By GRAHAM REID
At some levels the blues is still a primitive art: it doesn't require much beyond the human voice and a story to tell. Oh, and these days some catchphrase philosophy to couch it in mystique while ostensibly explaining it.
Every bluesman has some wearying aphorism: blues ain't nothing but a feelin', the blues is a hard heart breakin', blues is truth ...
Curiously enough, John Lennon - hardly in the roll call of great bluesmen - had an insightful comment. He said the blues is a chair. Not the design for a chair, but the first chair.
That makes more sense than most grumbled aphorisms.
For the first 20 years of its history rock'n'roll sat on the blues as its source. Today Moby will be as close as many come.
Which means it is increasingly startling to hear primal, untutored vocals and a primitive guitar or piano. And - surprisingly, in these days of Bardot and boybands - there are still performers who have lived just as those legendary old blues singers did: working on poor farms in America's south, playing a juke joint on weekends, and with no expectation anyone would be interested in recording them.
Robert Belfour is 60 but his What's Wrong With You (Fat Possum/Shock) **** sounds like it should come with surface noise.
Belfour grew up in the same region of northern Mississippi as R.L. Burnside, Fred McDowell and Jessie Mae Hemphill. His next-door neighbour was Junior Kimbrough. He spent 35 years on construction sites in Memphis, and played guitar and sang, mostly for his own interest.
The album - nine tracks of unalloyed electric guitar and ancient sounding vocals - might have been recorded in a Memphis hotel room on a reel-to-reel. Gripping.
It's like the first chair.
T-Model Ford, who cracked the excellent You Better Keep Still last year, is cut from the same ragged cloth. He thinks he's about 77, has served time for murder, plays barbed-wire electric guitar like Hound Dog Taylor, has a small band that sits in playing choppy rural blues - and at the end of his new She Ain't None of Your'n (Fat Possum/Shock) *** gives a plug for his other two albums. Good on you, Mr Ford.
Does he have a distinctive voice? Not really. But do you remember it? Do you what. He's rough and menacing on Take a Ride With Me (you wouldn't want to) and there's the lasciviously murderous Chicken Head Man ("I love chicken head ... when you kill a chicken, babe, save me the chicken head"?)
These albums are difficult if you are new to old blues. They are the hard chairs.
The smooth, professional end of the blues has always been taken by guys like Robert Cray (urbane, suburban and dealing with real life in these rather more complex times) and B.B. King, whose signature style has hardly made a misstep in the past decade.
King makes it all seem effortless, and that's part of his appeal. And he's certainly offering well-polished blues on Makin' Love is Good For You (MCA) *** There's a slice of blues-pop on the stately Since I Fell For You, an old doo-wop classic (you can sing bits of Blue Moon to it) but which King manages to make new. This time there's a pop approach all round, and while that mercurial guitar slips and slides and delights in its own dexterity, this doesn't have quite the sense of excitement King brought to his recent Blues on the Bayou or his tribute to the jump-blues jive of Louis Jordan on Let the Good Times Roll last year. It's a well upholstered chair.
Finally, Gaye Adegbalola, a founder member of Saffire - Uppity Blues Women whose debut solo album Bitter Sweet Blues (Alligator) **** covers a lot of turf, from Keb Mo's lively She Just Wants to Dance through a creditable treatment of the salacious Need A Little Sugar in My Bowl (made famous by Bessie Smith), into Nina Simone (Images), some backporch blues picking, a hearty take on Smokey Robinson's You Really Got A Hold on Me, and her own material (the funky Big Ovaries, the politicised Nothing's Changed about southern discrimination, The Dog Was Here First).
Adegbalola is a smart, big-voiced woman with something to say and the album shifts from small slide-guitar bands to acappella. It's uppity. She's good.
It's the blues. Pull up a chair.
<i>Elsewhere:</i> Three chairs for the blues
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