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in the early 1920s, the first blues records featured female singers
accompanied by Dixieland bands. Veteran folkie Maria Muldaur, who got
started singing in Greenwich Village folk coffeehouses in the early
1960s and went on to record with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, has completed
a trio of tribute albums to blues singers from the 1920s through 1940s
with Naughty, Bawdy, and Blues (Stoney Plain). Backed by
James Dapogny’s Chicago Jazz Band, an authentic New Orleans-sounding
outfit, this latest disc focuses on 1920s singers. Muldaur delivers
luscious renditions of songs from Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta
Hunter, Sippy Wallace, Ethel Waters and Victoria Spivey. Bonnie Raitt
guests on one track also.
By the
1950s, the newly electrified blues had taken up residence in Chicago.
For fans of South Side-style blues, there is a new Muddy Waters CD,
Breakin’ It Up, Breakin’ It Down (Legacy). This was
compiled from a series of late-1970s live shows with James Cotton and
Johnny Winter, who produced a series of albums for Muddy shortly after
Waters left Chess, his longtime label, in 1976. Also playing on these 11
blues standards are pianist Pinetop Perkins, drummer Willie “Big Eyes”
Smith, guitarist Bob Margolin, and bassist Charles Calmese. Winter is in
exceptionally good form here, so his fans, as well as Muddy’s, will want
this one.
For
aficionados of bluegrass and old-time string-band music, the all-female
quartet Uncle Earl have a release that will fill a holiday stocking
nicely.
Waterloo, Tennessee
(Rounder) was chosen for the title of this 16-track offering after one
of the band members thought she saw a roadside sign for the town while
they were traveling through the Volunteer State. The place was probably
Waterloo
Falls,
but no matter—what they got right is the plain singing and fancy picking
and that have won them national acclaim. For this record, banjoist
Abigail Washburn, mandolinist-bassist-guitarist KC Groves, fiddler Ranya
Gellert, and guitarist-fiddler Kristen Andreassen went to British
producer John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin fame, a move that paid off with
a 4 1/2-star Amazon.com customer rating.
Waterloo
encompasses fiddle tunes, songs ranging from the slow and mournful to
the fast and lighthearted, and even a shape-note hymn that evokes early
American church music.
Along with fellow Californian Buck Owens, country icon Merle Haggard
forged the Bakersfield sound, a return to the pedal steel and fiddle-led
instrumentation that dominated country music in the late 1940s and early
1950s, augmented by the Fender Telecaster. This year, though, Hag
decided to do his first-ever bluegrass album, The Bluegrass
Sessions (McCoury). With a crack band led by mandolinist-guitarist
Marty Stuart sitting in a circle with Merle, the group recorded a 12-cut
live CD that features tunes by Jimmy Rogers and the Delmore Brothers, as
well as some remakes of Hag’s hits, and four new originals. Even though
the album lacks some of the flashy picking you’d expect in a bluegrass
disc, Haggard’s insightful songwriting (only Hank Williams Sr. is ranked
above him as a lyricist here) is why this one is worth it.
Kevin Burke is a master of the
Sligo
style of Irish fiddling, and has played with the Celtic supergroups the
Bothy Band and
Patrick Street. His new effort, Across the Black River
(Loftus) is an exuberant outing with guitarist-composer Cal Scott,
containing 10 tracks of pure fiddling bliss. Burke and Scott serve up a
well-chosen and-arranged batch of both traditional and freshly minted
reels and jigs, as well as a Bill Monroe tune and a lament by Scottish
accordionist Phil Cunningham for his late brother, fiddler Johnny
Cunningham. Burke and Scott have an obviously swell time playing
together, which adds immensely to the record’s appeal. Sidemen include
accordionist Johnny B. Connolly, Michael McGoldrick on flute, and
bassist Phil Baker.
See the article on
the Metroland website
List of Metroland Stories by Glenn Weiser
©2007 by Glenn Weiser. All rights reserved.
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