Tag: Mississippi Blues

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Willie Farmer Brings the Duck Hill Blues to Memphis

Willie Farmer (Credit: Aaron Greenhood)

He may be one of the best kept secrets of the local blues scene, though he’s won some national recognition in the music press and made an appearance on Beale Street Caravan. It’s just that Willie Farmer doesn’t get to Memphis much. Of course, he had to come here to record his 2019 album, The Man From the Hill (Big Legal Mess), at Bruce Watson’s Delta-Sonic Sound, which made the Memphis Flyer‘s best-of list that year. But he’s too busy working as a mechanic in Mississippi to make regular trips here. That’s why the show at The Green Room at Crosstown Concourse this Thursday, June 15th, is a rare opportunity to see him live.

It was with good reason that The Man From the Hill was named one of 2019’s best LPs. As the Flyer noted at the time:

The first epiphany comes from the guitar tone. Farmer’s amp exudes a wonderful crud, a dirty squawk that seems to boil up out of the ground itself, like crude. After a few volleys on the strings to clear the air and put your mind in the zone, George Sluppick’s rock-solid drumming kicks in and we’re off, journeying through an album marked by the pitch-perfect, no-nonsense production we’ve come to expect from Big Legal Mess.

People talk about garage rock a lot (too much?) these days, but this is true garage blues. That’s not to suggest it’s especially frenetic. Rather, from the tone alone, you can feel in your bones the scene of Farmer’s auto repair shop in Duck Hill, Mississippi. And Farmer’s playing also conveys both the rough hewn strength and the sensitivity one develops from growing up on a farm.

It’s a style not often heard in these days of pop-crossover blues, made all the more powerful by Farmer’s soulful voice.

Opening the show will be two artists who’ve proven to be worthy acolytes of the blues. Shaun Marsh, a U.K. native, has mastered the finger-picking style of country and Delta blues from recordings of the forms’ early pioneers. It was that music that brought him to Memphis, where he continues to study these historical styles, with a repertoire ranging from Robert Johnson to Charley Patton, from Skip James to Big Bill Broonzy. He’ll have drummer Lynn Greer on Thursday, giving his set extra oomph.

In the night’s middle slot will be Ryan Lee Crosby from Medford, Massachusetts, who’s been turning heads for years with his blend of traditional music from Mississippi, Mali, and India, including what he calls “Hindustani slide guitar.”

As Mike Greenblatt writes in Goldmine magazine, “With a riveting singing style and the compositional chops to pull off such searing sagas ‘Institution Blues’ and ‘Down So Long’ plus add new lyrics to the 19th century ‘Was It The Devil,’ Ryan Lee is the real deal. Recorded in Memphis by Bruce Watson of Fat Possum — the label famous for RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough — it sounds unique, proudly independent and like a relic from another time.”

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The Blues Music Awards Go Live Once More

Triple BMA-winner Tommy Castro (Credit: Andrea Zucker)

The Renasant Convention Center played host to scores of blues musicians and fans Thursday night, as the ceremonies of the 43rd Annual Blues Music Awards (BMAs) took place. Between handing out honors in over two dozen categories, the evening featured performances from many nominees, culminating in a joyous all-star jam by the night’s end.

It was especially welcome after the 2020 and 2021 ceremonies took place online only. Judith Black, president and CEO of the Blues Foundation, recognized the watershed moment in a statement: “What an amazing reunion after nearly three years of separation. It was an awards evening filled with awesome music, wonderful fellowshipping, and exciting honors. It was apparent everywhere you looked that people were thrilled to be back and, I am sure they could tell we were ecstatic to welcome everyone back.”

Tommy Castro snagged three BMAs: the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year (which he won previously in 2010 and 2008); the Album of the Year for Tommy Castro Presents A Bluesman Came to Town; and Band of the Year for Tommy Castro & The Painkillers.

Sue Foley at the 2022 BMAs (Credit: Andrea Zucker)

Sue Foley, who we featured in this week’s music column, was one of two double-winners, with her Pinky’s Blues recognized as the year’s best Traditional Blues Album, and Foley herself garnering the Traditional Blues Female Artist – Koko Taylor Award, repeating her 2020 win in that category. Fresh off his Grammy win, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram took home Contemporary Blues Male Artist for the third consecutive year. He was also awarded Contemporary Blues Album, which he previously won in 2020.

Also on the local tip, the Best Emerging Artist Album award went to Rodd Bland & The Members Only Band for Live on Beale Street: A Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland. Native Memphian Eric Gales won in the category of Instrumentalist – Guitar, and longtime Memphis resident John Nemeth took home the award for Instrumentalist – Vocals.

The complete list of 2022 Blues Music Award winners:
Acoustic Blues Album: Dear America, Eric Bibb
Acoustic Blues Artist: Keb’ Mo’
Album of the Year: A Bluesman Came to Town, Tommy Castro
B.B. King Entertainer: Tommy Castro
Band of the Year: Tommy Castro & The Painkillers
Best Emerging Artist Album: Live on Beale Street: A Tribute to Bobby “Blue” Bland, Rodd Bland & the Members Only Band
Blues Rock Album: Resurrection, Mike Zito
Blues Rock Artist: Albert Castiglia
Contemporary Blues Album: 662, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
Contemporary Blues Female Artist: Vanessa Collier
Contemporary Blues Male Artist: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram
Instrumentalist-Bass: Danielle Nicole
Instrumentalist-Drums: Tom Hambridge
Instrumentalist-Guitar: Eric Gales
Instrumentalist-Harmonica: Jason Ricci
Instrumentalist-Horn: Jimmy Carpenter
Instrumentalist Pinetop Perkins Piano Player: Mike Finnigan
Instrumentalist-Vocals: John Nemeth
Song of the Year: “I’d Climb Mountains,” written & performed by Selwyn Birchwood
Soul Blues Album: Long As I Got My Guitar, Zac Harmon
Soul Blues Female Artist: Annika Chambers
Soul Blues Male Artist: Curtis Salgado
Traditional Blues Album: Pinky’s Blues, Sue Foley
Traditional Blues Female Artist Koko Taylor Award: Sue Foley
Traditional Blues Male Artist: Taj Mahal

Meanwhile, the Blues Hall of Fame held this year’s induction ceremony on May 4th. The inductees included pre-war performer and songwriter Lucille Bogan; soul, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll star Little Willie John; renowned songwriter, artist Johnnie Taylor; and legendary songwriter Otis Blackwell.

Classic recordings that the Blues Hall of Fame honored this year were Sonny Boy Williamson II’s “Eyesight to the Blind,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Farther Up the Road,” Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight,” B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” by the Baby Face Leroy Trio, and Bo Diddley’sclassic album, Bo Diddley. This year’s non-performing inductee was Mary Katherine Aldin, who worked as an editor, disc jockey, compiler, and annotator of blues and folk reissue albums. The Classic of Blues Literature entrant was Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast, written by British author Bruce Bastin.

Today, May 6th, the total blues immersion continues with a special reception at the Blues Hall of Fame for award-winning music photographer Jérôme Brunet, and the first volley of a four-day run for the International Blues Challenge.

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Cedric Burnside Named NEA National Heritage Fellow

Cedric Burnside (Credit: Abraham Rowe)

Long ago, North Mississippi Hill Country was overlooked in standard perspectives on the blues. While the Delta Blues had been a buzzword in music circles for generations, the variation to the east and north of the flatlands was little-recognized until artists like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Robert Belfour, Calvin Jackson, and Sid Hemphill gradually came to be known outside of the region.

Then the documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, released 30 years ago, featured Burnside, Kimbrough, Othar Turner, and Jessie Mae Hemphill. Fat Possum Records began releasing works by these and other artists shortly thereafter. And of course, the North Mississippi Allstars did much to further popularize the sound, albeit in a more hybridized form.

What they all shared in common was an emphasis on droning, hypnotic guitar riffs played over a driving, insistent beat. And the guitar sounds are unapologetically electrified and distorted, in a heavier and more stripped-down manner than the electrified urban blues guitar that came to prominence in the ’50s.

Since then, the sound’s reach has only seemed to grow. And this week, a new milestone was passed when R.L. Burnside’s grandson, Cedric Burnside, who began drumming for R.L. in his teens but grew into a songwriter and guitarist in his own right, was recognized as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts program.

This award recognizes individuals who “sustain cultural traditions for future generations,” and Cedric Burnside could not be more illustrative of that quality. While he was long recognized primarily as a drummer, winning Blues Music Awards as an instrumentalist in that field multiple times, he has also grown as a gifted guitarist and composer. He was nominated for Grammy Awards in 2016, for his album Descendants of Hill Country, and in 2019 for his album, Benton County Relic.

Burnside is not the first artist with Memphis and Mid-South roots to be recognized by the NEA. William Bell received the same fellowship last year, as the Memphis Flyer reported at the time.

In a biographical essay on the NEA’s website, onetime Rhodes College associate professor Zandria Robinson, now an associate professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, writes:

As an architect of the second generation of the Hill Country blues, Burnside has spent his career tending to the legacy of the genre by expanding the next, electric generation of the North Mississippi sound. In Burnside’s care, the sound leads with extended riffs that become sentences, pleas, or exclamations, rendering the guitar like its West African antecedent, the talking drum. These riffs fuse with Burnside’s voice, like the convergence of hill and horizon in the distance, carrying listeners to a deep well of Mississippi history whose waters reflect the present and the future of the state and the nation.

On June 25, Single Lock Records will release Burnside’s latest album, I Be Trying, recorded at Royal Studios. The album’s first single, “Step In,” was released in April.

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That’s Doctor Bobby Rush to You

Bobby Rush (Photo by Bill Steber)

Bobby Rush, the forever young blues man based in Mississippi who won his first Grammy Award at age 83, and his second this year, when his Rawer Than Raw record was named Best Traditional Blues Album, is no dummy. In fact, he’ll tell you how smart he is. “I’m smart enough to know I don’t know anything,” he says. “If a man tell what he know, he won’t talk long. ‘Cos man don’t know nothing.”

It’s a typically humble statement from a man who, paradoxically, is not known for his shyness or reticence onstage. When you speak with him, you hear the humility that has kept him working doggedly through the years. “I’m not just a blues man,” he says. “I’m God’s child. I’m another kinda person, you know? And I got by in this rat race, not because I was so good, but because I was so blessed, and God had so much mercy on me. I’m not here on my own. I’m not doing anything on my own.”

With such a philosophical bent, its should come as no surprise that the songwriter and performer has also been a teacher of sorts. Since 2014, he’s partnered with the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College as the inaugural Curb Visiting Scholar in the Arts. He continues his relationship with the college to this day through immersive student experiences and historically significant public programs. Over this time, the relationship between Rush and the college has been a part of the educational experience of well over one hundred Rhodes students.

As a visiting scholar, Rush has taught a course on “Music and Community in Memphis,” and offered lectures and performances with Rhodes students in local venues. This semester, Rush partnered with the Curb Institute on a project involving dozens of students that culminated in a recording of an original blues version of “America the Beautiful,” which will be released in recognition of Memorial Day.

As a culmination of all of this and Rush’s own storied career in music, the Rhodes Board of Trustees announced today that Rush will be this year’s recipient of the Honorary Doctorate of Humanities. The degree will be presented at the Commencement Exercises of the Rhodes College Class of 2021, to be held Saturday, May 15th, at 8:30 a.m., in the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. Congratulations, Dr. Bobby Rush!

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Bobby Rush Brings It All Back Home (and Online) for Education Initiative

Bobby Rush

Nearly six years ago, when Memphis Flyer film editor Chris McCoy first wrote about the innovative new documentary Take Me to the River, few could have suspected how viable the movie would remain to this day — or the many offshoot projects that it would spawn.

One reason for such longevity was the film’s reliance on actual performers, collaborating across the generation gap. The brainchild of North Mississippi Allstars’ Cody Dickinson and producer/director Martin Shore, the film’s central premise was bringing together old school soul singers with younger hip-hop talents, with footage of the recording sessions bearing witness to the creation of new, hybrid sounds. Featuring Bobby Blue Bland with Lil P-Nut, Booker T. Jones with Al Kapone, William Bell with Snoop Dogg, and other luminaries like Mavis Staples or the Hi Rhythm Section, the film could hardly go wrong, musically.

And, on the strength of that musicality, a perennial tour revue was launched with many of the same talents hitting the road together. The ongoing interest inspired a follow-up tour focused on players from New Orleans, and an accompanying film for that as well; not to mention the Take Me to the River Educational Initiative, which has provided instructional modules to hundreds of schools, and hosted several online webinars and other events.

One such webinar will be happening tomorrow, Thursday, July 23, as a star of the first film, Mississippi bluesman and Grammy-winner Bobby Rush, performs music from his new album, Rawer Than Raw, and sits for a Q&A with moderator Martin Shore. Though the full album is not due until August 16, its first single was just released this month.

Bobby Rush Brings It All Back Home (and Online) for Education Initiative

This will be the 16th online webinar or masterclass hosted and inspired by Take Me to the River, and surely not the last. Visit their website or their Facebook page to keep up with future events, and see why their banner motto is “A Movement of Social Consciousness.”

Take Me to the River: Modern Blues Music, with GRAMMY-winning legend Bobby Rush and Award Winning Filmmaker Martin Shore takes place Thursday, Jul 23, at 7 p.m., CDT. Click here to register.