IF YOU thought blues was plain blue, you should lend an ear to Steve James. If you figured all blues players were obliged to wallow in, as well as play 12 bars at a stretch, then an introduction to this prince of intelligent blues is a must. And if you wondered where you could come by your next rib tickle, you need look no further than Art And Grit before long you ll have a crazed Jokeresque grimace plastered across your visage that ll be the envy of every pill-popper on Camden Street.
Yes, Steve James fulfils all the stereotypes. Languid, louche, lost in the music of the delta, he s not so much concerned about the bank balance as with the whereabouts of his beloved six-string. And as a contributing editor to Acoustic Blues, he s no neophyte when it comes to blues roots himself.
Just take a look at his aural travelling companions for his latest foray over here: Furry Lewis, Barbeque Bob (who s since sidled off to keep John Kelly company in the Eclectic Ballroom), Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell and Lemon Jefferson. Hardly the stuff of someone raised on Clapton covers. No siree, this here young fella (OK, so what s a touch of poetic licence? We re all friends here) treads a path that s so steeped in blues it s almost a swamp and oh, how he relishes its magnetic draw.
As a purveyor of Jack Daniels-vintage blues, I wonder if James has any difficulty in translating his music to Irish turf, where the audience is more likely to be reared on jigs and reels than on down-home blues.
You know, I ve found that a lot of the people who come to hear me play are musically inclined, he ventures, a dab hand at sidling his way into our affections with his opening volley. And I also think that Ireland is like the American south. There s a musical soul here. And that s all that really matters. As someone spelt it out to me last night: we ve got the work song, the lament and the dance tune.
And music is transcendental anyway. I m marketed as a blues stylist but if you listen to my records, they have waltzes on em, ballads, all sorts of folk stuff. I love blues, and it s my vocabulary. My musical accent is blues but I don t feel constrained by it.
James introduction to the blues stretches right back to his childhood when his lullabies ran the gamut of Tubby The Tuba to Leadbelly.
When I first started to learn the guitar, he recalls, my influences were Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt and folks like that, who were great players of country blues, but who weren t constrained by that at all. I ve always felt the same way. Blues was the point of departure but it wasn t a religion, so I hear similarities between different kinds of music from around the world as they relate to mine, and I also tend to see people as more the same than they are different.
A native New Yorker, James has been adopted by those enlightened folk in Austin, Texas, who can tell a blues brother at 50 paces. Was he an oddity, playing the blues amid the way cool denizens of Manhattan Island?
He shakes his head, adamant that such borders didn t exist, even in the core of the Big Apple. First of all, when I was growing up in New York, he maintains, country blues was everywhere. When I was in my teens I went to the Newport Folk Festival and in one day I saw live performances by Skip James, Sun House, Lightnin Hopkins and Howlin Wolf, plus Doc Watson! So how did I learn to play country blues? Well, I was absolutely saturated by it in New York. Growing up in the North East of the US in the 60s like that, I probably heard more roots music than if I d grown up in Mississippi.
James produced one of the most electrifying acoustic blues albums in American Primitive in 1994, thereby setting himself a hard task to follow. But this year s Art And Grit has seen to the continuation of some serious sibling rivalry. If American Primitive was quirky and quizzical, Art And Grit is James claiming kinship with his forebears with a gravelly defiance that s one part history to two parts raw passion.
Yeah, you know, I just loved making this album, he enthuses. By now, I guess I figure we ve got the studio thing worked out to a tee. We just get in there and play. And songs like Ooze It To Me, Mama and Wet Laundry Blues are such wonderful links with all that s gone before . . . Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell. I feel the bloodstream is flowing through all our veins. That s all I wanted from this album, and it s what I got, I believe! n
Art And Grit is available on Discovery Records, a subsidiary of Warner Music.