“Blues!”
has been offering a variety of blues music shows on the Edinburgh Fringe for a
few years now, but Roots Of The Blues
is a new addition to the family. Hosted
by Toby Mottershead from Edinburgh blues outfit The Black Diamond Express, it’s
a little gem of a one-man acoustic show, in an intimate studio setting.
Presenting
a selection of songs from some of the early blues masters, with a few
curveballs thrown in for good measure, Mottershead’s love for the music shines
through. He’s knowledgeable, witty, and
sensitive to the material – and that’s just his between songs chat.
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| Toby Mottershead - fingerpickin' good
Pic courtesy of Stuart Stott
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He starts
the proceedings with an a capella version of Dillard Chandler’s ‘Short Time
Here, Long Time Gone’, an Appalachian ballad that demonstrates he doesn’t feel
constrained by narrow-minded definitions of the blues – and also shows off his
strong voice. Then he picks up his Dobro
and sets off into slide guitar territory, opening up with Blind Willie
Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground’, a song famously included on
an album of music played on the Voyager spacecraft, and a excellent
introduction to Mottershead’s great fingerpicking. He segues it into a variant of ‘Rollin’ and
Tumblin’’, and it’s interesting to follow the rhythm in a solo version of
something that would often feature a distinctive “shave and a haircut – two
bits” beat on drums.
He follows
up with Mississippi Fred McDowell’s ‘I Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down’,
before switching guitars and ditching the slide for a batch of straight-ahead
acoustic songs. First up is Mississippi
John Hurt’s delightfully titled, folksy ‘Let The Mermaids Flirt With Me’, which
Mottershead introduces as “a classic blues fusion of sex and death” (you can here the original here). Blind Willie McTell’s ‘Dying Crapshooter’s
Blues’ is perhaps more down to earth, but features equally imaginative lyrics.
Mottershead
drives these songs along with a great sense of rhythm, but he also demonstrates
his grasp of the tradition as a writer as he plays his own ‘Good Woman (You Can
Do No Wrong)’ – intended, he says, as a corrective to the bad rep women tend to
get from many blues songs. He then
offers up another modern day example of the style, with ‘Jailhouse Blues’ by
Australian singer C.W. Stoneking.
No good
blues set should be without a ‘train’ song, and there are two to choose from
here, the pick being Charlie McCoy’s rattling ‘That Lonesome Train Took My Baby
Away’. Along the way Mottershead
switches to another guitar, which he describes as “a piece of shit he got for a
few quid on eBay” and says is more typical of the kind of instrument these
blues originators would have played.
Frankly I think it’s still a cut above what those guys might have had at
their disposal, but that’s by the by. He
coaxes some damn fine slide out of this model, before going back to his Dobro
for Mississippi Fred McDowell’s ‘Write Me A Few Lines’ (covered in recent years
by Seasick Steve, with some help from Jack White).
He closes
with another a capella song, ‘The Parting Glass’, a folk song of obscure
Scots/Irish origins which may not obviously be connected to the blues, except
that as Mottershead rightly points out, cross-fertilisation was part of blues,
country and folk music in America. And
it’s also interesting to contemplate the evolution of the blues over the
decades from these stripped down beginnings.
No time for
an encore on a tight Fringe schedule, but this is an hour well spent, in the
company of an excellent guide.
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