We all know it takes a village — to raise a child, tend a garden, or create art — but first someone has to make the village. Talibah Safiya, the Memphis singer-songwriter with a recording career now spanning almost a decade, is one of those people, drawing scores of collaborators around her by dint of her vision and voice, pulling disparate threads together to craft her unique neo-soul/trap hybrid music.
That sonic identity seemed to arrive fully formed with her 2015 debut single, “Rise,” and is just as powerful today, her collaborations only growing deeper and wider. Not only does her 2024 album, Black Magic, feature some notable co-producers, she’s worked with even more since its release in February, as several remixes, the latest of which dropped last Friday, have shown.
And, as she points out, she’s been “working mostly with producers who have Memphis roots, even if some of them don’t live here anymore,” proving that you can still go big while going local. One case in point: “I worked with Brandon Deener, who is from Memphis but based in L.A. He’s actually an incredible visual artist who is currently working on a solo show in Paris that’s happening this summer. But he’s a producer as well.” Indeed, his painting was the focus of The Guardian’s profile of Deener last year, where he was called the “former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Lil Wayne … now known more as a visual artist.”
Black Magic, the latest album by Talibah Safiyah.
Yet the album’s title song proves Deener is still in the music game. A bold opening shot, it builds on a vintage loop of stinging, soul-blues guitar before Safiyah’s voice decries, “We come from a Black-ass city/Black Magic … We said our pledge of allegiance/To the capital of Egypt!” It’s an anthem of sorts for Safiyah’s hometown, and the vintage soul stew loop only puts a finer historical point on it.
Deener also worked on “Jack and Jill” and “Have Mercy” (the latter featuring Marcella Simien), and both also play with locally-derived samples of roots guitar. Those flavors were very intentional, growing, Safiyah explains, from her time as artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year. “The Rudi Scheidt School has the High Water Recording Company catalog, and I did a deep dive into some of that music, singing along with my guy Brandon Deener at Ari’s studio.” That would be producer/engineer Ari Morris, profiled in these pages last year as “Memphis music’s secret weapon,” who was also deeply involved in Black Magic.
“That was when I first met Ari, and how Ari and I ended up locking in,” Safiyah adds, “but I found myself really inspired by, firstly, R.L. Burnside’s ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song had me really immersed in the sound of R.L. Burnside’s voice — it sounded to me like he was improvising the song, and I loved that. It sounds like he was just making it up on the spot. And it got me thinking about Memphis. So I was super inspired by ‘Bad Luck City,’ which we sampled for the single ‘Black Magic,’ and that’s how the whole project got that name.”
Another High Water artist that Safiyah found inspiring was Jessie Mae Hemphill, though her music was not sampled for the project. “She was my guiding light for the energy of the composition of music,” Safiyah says. “My husband Bertram and I were at A. Schwab’s and he bought me a book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Y. Davis, which talks about how Black women have freed up the way we tell our stories through the blues.”
Hemphill would be a prime example of that process, but she has modern-day analogs. As part of her village, Safiyah enlisted a current feminist hero of the local neo-soul/hip-hop scene, MadameFraankie, for the track, “Papa Please!” Even that was touched by R.L. Burnside.
“For ‘Papa Please!’ specifically, I played Fraankie ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song is such a huge influence on a lot of the songs on the project, even if everything didn’t sample it. So I told Fraankie about a friend of mine and her relationship with her dad. I gave her a whole visual story and played her ‘Bad Luck City,’ and she went off and made the beat for ‘Papa Please!’ And when sent me that track, I was inspired right away. I wrote the song immediately, sang it for her, and that was the first one that we composed for the project.”
The track features MadameFraankie’s trademark liquid rhythm/solo guitar, but that’s not all. “She played the bass. She played the drums. She did everything on that song, there’s nobody else playing,” Safiyah enthuses.
Meanwhile, there are still more collaborations going down as Safiyah issues remixes of the album’s key tracks. The first was a brilliant reimagining of “Jack and Jill” by another soon-to-be-iconic Memphis figure, Jess Jackson, aka DJ BLINGG, who originally built a name with her sisters in the band JCKSN AVE. And as of Friday we have the album’s closer, “Delicious,” remixed by A.N.T.E. “He plays the keys and he’s done a couple other remixes for me,” notes Safiyah. “It’s really fun, and has a soulful, jazzy kind of vibe. But it feels totally different than the other version.”
True to form, “totally different” is something Safiyah will always be pursuing as she taps into her very disparate networks. “My theme throughout has been genre-bending,” she says. “I grew up listening to a lot of different types of things, and I love a lot of different types of music. I don’t think that they should be separate.”
“This city’s filled with reasons to kill, but everyone wants to play the blues.” So lamented the Lost Sounds over 20 years ago on their Black-Wave album, and that sentiment, that palpable frustration, was easy to relate to at the time. For youth on the edge of alternative culture, the blues could feel soul-crushing, especially in Memphis, especially on Beale Street. Somehow, it felt like the sound of complacency. I was certainly too snobbish to play Beale Street back at the end of the last century, and I was not alone.
One group, though, worked Beale Street to their advantage in those days. Luther and Cody Dickinson formed the North Mississippi Allstars with Chris Chew and played Beale Street clubs almost from the beginning, relentlessly refining their blues-based rock and funk there, night after night. Over the decades, with a few other like-minded souls, the two brothers have stayed the course, and their ceaseless experimentation has left in its wake a revelation: The blues are extremely mutant-friendly.
Indeed, the blues may be more open to cross-pollination, hybridization, and evolution than any other genre, and that’s never been more apparent than today. After decades of bubbling under the surface, from the Delta to the Hill Country to the gritty, grinding streets of Memphis, the blues have soaked up something from the sands. And now, once again, the creature is stirring.
A New Era “The blues is dead!” quips Bruce Watson, co-founder of Fat Possum Records, the label that first made its mark with hitherto under-recognized artists like R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, among others. Then he laughs out loud. “I’m kidding. That’s been our catchphrase for 30 years. Actually, the blues may kind of die down, but there always seems to be somebody who starts the flame again. If you look at The Black Keys’ record from last year [Delta Kream], they were reaching back into the old Fat Possum catalog for most of that. That’s pretty great. It introduces a whole different audience to the blues. These days, it definitely feels like something’s happening.”
That sentiment is shared by many with their fingers on the pulse of the music. “There is a new appreciation for what the blues is and what the blues is all about,” says Judith Black, president and CEO of the Blues Foundation.
Rapper Al Kapone, who we’ll return to later, also knows a thing or two about the blues, and agrees with Black. “A new era of the blues has begun, and it’s needed,” he says. “It’s a great thing to witness. We’re right at the beginning stages of something going on. It’s really cool to see.”
And Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, whose 662 won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album earlier this year, says, “There’s definitely a new vibe. A crop of young people are coming out of the woodwork, more young people of color. So there’s a big resurgence of the blues at the moment.”
Cedric Burnside (Photo Courtesy: Reed Watson)
Nostalgic and Futuristic — at the Same Time Just what specifically is changing is harder to define. One sign came with last year’s release of I Be Trying, by Cedric Burnside, grandson of the great R.L. Burnside. Originally a drummer, he came of age on the road with R.L. and close family friend Kenny Brown, during a time when R.L. enjoyed a revival of sorts, on Fat Possum and elsewhere. Now, being steeped in the North Mississippi Hill Country blues that his grandfather typified, Burnside has appropriately been named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, a sort of guardian of the Hill Country tradition.
The irony is that, despite such historical bona fides, Burnside has forged a style all his own. With a clean, percussive guitar style, likely derived from his years behind the drums, he lays down riffs and snatches of melody that lean heavily on the blues but also evoke echoes of soul and gospel. As with classic Hill Country blues, there’s still a hypnotic quality, but with less distortion (an innovation in itself in R.L.’s day) and a greater sense of playfulness. With the quality and care put into this very intimate-sounding recording, it’s no wonder he took home the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album this year, and yet Burnside defies tradition as well. As producer Boo Mitchell says, “It’s nostalgic and futuristic at the same time. It captures all the spookiness of the old deep blues, and it still sounds current. Some of those tracks could be in a Wu-Tang sample.”
Paradoxically, such innovation sits comfortably within the Hill Country tradition. At Kenny Brown’s North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic, taking place this week, June 24th-25th, and now in its 16th year, tradition and innovation sit side by side. Many of the region’s great musical families are represented by performers like Robert Kimbrough Sr., Kent Burnside, Duwayne Burnside, and Garry Burnside, not to mention Shardé Thomas and R.L. Boyce, who both started out in the great Othar Turner’s fife and drum corps, but the tradition of innovation will also have its hour, with longtime blues genre-benders like the North Mississippi Allstars and Alvin Youngblood Hart.
Though Cedric Burnside will not perform there this year, his unique sound may be a direct result of the tradition’s innovative side. As David Evans, a former ethnomusicology instructor at the University of Memphis and highly regarded authority on local blues, notes, “People have identified Cedric, either rightly or wrongly, with this Hill Country sound or style. And he’s supposed to be upholding that, and that might be a little restrictive. He seems like a guy who likes to explore.”
Or, as Burnside himself puts it, “Different, to me, has always been a great thing. I always wanted to be different.”
Too Young to Remember, Old Enough to Know If Cedric Burnside, now 43, seems to have reinvented the blues based on years of playing with his elders, followed by a lifetime of painstaking craftsmanship in search of something different, others are doing the same simply by virtue of their youth. Clarksdale’s Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is the perfect example, and the twin Grammys won by Ingram and Burnside this year are, in a sense, two sides of the same shiny new blues coin.
Twenty years younger than Burnside, Ingram has brought a new energy to the blues of the Mississippi Delta by virtue of having grown up with all the world’s music at his fingertips, even as he matured into a die-hard devotee of the blues. “When I was growing up, my mom played everything, from ’60s soul to Bon Jovi to Patti LaBelle,” he says. “I was always hearing different styles of music. And pretty much all of that inspired me to infuse that into the blues and make my own little genre, for lack of a better term.”
At the time, simply embracing the blues felt like a radical act. “When I went to school, other young kids were more into rap and everything like that. The blues was almost taboo. But now, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen more kids in my generation gravitating toward it.” Ingram himself led the charge, diving wholeheartedly into educational programs sponsored by the Delta Blues Museum in his hometown.
“My instructors were actual bluesmen, Bill ‘Howl-n-Mad’ Perry and Richard ‘Daddy Rich’ Crisman. They were my teachers and my mentors of the blues, from the time when I played bass through when I got into guitar. And when they found out I had a little voice, they even pushed me to sing. There were even times when we would do readings. It was a full-on educational class, for sure. And it still goes on today.”
It’s an outcome that historians and supporters of the blues, such as those behind the Delta Blues Museum, can only dream of — until their efforts actually culminate in a phenomenal artist like Kingfish Ingram. And much of that can be put down to Ingram’s unique personality, his uncanny feel for the traditions that came before. “I’m too young to remember,” he sings on one track, “but I’m old enough to know.”
While the overall sound of 662 (name-checking Clarksdale’s area code) has an up-tempo drive and bounce that ranges from the hard rock power chords of “Not Gonna Lie” to the mellow soul stylings of “Another Life Goes By” or even alternative balladry like “Rock & Roll,” his voice grounds it all with a weathered worldliness. And somehow that voice comes through his guitar as well. As Boo Mitchell says, “He’s literally one of the most talented and prolific guitar players of our time. He plays with the feel of an 80-year-old man. How can you have that much soul? You’re only 20-somethin’! Kingfish is incredible. His voice, too.”
Not all blues fans feel that way, however. The blues genre in particular has always been plagued with fans who love only that which does not evolve: the purists. “It’s been something I struggled with because trying to get accepted by the purists has always been something I wracked my head over,” reflects Ingram. “In some ways, I’m just getting over it. But I look at it like this: One of the ways I’ve gotten young people into the blues is by mixing other genres into it. But here’s where the tricky part comes in: You don’t want to mix too much, to where it becomes something else. But as far as keeping it pure, I think the more you hear the blues or things that are blues-inspired, it’ll always be pure. When Albert King did his funkiness, you could hear the blues in his funkiness. For me, it’s all pure. Whatever comes from the heart is pure.”
Memphissippi Sounds (Photo: Peter Lee)
The Soundtrack of Our Lives If Ingram felt like an outsider among the Black peers of his youth, who gravitated more toward rap, that distinction is coming to mean less and less as the new blues arise out of the landscape today. It’s something that Judith Black noticed soon after taking the helm at the Blues Foundation. “A new duo called Memphissippi Sounds performed at the Blues Music Awards, and right before the ceremony I saw them practice and had an opportunity to meet them. And they don’t necessarily look like your typical blues artist. They look like hip-hop artists. And their sound is kind of a combination of hip-hop and soul and blues. More blues than anything — they’re definitely blues. And I think artists like them are starting to attract a younger crowd, listeners who would not typically choose to listen to blues. So it’s emerging.”
To Black, whose childhood was steeped in older blues thanks to her father, a collector and independent scholar, such emerging connections make perfect sense. “I think there’s a new appreciation for the history that comes with the blues. In this time of racial reckoning, the blues puts that history in perspective. It was the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement, the soundtrack of our lives as we’ve moved from the late 1800s all the way up to now. I’ve looked at the lyrics of artists from, say, the early 1900s, and some of us talk about young hip-hop artists and their lyrics nowadays, but once you listen to those early lyrics, they make most rap lyrics look like nursery rhymes!”
Al Kapone (Photo: Jenny Max)
Black’s words unwittingly echo the thoughts of one of Memphis’ most iconic rappers, Al Kapone. Appearing at the Beale Street Music Festival this spring, Kapone sealed his legendary status once more as he led a crowd of thousands in the chorus of “Whoop That Trick,” the song he penned for Craig Brewer’s film, Hustle & Flow, now chanted regularly at every hometown Memphis Grizzlies game. But mixed in with Kapone’s classics was a new batch of tunes, the culmination of an epiphany that struck the rapper only recently.
“Being a rapper from Memphis, I realized no one from the rap community has embraced something that’s so uniquely Memphis as the blues. When it hit me, I was like, ‘This can’t be!’ It just hit me, I’ve gotta really, fully embrace it and represent the blues. And I wanted to do that in the Memphis rap style. Because the Memphis rap sound is unique in itself. So I figured if I could marry the two, I’d be coming up with something that’s doubly unique.”
Marrying the two genres has been the focus of Kapone’s most recent singles, and at the Beale Street Music Festival, it hit home in a powerful way. As doom-laden beats pounded on in classic Memphis fashion, a new layer of sound also appeared: the dark, heavy wail of an electric guitar, pushed to its limits, ricocheting off the walls of the nearby Mid-South Coliseum and across the cityscape. It was an aesthetic shot across the bow.
“I was like, ‘How can this not have been done, this far into the musical era we’re in? There’s no way!’ I felt it was my duty and my honor to marry those genres together in a way that only a Memphis OG rapper could. And I’m very happy to wave the flag.” For Kapone, independently echoing Black’s remarks, it provides a direct connection to history. “I listen to a lot of the older blues records, and when I listen to the words, I’m like, ‘Lyrically, this is just as raw as hip-hop!’ The lyrics are as raw as the street. They talk about gambling, somebody getting their gun, somebody messing with their whatever. [laughs] You can get a glimpse of street life way back then, listening to those songs. I feel their era connecting with our era, with the same kinds of stories.”
Now the rapper has just released the culmination of this epiphany, an EP titled Blues Rap Music, which gathers a handful of singles he’s recently done that capture this approach. One track, “Dead and Gone,” even features a renowned Memphis guitarist who first rose to fame when Al Kapone was just getting started in the hip-hop game: Eric Gales. And his very involvement serves as an object lesson that the generic boundaries between blues and hip-hop are not hard and fast.
“In the ’90s,” Kapone recalls, “a lot of people in the blues world had no idea that Eric rapped on a lot of Three 6 Mafia mix tapes. He went by the name of Lil E. And he had a cool personality and identity. So I knew him from then. The underground Memphis rap world, the mixtape world, had no idea he was a guitar player, and people in the blues guitar world had no idea he was a rapper!”
Now it’s come full circle, as the two musical cultures that have put Memphis on the map converge. The blues, as Judith Black likes to say, is continually emerging. And lately, the blues has got a whole new bag. As Bruce Watson says, “The blues is dead!” Long live the blues.
As he poses for a new photo, leaning against a tree with his guitar, tall and slender guitarist Kenny Brown looks pretty much like he did in old photos of himself in his twenties performing with blues legends.
“I’ve weighed between 130 and 160 since I got out of high school,” says Brown, 68.
But then he adds, “Somebody told me the other day — we went down to the coast — something about my skin looking so good. That’s the only person who ever told me my skin looked good. Hell. My hair iscoming out. Growing out my ears and nose and falling off my head.”
Kenny Brown at the 1999 Thirsty Ear Festival in Santa Fe (Photo: Jennifer Esperanza)
Though his hair is falling “off his head,” Brown’s musical ability continues to grow. The latest proof? Brown is nominated, with The Black Keys and Eric Deaton, for a 2022 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album for Delta Kream.
“[The title] ‘Delta Kream’ came from a William Eggleston photo of a Delta Kream custard stand down in Tunica,” Brown says. “Eric Deaton plays bass and I play guitar. The way it happened was, Eric had done a couple of records with [The Black Keys’] Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye studios in Nashville. They were doing a Robert Finley record and they asked me to play on it.”
They finished that record in two days, but Auerbach asked Brown and Deaton to stick around for a couple more days. They recorded Delta Kream.
That serendipitous recording session was no fluke; Brown has a history of finding himself in the right place at the right time.
Junior Kimbrough and Kenny Brown at Kimbrough’s juke joint (Photo: Rita Weigand)
Must Have Been the Right Place Brown recorded his debut album, Goin’ Back to Mississippi, in 1995 with Dale Hawkins in Little Rock, Arkansas, but his list of bona fides is long. Brown played on albums with blues legends R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Paul “Wine” Jones, and CeDell Davis, all of which were recorded for Fat Possum Records based in Oxford, Mississippi. That was also where Brown recorded his solo album, Stingray.
He performed in the 2006 movie, Black Snake Moan, which was written and directed by Craig Brewer. In addition to backing Samuel L. Jackson’s singing, Brown appears in the film as a blues band guitarist along with his buddy, Grammy-nominated drummer Cedric Burnside.
“I was always a big fan of Kenny Brown,” Brewer says. “I am a fan of that whole early Fat Possum era that he was a part of. I think why I love him and everybody loves him, is there’s a great craft in the way he plays. The older I get, the more I tend to appreciate that. It’s authenticity. He’s playing what he lives. He’s playing what he knows and you can feel it. It’s more than just hearing it. You can feel it. There’s only a handful of artists that can do that. And he’s one of them.”
Big Jack Johnson and Kenny Brown (Photo: Rita Weigand)
Raised on Radio Brown’s mother was spot-on when she wrote about her child in his baby book. “She said that I was crazy about guitars, guns, horses, and cowboys,” Brown says. “I still am.
“The first time I remember hearing any music was getting in my parents’ car in the early ’50s,” the musician remembers. “I was laying in the car getting ready to go to church and hearing, I guess, a Johnny Cash song. I grew up watching the Ozzie and Harriet show with James Burton and Rick Nelson playing. There were some country shows that would come on like Louisiana Hayride.”
Brown also listened to a blues station late at night with a friend. “We’d sneak out in the car and lay down in the seat and turn on the radio and get that Nashville station,” Brown says, remembering that he didn’t need the car key if the car was put in “lock.”
Growing up in Nesbit, Mississippi, Brown remembers when he heard his first blues fife and drum band, a style of music with its roots in African drumming, military fife and drum corps, and blues influences. “I was out in the yard playing one day and I heard this music. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, and it was getting closer and closer. I looked and there was this truck coming up the road and there was this fife and drum in the back of the truck,” Brown recalls. “That’s how they announced the picnics. Not everybody had phones [at the time]. They turned right across the road from my house. There was this guy who had picnics right across from the house.”
Brown didn’t get to go to them, but the picnics fascinated him. “I would lay in bed at night. Sometimes they’d play all night long and party all night.”
The music took root in Brown’s mind, and he got his first guitar when he was 10 thanks to a business venture with his brother. “You could order seeds from the back of a comic book. We ordered a bunch of seeds and we rode our bicycles selling garden and flower seeds to the ladies around us,” he says.
The Brown brothers won prizes for the amount of seeds they sold. “I got a little plastic guitar that would tune up and had a book with it. I think my brother got a BB gun,” he remembers.
Brown taught himself to play the guitar, which had “little catgut plastic strings,” by reading the book as well as listening to the radio “trying to figure out stuff.” He also took some lessons.
One day his mom surprised him with a real guitar. “A Kay archtop acoustic guitar with the F holes and stuff,” Brown says.
In another right-place, right-time moment, blues guitarist Mississippi Joe Callicott moved next door when Brown was 10. “His house was probably not 100 yards away. I could hear him sitting on the porch playing.” Brown’s brother said, “You ought to go over and see Joe.”
Brown and Callicott played “When the Saints Go Marching In” and other gospel songs. They also played blues songs, including “Frankie and Albert.”
Callicott gave him pointers. “He’d say, ‘Hit it like this, boy.’ And he was singing songs. All that got me really interested. I hung out with him almost every day.”
Conjuring Brewer’s comment about authenticity, Brown muses about the heart of blues music, saying, “It feels so good. And it’s real music — comes from the heart. It’s hard to describe. People just get feelings for different things.”
Brown, who plays the “North Mississippi hill country blues” style, says, “The hill country stuff kind of fit. Maybe from growing up around here, I don’t know. People always ask me to describe ‘hill country.’ I just tell them, ‘Don’t try to analyze it. Just feel it.’”
R.L. Burnside, Kenny Brown, and Cedric Burnside (Photo: Laurie Hoffma)
“Some of That Stuff” As he got older, Brown began meeting other blues players, including Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, and Lee Baker. “Sometimes I think I was better when I was 18 than I am now,” he says. “I guess ’cause I didn’t know anything. I’d just do whatever I could do. I was so hungry for it back then, I guess. I was a slow learner, but I just tried to learn from everybody I could. I never expected to make a living at it.”
A friend who had a rock-and-roll band hired R.L. Burnside to open for him. Brown introduced himself and said he liked what he was doing and wanted to learn “some of that stuff. He told me where he lived and I started going down there and playing.”
They played together at juke joints, picnics, and other events “for 30 years until he quit playing. For years, I’d just play around his house or go to picnics or juke joints.”
R.L. took him to his first juke joint, Brown says. “It was a juke joint way out in the sticks somewhere in Panola County.”
It was “just an old house in the middle of nowhere. Seems like we drove down one of the wooded roads that was like a tunnel for 20 miles. All the trees have grown together above you. We came to a house. There was nobody there for 30 minutes. As soon as we started playing, it filled up. I don’t know where they came from,” he says.
“We got to playing. And they were gambling in the back room. All Black people. I was the only white person there. It was the first juke joint I’d really been in. We were playing for a while and R.L. said, ‘You keep playing. I’m going in the back and gamble some.’ I said, ‘R.L., don’t do that. They’ll kill me out there.’ He said, ‘I think you’ll be all right.’ He lost his money and came back. I kept playing and people loved it.”
Brown went on to play gigs with other blues performers. “We used to play a lot of picnics and little juke joint house parties. Sometimes I’d get with Johnny Woods and pick him up Friday and start driving and go to different house parties and stay gone all weekend.”
Music was a side job at first. “I made decent money doing construction, being a carpenter. That way I could afford my habits — going to the juke joints and stuff to play.”
Photo: Courtesy Kenny Brown
Juke Joint Caravan, Hill Country Picnic Brown began touring after he met George “Mojo” Buford on Beale Street. “Hit it off with him and we got to playing. We did a tour up to Canada and the East Coast and ended the tour in Clarksdale on Muddy Waters’ birthday.”
Brown invited R.L. to sit in with the band at the Clarksdale show. R.L. arrived with Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, where R.L. was recording.
A couple of weeks later, Johnson called Brown and said they wanted him to play on R.L.’s record. They said, “We love his solo stuff, but we want it to rock a little more.”
They recorded R.L.’s album, Too Bad Jim, with drummer Calvin Jackson the first day. Then Brown played on Junior Kimbrough’s album, Sad Days, Lonely Nights. They were recorded at Junior Kimbrough’s legendary now-gone juke joint near Holly Springs, Mississippi.
“I love Kenny,” Johnson says. “I was lucky to be around a lot of great people, but I put Kenny at the top of the list.” Of Brown, whom he calls “a savage guitar player,” Johnson says, “We wouldn’t have Fat Possum without him. He was so vital in the creation of the label.”
Plus, in a nod to the seemingly mundane but practical details that can make or break a burgeoning music career, Johnson says, “He had a van. He had a driver’s license.”
After they made a record, they had to get out and promote it, Johnson says. “You got out there and beat the hell out of the road if you’re going to make it. And we did that. We toured nonstop.”
After they did the Fat Possum albums, Brown and R.L. were invited to play a gig in Canada. They needed a drummer. R.L. said, “I’ve got a grandson who plays pretty good.”
That was Cedric Burnside, whose Grammy nominations include Best Traditional Blues Album in 2019 for Benton County Relic.
“We would go out for two weeks at a time. We’d have me and R.L. and Cedric and T-Model Ford or Paul ‘Wine’ Jones. We’d have a vanload of people. A lot of times they called it the ‘Juke Joint Caravan.’”
And, he adds, “I think I counted up one time. I’ve been to every state and, I think, something like 12, 15, 17 countries.”
Brown began the iconic North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic 16 years ago. “I’d been traveling all around the world, seeing all this interest in this style of music. I think they began calling it ‘hill country’ music by then. People were loving it everywhere we went, but nobody was doing a festival here in Mississippi focusing on that type of music from the region.”
The first Hill Country Picnic was held in a pasture in Potts Camp, Mississippi. The stage was a flatbed trailer. About 1,000 people attended the picnic, which was organized by Brown’s wife, Sara. “All we did was send out maybe 100 emails.”
Brown later had a permanent stage built at the picnic’s current location between Oxford and Holly Springs. One year, Brown says, the two-day event, which is held the last full weekend in June (June 24th and 25th this year), drew 3,000 people from 38 states and 11 countries. “I wanted it to be like the old-style picnics where there was plenty of food and drink and good hill country music.”
Farther from home, Brown plans to attend this year’s Grammy presentation on April 3rd in Las Vegas. “I hear all the time people are booking gigs and asking if they’re Grammy-nominated. I don’t know. I hate to say it’s not a big deal ’cause I guess it is. But I don’t know how much my life will change.”
For now, Brown says, “I’m doing a tour with The Black Keys this year. It’ll be fun. Decent pay.”
Brown, who lives near Potts Camp, says, “I’ve got a big barn over here next door to my house with a big living area upstairs I’m trying to convert. We set up some recording equipment in there. I’ve got a project I’m trying to get done there. There’s a record by a pretty big country artist that I played on that’s supposed to be coming out in April, but I’m not supposed to tell who. I’ve got some songs put together good enough to record them. And digging out some old stuff to record. And trying to get everybody lined up, find the right people to record them.”
He’s written original songs over the years as well. “I write ideas down all the time. Lot of times I get them during the night,” Brown says, “and if I don’t get up and write them down, they just keep flying through the air and somebody else gets them.”
Kenny Brown (Photo: Courtesy Kenny Brown)
Last Kind Word Blues Brown has watched his old friends and mentors die. He was 15 when his next-door neighbor Mississippi Joe Callicott died. “His wife told me he rolled over and his last words were, ‘Kenny be a good boy.’
“I hated to see him go, but he had gone downhill some. None of us are getting out of here alive. Hell. It used to be I was the youngest one hanging around all these guys like Bobby Ray Watson, Johnny Woods, and R.L. Burnside. Now I’m one of the older guys.”
Brown once visited a psychic at a health food store. “He told me my purpose on Earth was to raise the vibratory rates of the human race through music. I don’t know how many people he told that to, but I was one of them. He didn’t know I played music. That was kind of a weird thing that he could actually tell that. He could have been making it up and it could have been all bullshit.”
But, Brown says, “We were on stage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, one time. The place was packed wall to wall. T-Model and R.L. were doing the show. And every face that I saw had a smile on it. And I thought, ‘Maybe he was right.’”
Cedric Burnside has become a fixture in the regional and national blues scene, and not just because R.L. Burnside was his grandfather. Granted, starting your professional life with such a giant of the blues at age 13 can help, but it’s never been just about the name or the connections for Cedric. He honed serious drum skills over those years on the road, and has been granted several Blues Music Awards for those chops (not to mention a Grammy nomination in 2016), but he’s always had a larger vision, and in these early decades of the 21st Century, his feel and dexterity on the guitar has grown formidable as well, especially when paired with his soulful, earnest voice.
His familiarity with North Mississippi Hill Country blues guitar has been clear for years, but with this summer’s release on Single Lock Records, I Be Trying, he’s made a quantum leap in expressiveness and coherence of vision. Indeed, by altering a few details in his approach to his songs and his playing, he’s remaking the blues entirely.
Cedric Burnside at Royal Studios (Credit: Abraham Rowe)
That’s a tall claim to make, but one listen to I Be Trying tells the tale. One distinctive feature of Hill Country Blues has been the heaviness of the guitar tones, brazenly verging on metal territory, yet played with the subtle phrasing of less industrial times. If that was compelling, it was also more mainstream, in a sense, for what could be more familiar in today’s America than metal guitar?
In Mississippi, it was always more than just that, but now, with a new dryness and sparseness, Cedric sets even that aspect aside. Instead, he’s crafted a unique approach to the blues that deftly sidesteps any preconceived riffs or licks, and even those you’ve heard elsewhere take on a new urgency and gravitas. As if to say, “Leave all your expectations at the door.” As if to say, “I shall make a music as bleak and beautiful as this world around us.” As if to say, “I’m rebuilding from the ground up.”
Most of it was recorded in a simple three-day session at Royal Studios before the pandemic, with Boo Mitchell producing. Thus, part of the sparseness comes not from quarantine, but from the soul-gripping intimacy possible in a studio of that caliber in the right hands. As the liner notes mention, “All guitar and vocals were run through 2 Coil Audio CA70S mic preamps,” some vintage gear indeed. “Cedric used Al Green’s famed ‘Mic #9’ on ‘The World Can Be So Cold.’ Drums were tracked Willie Mitchell style, with a single Mono RCA 77DX overhead through our 536 MCI preamps.”
Though the technical specs are beyond most listeners’ expertise, the upshot is that this record was made with naught but a guitar, drums and voice, or the occasional light touch of a second guitar (including childhood friend Luther Dickinson in places), a brief bass cameo (by Zac Cockrell of the Alabama Shakes) and — would you believe it? — cello. With precious few instruments and Cedric’s soulful voice captured in such a pristine way, one gets the feeling that the band is perched on the edge of your ear.
Musically, Cedric has crafted songs that start with more of a blues feeling than any time-tested riffs or scales. The guitar parts are a bit dirty, but not saturated with distortion, and that dry sound gives them a lightness that complements their melodic figures, which are downright major-key in places. The title song is a perfect case in point: where the verse melody skips along with nary a blue note to be heard, the descending line of the chorus implies the blues without mimicking them.
“I always try to incorporate new things. Different, to me, has always been a great thing. I always wanted to be different,” Cedric tells me, and this record is the payoff. While he doesn’t shy away from his roots, and in fact has just been recognized as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, thanks to his role in championing the North Mississippi sound, he seems to reinvent those roots afresh with that basic, experimental philosophy.
Part of the unexpected melodies and changes in these tunes hint at gospel, and certainly tunes like “The World Can Be So Cold,” “Step In” or “I Be Trying” have undeniable roots in a folk-meets-soul approach. But others seem to have sprung up as fully formed stylistic statements, out of nowhere. At times, the mixture of sparse, droning, slightly unfamiliar riffs is reminiscent of no artist more than Ali Farka Touré, the guitarist and singer who has incorporated American blues into his work more than any other artist from Mali, or anywhere in Africa.
And yet, while Cedric says he’s a recent fan of Touré, his sounds aren’t beholden to any other artist. This album takes the blues, gives them just enough of a tweak to make them strange again, and sets you down in the midst of a wide, empty landscape, urging you to face down your life and death on new terms.
