It’s been more than a dozen years now since we told you about the first True Blues album, featuring solo and joint performances from such blues greats as Taj Mahal, Corey Harris, Guy Davis, Shemekia Copeland, Alvin Youngblood Hart, and harmonica ace Phil Wiggins, and then, shortly after that, our pleasure in catching three of those artists–Davis, Harris and Hart–during their tour in support of the album, with each of the bluesmen playing solo before joining for a short set together to end the night.
Although this long-awaited follow-up to that project doesn’t include any joint performances like the first album and concert did, Fight On! True Blues Vol. 2 (Yellow Dog Records) sees those same three bluesmen reunited at least in spirit, rotating through nine solo acoustic tracks that include traditional blues numbers associated with Charley Patton, Rev. Gary Davis, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, along with several originals much in the same vein, about which Davis commented: “The fight we are waging is to keep this precious music form alive. To us, there is not so much difference between our arrangements of blues classics and our newly created work. It’s all connected to the ancestral spirit.”
Indeed, you won’t find better blues anywhere than Hart’s brooding original “If the Blues Was Money”, inspired by his late friend and bluesman Henry Townsend, who passed two decades ago. You’ll also hear Hart’s robust gritty vocals and Sears Silvertone 1950s Kay flat-top guitar on the lively “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues”–the first Charley Patton song Hart attempted to learn in his late teens–and “Highway 61”, which some may recognize having been done by Fred McDowell but that Hart learned from his friend and Delta bluesman David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards, with whom Hart worked during many festivals domestically and abroad.
Davis contributes two-and-a-half originals to the project: a poignant “See Me When You Can” that he wrote for his grandmother many years ago; a bustling, perhaps double entendred “Deep Sea Diver” that may not have been intended for his grandmother’s ears; and the closing reworking of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” that Davis imagined being played by Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell (“Statesboro Blues”), also adding some original verses and retitling the song “Everything I Got Is Done in Pawn”.
Harris opens the recording with the track from which the album derives its title, Virginia musician Jimmy Strother’s “We Are Almost Down to the Shore (Fight On)”, which Harris adapts to guitar from its original instrument of banjo to give it a Piedmont blues sound. The humorous “What’s That I Smell” becomes even funnier when you know the story behind the song, having been inspired by Harris’ time in New Orleans playing a local bar called the Funky Butt (named after the historic hall that famed cornetist Buddy Bolden played), with Harris’ final number being a take on Reverend Gary Davis’ “I Belong To the Band”.
On their own, Hart, Harris and Davis are each master players and storytellers, both through and in between their songs, but, together, they make for an unbeatable tag team that we’re glad to see–and hear–is still fighting hard to help preserve traditional acoustic blues.