Charlie Musselwhite - Mississippi Son

Charlie Musselwhite may have grown up in Memphis, and spent much of his adult life in Chicago and San Francisco, but he was born in Mississippi, and now lives there in Clarksdale, of “Crossroads” fame.  And Mississippi Son is an expression of his lifelong affinity with the acoustic country blues that emerged from Mississippi and throughout the South.
Musselwhite may be best known as a harp player, but he’s also played the guitar since his teens, and his guitar, voice and harmonica form the bedrock of this album, with occasional help from rhythm buddies Ricky ‘Quicksand’ Martin on drums and Barry Bays on stand-up bass.  The

Charlie Musselwhite - have harp, will travel

Pic by Rory Doyle

result is a down-home, stripped back affair, and though the 14 songs are split between originals and covers, one can scarcely hear the join.
For example, there’s a Tony Joe White groove to both the original ‘Blues Up The River’ and the take on John Lee Hooker’s ‘Crawling King Snake’, but in different flavours.  There’s a peachy swing to the former, with tumbling guitar notes and bright harp over loping bass and tapping drums to accompany Musselwhite’s groaning vocal.  But the latter has more of a dark chocolate taste, brooding and with bouts of wordless, moaned vocal.
Meanwhile Musselwhite’s own ‘In Your Darkest Hour’ feels like a descendant of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s ‘You Gotta Move’, and if its twinkling guitar feels like it's treading a familiar blues path, augmented by mournful harp, the real point is that Musselwhite nails the vibe.  The same is true of ‘When The Frisco Left The Shed’, which may share some DNA with ‘Key To The Highway’, but interleaves Musselwhite’s guitar and voice beautifully, and adds a mellifluous harp break over the gently clacking rhythm.  Charley Patton’s ‘Pea Vine Blues’ is another train song, but a snappier one, with a skipping, rattling rhythm from Martin on drums and some chirpily bird-like harmonica.
The melody of spring-in-the-step ‘Blues Gave Me A Ride’ carries undertones of ‘Stagger Lee’, given a lift by intertwining of pinging guitar and cheerful harp, while the slower ‘Drifting From Town To Town’ is ‘Red Rooster’-tinged, with an appealing, undulating bridge.
In a different vein, ‘The Dark’ is a folkie Guy Clark tune turned into a not-quite-talking-blues, not particularly rhythmic and with Musselwhite’s incidental guitar accompaniment leaning towards a lower pitch.  And ‘Rank Strangers’ is similarly semi-spoken, a murky reflection on alienation with hints of Americana as the tune takes some novel turns.
Some tracks don’t add much to the equation though.  A brief whirl through John Lee’s ‘Hobo Blues’ has some tension in its nagging, repetitive melody, but that’s about it.  ‘Stingaree’ is a fairly inconsequential jaunt through some familiar blues tropes, albeit with a neat stop-time acoustic guitar segment.  And the instrumental ‘Remembering Big Joe’ may feature some nifty picking and thumb-strumming bass from Musselwhite, but it still feels like something of a limbering up exercise, and with some moments of strings squeaking gratingly on frets.
For my money trimming the album by, say, four tracks would have said “never mind the width, feel the quality”.  But still, throughout Mississippi Son the simple virtues of Musselwhite’s subtle vocals, rippling acoustic guitar and understated harp capture the spirit of country blues, underlining and celebrating his connection to his musical roots.
 
Mississippi Son is released by Alligator Records on 3 June. 

Alligator Records: 50 Years Of Genuine Houserockin' Music

With a blockbusting 58 tracks, this compilation celebrating 50 years of Alligator Records is certainly a representative tour of the label’s roster over the years.  And what’s most enjoyable about the collection is the way its variety underlines the point that the house of blues has many rooms.
That notion is nowhere better exemplified than on the opening track, ‘Give Me Back My Wig’ by Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers.  This was the very act that gave birth to Alligator when Bruce Iglauer couldn’t persuade his boss, Bob Koester of Delmark Records, to record them, and

Alligator then, with Hound Dog Taylor . . .

Pic by Diane Allmen

so resolved to do it himself.  ‘Give Me Back My Wig’ is an itchy, scratchy, fuzzy piece of business, like a ragged and hyperactive version of ‘The Boy From New York City’ – and it’s a wicked delight.
That sense of getting beyond the obvious is a recurring pleasure across this 3 CD set, whether in the breezy harp instrumental ‘Have Mercy’ by Big Walter Horton and Carey Bell, the piano and horns New Orleans sound of Professor Longhair on ‘It’s My Fault’, with its eccentric yelping vocal, or the stuttering, twitching version of ‘Got My Mojo Working’ by Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown.
There’s a great run of more contemporary tracks on Disc 3 that ventures into several different vibes to great effect, kicking off with the Delbert McClinton-like soulful rock’n’roll of Curtis Salgado on ‘The Longer That I Live’.  Selwyn Birchwood’s ‘Living In A Burning House’ follows, edgy but vibrant, before the old-stagers Elvin Bishop and Charlie Musselwhite take things down with the sombre guitar and harp duet of ‘Midnight Hour Blues’.  Then the Cash Box Kings ramp things up again with the smile-inducing, dance-able jump blues of ‘Ain’t No Fun (When The Rabbit Got The Gun)’, as a prelude to the rockin’ boogie of Tommy Castro & The Painkillers’ live rendition of ‘Make It Back To Memphis’.
In between there’s plenty of the classic guitar-led blues style to keep the six-string lovers happy, ranging from Fenton Robinson packing plenty into three minutes on his excellent 1974 re-recording of ‘Somebody Loan Me A Dime’, to Albert Collins showing just how to do a slow blues with ‘Blue Monday Hangover’, to Luther Allison ripping it up on a rollicking live reading of ‘Soul Fixin’ Man’, and on to 2019 with Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram and the big, fat, dirty groove of ‘Outside Of This Town’.
There are female voices too, starting with Iglauer’s early signing Koko Taylor, who groans and rasps her way through the R’n’B of ‘I’m A Woman’.  Marcia Ball delivers a paean to New Orleans

. . . to Alligator now, with Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram

Pic by Rory Doyle

with the cajun-inflected ‘Party Town’, while Shemekia Copeland’s ‘Clotilda’s On Fire’ is a typically bruising piece reminder about the about the slave-traded origins of African-American oppression.  Oh yeah, and Janiva Magness hits her sweet spot on the funky soul of ‘That’s What Love Will Make You Do’.
There are also less familiar names, to me at least.  Another female singer, Saffire, The Uppity Blues Woman, comes up trumps with rattling piano-led accompaniment to her Nina Simone-like pipes on 'Sloppy Drunk'.  Meanwhile The Paladins get shaking on ‘Keep On Lovin’ Me Baby’, which enters on a Hendrixy shiver of guitar before vaulting into the energetic, snare-snapping tune itself.  And Corey Harris and Henry Butler come up with some hand-clapping acapella gospel on ‘Why Don’t You Live So God Can Use You’.
There are a couple of stretches when some of those guitar lovin’ fellas seem to be ploughing an all too similar furrow, in contrast to the stylistic variety and quirks of character on offer from other artists.  But there are also plenty of other little gems, too many to name check them all, that make Alligator Records: 50 Years Of Genuine Houserockin’ Music a more than worthwhile proposition – and also an excellent entry point if you want to explore the Alligator catalogue.

Alligator Records: 50 Years Of Houserockin' Music is released by Alligator Records on Friday 18 June.

New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers - Volume 2

If what you’re after is a slab of blues-rock seething with guitar sorcery, I suggest you get off the bus at the next stop.  This ain’t that kind of album.
The New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers – and that’s a mouthful I won’t be repeating much, believe me - weren’t a real band.  They were a bunch of roots music comrades who got together in the studio back in November 2007, set the tapes rolling, and  - well, played some stuff.  And it’s taken till last year with Volume 1, and now with Volume 2, for the fruits of those sessions to see the light of day.

Memphis big cat Jim Dickinson

The thing is, these weren’t just any old blues geezers.  They included Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars, and their dad, that redoubtable stalwart of Memphis music Jim Dickinson, who died in 2009.  Also present were the respected Clarksdale harp player Charlie Musselwhite, Grammy Award-winner Alvin Youngblood Hart, and their pal and Squirrel Nut Zipper-in-chief Jimbo Mathus.
The feel of what they recorded is similar to Ian Siegal’s Picnic Sessions album, which was also recorded in the Dickinsons’ Zebra Ranch studio in Mississippi, with some of the same personnel.  The Jelly Rolling gang sat themselves down in a circle and played live, pulling out old covers and a few of their own songs, and capturing them in the most relaxed, down-home style you can imagine.
If a crate of beers and some bottles of rye were dispatched along the way, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.  The Charlie Mingus tune ‘Oh Lord, Don’t Let Them Drop That Atom Bomb On Me’,

Charlie Musselwhite - have harp, will wail

for example, is a slow blues that sounds like a bourbon-soaked funeral march, with Jim Dickinson delivering a plaintive moan’n’groan of a vocal, his chiming piano counterpointing a tentative guitar solo.  The closing ‘Blues Is A Mighty Bad Feeling’ is mournful too, the beat dragging like the half-step-and-pause of a slow march as Dickinson père croons along over warm, spare guitar chords and lonesome harp.
They can swing too though, as they show on a reading of ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ that’s way closer to Junior Wells than Rory Gallagher.  Dickinson senior provides vocals again, growling along over skimpy promptings from son Cody’s drums, twitching rhythm guitar, and Charlie Musselwhite tooting away on the stumbling riff before providing a solo to go along with a sparkling guitar break.  And there’s a similar light touch later, on Jimmy Reed’s ‘Can’t Stand To See You Go’, all chirpy piano and harmonica flourishes.
After taking the lead vocal on opener 'Blues For Yesterday', Musselwhite is also to the fore on the atmospheric highlight and dark-from-the-off ‘Black Water’.  He offers up ghostly harp to accompany lowdown guitar work that’s like an alligator gliding through the bayou, later migrating into a slithering harp’n’slide conversation, while stirrings of drum paradiddles conjure up snakes in the bushes.  But if all that sounds like the setting for a midnight-at-the-crossroads yarn, Musselwhite’s semi-spoken vocal is in fact a reflection on the modern world.

Jimbo Mathus comin' at ya!

  Brighter notes come in the likes of ‘She’s About A Mover’ and ‘Searchlight’.  Alvin Youngblood Hart takes the mic on the former, a Sir Douglas Quintet song owing plenty to Ray Charles, Hart’s voice light and airy for a big fella, over an oom-pah rhythm and jittery tweeting organ, ahead of a fuzzy guitar solo.  On the following ‘Searchlight’ it’s Jimbo Mathus who takes the floor, with some bass work lending a warmer sound, while harp, slide guitar and piano all interweave, Musselwhite gets his wail on for a solo, and some spiky guitar adds extra spice.  Luther Dickinson also gets the chance to shine on the instrumental ‘Blue Guitar’, his slide guitar moaning and slithering around the melody from ‘You Shook Me’, guitar and harp eventually squeaking away together over a grinding rhythm that’s very ‘Chicago Blues’.
What the New Mooners got down was ensemble stuff, feeling their way around each other and the songs to create something organic – loose and spontaneous rather than tight and structured.  Freedom Rockers indeed.  If that sounds like your kind of gig, then get yourself a beer, pull a chair up to the circle, and listen in.
 
New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers Volume 2 is released on Stony Plain Records on 26 March.