shots on goal

If you like or care about blues, walk, run, swim, click--whatever--here or wherever and buy that record.

I've been listening to it for the last hour and the hair on the back of my neck just won't lay down.

Unbelievable.

Thank god for the CD revolution. I remember the sad, sad days of trying to find great blues on vinyl back whenever the hell it was. Early 80s maybe. Granted I wasn't the most resourceful kid in the world, and anyway, record finding services were sort of out of my budget, so I'd always have to make do with whatever Tampa Red, Elmore James, Reverend Gary Davis, and Jimmy Reed albums I could find in the bins--great finds of course--but it was always so hard to find a lot of exactly what I wanted.

Then, college got in the way and with it, a general turn for the worse, with people like Robert Cray turning what should sound like old peeling shellac into something more akin to mass-produced formica. Even B.B. King--god bless his genius heart--was recording some really lame records, and doing all kinds of clumsy collaborations. Am I remembering one with that jazz singer lady that was always being hawked by the most evil label in the history of American music, GRP?

Anyway, CDs have made life wonderful again. Too bad the mp3 genie is out of whatever bottle to rain on the CD reissue parade. Well, no matter. I'm not the twelve year old girl downloading scourge of the information super highways being sued by the satanic RIAA, so what do I have to worry about?

So, back to Fred McDowell. You may know his music. He wrote "You gotta move," famously covered by The Rolling Stones. Bonnie Raitt did "Kokomo Blues."

As I've been listening to it--as I've been doing this or that around the house, cleaning up downstairs--I've found myself stopped dead in my tracks. You know, like when you stop doing whatever you were doing, and stand frozen, all thoughts draining out of you, all recognition of where you are or what time it is drifting outwards and away from you, waves of electricity swelling up and down your spine. This stuff is like that.

Mostly unaccompanied, McDowell's slide darts and flashes through the throbbing chords, his hard, brittle voice rising and falling over his guitar, sometimes muttering, sometimes hollering. Often, his voice will join his guitar in unison; the effect--although familiar--is chilling.

McDowell was actually older than Robert Johnson. I recall reading somewhere that he even taught Robert Johnson a thing or two. On account of his remaining unrecorded until 1959, he's not as well known.

That ought to change.