 71. What was known of him was the music on six 78rpm records made in 1928.

These songs we can now enjoy on Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings.

Born in 1892, John Hurt, whose parents were freed slaves, was the last of a large family of ten. His mother Mary Jane Hurt and her children moved to Avalon in Mississippi when John was a baby and he lived there for most of his life. He picked cotton for long hours when he was a child, but began playing the guitar when he was nine when his mother purchased his first guitar for $1.50 – a major purchase given that a day’s wages for black labourers was under a dollar. John referred to it as “Black Annie”, which he insisted was the brand name of the instrument, and he became an accomplished picker as a teenager, going on to play at local dances (never juke joints).

His guitar style became the inspiration for generations of acoustic guitar players, after his rediscovery in the early sixties after more than thirty years simply working as a farmer. Many of today’s professional artists started their journey of seriously studying guitar by learning the style of John Hurt.

For many, hearing him play for the first time, it sounds like there is more than one guitarist. He keeps a steady alternating bass going, combined with melodies and harmonies picked out on the treble stings, and throws in intricate hammer-ons and slides. Although he developed his guitar style around the same time as Mississippi bluesmen like Son House or Charlie Patton, his more constrained and relaxed approach is far removed from theirs.

There are some similarities between Hurt’s style and the Piedmont style of picking characteristic of musicians like Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker from North Carolina, or John Cephas from Virginia. But his friend Jerry Ricks didn’t think John had ever heard any of these musicians and we can’t be sure how he developed what is a very characteristic style. You just know who it is within a couple of bars of any song he’s performing, and you know if anyone is playing in his style.

By all accounts, John was a lovely man, easy-going and friendly, with a gentle smile. He was a great story teller and very humorous, and his deep religious faith was a strong foundation in his life, particularly in later years. His granddaughter, Mary Frances Hurt Wright, said, “My Daddy John had a supernatural spirit that had a far greater effect on people than his music alone.

“I can still visualize Daddy John playing on the dusty circle drawn stage of our front yard, totally absorbed in his music. While the people clapped and stomped their feet in agreement with the music, Daddy John’s smile would widen like a stone thrown in a pond.”

And Larry Hoffman, musician and author, said of him: “It seems as if this gentleman was to enrich every life he touched…His great kindness, generosity and gentle spirit has made him a folk legend, and we remember and treasure him through his music – the loving spirit that flows through time and the generations as does his unforgettable music.”

By the early 1920s, John had teamed up with a white fiddle player, Willie Narmour, to play at local dances, with a repertoire that included blues, spirituals, ballads, and ragtime tunes.

Narmour was picked to record after a fiddle contest by visiting Okeh agents. He then introduced them to Hurt, who agreed to go to Memphis to record. Ten months later, at the age of 35, he was asked to come to New York to record some more. Here he recorded some twenty songs, from which 6 records were released (12 sides in all). John was paid $240. Another song, Big Leg Blues was released at a later date and is included in The Complete Okeh record.

The 13 songs on the album feature simply John singing in his laid-back manner and playing his guitar in his iconic style. The album contains a number of his most famous songs like Frankie, Candy Man, Louis Collins and Stack O’Lee, as well as a couple of spirituals, Blessed Be the Name and Praying on that Old Camp Ground. It’s a glorious mixture of murder songs, blues, and Christian songs, all delivered with good humour, fine musicianship and considerable style.

The album opens up with Frankie, written by Bill Dooley from St Louis in 1899, about an event said to have taken place in a St Louis bar room in the 1890s. “Good girl” Frankie Baker shot and killed Allen (Albert) Britt, a ragtime pianist, for his infidelity with Alice Pryar. “He was my man, and he done me wrong.”

John Hurt’s Stack O’Lee Blues – variously known as Stagolee, Stackalee, Staggerlee – is probably the definitive version of the countless recorded versions of the tune. John explained the background to the song to Tom Hoskins in 1963, as he also does in his introduction to the song on the Mississippi John Hurt: Legend album.

Hurt said that Stackolee and Billy Lyons were white men and the fight took place down in a mine where Stackolee was aiming to rob the miners who were gambling. Jesse James, claimed Hurt, accompanied Stackolee, and also shot one of the miners,. I’m not sure how that exactly tallies with the confrontation in the song about the stealing of Stacklolee’s “ten-dollar Stetson hat.” But the story in the song seems to stand by itself anyway, and it rips along nicely, driven by Hurt’s rapid and rhythmic guitar picking.

Louis Collins was written by John Hurt about a real event. His friend Jerry Ricks reckoned it was about a cousin of John’s, but Hurt himself said it had happened in Memphis. Collins, Hurt said, “was a great man. I know that, and he was killed by two men named Bob and Louis. I got enough of the story to write the song,”

The two Louises in the song had me confused every time I listened to it until I heard John Hurt’s explanation. First, Mrs Collins is weeping “to see her son Louis leaving home” to go to “the old graveyard” after his killing, But in the verse that accounts for Louis’s death, we get, “Bob shot once and Louis shot two, shot poor Louis, shot him through and through.” So, it seems, there were two Louises, one shooter and one shot. Somehow, once again, the violence of the song is counterbalanced by Hurt’s gentle singing and nifty guitar work.

Candy Man, a song full of gleeful sexual innuendo was written by Hurt on the way to New York City for the Okeh sessions. He recalled having written it in pencil and that the lyrics were typed up for him at the recording studio. The comedy in the song is accented by Hurt’s seemingly innocent vocals which accentuate the song’s comic effect perfectly. As one writer put it, he sounds so kind and sincere that you can almost convince yourself that he doesn’t actually mean anything sexually suggestive at all!

Avalon Blues was also written on this New Trip trip, a nostalgic yearning for John’s home town – “Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind.” The bright lights of New York city might be attractive – “New York’s a good town but it’s not for mine,” but it’s nothing compared to Avalon and his “pretty mama.”

Okeh never called on John to record again.  The 1930s saw economic collapse and the Great Depression, and along with that a record sales slump. Hurt’s Okeh recordings were unlike anything else recorded at the time and didn’t translate into big sales. He retreated into rural Mississippi life and obscurity.

If was only after producer Harry Everett Smith included some of those old recordings on the Anthology of American Folk Music, which led Tom Hoskins and Mike Stewart to track Hurt down in 1963, that John Hurt was to have a proper music career, playing universities, coffee houses and the 1963 Newport Music Festival.

Alas, it was short lived, with Hurt passing away in 1967. It was enough, however, to make him one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century.

Mississippi John Hurt remains an iconic figure in the country blues. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1990, and continues to inspire new generations of guitarists, and his gentle spirit lives on in his music – these Okeh recordings, after nearly a hundred years, still sound great and have a great attractive charm.

Check out Philip R. Ratcliffe’s detailed biography

These tribute albums are also worth listening to:

The story of John Hurt’s Guitar – John Oates

Mississippi John Hurt Documentary

Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His times, His Blues, by Philip R. Ratcliffe

Eric Bibb: “Everything can change, if we believe”

Photo: Michael Wall

Eric Bibb – blues troubadour, global griot, as a recent album has it, whose music always seems to arrive at the Needed Time – considers his Dear America album to be his finest work yet.

Bibb, originally from New York, but now resident in Sweden, has been delighting audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for more years than he cares to remember, with his finely honed guitar picking, his honeyed vocals, his good humour and all-round positive vibe. No matter what sort of day you’ve had, when you go to an Eric Bibb gig, the weight of the world disappears and you’ll find yourself with a smile on your face that doesn’t go away for a week.

He’s a Grammy nominated, Blues Music Award winning song-writer and performing artist who is very much at the top of his game, as is evidenced by Dear America, which he says is “a love letter, because America, for all of its associations with pain and its bloody history, has always been a place of incredible hope and optimism.” On this record, he says, “I’m saying all the things I would want to say to somebody dear to me.”

Thanks to the wonders of Zoom, I got chatting to Eric at his home on a farm south of Stockholm where he has spent the last 18 months, like the rest of us, keeping safe. He has, however, been able to work online, performing and giving guitar lessons – “I haven’t suffered like many of my colleagues, so I feel quite, quite blessed.”

I asked him, first of all, about the making of the album and his musical collaborators and guests. He told me that, although he’s proud of the body of work he’s created in the past, both he and his producer, Glen Scott, who has worked with him on many previous projects, agree that “this is our best work.”

The album, on the Provogue label, features a number of well-known guest artists, the result of Scott’s vision, who had said to Eric a while back, “Eric, one day, we’re just going to go to New York and you’re going to have like the best rhythm section in the world, and we’re going to cut some tracks.”

So, the album features top notch players like Steve Jordan on drums, who has worked extensively with Keith Richards and John Mayer, Tommy Sims on bass, “a great musician all around, but amazing bass player and singer and guitar player, who’s worked with everybody from Bonnie Raitt to Bruce Springsteen,” Chuck Campbell of the Campbell Brothers who plays lap steel guitar on Different Picture, Billy Branch on harmonica, and Ron Carter, again on bass.

Of the legendary Ron Carter – the most recorded jazz bassist in history – Eric talked about the first time he’d played with him more than fifty years ago, as a young man of sixteen.

“He was the bass player who had the bass chair on my dad’s television show in the late sixties. My dad [Leon Bibb, the renown folk singer, actor and civil rights activist] had a TV show called Someone New that featured young talent – nine-year-old Yo Yo Ma was on that show. I was sixteen years old and my dad put me in the guitar player’s chair. It was the first time I was in a completely over my head situation. I had to get a union card and there I was with Ron Carter playing bass and I’m trying to read the chart! So it was an amazing reconnection with him.”

Other guests include Lisa Mills, who duets on the album’s last song, the exquisitely beautiful Oneness of Love, and Shaneeka Simon, a gospel singer from the UK – “just a gem of a musician, a great singer, a fine person” – who makes a telling contribution on Born of a Woman.

The songs on the album are quite bluesy both musically and lyrically. None more so than Whole World’s Got the Blues, which bemoans the state of the world – “everywhere you turn you’re looking at sad, sad news.” The song is taken to a new dimension by the appearance of Eric Gales’s guitar, which weaves in and out of Bibb’s lyrics and then breaks into its own protesting, moaning solo, echoing eloquently the sombre message of the song.

“Eric Gales – his palette is so huge, and when it comes to blues, he’s the epitome of the best of old school and modern sensibilities. He’s in a class all by himself and also a fine person to work with, to vibe off. Because he’s spontaneous, straightforward, honest, you know, a heart open-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. I met him on a Joe Bonamassa blues cruise and Ulrika [Bibb’s wife] caught him on film, kind of dancing to a song during my set. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a good sign.’ And then I heard him and I was completely blown away, so I went up to him said, ‘listen, would you guest on my album if I could make the thing happen?’ And he said, ‘it’s going to happen’!

Dear America is a collection of thirteen Eric Bibb originals, all testament to his outstanding song-writing skill, ear for a good tune and top-notch guitar chops, but what makes Dear America such a great album – and an important album – is not just the music but the nuanced social commentary and challenge he presents.

Dear America addresses the troubled racial history of the United States and what is still, sadly, going on. A number of the songs are quite explicit and quite hard hitting. In White and Black, he highlights the “crooked thinking, white is good, black is bad”; in Dear America, “on the one hand to be called your citizen, on the other to be excluded because of the colour of my skin”; and in Different Picture, the repetitive nature of America’s racial problems are firmly in view.

I wondered how important it was for Eric to make this record, to say the sort of things that he’s saying here and to ask the sort of questions he poses.

“I think the whole world has been preoccupied with current events in America for some time – the whole Trump era unleashed a lot of monsters that we’ve been trying, as a collective people, to sweep under the carpet. I think that, with that, and with events like the George Floyd murder and so on, things just seem to be coming to a head.

“And it was like everything was conspiring to make the world pay attention to these issues in a new way. This was borne out by the fact that so many young people ended up becoming involved, and not only African-Americans, but others with the whole Black Lives Matter movement. And, you know, this is ongoing. It’s not new, but it’s certainly more in our face than ever before.

“I was very aware going into this project that we were dealing with very uncomfortable issues. But to pretend that it doesn’t exist or minimize its impact on our lives is to end up being much more uncomfortable. And I think the more we understand that, the better off we’ll be. So, I knew I wanted to say something about all of this and say it from a perspective of an American living outside of America.”

One of the very sobering songs on the album is Emmett’s Ghost. The gentle, almost cheery finger-picked guitar introduction belies the dreadful historical event the song refers to. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955, who was falsely accused of offending a white woman and then brutally lynched, before his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Outrageously, his murderers were acquitted, but Emmet Till became an iconic figure in the Civil Rights movement.

Bibb sings about his own experience of coming to know about Emmet Till as a boy himself, of coming to realize “from that day on, some hated my kind.” Sadly, this is not just an event from the past – Emmet Till’s ghost still haunts America, “we can’t move on because hate’s still going strong all over this country.”

Events like this still clearly reverberate; another recent blues album, Guy Davis’s Be Ready When I Call You, shines a light on the appalling Tulsa Massacre of 1921 [see our interview with Guy here]. I asked Eric if America has really come to terms with its past, with the brutality and inhumanity of events like these?

“Well, the hatred mentioned in the song refrain is still going on, and one of the reasons for that is because it’s never been properly acknowledged, it’s never been properly taught about in schools. It’s that part of American history that has often been whitewashed. There are people who told me – and I’m talking about educated people, man – they had never heard of this story.

“But African-Americans have been aware of it because it was pivotal in the history of the whole Civil Rights movement. But the number of people who were unaware of this story was quite shocking to me. Emmet was 1955, half a century ago or longer. The George Floyd murder, for example, to me was a very palpable reverberation of the same energy, the same attitudes.

“The fact that the guys who perpetrated the Emmett Till murder got off, the fact that the policemen who murdered George Floyd didn’t get off, tells me something about the evolution of consciousness and that we’re growing. And I also found out the Emmett Till case has been reopened and in absentia could possibly get a guilty verdict. [This Guardian article reviews the re-opening of the case.]

“So, as uncomfortable with this history is, as long as it’s taken to even get to this point and, let’s face it, these are what seem like minimal steps forward, I have a feeling that the process is accelerating.

“And I think being in a position to add my voice to this ongoing conversation is really good for me because this is what I do. I’m a troubadour who is aware of my surroundings and the world that I live in. And if there’s any way this troubadour can influence a conversation and perhaps promote change, that’s good.”

Although Dear America addresses some serious issues, Eric wanted to make clear that “this is not a protest album.” Growing up in the ‘60s in New York, with a father like Leon Bibb, Eric was well acquainted with folk protest songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. And so, although he never considered himself an artist in that vein, “it was impossible for me to not take on board in my songwriting all of these things. It was just impossible.”

“I consider myself some kind of storyteller. Who’s got something to say, with a history that gives me a platform for speaking out and being a voice for promoting certain kinds of conversations that will hopefully lead to change. That’s part of my chameleon background. But I also wanted it just to be a groovy album, you know, that people would get into. I didn’t want to just be on a soap box. So that was in itself challenging, but I think I had help from above in pulling it off, you know?”

That’s a delicate balance to achieve, but I think he has, indeed, pulled it off. Because, like every Eric Bibb album you listen to, there’s a thread of hope and joy that comes through very strongly. And the music is great.

Photo: Michael Wall

I did want to ask him about one other song on the album, which I think is a hugely important one. Born of a Woman, which features Shaneeka Simon, addresses the tsunami of violence against women all over the world.

“Yes, I’m very glad that song came to me because I want to weigh in on this and basically draw attention to something that is really, as you say, global and alarming, to say the least.

“Again, to me it is indicative of the fact that we’re in a time right now, where it seems that all of the issues or whatever trauma that is holding the human community back from becoming this loving family – the misogyny, racism, all of that – seems to just being pushed to the front of our awareness in dramatic ways, and people are taking sides.

“And young people, fortunately, are kind of getting it and stepping up in more numbers than ever before. But the pushback is also quite intense right now, there are people who are really resistant to looking at all of this and coming to terms with it.”

While Eric, rightly, points to the hope lying in the younger generation, a thread of hope is never far away in an Eric Bibb album. Take the first song, Whole Lotta Lovin’, where we find Eric giving thanks for the simple things in life. “A whole lot of thank you, Lord, for all you provide.” It’s a wonderful way to start the album and we get threads of this thankful attitude right the way through. I wondered how important gratitude is to him and how important gratitude is in the midst of all the difficulties we’ve be talking about?

“It’s essential to me personally, and I think it’s an essential attitude and emotion for the healing of all of us. I’ve written a couple of songs, even one with the title Gratitude [On Roadworks, 1999]. It’s central to my way of going forth in the world. And it’s really helped me, I think. Without that the possibility of tipping over into the lane of cynicism and bitterness is quite huge. So that’s the antidote to that.

“And it’s funny, you mentioned the first song. This album is called Dear America and I call it a love letter. If I can think of one or two things about the American experience – speaking personally, but I think it’s also a universal feeling – it would be the food and the music, you know, because there’s something poetically and cosmically fitting about a music that spans so many different kinds of expressions – jazz, calypso, blues, gospel, whatever, music born of a history and a people who have been really hard done by. And this fascinates me.

Photo: Michael Wall

“It’s like, it tells me something about the creator. Giving the gift of a certain kind of irresistible music that not only makes the whole world joyful, but makes whole world connected in its love of it, makes the whole world want to play it, sing it, understand it, know about it.

The fact of where it’s come from is a beautiful, beautiful comment on life in general. And I want to make it clear that this gift from the African-American tribe to the world, that has basically brought so many people together in so many ways, is the way I want to think about America when I think about what’s great about it, you know, what it’s given us. And I wanted to start there because I knew I had to go other places, but I really wanted to start there. And I’m glad you mention that.”

In similar vein, Love’s Kingdom, strikes that same note of hope and thankfulness – “Everything can change, if we believe,” and “Let’s start with being grateful for being alive.” There’s a defiant hope here against all the darkness, hope which almost goes against the grain.

“That song, really, I guess you could say, summarizes my philosophy. I really think at the end of the day this is the way. And I think it’s not a simple path, getting there is not simple, but it is a simple solution. Making that decision to step into Love’s Kingdom, to basically really follow the great teachings of all the great teachers, whoever you want to follow, that was the message. And we have that possibility and I just felt like saying it as simply as that – if we can step into Love’s Kingdom, you know, turn it over and really trust in some kind of loving higher power, however you want to frame it or put it into words.”

It’s a fabulous song, though not a typical Eric Bibb arrangement. A collaboration between Eric, Glen Scott and Tommy Sims, it’s got a kind of retro soul feel to it, which lifts you up and carries you along. Right into the closing song, Oneness of Love, a beautiful, gentle song, with a simple accompaniment, graced by the sweet voice of Lisa Mills added to Bibb’s own. It’s a fitting way to complete the album, where a letter that is painfully honest, but never hopeless or cynical, is sandwiched between notes of thankfulness, hope and love at the beginning and end.

Eric Bibb’s is a voice we need to hear. In a world where there’s so much aggression and hatred, a voice for peace, for unity, for humanity is one that needs to be heard. And Dear America is especially timely – shining a light on much of what is pulling people apart and giving rise to bitterness and division, but never giving up on the possibilities that love can bring.

[See our extended comment on Born of a Woman here]

Great Blues Albums: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan made a big impact in what was a short career, sadly dying in a helicopter crash in 1990, after featuring in a concert along with his elder brother Jimmie, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray.

Despite living only long enough to produce six studio albums (two released posthumously), he breathed new life into the blues rock genre and left a lasting mark as a guitarist who has inspired subsequent generations. Vaughan drew his inspiration from the pantheon of great blues guitarists, like the three Kings, Albert Collins, T-Bone Walker, and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

“I started out,” he said, “trying to copy licks from Lonnie Mack records. He was a really big influence for me. And my older brother Jimmie used to bring home records by B.B. and Albert King, Albert Collins and guys like Hubert Sumlin, Buddy Guy – all of ’em.”

He was able to synthesize all these influences into his own unique style rooted in blues, rock, and jazz, but yet was clearly in the tradition of the great Texas bluesmen. John Hammond (Sr.) said of him, “Stevie is in that great Texas tradition of T-Bone Walker. It’s a wonderful tradition. T-Bone, who I first saw back in 1936, used to do what Stevie does now – play the guitar behind his neck and everything else.”

Although, refreshingly at that time in the early 80s, Vaughan eschewed technological musical wizardly, dry ice, fog and lasers, stripping the music back to its essentials of guitar, bass and drums, he was an extravagant on-stage showman, with his distinctive Tex-Mex bandido get-up and pained guitar-solo face. But it was his virtuosic guitar playing that rightly endeared him to fans, both during his life-time and after.

Texas Flood was the debut studio album by Vaughan and his Double Trouble band mates, Tommy Shannon on bass and Chris Layton on drums. Released on June 13, 1983 by Epic Records, the album took its name from one of the record’s songs, first recorded by  Larry Davis in 1958. There are ten songs on the original release, with six written by Vaughan. The CD version released in 1999 added 5 more songs.

Jackson Browne had seen and been impressed with the band when it played the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1982. After taking up Browne’s offer of some days of free use of his own recording studio in LA, the band recorded a demo which caught the attention of John H. Hammond and landed them a recording contract with Epic Records. Texas Flood was the first album made, recorded in the space of three days again at Jackson Browne’s studio.

The album garnered Grammy Award nominations – the album for Best Traditional Blues Performance, and the song Rude Mood for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Critical reception was generally excellent, with Stephen Thomas Erlewine describing it as having a “monumental impact” and suggesting it “sparked a revitalization of the blues.” Texas Monthly called Vaughan “the most exciting guitarist to come out of Texas since Johnny Winter,” although Winter himself was less than positive, saying that he thought Vaughan didn’t have a distinctive style.

There’s no doubt about Texas Flood’s success, however – the album went to #38 on the Billboard 200 chart and went platinum in Canada and double-platinum in the United States, selling over 2,000,000 units. It became a 2021 inductee into the Grammy Hall of Fame in recognition of its historical significance.

The album kicks off with some rockin’ rock’n’roll with Love Struck Baby and you’re hooked straightaway. Before you’ve time to catch your breath, we’re into one of Vaughan’s signature tunes, Pride and Joy, showcasing his fine songwriting and, of course, his guitar chops.

Photo: Marty Lederhandler

The title track is up next, slower in tempo, but the guitar work no less fiery and emotional. This is old school blues, but it’s got a characteristic SRV stamp on it. As well as Vaughan originals, the album has a Howling Wolf song, Tell Me, driven now by Vaughan’s urgent guitar rather than the piano of the original, and a little more up tempo.

Oddly, Vaughan includes a children’s nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb, now transported into a blues setting but it’s largely an opportunity for Vaughan’s guitar soloing. We get a couple of instrumentals, too, in Lenny, a slow, shimmering electric guitar exercise, and Testify, with Vaughan going at break-neck speed up and down the fretboard.

For the most part, it’s breath-taking, toe-tapping (or dancing if you’re so inclined) stuff, all Texas brashness and explosive energy. No wonder it went down a storm and put Stevie Ray Vaughan on the map.

He was the victim of his own success, sadly, descending further into the drugs and alcohol addiction that nearly claimed his life before he managed to get clean and begin touring again in 1986.

He recorded his fourth album, In Step, with Double Trouble in 1989 – “I’m finally in step with life,” he said, “in step with myself, in step with my music.” That was to be Vaughan’s last recording – tragically, he was killed in a helicopter crash with four others in August 1990. A huge loss to his family, but also to the wider music and blues world. Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker dedicated their next albums to his memory.

Track list:

Love Struck Baby
Pride and Joy
Texas Flood
Testify
Rude Mood
Mary Had a Little Lamb
Dirty Pool I’m Cryin’

Great Blues Albums: Eric Clapton, Unplugged

Eric Clapton was once “god,” the best rock and blues guitarist on the planet, adored by fans of his time with John Mayall, Cream, Derek and the Dominos and then his solo career.

Now, aside from the recent nonsense of joining in with Van Morrison in a petulant wail against pandemic restrictions, and touting unscientific and dangerous claims about fertility against vaccines, he is a figure who seems to divide blues fans.

This is clear whenever you see something about him posted on blues-related social media – the negative reaction can be visceral. There’ll be those who won’t even bother to read this article and will simply react to the mere suggestion that Clapton’s Unplugged could be a classic blues album.

Others will take a more considered approach to Clapton, understanding his lifelong obsession with the blues and the contribution he made to the genre during the 1960s when the genre was in steep decline in the United States because of the rise of pop, rock’n’roll, soul and R&B. That was B.B. King’s view, who said that he and Clapton had been friends since they met in the 60s and that Clapton “plays blues better than most of us.”

The album the two made in 2000, Riding with the King, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues album, shows two men in love with the blues, their music making flowing effortlessly off each other. And, of course, the admiration was not one way, Clapton thanking King “for all the inspiration and encouragement he gave to me as a player over the years,” and hailing Live at the Regal as the album which got him started with the blues.

Clapton was also very close with Muddy Waters, whom he described as “the father figure I never really had” and his greatest influence. His playing was also deeply influenced by Robert Johnson, who amazed him with his guitar chops and singing. “There were very few people on record who sounded like they were singing from the heart,” said Clapton, “there’s no comparison, this guy’s got finesse. His touch was extraordinary. Which is amazing in light of the fact that he was simultaneously singing with such intensity.” Clapton’s 2004 album, Me and Mr Johnson plays tribute to his lifelong fascination with Johnson.

So, given the association Clapton has had over the years with the greats in the blues Pantheon and their high opinion of his blues contribution, it’s hard to understand how he gets dismissed so readily by some blues fans. Clapton himself has said of his commitment to the blues, “I recognise that I have some responsibility to keep the music alive.”

All that said, on to Unplugged as one of our “Great Blues Albums.”

Playing his Martin 000-42 acoustic guitars, and accompanied by a small group of musicians, including Andy Fairweather Low and Chuck Leavell, Clapton performed the songs for a small audience in England in 1992 at a particularly emotional time for him. His four-year-old son Conor had died four months previously after falling from his 53rd floor apartment. Tears in Heaven – clearly not a blues song in form, but arguably in content – was one of the fourteen songs on the original album, which became 20 in the 2013 remastered version.

The album won three Grammys at the 1991 awards and became the bestselling live album of all time, and Clapton’s bestselling album, selling 26 million copies worldwide. It was released in August 1992 to wide critical acclaim and revitalized Clapton’s career.

The bulk of the setlist consists of traditional blues, including Big Bill Broonzy’s Hey Hey, Robert Johnson’s Malted Milk and Son House’s Walkin’ Blues. Songs from Jimmy Cos, Lead Belly, Muddy Water, Bo Didley, and Robert Cray, along with a couple of Clapton originals complete the set. One of these is an acoustic version of Layla which works surprisingly well.

Clapton breathes new life into these songs – his version of Jimmy Cox’s depression era song Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out has become something of a definitive version, his Walkin’ Blues with its cool slide guitar recalls Robert Johnson’s version, and Muddy Waters Rollin’ and Tumblin’ still rocks as an acoustic number.

Although the blues songs here are all cover versions of old blues songs, aside from the fact that the album just sounds so good, the significance of the album is the effect it has had on acoustic blues music. Subsequent to Unplugged, during the 1990s, you see artists like Keb’ Mo’, Kelly Joe Phelps, Eric Bibb, Rory Block and Guy Davis all seeming to come to prominence. For sure, these and other great artists whose music was based on acoustic guitar had been plying their trade for some time before that – some for a long time, reaching back to the 60s – and had a loyal following. But Clapton’s Unplugged brought blues music – and acoustic blues – to a much wider audience and got a new generation of fans interested in these other artists and then also beginning to listen to the original artists as well.

Testimony to that is conversations I’ve had recently with professional acoustic artists who hail Unplugged as being formative in their awakening to the blues.

Plus, Unplugged stands the test of time. It’s an album anyone can listen to and hear a modern interpretation of the blues that is not dated and is hugely enjoyable. Purists may prefer that everyone listens to Lead Belly or Bill Broonzy, but for everyone else, Eric Clapton’s Unplugged is their way into appreciating the blues.

The Unique Talent that is Mark Harrison

“Rapidly becoming a British national treasure.” Blues Blast Magazine

Mark Harrison’s sixth album, The Road to Liberty, showcases his adept story-telling and clever lyrics, his knack for composing a catchy tune, and his never-less-than-engaging performance as a singer and guitarist. He’s hard to pigeon-hole, not quite blues, but blues never far away, somewhere in the folk-blues-country continuum.

That’s not a bad thing, given the unique talent that he is, able to write songs that transport you to another place, to make you contemplate the world around and, as well as that – most importantly – to entertain you.

Harrison is an English singer songwriter, who plays a nifty acoustic guitar, who has been delighting audiences over the last ten years with his carefully crafted songs and witty banter. He was a late starter as a professional musician, not picking up a guitar and singing until his fifth decade, but he’s made up for lost time, touring the country and supporting such artists as The Holmes Brothers and Doug MacLeod, along with major festival and radio appearances. He’s also released now six albums, all of which have been eagerly received and critically acclaimed. If you haven’t come across him as yet – put that right straight away and grab yourself a CD or download.

You could start with The Road to Liberty, a double album of 21 songs, featuring Harrison and his two bandmates, Charles Benfield on double bass and Ben Welburn on drums and percussion.

I got chatting to Mark about the new album and his musical journey. His previous albums, he told me, had been the “standard studio procedure of layer upon layer,” but that the band had felt that this album ought to reflect much more Mark’s live performances – “this business of singing your songs, standing up in a booth with headphones on, when do you ever do that in real life?”

A double album is a little unusual these days, and I wondered how that had come about. Mark said that he’d a lot of songs in the bank, so to speak, and, although he thought they’d only choose the standard 12 or 13 songs, the band like the lot of them, “so we thought, well, let’s just record them all. So, I’ve actually cleaned out everything I’ve got now!”

I remarked on the quality of the album’s cover and artwork – so often you get flimsy, pared back packaging these days and you wonder why you didn’t just buy the download. The Road to Liberty, however, feels quite luxurious.

“Well, it’s Andy Hall, who’s done everything for me from the very beginning. He and Rick, his business partner, ran a website called Blues in London when I got started, which was a sort of central thing for the blues scene in London. That’s how I met them, doing jams down at the Green Note in Camden. So when it came to do my first album, they said they’d like to do the cover. And so, it’s gone on from there and Andy does really wonderful things that make everything look great.”

The album has more of a band feel about it than some of Harrison’s previous albums. Charles Benfield and Ben Welburn, Mark’s two band members, are very talented musicians, whom he met on the blues jam scene at the very beginning of his career. They’ve been playing as a settled trio since around 2017, and sound a very solid and tight little outfit.

Mark does some solo gigs as well, depending on the venue and the promoter’s budget, but increasingly, it’s the trio. “I’d say it’s more fun when it’s the three of us.”

The album’s title, The Road to Liberty, is intriguing and one reviewer rather poetically suggested that it describes a “set of observations set to the heartbeat of humanity which exemplify the struggle of narrative freedom being taken seriously.” The phrase occurs in the song Restless Mind, a clever, jaunty number, with the band in full flight, which takes an ironic look at what happens when you let your mind become too restless.

“Well, I always take a phrase from a song, not a song title. So all the albums have a phrase or a word that is in one of the songs as the title of the album. I felt that I wanted a title that reflected some upbeat message because, in my opinion, the music generally speaking has an upbeat message in the words, even if it might not appear that at first glance.”

For sure, the tunes in the album are very upbeat, very optimistic sounding. At times they almost seem to belie the lyrics, a deliberate ploy by Harrison: “I’ve always felt that the music itself is uplifting or is meant to be, so you have perhaps a contrast between what is often a jolly tune, with what might be called slightly acerbic lyrics. And I think that’s probably where I’m at.”

As you listen to the songs, you’ll find yourself in turns amused, intrigued and puzzled. I asked Mark about one song in particular, which is great fun and had piqued my curiosity, Don’t Let the Crazy Out of the Bag (Too Soon).

“A woman friend told me a little while ago that if she was in a successful relationship that was going well, she would often find that the worst possible thing she could say would pop into her mind. And yet knowing that, she would find herself saying it! And then there came a point where she got engaged. But later I noticed on social media that she was no longer engaged. So I asked her about it. And she wrote, ‘I think I let the crazy out of the bag too soon.’

“And that one does have a happy ending by the way! It’s like a lot of things, you come across a phrase and you think it has a much more general application perhaps than the context in which you’ve heard it. And so, as well as that being a bit of fun, I thought that was a suitable subject for a song.”

Mark Harrison’s songs typically address a wide variety of situations and snapshots of life – on this album, you’ll find a song about the life of Skip James, Skip’s Song, a song about working in a factory in an economic downturn, Toolmaker’s Blues, and one about a poor guy on trial before the judge, All Rise. As you listen to this set of all-original songs, you can’t help but pick up echoes of blues music. Harrison plays a National resonator and has a cool kind of bluesy, picking style. You might expect him to throw in a few old blues songs, but that tends not to be what he does.

Mark told me that when he first got started, he tried to work out a few old blues tunes on the guitar, but found he couldn’t do it. The second song on the album, Everybody Knows, is a nice guitar-driven song in a Mississippi John Hurt style, but Mark said it was actually the first song he wrote using the 12-string and he had thought at the time he was working out Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues. “So the short answer is, I don’t do covers of them because I’m not capable!” (Unlikely, Mark is an accomplished guitarist.)

Mark’s back story as a musician is a remarkable one. He’d played guitar seriously in his youth, but only returned to it much later in life, about eleven years ago.

“I got this guitar shortly before I started in 2010. And that transformed everything. I had absolutely no intentions at all of launching it into anything. I didn’t expect to make an album or do a gig, and so for a little while, I just went and played a little bit at jams and it was a social thing. But the London blues jam scene is pretty good – a bunch of really good people and very high standards. So then, I’d written some songs and I thought I’d commit them to posterity and that was the first album [the acclaimed Watching the Parade]. I had no inkling of what would happen. It sounded okay to me. I put it out there a little bit cautiously and I got a few gigs and it built from there. So it’s a rare case of something in life that’s just taken on its own momentum. And it hasn’t been a big struggle!

“One of the advantages of the changes in society in my lifetime is that it doesn’t matter what age you are with music. In fact, the acts most likely to sell tickets and do main stage at festivals probably have an average age that’s pushing 70! Most theatre listings of music and festivals are all about nostalgia. So, the idea that you couldn’t be doing this at a relatively older age, that doesn’t exist. Which is pretty good.

“And people with my musical background would tend to be what you call old school, which is that you’re not going to go out there and inflict yourself on people then unless you’ve worked out something that’s of a really high level professionally. So I carry that sort of attitude with me.”

We chatted a bit about the economics of being a musician and how embarking on a career or going out as a professional musician is a pretty uncertain enterprise.

“It’s pretty obvious to anyone involved that the demise of recorded music as a commercial enterprise has had an enormous effect. In the past you could shift a lot of albums, but by the time I got started, that ship had sailed. So you need to form your plans realistically with that in mind. I do really pretty well for someone that wasn’t established many years ago. But in terms of making money, nobody is.

“I used to listen to radio when there were a limited number of radio shows and I would buy albums straight off hearing people on, say, the Paul Jones show and others. Now I’ve been on those shows subsequently, and I think in the past, if you got played there, let alone did a session, like we have, that would have led to very significant sales of your albums. But these days it doesn’t. So there’s no point complaining about that. That had already kicked him by the time I got going. So it’s a question of understanding the environment you’re operating in and being realistic. There’s no point being in music if you’re going to complain about not being famous.

“For me, it’s going out and playing, the audiences, the people that come up and talk to you, the places that you go, the experiences that you have.”

Part of Mark’s story is acquiring a guitar previously owned by Eric Bibb, whom he admires a great deal.

“I started to listen to music again about 2000 after a long time of not listening to anything. I saw in the gig listing of one of the papers, “Eric Bibb, Sublime Bluesman.” I thought, I didn’t know there were any sublime bluesmen still alive. So, I went to see him several times and I thought what he was doing was great. And it showed you that you could get a really great big sound with a band that had an acoustic guitar leading it, not an electric guitar and someone pulling faces.

“Years later, I went to a shop in London – it doesn’t exist anymore – The London Resonator Centre and I thought I’d buy one of these guitars. They got me trying out some of the new Nationals, which are great. And then the guy running the shop said, ‘Ah, the way you play, you might like this that’s just come in.’ And he said that Eric Bibb had just brought it in. So I ended up getting that and subsequently I’ve met Eric numerous times, and he always hails me whenever I go to one of his gigs – “Mark!” from across the room.”

If you like acoustic blues music, you’re almost bound to appreciate Mark Harrison, even though his music can’t be pinned down to simply that genre.

“I think that I’m in the tradition of those guys that called themselves songsters. Back in the twenties and thirties, they would do a whole variety of stuff. I mean, if you listen to the full output of Robert Johnson, very little of it, actually, is what would now be called blues. Variety and entertainment were the key factors. So I’m in that tradition.

Entertainment is certainly what you get with a Mark Harrison performance and with a Mark Harrison album. But it’s not just entertainment. He’s a thoughtful artist who appraises life’s peaks and valleys and converts this into stories with wry and incisive lyrics, but never short of compassion. He’s a unique talent and one you ought to be familiar with.