The annual Blues Music Awards just took place earlier this month but we’re pretty sure we’ve already heard next year’s winner in the Best Emerging Artist Album category (captured this year by Sean McDonald for his Have Mercy!) in the soon-to-be released debut recording from rising Mississippi marvel Harrell “Young Rell” Davenport. We don’t want to get ahead of things, being that there’s still a long way–and, we’re sure, plenty of other great releases from emerging artists–to go until the next awards, but we’re just sayin’ that, for anything to eclipse Young Rell (Little Village), it’s going to need to be pretty darn special.
While we thought we’d seen and heard enough of Davenport in recent years on social media and in videos to have a pretty good sense of what to expect from the now 19-year-old on his debut, we don’t know that anyone could have guessed just how impressive this first outing from him would be, offering at various times throughout the album the sound of much more established and classic bluesmen including the likes of Bobby Rush, Johnny Rawls, T-Bone Walker, Magic Sam, and James Cotton, among others, even if his voice isn’t yet quite as seasoned. In addition to demonstrating some serious talent on vocals, guitar, and harmonica across a superb variety of tracks, Rell also proves here to be quite a songwriter, having penned all but two of the dozen tracks himself.
Judging just by a breakdown by tempo of the tracks, you might get the sense that Rell is most comfortable, and perhaps at his best, delivering creeping blues numbers like the deep, hard-luck “Fatherless Child”, the socially observant “Giving Me the Blues” and “Hurt People, Hurt People”, and the closing, Magic Sam-sounding “The World Don’t Deserve Your Smile”. But then Rell certainly doesn’t seem any more out of his element laying out the album’s two swinging instrumentals–the rocking “Richland Swing” with its T-Bone Walker-style guitar licks, and the rich, harmonica-driven “Nite Creepin'”–or the soul groover “Spinning” for that matter, or even shuffling numbers like the opening “Tomorrow” that takes a clever dig at Rell’s youthfulness with such lyrics as “she said that she wanted to, take me home/ come back tomorrow, come back tomorrow when I’m grown/ well then maybe, just maybe, maybe we can be all alone” or the low-key bravado of “I’ll Keep It Hot for You” that comes later.
A tough, sauntering “I Be Tryin'” featuring some James Cotton-like harmonica rounds out the original tracks, with Rell also including a pair of covers in a cooking “I Hear Some Blues Downstairs” (Fenton Robinson) and the timely and relevant “Masters of War” (Bob Dylan).
It doesn’t hurt that Rell is joined here by such industry veterans as Jim Pugh on keys, Kid Andersen on guitar, and June Core on drums, along with some nice horns throughout the album, making this easily one of the finest debuts we’ve heard in quite some time.