Five decades after its beginnings as part of the British blues explosion, Savoy Brown continues to cast a familiar blues-rocking spell on the band’s latest album Witchy Feelin’ (Ruf Records). Now down to a trio made up of founding member Kim Simmonds on vocals and guitar joined by Pat DeSalvo on bass and Garnett Grimm on drums, the band rolls through just shy of a dozen tracks thick with stinging guitar and rich, steady grooves.
Opening on the powerful, shuffling “Why Did You Hoodoo Me” and a gritty, crawling “Livin’ on the Bayou” that mixes Simmonds’ often Mark Knopfler-like vocals with some David Gilmour-ish guitar solos, Witchy Feelin’ is already a winner before you even arrive at the album’s creeping title track and such other gems as the steady-rocking “I Can’t Stop the Blues”; a laidback and lonesome “Standing in a Doorway” that will help fill up your musical drinking glass with its gentle vocals and thick slide riffs; a hard-driving, Cream-like “Can’t Find Paradise”; and a slow-cooking, wah-filled “Thunder, Lightning & Rain” on which the band brings things down a bit to allow Simmonds’ guitar to do much of the talking.
The album concludes on the soft instrumental “Close to Midnight” and, if you like that, you might also want to check out another somewhat recent project in the form of Simmonds’ solo Jazzin’ on the Blues, a jazzy and quieter instrumental acoustic album that also finds Simmonds contributing harmonica and bass on several songs, joined only by Ron Keck on percussion.
Here’s one we mentioned in our 
On the opening track of her debut album Jetlagger (Big Legal Mess Records), Brooklyn-born soulstress Bette Smith promises “I Will Feed You” and that’s exactly what she proceeds to do musically, moving from the haunting, Macy Gray-ish sound of that number and others like “Flying Sweet Angel of Joy” to such rockers as a Tina Turner-ish take on the Little Steven Van Zandt co-written “I Found Love” (Lone Justice) and heavy soul R&B of “Manchild”, one of several songs penned or co-penned by Jimbo Mathus, who also produced and provides some nice guitar, keyboard, and background vocals on the project.
Pierce didn’t write any of the songs included on his latest album You’ve Got to Feel It! (Calabama Recordings), but he did do an awfully nice job of selecting a dozen soul classics to cover here, from the “We Can Always Come Back to This”-like sway of Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is”, a gospelish take on James Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street”, and the slow, closing ballad “Many Rivers to Cross” (Jimmy Cliff) to the slightly more uptempo “Slip Away” (Clarence Carter) and Blues Brothers-ish grooves of “Stop” (Howard Tate) — with its powerful soul/R&B combination of horns and vocals — and swinging “Is It Something You’ve Got” (Tyrone Davis) to the tougher, Tommy Castro-like blues of “Don’t Fight It” (Wilson Pickett) from which the album’s title derives and that features background vocals from the Grateful Dead’s Donna Jean Godchaux (if this one doesn’t get you moving, we don’t know what will!) and a biting, funky take on Al Green’s “I’m a Ram”.
After a couple of albums announcing his return to the fray of the music biz from a last-hour liver transplant in the 2015 studio project 
Southern rocker Gregg Allman‘s final album Southern Blood (Rounder Records) may not be the bluesiest he’s done (which would have been a difficult undertaking following his 2011 solo studio offering 
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