Sometimes I just love the blues, I know it's work...I know that I have huge gaps in my knowledge and it tends to make me steer a little clear. There is this great show Saturday or Sunday mornings on WFMU that is super blues....really dirty old beginnings of blues...and by dirty I mean graphically explicit descriptions of ladies parts. Serious stuff. All scratchy and hard to understand. The poeple who love it are really in love with it. It's not something to be casually into.
I didn't know too much about Charlie Parr when I started this post, other than those blues great's comparisons below but I've been listening to his myspace tracks on and off all day and I'm really into the 5 or 6 tracks I've listened to there. Amazing guitar and honest vocals. It's not trying to emulate that classic blues style that's been overdone, it's still recorded professionally, there's nothing fake low-fi about it.
Dead Cat on the Line is a great really haunting traditional blues songs...now that I think about it, there isn't one cover here... or Last freight out of asheville, it's not that you have to have had these experiences exactly, I don't know if he's ridden trains or been completely broke...but I believe it. He's tapped into what makes this genre good, something about the purity...I think maybe that's what makes the blues that hardest to be so sincere....because it has been distilled down into a few bars that go up and down the scale.
The slide guitar work is amazing, it's that combination of not trying too hard, but really just playing competently and emotionally. Again,It's a genre that's easy for anyone to do but to stand out makes that even more of an accomplishment. Really beautiful....I could easily hear this fitting in with a John Fahey / Nick Drake playlist. I can hear the influence of both. It's surprising that this is his first time being pressed on vinyl. That's the best way to hear this for sure.
It's really too bad ths is imported from a UK label and will set you back at least 15-20 depending on the price of oil.
CHARLIE PARR - 'WORRIED BLUES / WRITE ME A FEW LINES'
END OF THE ROAD RECORDS
It must be a crazy world when authentic is a term used to separate an artist from the pack. Charlie Parr is a folk and country blues musician who is routinely labeled authentic and the real dealby fans and critics alike. Charlie shows up with a lived-in rasp of a voice, National resonator and 12-string acoustic guitars, a banjo and a batch of his own songs and well-traveled numbers by Mississippi John Hurt, Charley Patton and other cohorts from another time. He lays it on you, and you sense that the gamblers, the union workers, the criminals and the sinners that wander around his songs are peering right over your shoulder. Anyways on that note End of the Road Records will be releasing his first ever Vinyl pressing which will be the instantly likeable Worried Blues as the A side and the B side a Misspipi Fred McDowell cover. The pressing will be limited to 500 only. Highly recommended
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