Guy Davis: Chocolate to the Bone

By GRAHAM REID

(Herald rating: * * *)

These days young black artists - now removed by generations, education, hip-hop and 57 channels on television - are almost as remote from the blues as Rory Block.

Yet within each generation there are dozens who are discovering it and becoming steeped in the tradition.

Dreadlocked, Colorado-born college graduate Corey Harris isn't out there alone, Davis - who was raised around New York - is right beside him sounding like he's a four score-and-ten bluesman.

Davis heard stories of the South from his grandparents and was turned on to the blues by Taj Mahal, himself also a few steps removed before becoming an authentic voice.

Davis started as an actor (the hip-hop movie Beat Street) and a decade ago performed as the legendary blues player Robert Johnson in the off-Broadway production Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil for which he received critical acclaim and won that year's Blues Foundation's Keeping the Blues Alive award.

Since then he's made almost half a dozen albums, all acclaimed and each getting deeper into the country-blues of his musical mentors Son House, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. His original music is often an adaptation of songs by these people, or closely allied in spirit.

On this powerful collection he makes over Sleepy John Estes' classic chords from Brownsville (which became Rollin' and Tumblin') and rumbles through John Lee Hooker's I Believe I'll Lose My Mind and Willie Dixon's Back Door Man as if he wrote them (that's a compliment).

He takes on a traditional tune that Lead Belly, Josh White and Blind Willie McTell recorded (that's ambitious but he pulls it off effortlessly) and he does Blind Lemon Jefferson's Matchbox Blues (and needless to say makes a somewhat more convincing fist of it than Ringo did of Carl Perkins' version on the Long Tall Sally EP in 64).

Davis probably hasn't hit 40 yet, but here - on wheezing harmonica and with a fine backing band - sounds every bit that four score-and-ten bluesman while singing of universal truths from 150 years ago.

Lovers of traditional acoustic blues can safely slide this alongside dead hero albums.

Label: Red House Records