Reviews
Reviewed by Mark Coltrain
IRONING BOARD SAM
Going Up
Music Maker - MMCD 146
North Carolina’s Music Maker label has been digging up obscure and blissfully eccentric blues and traditional music characters for most of their 17-year existence. Ironing Board Sam is no exception. While Sam Moore may not be a household name, stories of his inventions, gimmicks, and wild musical exploits from New Orleans to Memphis to Chicago and beyond are the stuff of legend to many readers of this publication—especially thanks to Gene Tomko’s Lost Blues Files piece on Moore from LB #211. The article ended with a mention of Moore’s discussions…
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Reviewed by Marc Myers
When folk-blues guitarist Cary Morin digs into Steely Dan’s Black Friday with an acoustic guitar on Sing It Louder (Music Maker), you know the rest of his album has to be slamming. And it is. Morin pulls off song after song beautifully, and his voice and guitar are as honest as they come. There are touches of Jose Feliciano and Levon Helm of The Band here. Check out Together, This Train and Rounders. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something about this album that awakens your conscience. More on Cary Morin at his…
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Cary Morin - One Track Mind: Cary Morin, “Sing It Louder”
Reviewed by Nick DeRiso
There is a shambling, plain-spoken beauty to this track as Cary Morin, a Crow Indian from North Dakota, sings about dancing his way toward salvation. Powered by some ever-so-fleet fingerstyle guitar and a distinctive vocal — one that combines Van Morrison with a dusty-booted country tinge — “Sing It Louder” will make you want to do just that.
It’s only later that the song’s deeper message, the one about salvation, sinks in. And that’s just the beginning of the backstory for “Sing It Louder,” released on a North Carolina-based benefit label. The Music Maker Relief Foundation provides grants and other…
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Reviewed by Cliff Bellamy
By Cliff Bellamy
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address); 419-6744
CHAPEL HILL –…
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Reviewed by Andrew Barker
Longtime TV writer and showrunner Rene Balcer may have been at the helm of one of the smallscreen’s more lucrative spinoffs in “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” but it’s hard to think of any obvious precedent for his latest venture—as a songwriter for North Carolina bluesmen, in collaboration with a Chinese artist and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient.
Balcer’s debut as a blues lyricist can be heard at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, accompanying Chinese artist Xu Bing’s exhibit “Tobacco Project Virginia.” An admirer of Xu’s, Balcer composed a poem, “Backbone,” to be incorporated into his art; the poem, a…
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Reviewed by Simon Rowland
Live albums can be a mixed blessing: something to treasure for the hard-core fans but rarely so for the newbie. Live! feels different, being tight and distinct enough to appeal to the uninitiated and familiar enough for the converted.
Recorded in North Carolina late last year Fé, a half-Tuscarora Indian, presumes nothing from her small audience and plays it straight with minimal introductions. She once said, “singing is my first language” and here she speaks it with a fluent blues intonation that makes her Native America’s premier blues exponent. Alongside her regular sidemen she is assisted by Justin Robinson…
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Reviewed by Trevor Hodgett
Fair play to Tim Duffy over the last fifteen years, the press release tells us, his Music Maker Relief Foundation has helped and recorded nearly a hundred veteran American blues musicians, alleviating their poverty and preserving their music.
Live! In Europe features obscure artists like Dr Burt, Pura Fe’, Eddie Tigner, Alabama Slim, and Pat Cohen, each of whom plays solo or accompanied by the Revue’s small house band. Pura Fe’’s impassioned a-cappella ‘Borders’ is a striking opener; Dr Burt’s plaintive ‘What Can An Old Man Do, But Sing The Blues?’, features simple but powerful twelve-string guitar; Alabama Slim’s…
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Reviewed by Carl Abernathy
Blueswoman Pat Cohen makes me smirk each time I hear her sing “You Can Have My Husband, But Please Don’t Take Me Man.”
Cohen’s introduction is amusing, but the really funny part, at least to me, is the sassy way she explains that her husband feeds her beans and rice, but her man gives her steak. In fact, Cohen’s boisterous personality seeps into ever note of the song. She also delivers a spicy rendition of “At Last.” And I don’t know of many other women who could approach Koko Taylor’s intensity when singing “Wang, Dang, Doodle.” It doesn’t hurt that…
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Reviewed by Lou Novacheck
Truckin’ My Blues Away is a mesmerizing and compelling work which draws you in, like a spider drawing you into her web, until there’s no escape. It’s devastatingly effective and will leave you pensive, energized, and determined to drive right down to North Carolina and offer your help to Tim, Denise, their staff, and volunteers, which I’ll explain below.
Truckin’ My Blues Away is an hour-long podcast and radio show featuring four of Music Maker’s many mainstay musicians. The musicians featured in this broadcast include Boo Hanks from Virgilina, Va.; Captain Luke from Winston-Salem, N.C.; Eddie Tigner from Atlanta; and…
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Reviewed by Dave Esson
A hugely-talented trio of young musicians resurrecting the black string-band and jug-band sounds of the 1920s and 1930s, the Drops have delivered a wonderfully energetic collection. They leap from banjo to fiddle to kazoo to snare drum with abandon. There are traditional songs of the era, a couple of originals, thentwo great covers – a country-blues stroll through Tom Waits’ Trampled Rose, and a fiddle-frenzy drives Blu Cantrell’s Hit ‘Em Up Style.
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